Something else I've noticed over the last few years is the dearth of children playing in playgrounds. It seems to me that as councils replaced risky 'they'll sue us if their kids hurt themselves' equipment with 'unable to do your kid an injury' equipment kids sorta stopped using the playgrounds. Maybe other places NSM.

They put in an additional new playground at my elementary school when I was in fourth or fifth grade. The old playgrounds (there were three of them) were the old metal climbing things, swings, slides, etc. The new one was the kind made of logs, with little tiny safe plastic slides, a few things to climb, and a bunch of weird things like those spinny tic-tac-toe boards that we couldn't figure out what to do with. I didn't like it because it was too much stuff in one place. The old playgrounds took up a lot of room. If you were on the swings, and someone else was on the balance beam, there was a lot of space in betwen you. With the new thing, you couldn't move without bumping into other kids, too much of the stuff was just random and pointless, and very little of it was actually fun.

They used to have a see saw at Mr. Heather's bar. Not the wisest of toys to give the drunks.

What are kids supposed to do with those spinny tic-tac-toe things, anyway? There's no room to actually sit there and play it, and aren't playgrounds supposed to encourage movement in the first place?

They do tend to get rid of the best playthings on playgrounds. There used to be this huge rocket thing on a playground back home. Last time I was there it was taken down. Upsetting, and not just because I used to make out in the top level of the rocket when I was a senior in high school.

The first thing to disappear from Australian playgrounds were maypoles, then see-saws, then those metal roundabout thingies that you could get underneath and lie on your back so that you could use your legs and feet to make it spin really fast, thereby (in theory anyway) throwing the other kids off. Ummmm I wonder if that is why they were removed.

There's a fairly newish playground near me that has seesaws. Even has monkey bars.

those metal roundabout thingies that you could get underneath and lie on your back so that you could use your legs and feet to make it spin really fast, thereby (in theory anyway) throwing the other kids off. Ummmm I wonder if that is why they were removed.

Actually, the reason I've always heard for those being removed or modified is kids getting underneath and then getting hit on the head while it was spinning.

They have a wonderful playground in the middle of downtown San Francisco. It's all foamy, don't-hurt-if-you-fall-on-it & it has fun, windy slides and sand for making messes. We took the niece and nephew there & had a ball.

Wow, look what I started!

OK, Red Rover everybody seems to know about. Same with dodgeball, although we never played "prison ball". Old school, no gym. We were playing in the lobby with the building's support pillars wrapped in exercise mats because we always slammed into them. But outside we had a nice big yard with asphalt and absolutely Nothing To Do--no equipment, not even a basketball hoop. So the boys brought baseball stuff and the girls played jumprope. Anybody else have double dutch? It's sort of dancing in and out of two ropes. We also had zillions of different chants for them but that's another thread--Miss Lucy and her steamboat and how much blood would come out of various dead animals are two of them.

Stoopball was a New York thing, although I guess you could do it in Baltimore or something. You had to throw your pink Spaulding (spal-deen) ball against a stoop and make it bounce a certain number of times. You could also take a jumprope and have someone stand in the middle of the street (these were 1-2 lane streets, mostly houses but not suburbia) and whip it around so people had to jump over it.

If we were stuck indoors, we would play Ship, Shore, Wave. One side of the room was a ship, the other side the wave, and one person yelled what side to go to and everybody ran like hell towards it. Of course, they'd change the side halfway over and everybody would skid to a halt like Daffy Duck and then crash into the slower ones still coming the wrong way. If the kid yelled "Wave!" you had to hit the floor. Lots of elbow and knee contact in that one.

In the summer we went out after dinner, too, and caught fireflies and went to the playground, which had heavy metal swings, old wooden seesaws, metal slides, and a sandbox that even in the 70's you avoided. Not because of needles, but because that was before Mayor Koch's leash laws. There's still a classic one left in the park in Sutton Place, of all places.

Wow, my boring childhood killed the thread!