Remember Taylor Park in the 70's.

These pictures (if I can get them to upload) aren't from Taylor Park, but we're the closest representations I could find on google.

As a kid I remember there being a rocket ship jungle gym. It was similar to this one, but the colors were different. I believe it was white or silver.

As a kid I remember the merry go round being at least ten feet across and eight feet high. Looking back I was in preschool, so chances are it wasn't the huge behemoth I remember but was probably more along the lines of what is pictured here. I do remember climbing under the seat to go up inside the wooden center.

The sandbox was a large cement circle, and was always filled with kids.

Boy the way Glenn Miller played....

I don't know if it was in the 70's or 80's, but I also remember Marshall school having a really cool playground made out of tires, including a tire dragon.

MDonoghue said:
Just recently, as my kids were "unofficially" checking out the new Jefferson playground, I tried to describe to them what the playgrounds in queens were like in the early 70's.... metal slides, nuts and bolts fully exposed, metal chains holding metal swing seats (cozy in January!), all-metal monkey bars that were REALLY HIGH, and the floor? 100% solid concrete. Mulch? We didn't need no stinkin' mulch! ">

You forgot the all-metal see-saw that landed with a thunk that could give you a concussion if the other kid got off while you were on the up side. And ours had a large sandbox as well. All snuggled up behind a concrete wall that separated it from the Grand Central Parkway.

But on a good day, our teachers would walk us over there for an extended recess, and, miraculously, nobody died. On the other hand, one kid did get a nasty gash when his forehead met the chain link fence around the asphalt "playground" adjacent to our school, and had to be taken for stitches. He's now a doctor.

I think Taylor Park may havehad a see saw also. I'm sure that was probably standard equipment for playgrounds nationwide

It's amazing that any of us made it to adulthood!

sac said:
It's amazing that any of us made it to adulthood!
">

That was before we became the United States of Fear where statistics and factoids devoid of context are used to terrify us.

tjohn said:

sac said:
It's amazing that any of us made it to adulthood!
">

That was before we became the United States of Fear where statistics and factoids devoid of context are used to terrify us.

I tend to agree that we are too easily afraid of imagined dangers.

BUT -- I don't think we need to go back to concrete surfaces below the jungle gym.

I'm not upset that we now have safer playground equipment, even while nostalgic about some of the old stuff.

I have to admit, sometimes I wish they'd bring back the Bag O' Glass.

https://screen.yahoo.com/bag-glass-000000237.html

I don't recall any concrete playgrounds, but my playground experience was limited mostly to Millburn, South Orange, and Maplewood

Where I lived, we couldn't afford concrete.

My elementary school had a jungle gym over asphalt. It was removed when some kid fell and cracked his head open and had to be taken away by ambulance. The only other feature on that "playground" was a rusted backstop with an enormous hole directly behind home plate. The shortest distance to a ball (which you had to bring from home) that had passed through the backstop was to follow it through the hole. The injuries were minor, but frequent.

Were we tougher back then? Or did our parents just love us less?

RobB said:
My elementary school had a jungle gym over asphalt. It was removed when some kid fell and cracked his head open and had to be taken away by ambulance. The only other feature on that "playground" was a rusted backstop with an enormous hole directly behind home plate. The shortest distance to a ball (which you had to bring from home) that had passed through the backstop was to follow it through the hole. The injuries were minor, but frequent.

I think we must have gone to the same elementary school.

I grew up in Brooklyn, with a playground that had octagonal stone blocks as the playground surface area. Can't remember how many bumps and bruises I got from the monkey bars. I remember falling off the top of the slide once - I especially remember my mother washing my face off in the stone drinking fountain where I scraped the whole side of my face. The playground didn't have the circular spinning platforms, but it had the seesaws - we thought getting bumped off them or smashing them down as hard as you could was fun - maybe if I'd grown up in Texas or Wyoming, riding horses would have had the same impact! We also had the metal swings that you had to learn to be careful about walking too close to, because getting hit with one of those could also send you flying.

And with all that, I LOVED going to the playground! I'll have to see if I can google a picture of Fort Greene Park in the 1950s!

Cement? Asphalt? Stone blocks? You guys had it rough! We had wood chip mulch. It stank to high heaven whenever a new shipment was trucked in, but other than that it wasn't so bad. At least if you fell on it you didn't get hurt, you just had to brush it off of your clothing

The "town" playground was sand, only the school playground was asphalt. I should point out I grew up in the sticks, not the city. They literally had to go out of their way to make the playground that dangerous.

I don't see so many merry-go-rounds any more - the kind where you could be assured of getting motion sickness.

tjohn said:
I don't see so many merry-go-rounds any more - the kind where you could be assured of getting motion sickness.

There was one in Maplecrest Park up until about 10 years ago.

Songs that made the hit parade.

Until around 1960, the mud hole in front of the recreation center on Main Street was the town swimming pool. At 9:30 and 12:30, a kid in a rowboat would row around the pond and dump pounds of chlorine in the water. At 10:00 and 1:00, the whistle would blow for swimming to begin.

There is probably a foot of goose poop in the bottom of that pond!

the municipal park merry go rounds were largely litigated out of existence. If I recounted the crazy ***** we used to do as kids on merry go rounds, it would make your head spin.

I used to spend hours hitting a tennis ball against those two big cement walls. There was nowhere else to do that, and I think thats still the case. I loved Taylor Park. I remember the rocket ship.

MDonoghue said:
Just recently, as my kids were "unofficially" checking out the new Jefferson playground, I tried to describe to them what the playgrounds in queens were like in the early 70's.... metal slides, nuts and bolts fully exposed, metal chains holding metal swing seats (cozy in January!), all-metal monkey bars that were REALLY HIGH, and the floor? 100% solid concrete. Mulch? We didn't need no stinkin' mulch! ">

wow ! This post brings back good memories of my childhood. Aww, I loved those monkey bars

Hell, it's lucky I'm still alive. Before M.H.S was built, the area behind from Millburn Ave to Morris Ave in Springfield, and from Mechanic St/Spring St to the Apartments was all wooded area...approximately three square miles.

We were allowed to play there, unsupervised ferchrisakes. It's lucky any of us were not killed.

Formerlyjerseyjack said:
Hell, it's lucky I'm still alive. Before M.H.S was built, the area behind from Millburn Ave to Morris Ave in Springfield, and from Mechanic St/Spring St to the Apartments was all wooded area...approximately three square miles.


We were allowed to play there, unsupervised ferchrisakes. It's lucky any of us were not killed.

Your mother wouldn't let me play there (what is left of the woods, she said there were homeless people and drug addicts in there.

ETA: I believe there was a body found there by some high school students, I don't recall the year though