When our older daughter Sarah was little, around the turn of this century, her preschool had events at Smith Memorial Playground in Fairmount Park. At the time the wooden slide for which the playground is famous had narrow splintery stairs separated from the slide area by chicken wire; the seesaws operated entirely on trust; and I remember in particular a metal slide, very tall and steep, situated at the midpoint of a narrow platform that was mostly open at the sides and reached by ladders at either end—inviting one nervous parent to envision horrible falls at every second. The kids loved it.
There’s a seven-year age gap between our daughters, so by the time we were bringing Lily there the playground had been closed for safety reasons (according to the Smith website) and renovated with more up-to-date equipment. The kids still had a good time, but I don’t remember ever having my heart in my throat watching them. (Which, as it turns out, is maybe not a good thing.)
Those contrasting visions came to mind as I was reading “Tossing Out the Playbook” by JoAnn Greco. Her cover story profiles several alumni and faculty of the Weitzman School of Design’s landscape architecture program who are determined to return a sense of challenge, mastery, and even a little danger to a play environment where often “kids go up the stairs, across a bridge, and down a slide over and over again.”
The article highlights several new projects designed by Weitzman affiliates, from large-scale efforts in FDR and Cobbs Creek parks to neighborhood playgrounds and even smaller efforts incorporated into libraries and other public spaces. It also sketches in the history of ideas about play and advocacy for more open-ended, riskier facilities—pioneered by London’s post-World War II “adventure playgrounds” and other European practices—and the constraints faced by US designers that these new projects are meant to challenge.
Several of the landscape architects JoAnn spoke to link their design approach to childhood experiences of unstructured play in nature and the outdoors. Associate editor Dave Zeitlin C’03’s story,
“A Daughter’s Reckoning,” opens with Artis Henderson C’02 W’02’s idyllic memory of flying with her father over the trees, creeks, and pastures of her beloved childhood home in Georgia’s Blue Ridge Mountains, which abruptly turned nightmarish when his plane crashed.
Henderson, who survived multiple injuries, has investigated the details of her father’s secret life as an international drug smuggler and the mystery of his death in her new book No Ordinary Bird. Dave spoke with her about the process of writing it, her award-winning work as a conservation journalist, and how the death of her father and later her husband have shaped her path and diverted her from the “ghost lives” she might have lived.
The playgrounds feature also mentions—in the context of making facilities more inclusive for people of different abilities and ages—the statistic that by 2030 there will be more people in the US over 65 than under 16. Currently, some 7 million people in that over-65 population are afflicted with variants of Alzheimer’s disease, the most common cause of dementia. While a cure still seems far off, and much about the condition remains frustratingly unclear, there are some hopeful signs of progress, as detailed by Mary Ann Meyers Gr’76 in “Alzheimer’s Now.”
—John Prendergast C’80
Editor
