Retro Playground Equipment That Was Super Dangerous
Playgrounds are supposed to be places where children can burn off some energy, not literally get burned. But for much of the 20th century, there were real risks associated with many popular pieces of playground equipment, including scorching-hot metal slides that often launched kids straight onto a surface that had about as much give as a parking lot.
In 1975, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) began developing safety standards for playground equipment, citing an estimated 55,000 emergency room visits involving playground injuries in 1973. Equipment under scrutiny included slides, seesaws, merry-go-rounds, and gliders, and while some of these items remain in use in various designs today, many of the more dangerous pieces have vanished from schoolyards and parks. Here are five pieces of retro playground equipment that were shockingly unsafe.
Merry-Go-Rounds
Considering the fact that carousels have roots in medieval knightly tournaments, their rough playground reputation feels appropriate. Playground merry-go-rounds could be enormous in the mid-20th century, with catalogs offering models up to 16 feet in diameter. And if you’ve ever played on one, you know they can be whirling disasters.
Kids could stand on the spinning platform and hold on to the bars as they spun around as quickly as they could make the thing go. But they could also be thrown from it, fall underneath it, or get hit by the heavy equipment after losing their grip. The portable playground merry-go-rounds also had exposed gaps and moving parts that could catch fingers. In a CPSC review of playground injuries from 1979 to 1988, five incidents involving merry-go-rounds resulted in partial or full finger amputations.
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Giant Strides
The giant stride was essentially a maypole that could send kids airborne. Ropes or chains with handles hung from a rotating wheel atop a tall pole; kids would grab the handles and run around in circles until they were moving fast enough that their feet left the ground.
It sounds fun enough, but children could lose their grip and go flying or get smacked by one of the swinging handles while someone else was running around the pole. The giant stride had another problem: It needed to be installed on hard ground. A 1908 playground guide warned that softer ground would quickly develop holes from all the running around, so when kids went flying off the equipment, they were landing on concrete or asphalt.
The giant stride’s reputation changed dramatically over the first half of the 20th century: The National Recreation Association first recommended dismantling them in 1921, and by the 1970s, they had disappeared from North American playgrounds.
Towering Jungle Gyms
Climbing structures are still a fixture of modern playgrounds. But some old-school jungle gyms, not much more than towering mazes of metal bars, looked more like Army obstacle courses than safe places for children to play. By the 1970s, the structures were getting more creative: The Mark IV, for example, was a sprawling multistation playground structure sold by Iowa’s Miracle Recreation Equipment Company. Introduced in 1972, one version stood 18 feet tall with nary a net underneath.
It packed in towers, platforms, ladders, tunnels, and slides, and the company advertised it, tellingly, as a structure that could “handle a whole neighborhood of children.” A 2001 CPSC study found that about 86% of all injuries sustained on climbers were from falls, and 67% of falls were from more than 4 feet up — only a small fraction of the height of the jungle gyms of the past.
Teeter Ladders
A seesaw seems harmless enough until you realize it’s essentially a human-powered catapult. So you can imagine the problem with putting it high in the air. That was the idea behind the Teeter Ladder, a contraption that featured a long ladder balanced on a pivot. It was designed to be used from the rungs, with children hanging beneath the ladder and shifting their hands along the bars as they moved, changing the weight and balance as they went.
A 1929 playground equipment catalog promised that “all sorts of stunts” could be performed on the equipment and assured buyers that its “factor of safety” had been well considered. As proof, it pointed out that adults could use the Teeter Ladder without fear of it breaking; no mention was made, however, of falling off it to the ground or getting hit in the head with the metal ladder.
Giant Metal Slides
Slides are still a playground staple, so it’s easy to forget how extreme some of their predecessors were. Giant metal slides could tower 30 feet above the playground, with kids climbing a long, rickety, gapped flight of stairs before hurtling down a sheet of steel. And unlike today’s slides, they were often positioned over gravel or concrete, with little to cushion the fall.
The height was only part of the problem. On a sunny day, exposed metal can reach scorching temperatures of around 150 degrees Fahrenheit, turning the slide itself into a hazard before kids ever reach the bottom. Modern playground slides are more likely to use plastic or other materials that don’t get quite as hot, while impact-absorbing surfaces have largely replaced the hard ground found beneath many playgrounds of the past.
