Remember when Playground Equipment was Made of Steel?

I spent a couple hours in Hubbard's Harding Park over the weekend and saw that at least one playground still has the old style steel pipe equipment.  There is a more modern playground in the park full of plastic equipment with a mulch base to ease falls but down by the creek you can still find slides made of sheet metal and steel tubing bent into insect shapes.

The Bug

This was the playground equipment of my youth.  This was the stuff we found on the elementary school playground at home.  On weekends and summers at Dad's house on the Southside we would walk up the street to Sheridan elementary on Hillman and find exotic equipment like steel pipe spaceships and our favorite, the red stagecoach with bench seats and large wheels made of bent pipe.

A steel jungle gym.  Or an eight year old's fort

There's a reason this equipment isn't used anymore.  I can't count the number of times I had skin burned by a sliding board made of polished sheet metal or risked a concussion by falling off a jungle gym.  Heck, all of this stuff had concrete bases!  Of course, when we were kids no one really thought about things like that.  You just played and if you skinned a knee or fell too hard no one wanted to walk two blocks to get home.  You just kept playing.

Progress is good and I'm sure today's equipment is safer but some of that stuff was just plain fun.

A Space Station?