Way Out to Play

Children poured into the playground and found two jet planes, a tank and three trolleys, an 1870 locomotive, a Coast Guard tug, an amphibious craft, a fire engine, a Marine obstacle course and a soapbox racing track. There were some old-fashioned things too--basketball courts, swings and seesaws.

This child's vision of Eden is the new John F. Kennedy Playground, which opened in Washington last week. The idea came from Attorney General Robert Kennedy after a drive through one of the city's most depressed areas, which had almost no recreational facilities. He studied the problem, developed plans, and chose O. Roy Chalk, the energetic president of the D.C. Transit System, to raise the $200,000 needed for construction. But the most inspired idea cost nothing: to ask the armed forces to donate some obsolete tanks, planes, and ships. They happily complied. Chalk has now set up the National Committee on Playgrounds for Young America, hopes to raise $2,500,000 to duplicate the playground in other cities.

The Monster & Friends. The Kennedy Playground is only the latest variant in a slow latter-day transformation of the old slide and swing. The slides are now apt to be shaped like oversized caterpillars, and space stations, poly-blocks and geodesic domes are standard equipment in better playgrounds across the U.S. "Creative play" is one of the country's newest fancies.

Oakland, Calif., has a $65,000 Fairyland with supersize Mother Goose characters and a clocktower slide; a 30-ft. sculpture called "The Monster" whose innards are littered with caves and slides; a series of structures made of wooden piles and culvert pipe, imaginatively painted and arranged; a Western frontier town (with a tombstone inscribed "As You Stand Now So Once Was I").

Philadelphia's twelve-year-old playground program has cost $30 million, is generally acknowledged to be the most successful in the country. No two of the city's 347 recreational facilities are identical: one has a series of concrete castles, one a squirrel house, another a spray pool. Newest equipment includes a 25-ft.-high rocket to the moon (with a helpful slide back to earth) and a gigantic turtle made of pipe and concrete. A big draw at the Penn Valley playground in Kansas City, Mo., is a magnificent woodpile composed of a series of tree trunks embedded in concrete under sand to form an intricate jungle gym. Even small towns are adopting the new gadgets. The town of Warner Robins, Georgia, for instance, has constructed a new 13-unit obstacle course of slides and balance beams, installed a couple of whirl merry-go-rounds.

Splinters in the Dust. Chief holdout is old New York. In a memorable exchange in 1948, Architectural Critic Lewis Mumford accused Park Commissioner Robert Moses of creating playground spaces "that are merely leftovers, bleak asphalt wastes, marks of an absence of human interest and an almost positive distaste for beauty." To parents' demands that sawdust be substituted for cement, Park Commissioner Newbold Morris replied with a pungent comment on the problems of the great big city. "Sawdust gets full of splinters, broken glass, empty cigarette packages and debris. We're experimenting with a rubber compound, but it's been ripped with knives. We have $450,000 a year in willful damage to park property."

In an effort to smuggle some imaginative ideas into the city, Architect

Louis Kahn and Sculptor Isamu Noguchi have produced a design for a $1,000,000 playground to be carved out of Riverside Park. Proposed as a memorial to the late Philanthropist Adele R. Levy, the layout includes a grass-covered amphitheater, a pyramid and some handsome free-form sculptures designed to tempt the clambering young. But by the time the park engineers, the evaluators, the experts and the mayor are through with the plans, many a moppet may well have hair gone grey at the temples.

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