The Adventure Playground :: Has Boston Missed the Boat?

Have you ever noticed that your kid’s favorite thing at the playground isn’t the primary-colored tunnels and slides, but instead a nearby tree stump or a railroad-tie-turned-balance-beam? Or maybe it’s the sand, and your child is perfectly happy to dig through it with a stick?

Yup, I’ve noticed this, too, and so have the folks behind the “adventure playground” movement — the idea that playgrounds should be organic, built into the land, and, ideally, even of the land itself. The “playground” should challenge kids in different ways, stimulate their imaginations in addition to their bodies. What they should not be is the generic, plastic climbing structures we see all over this otherwise awesome city. Hey Boston. The 1990s called and wants its playground back.

I started thinking about all this on a recent family trip to New York City. With three little ones along, our explorations of the Big Apple weaved in and out of the city’s playgrounds. And we found some pretty amazing ones. In Central Park alone, we encountered mazes of stone ramparts and pyramids of wooden steps, not to mention the park’s giant rocks that beckon both kids and adults alike to scamper to the top.

I came home to Boston and saw our usual stomping ground of playgrounds through a new lens. The two-level climbing structure. The monkey bars. The plastic shelter and bridge. It was fine. Totally fine. But maybe we can do better?

This is not a new idea. In fact, the original permeation of the adventure playground existed in Boston long before the plastic structures that dot our city today. In 1885, a large pile of sand was dumped in a chapel yard in the North End, intended as a spot where the neighborhood children could come and play. It was simple, yet effective, and the kids played there late into the afternoons.

The lone Boston “sand garden” spread to ten inviting sand piles by the following year. A couple years later, a 10-acre park with swings, see-saws, and, yes, more sand, opened in the West End. And a playground era was born in Boston.

In the design-inspired 1950s and 60s, playgrounds got a little crazy — super-high slides, shifty swing sets with arguably more form than function. There were a few high-profile injuries, as well as lawsuits, and everyone freaked out a bit. So by the 1980s, safety was the name of the game, and even more so in the 1990s, when the height of the equipment shrank and guard rails were installed everywhere. Playgrounds across the city began to look the same and challenged kids in the same routine manner. Up, down, through the tunnel. Up, down, over the bridge. Repeat.

Now when I say I’m looking for more adventure playgrounds, I’m not even talking about the European idea of adventure playgrounds, where kids are given random objects like hammers, nails, and wood and challenged to create. I’m trying to picture my three young girls in such a space, and in my mind, it gets ugly fast. And get this, there are playgrounds in Wales where kids actually light fires in tin drums and jump on dirty mattresses. These spaces are more junkyard than playground, and they’re pretty far out of our American comfort zone.

I’d like to think we could find something in between the Lord-of-the-Flies bonfire and predictable plastic. Something like the Alexander W. Kemp Playground on Cambridge Common, which mimics a natural landscape with its hills, valleys, water, and sand. Or Boston’s Esplanade playground, which offers a huge spiderweb of climbing ropes and interlocking wooden logs stuck into the ground. Both features challenge kids to figure out how to use them in a way that a simple series of steps does not.

Or the new Fisher Hill playground in Brookline, where I took my girls just this morning. Newly installed last summer, the park — which features a winding wooden structure, a metal slide built into the steep hill, a lookout tower, and walking trails — is controversial. I’ve heard complaints that they could have done so much more with the space: more to climb, more swings, more tunnels. Enclosed the little ones with a fence. Added a rubber floor.

To me, it’s the absence of more that’s so great. My girls run through the field of wild flowers, “spy” from the lookout, hide behind wooden planks. Run, imagine, run some more. Adventure.