Playground age for me was the early 80s which included the following spaces: - The neighborhood playground was made out of cast concrete in a few pieces that s

Playground age for me was the early 80s which included the following spaces: - The neighborhood playground was made out of cast concrete in a few pieces that sat on top of concrete. It looked very similar to this [1][2] but had several other concrete pipes that were quite a bit taller. Minor injuries were pretty daily. - My elementary school playground which was made out of old telephone poles formed into various climbing equipment. Even casual scrambles ended with numerous splinters and tar stains. A couple of the pieces were easily over 10 ft tall. They sat on wood chips or gravel. There was a broken arm or other hospital ready event a couple times a year. - Another school I went to while transferring during a move had equipment in the middle of the woods with no particular safety padding. Kids regularly jumped from equipment to trees, or fell of the large slides. It was cool looking, I remember at least 2 broken arms while I was there for half a school year. - A local public park had a 2 story corkscrew slide that kids fell off of, and a 3 story rocket ship structure with a zipline over grass that had numerous other places to fall and get hurt. I believe they eventually tore it all down after some ICU-level injuries befell a few kids. A lot of the equipment here looks very familiar to this particular park [3] - Another local public park built a massive climbing structure with most of it 2-3 stories off the ground with numerous slides, poles, swings, and other bits. It was all wood and a guaranteed splinter. There was also a cool tunnel full of graffiti that was also most kids' first introduction to used condoms and drug paraphernalia. This was on top of the usual assortment of local parks with hand pushed merry-go-round death traps and other odds and ends. It's a miracle so many of us survived childhood as all the playthings were literally trying to kill us. On the flip side, we're all monkeys and today's playgrounds often don't have much for kids to really do. The old structures on the other hand challenged us kids to overcome our fears and getting to the top of some of them felt like a major life accomplishment and often forced us to build temporary alliances to help each other up, in, down, or across complex and scary feeling play spaces. They taught both real and imagined limits and how to discover the former while defeating the later. I don't know what the educational and emotional benefit of modern playsets are supposed to support. 1 - https://youtu.be/hmLV3ThGzKk https://youtu.be/hmLV3ThGzKk 2 - https://modernistplay.tumblr.com/post/162016983146/pg7-saddle-shape-designer-dw-renshaw https://modernistplay.tumblr.com/post/162016983146/pg7-saddl... 3 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_War_playground_equipment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_War_playground_equipment