That’s a jungle gym.
Seen that vicious beast gather more than a few teeth.
At my elem. school we had a recess period to burn off energy between instruction sessions...playground activitywas essentially unsupervised with 2 or 3 teachers providing overwatch ( and some to sneak a cigarette) and wash cuts and scrapes with the dreaded but fascinating bubbling hydrogen peroxide. If you didn't have scabs on your elbows or knees, you weren't really having fun.
You mentioned yur concrete playground, we had a blacktop areaaround the back of the school with a much larger fenced off grass area, guess where we played most of the time.
Ah yes, the “Iron matrix of DEATH” or Jungle Gym. LOL!!!
“I remember monkey bars”
Great picture.
I remember the one at our elementary school. Made of galvanized pipe joined with threaded fittings. I detest the mass produced bloated plastic and steel things they are putting on playgrounds everywhere now.
You were lucky.
We just had a big square cube of monkey bars! And I remember...
Teeter totters. The long ones you could fit two kids on each end. There was always some cruel kid who would jump off the low end while you were high in the air.
Four square courts painted on the asphalt or concrete.
Swing sets.
Ladder bars. Useless, not fun, unless you tried to walk over the top while other kids were going hand over hand just to see if you could do it without killing yourself or stepping on their fingers!
As a boy, never understood hopscotch, but...liked watching the girls play until I reminded myself they were the enemy!
Loved the merry go round thingie. We would get a couple of people in the middle, at least four people on the outside, boys usually, facing the same direction, one leg folded under you, the other foot on the ground and would begin in unison to make that thing spin until the people in the center would scream to stop or all the guys on the outside would be flung off!
Was never able to make a swing go over the top of the bar, though I did get it high enough to launch myself dangerously out of as it swung towards its apogee!
There is a privately owned youth camp in Maryland that I rent out weekend camps for our Trail Life USA troop.
They have a playground area with tons of homemade games and challenges.
Seesaws, balance beams, a short climbing wall on the trunk of a massive tree stump, a climbing net. But the real attraction is the swings. The seats are round cuts of lumber about the size of a Frisbee with a single rope in the center. The rope is about 40’ long tied off to a cable strung between two tree branches 50’ off the ground.
Last year, the weather turned and it was about 20 degrees out. I looked up at about 5:30 am and most of the kids, as young as five were already out playing and screaming.
I said “cool” and went back to sleep.
The benefits of unstructured play.
If one puts up a monkey bar set in a black neighborhood, does that make said act racist?
If one puts up a monkey bar set in a black neighborhood, does that make said act racist?
My grade school had one of these, along with rows of see-saws, a slide that you climbed a good twelve foot to the top, swings, basketball courts, half a football field, a softball field and volleyball court. You had concrete, grass and gravel under foot in this playground. We played dodge ball, touch football, smear the queer, tag and about every game imaginable. We would get the swings going as high as possible and bail out at the top of the arc, it hurt but was fun. Playgrounds now are useless and sad, about as fun as a five pound bag of fertilizer.