In the backyard of the Winnetka Historical Society, behind a fence of manicured hedges, there stands an ancient jungle gym, a monolithic, caramel-color 7-foot tall cube of deliberately spaced sharp angles, a geometric Tetris of rusted pipes not soldered end to end but fastened curiously in place with small curls of steel. It looks as punishing as contemporary playground equipment is welcoming, promising the softest of falls to the youngest of kids. Its only concession to safety is the sandbox of wood chips beneath it.
Rachel Ramirez, the society’s curator, says, “I wouldn’t let my own child play on it.”
And you shouldn’t either.
Playground equipment gets inspected often, even in autumn, because playgrounds, as much as we see them as warm-weather spaces, transcend season. But this jungle gym is different. It transcends inspection. It looks as if it were built to remind a child to be cautious, to stop and think and pay attention to what he or she is doing — actions do have consequences! — and yet, on the other hand, wink, wink, fortune does favor the daring …
So neighborhood kids climb on it; they’re not supposed to, but this jungle gym is hard to deny. Its influence is felt in the 22-foot treetop climb at the Lincoln Park Zoo, in the sky-high slides at Maggie Daley Park, in the swoops of monkey bars once planted into suburban concrete. Its legacy can be seen in the colorful pre-Target, postwar playground creations at the Milwaukee Art Museum’s latest exhibit, “Serious Play: Design in Midcentury America.” And though it may lack a marker or plaque from the Winnetka Historical Society, it, too, is a museum piece.
It is the first jungle gym.
The very first.
For a century, hard steel jungle gyms and their bright plastic playground offspring have been neighborhood fixtures, as ubiquitous and unseen as mailboxes and squirrels. You likely never thought that someone actually invented the jungle gym. But that someone was Sebastian Hinton, a Chicago patent attorney with a love for math and a history of mental health issues. His story takes a dark turn. His famous creation, though, was so successful you can trace the rise, decline and future of the neighborhood playground in it. Because the story of the jungle gym is the story of why we created playgrounds in the first place, why we remade them as cushioned, coddling spaces and, counterintuitive as it sounds, why playground designers are now eager to install a little “calculated risk.”
Hinton was too.
In his 1920 patent application for a “climbing structure,” he admitted climbing equipment was “somewhat dangerous.” But his invention was as natural as a jungle. It would harness “the monkey instinct strong in all human beings and perhaps more clearly displayed in children.” The upper layer of bars would serve as “the forest top”; from there, a child could “climb from one side to the other, without touching the ground.” He believed in the primitive instinct of children to learn from their bruises, and push their luck.
What could go wrong?
Outside the fence of play:groundNYC on Governors Island, there is a handmade sign that asks parents to relax, if only for a moment, to breathe and let go: “Your kids will be fine without you.” A child made the sign while playing at play:groundNYC, using wood and paint. Another sign reads: “Bye Mom, Bye Dad.” The space was founded three years ago by Rebecca Faulkner, a London native who was inspired by her father’s memories of playing in the rubble of a post-Blitz England. It is, at a glance, a mess of spare tires and scrap wood, crates and fabrics. It is also one of the most celebrated possibilities for the playground of the future — an empty lot full of tools and nails and stray material waiting to be assembled into whatever a kid might imagine.
For the past three years, it has averaged about 10,000 children a year — and only children. The space has four adult play supervisors at all times and caps admission to 45 kids at a time, but also, parents sign liability waivers and are not allowed inside.
“I think 99 percent of them watch from the fence,” Faulkner said. “They see the tools, they get nervous. I walk up to them and say: ‘It’s sort of like you used to play, right?’”
Actually, it wouldn’t have been out of place at the dawn of playgrounds, in 19th-century Germany, where early sandlots were set up to encourage free play through scrap materials. The first playgrounds in this country found inspiration there, particularly in the writings of German educator Friedrich Froebel, who believed that teaching through play could install a healthy understanding of spontaneity and risk in a child. The first American playground (really large boxes of sand) opened in Boston in 1885. But one of the first playgrounds that resembled the playground of today — swings, benches, green field — was Jolly Romp. It was built in 1895 at Hull House on Chicago’s Near West Side.
The playground was understood initially as a public service, as a way of socializing and keeping safe the children of new immigrants — and therefore, to some, the playground was apparently insidious, a Trojan horse. The Tribune warned that new play spaces would overcrowd already-crammed immigrant neighborhoods, “limiting the breathing space.” Still, as playgrounds took off in the early 20th century, a more practical purpose was touted: Since kids played often in streets then, playgrounds would steer them out of the path of another more popular invention, the automobile.
The idea of a playground as an early catalyst for a child’s development, however, was gathering steam nationwide, but particularly in the Chicago area, fast becoming a center of progressive education. John Dewey, the reformer who founded the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, introduced a sandlot to the school soon after it opened in 1896. And according to Alexandra Lange, author of the new history “The Design of Childhood: How the Material World Shapes Independent Kids,” architect Dwight H. Perkins, who created Lane Tech high school and Cafe Brauer at the Lincoln Park Zoo, designed many of Chicago’s initial playgrounds himself; he regarded the concept of the playground as a fundamental step in allowing a child to understand that he or she was a part of a larger world.
The closest Hinton apparently came to progressive education was his wife, Carmelita, a former secretary to Hull House reformer Jane Addams. One night at a dinner full of influential local educators, he found himself talking with a Chicago man named Carleton Washburne, the new school superintendent of Winnetka. Washburne would later be whispered about as a closet socialist — it was a “close-knit, progressive-minded and insulated” town, said Tane Beecham, Winnetka Historical Society executive director. But in 1920, Washburne was introducing ideas to classroom education that are now fundamental: He believed in sex ed, in-school psychologists and movable desks and that children should take graduated, self-directed risks to advance — at their own pace.
At dinner, Hinton told Washburne about growing up in Japan. His father, who invented the first baseball pitching machine, was also a mathematician. To teach geometry, he built his children a climbable grid of bamboo sticks (fastened with curls of bamboo). He would shout Cartesian coordinates — X2! Y4! — and watch his kids race to the point. Soon, though, they became bored and just climbed and dangled for fun — just because.
A bell went off.
What Hinton described was a physical manifestation of Washburne’s philosophy — of the need to push higher, at one’s own speed. So along with educator Rose Alschuler, who would later establish the first nursery school in Chicago, Washburne and Hinton left the party and began designing a climbing grid that night. North Shore Country Day School got the first prototype. But the final version, the jungle gym now in that Winnetka backyard, was installed initially in a Horace Mann School, then at Crow Island School on Willow Road, Washburne’s proudest creation, where it was climbed for decades.
Hinton would never see most of this.
He filed the patent in his name and established Junglegym Inc. He was prominent enough in Chicago that the Tribune covered his wedding extensively. But when he died unexpectedly, the newspaper ran only a small notice, saying he was in New England and had heart disease. Actually, as his wife’s biographers would later clarify, Hinton had been institutionalized there for depression, where he hung himself. He was in his early 30s; he died in April 1923. Five months later, he received a patent on the jungle gym.
For decades the traditional American playground was a slide, a seesaw, a merry-go-round, swings and Hinton’s jungle gym, each a separate piece, typically metal. Seesaws, reliant on half of its riders not to leap off and send the other half plummeting to earth, became a queasy lesson in trust; slides and jungle gyms, which grew to 25 and 30 feet tall, could feel like tests of self-reliance. But because equipment was often cemented solidly into ground, removal was costly. Playgrounds in many neighborhoods became institutions, unchanged for decades. Childhood historians often see this period, from the late 1940s to the late ’60s, as a golden age, a time of anarchic play spaces with little restrictions, overseen mostly by kids themselves. Said Kim Brooks, the Chicago author of “Small Animals,” a new book about parental overprotection: “The idea of risk in a playground sounds great, but you know what sounds better? A kid who can play without a parent hovering. Sounds nuts, but it’s how kids played for a long time.”
That freedom, and a growing suburbia in need of fresh concepts for its playgrounds, attracted artists. In 1953, New York’s Museum of Modern Art even sponsored a contest to encourage innovative, witty new ideas in playground equipment. One of those ideas, artist Isamu Noguchi’s model for a minimalist Atlanta playground, on display at the new Milwaukee show, suggests the line between art installation and playground evaporating.
Then, a turning point.
In 1978, in the North Center neighborhood, a toddler slipped through an opening at the top step of a slide in Hamlin Park and fell to asphalt, suffering head injuries. The slide was 12 feet tall — too tall for a baby. A Chicago Park District engineer asked the Tribune at the time: “What good would it have done to have a (playground) supervisor there?” But the family sued the Chicago Park District and was awarded $9.5 million. A decade later, another family was awarded $15 million when their 10-year-old fell from a jungle gym in Washington, D.C., and suffered brain damage. All of this came as Americans were retreating indoors and municipalities were struggling to pay for the maintenance of decaying playgrounds. The value of rusting, overly familiar equipment was questioned.
The Consumer Product Safety Commission, which started tracking causes of emergency room visits in the ’70s, issued its first standards for playground equipment in 1981. It found that falls from climbing equipment were the most common playground injury. (Indeed, even now, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 200,000 children are treated annually for playground injuries, mostly from falls while climbing.)
By the mid-’90s, across the country, playgrounds softened. Steel frames became plastic molding, concrete surfaces became foam carpets. The playground slides in Chicago parks were shortened 6 feet. Tire swings disappeared. In Arlington Heights, equipment was sanded down to prevent splinters. Out of fear that a kid might get hooked and choke, park workers in Northfield even sawed ears off of riding horses. Merry-go-rounds? Gone. Jungle gyms? Removed.
Mostly.
By 2004, according to the National Program for Playground Safety, only 7 percent of schoolyard playgrounds still had a seesaw. “The goal,” says Heather Olsen, executive director of the group, based at the University of Northern Iowa, “was never to encourage boring, stagnant playgrounds, but we want data-driven solutions and best practices for healthy outdoor play. Because even if eight children are dying every year (in a playground equipment-related incident), that’s still unacceptable.”
The problem, some designers and even parents say now, was that solutions became sledgehammers, and as Jennifer Senior wrote in her 2014 book, “All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood,” the contemporary playground became “a protection against playgrounds.” Peter Exley, who started the Old Town firm Architecture is Fun in 1993 — they made the treetop climb for the Lincoln Park Zoo’s children’s section — said “playground equipment companies began offering tepid, safe experiences at attractive price points to park districts, so it became difficult for designers (like himself) to offer custom playgrounds with a personality.” He says it’s still that way.
Imagination feels like an afterthought.
And so does fun, said Lenore Skenazy, a Wilmette native who founded the Free-Range Kids movement in New York a decade ago to promote less obsessive parental helicopters. “When I was growing up in Wilmette, we had a fantastic merry-go-round, high swings, lots of empty space. And you did not go with your parents. Now, merry-go-rounds? Centrifugal force. What is hard to understand is that less risk became zero risk, and nothing has zero risk. There used to be an understanding that risk wasn’t only bad.”
These days, among designers, the buzzword is risk.
As in, managed risk, calculated risk, limited risk.
But always risk.
It’s an abrupt shift in mindset, born from studies that say children who rarely encounter danger seek out ugly places to channel it, and from studies that show the acreage that the average child can roam alone today is roughly the acreage of their family driveway. Scott Goldstein, a pediatrician at Northwestern Children’s Practice, said, “If (parents) are constantly hovering, saying ‘Be careful,’ what happens when you’re not there? Can they deal with that scraped knee? Kids need to figure out risk. Playgrounds today can keep things risky without making them dangerous. Maggie Daley is like the perfect example.”
As in the Play Garden at Maggie Daley Park.
When it opened three years ago, lost amid the hoopla for the new city park was that its inventive and gently terrifying scale was regarded by some playground designers and childhood development experts as a rebuke to a generation of homogenized, overly cautious playgrounds, a showcase example of a mainstream 21st-century play space. Super-angular walking surfaces that force children to balance. A rope bridge that sways high above the ground. Extra-tall flumelike slides that demand some measure of guts.
“The thing about that park,” says Michael Maloney, founder of the design firm Play Illinois and a Play Garden safety inspector, “is really you’re visually pushing the limit. It may look intimidating. But it’s extremely safe, a beautiful example of what we can do now.”
But that’s not irony.
Irony is that “lately we are seeing some of the same risk-averse communities asking us to challenge their kids again — in safe ways,” said Scott Roschi, creative director for Minnesota-based Landscape Structures, which creates equipment for scores of parks, including Chicago playgrounds. Which means, in the next decade, playground equipment will get steeper again. And there will be mud — sand and water attractions are becoming popular. More zip lines, and more trampolines. For children with disabilities, more inclusive-minded playground equipment.
Heather Gleason, director of planning and development for the Chicago Park District, said the city is getting more requests for naturecentric spaces, centered on natural materials. The city has eight and plans to add more in the spring. “I think people see a lot of concrete now, and they wonder how do you get (kids) interacting with this world.”
The answer: mud kitchens and stick forts.
Also, expect more art in the 21st-century playground:
Ole Barslund Nielsen, CEO of Dutch playground designer Monstrum, began creating theater sets. Now he makes actual Trojan horses (and submarines, and clown heads), for kids to leap from; he is one of the most celebrated playground designers in the world, and he’s in the early stages of a new playground for Chicago (but would not divulge details). He said there was a point as an artist when he realized he could make more art, “or for the same budget, I could make a functional princess tower. Which is not exactly art or sculpture, but it has more layers than your typical playground installation.”
You might say the playground of the future is a sharp stick in the eye of practical parents, short recesses and overscheduled childhoods. Or that it’s not so much a corral for unruly children but an argument for more pleasantly unruly children. Three years ago, Yulia Borisova created Purple Line Adventure Play, a pop-up playground in Evanston, not unlike play:groundNYC. She gets businesses to donate refrigerator boxes, asks parks and recreation departments to donate sticks and branches. They set up in a local park (with permission from the city), throw in the stuff and simply … step back.
“I want to create opportunities for spontaneous connections for kids. Kids get formalized play dates now, and kids just want to connect to kids. … Some parents come to (the pop-ups) and step in, ‘OK, let’s build a house,’ as if the kid is their helper. We discourage it.”
The goal, she said, is self-directed play.
I know, the Russian native sighed, crazy.
Except for those years it spent toppled on its side, just another chunk of rusting 20th-century culture, the first jungle gym ever stood in Winnetka throughout all of that — the rise and fall and rise of risk on the American playground. It’s likely not the last of its kind; Debbie Trueblood, executive director of the Illinois Park and Recreation Association, doubts that every scary old jungle gym in Illinois was purged, even if municipalities tried.
But certainly it’s a survivor.
It witnessed more change than its creator, whose family went on to remarkable lives: One daughter, Joan Hinton, a nuclear physicist, joined the Manhattan Project at 22, but was repulsed when her work was dropped on Japan; she moved to China, served as a translator during the Cultural Revolution and lived the rest of her life on a dairy farm there. Her brother William Hinton became one of the world’s leading chroniclers of communist China. And Carmelita, Hinton’s wife — she started the first nursery school in Chicago, then left after he died and founded the progressive Putney School in Vermont, which taught agricultural work and manual labor in lieu of athletics.
The first jungle gym hung around long enough to even see its spiritual replacement, the rope climb, a shaky, perhaps scarier volcano-shaped web of threads, intentionally lacking the sturdy grounding of steel pipe. You work for every inch you climb. Some stand as high as 30 feet tall; most offer a bed of soft rope should you slip.
But all demand guts in a child, an urge to pull forward. Hand over hand.
Twitter @borrelli
