I noticed a lot of your footage was shot in my local park in Centre-Sud in the Village when we used to live there from 2008 to 2016. We used to take our daughter to the playground there before it was renovated to it's sorry stale state it is now. Alot of the equipment there is confusing and unintuitive. On one trip to the playground with our daughter after it had been refurbished, a gentleman who was standing nearby introduced himself to my wife as the city project manager who was involved in the playground's recent refurb. He asked my wife what she thought of the new installations. She told him it was boring and asked him where had the swings gone. He wasn't pleased.
Watching this video, especially with the skate park that wasn't fenced in, it was clear you guys don't think about safety at all. Here in Ontario our fenced in skateparks got shut down and replaced almost everywhere. The only skate parks now are new ones like the ones in Uxbridge where I live. The fact it's surrounded by roads and not fenced in is a little dumb. I at least understand safety is our number one priority as the Russian hacker man would say
EVEN JAPAN HAS Swings. Ffs ppl stopped paying attention when Reality TV came along. Literally this all hit a paradigm shift when Survivor and COPS took off. Just ghetto drama. What a waste of the greatest era in man kind
Playgrounds don't need to be complex and expensive to build and maintain. Kids can have a lot of fun with simple structures. Most often playgrounds seem to be designed to appeal to adults, not to kids. Make them simple enough to repair easily, and let kids use their imagination. A playground structure designed for just one activity will soon be ignored. We work hard to keep children safe. So hard, in fact, that kids don't learn at an early age to recognize danger. When I was a kid, as long as I got home for supper, or maybe when the streetlights came on, nobody worried. I learned to look out for myself. I recognized places that were not safe or appropriate for play.
Exactly this too. We are seeing and are going to see more kids grow up and make these stupid mistakes or misjudgments as adults. I view parks as a vital tool for kids to learn as well. To learn how to know your limits, be safe, deal with other kids (good or bad), even see how the mechanisms work, and with art they can expand their creativity and imagination. All while getting their blood pumping running around being kids. And I'd like to see more adult parks too because young adults that are still active are stuck going to bars, clubs, and home. Middle of the night grounders or wrestling with friends as young adults is a very fun experience.
Instead of playgrounds, kids should have music studios and art centers. Kids can play in a yard. Spend our tax money on something innovative. But we will never get a park here in Southern California lol
@@AckzaTV Music and Art are all well and good until you realize 90% of those trying doing so all want to make a job of it but never will because they are vastly overflooded with people making music and art nowadays.
@@CommanderRedEXE Music and Art are good Hobbies but a career it is not for the vast Majority. We need people to find their own niche and not try to turn their life into bag chase. It wasnt into my Mid 20's i finally realized what i loved todo. Thats building, not "Architecture" or "Engineering" but literal Construction, Woodworking and MetalWork. Things that are pretty much considered trash tier blue work by snobby desk jockeys and b-level management. But it's what I found I am not only good at but love todo. it would have been great if i actually had something like Trade courses available in school, but it was pretty much exclusively geared towards Science and "Arts". While Fun, it was never something i actually cared about. We should be instead Diversifying our overall education outside of just math and art. if not as part of the main curriculum we would be encouraging "afterschool" programs are Part of the main school block to offer courses outside of the norm. not just clubs and sports
In 2008 I cut my leg open on a slide. No idea how I did that, don’t remember. Unfortunately they replaced that super fun leg cutty openy playground with plastic garbage. I hated it.
Give the safe plastic slide they replaced ol'cutty with a few years and the plastic will degrade in the sun and start breaking all over, becoming far more dangerous than the slide that could have simply used a little filing to dull the sharp edges !
i remember we had these nice metal slides. sure, they burnt the hell of your legs when you slid down it but at least they actually worked unlike the crappy plastic ones they replaced them with.
I’m surprised you didn’t talk about the playground surfaces that for last decade turned from natural materials into these rubber mats that contain recycled tyres filled with carcinogens and are leaching microplastics into the environment. It’s a big scandal that hasn’t been covered yet.
I remember when I saw places do that that I ended up getting cuts and slashes all over my body compared to back when it was just gravel or chipped wood bits... which I find funny when something that you'd think would hurt more, actually hurt less.
My school playground used old tires extensively. If you weren't careful you could get scratched by wire sticking out of some of the worn out tires. Then there was the treated timber that the rest of the equipment was built with. There was no plastic used anywhere in its construction.
An extremely unsafe but popular playground in my area, Portsmouth Rhode Island, once known as the wooden playground, was replaced by a standard playground. Absolutely no one went there. It's been replaced again, by a much larger and engaging playground, and seems to have reattractive visitors.
I have dozens of playgrounds around me, and like you pointed out, they're all literally pulled from a catalogue. So if you've been to a couple of them then there's little new to see. Even the kids are bored of them.
When I was a teenager, I used to love the park by my house. My buds and I would climb it, and fuck around, and then as I got older I'd go in the evening and smoke weed. Never vandalized it, everything was made out of metal. They replaced it with a shitty catalogue park, and I complained to the councillor literally because it was shit and made for like toddlers, and I stopped going to the park to climb on anything and we got bored and started vandalizing the park and other shit. I'm not proud of that and wouldn't condone vandalism ever, but I think it's telling that it wasn't until they blandified the park that I enjoyed it even until I was a teen and respected the park.
Unfortunately its not about safety...Its about liability. When parents let their kids play unsupervised, serious injuries can occur. It only takes one idiot to ruin it for everything. Cities hate to be sued. Insurance premiums suck. ;)
one I grew up near was made out of reclaimed telephone poles and railroad ties. They were old and weathered enough splinters were very rare, and it had such a cool vibe, I remember as a kid playing pirates and stuff there felt so much more immersive when you're running in and out of little log cabins, climbing up hemp rope netting attached to old weathered wood structures, etc. It wasn't less safe, but it still got replaced just cus it was different, and old.
I remember a park in california had a giant 3 story rocketship in the 1980's.. Yeah, we climbed the outside of it to the top. Sadly this thing was dismantled decades later. No one ded, you learned to not fall.
Seeing the lawsuit conondrum slowly deteriorate the parks I was playing in as a kid in the USA was depressing. They removed at least a solid 1/3rd of every park, and we'd have to explain to the younger kids that there used to be something there between the leftover poles. The best was an open end second story structure that led into a wide climbing net. We literally learned how to jump off the ledge and catch ourselves by grabbing the net at the ground level. It felt like a movie scene everytime you did it. They removed all the nets on that playground, and patched in a wall so that second level path became a dead end. They removed the rail zipline shortly afterward. Then they also removed a bounce tire thing you could jump on. Oh and then they also removed a climbing rope that literally only went up 5 feet to reach a small ledge. Lots of barren poles and support beams making people wonder what used to be there.
The best playground I ever saw when I was a kid we called “king’s castle”. It was a massive wooden jungle gym with rubber bridges and wooden towers and rooms in a sea of wood chips. Ignoring the bugs and wasps in the fall, it was amazing, even as an adult I thought it looked impressive! That is, until someone smoked cigarettes inside it at midnight and burned it to the ground…
My hometown when I was young had a similar playground, I can’t remember its real name but me and the other kids just called it Castle Park. It was awesome. Tons of fun memories there.
Unfortunately it seems like homelessness is a major reason for a lot of these older, sturdier, funner and wooden parks going out of fashion, due to them usually starting a fire there, whether intentionally or not it seems like the reason for a lot of downgrading for kids parks in Canada. In previous era's, it was rare for homeless to constantly burn themselves or a piece of equipment in a kids park, but as it becomes more and more normal (with an increasing homeless population on the rise) we've had to spend less and less in repairs and rebuilding kids parks that also rarely get used for inteted use due to less and less kids each generation, thus leading to less and less of a reason to spend on said kids parks.
The park across from my house just got “upgraded” with a hideous lime green and bright blue plastic jungle gym monstrosity for $1.6M. smh looking at these gorgeous playgrounds
I remember this one playground from when I was a kid that was near a beach, and much of the structure was built out of concrete tubes (probably for sewers idk) so that you could crawl around through these tunnels with escape holes underneath the rest of the playground. Kids make lasting memories at unique playgrounds like those - I certainly did.
Look up Caper Acres in Bidwell Park, Chico California. It still has its underhill sewer pipes, concrete Swiss cheese, crooked boot house and other original structures, as well as some new safety crud structures in garish colors.
I remember one when I was a kid that was a big wooden firetruck that had platforms and bridges on it, it was really fun. I saw it a few years ago and it’s just a generic playground now. Sad to see.
As a kid in the '80s, the playground was usually asphalt, and had stuff like monkey bars, a metal slide that would burn you on the way down on a hot day, a seesaw you'd use to try and launch your opponent with, and swings we'd jump off to see who could go the farthest.
The smell of the steel as the sun rose throughout the morning, the wear patterns of the paint on the merry-go-round, hunkering down inside Mayor McCheese's head to watch the everyday chaos unfold around you, firing handfuls of wood chips at each other- ah, golden memories.
I have a scar on the left side of my face, right next to my eye. It hard to see in amongst the wrinkles, but I know it's there. I had to ask my mom how I got the scar, because I was to young to remember how it happened. If i remember the age correctly, it happened when I was 4 years old. I had decided i could fly. So i got a beach towel, and tied like a cape around my neck. I climbed on the roof of my uncle's garage and I jumped. I got the scar from a pipe that was right by the garage. It was about 3 feet high. I just barely missed impaling myself on it. I did all of that in less than 2 minutes my mom said. Kids will be kids.😁
Wow. I got two face injuries but probably less extreme.. Once I was running around the living room. Climbing on the sofa and running around the table (a but like those obstacle courses you have in PE). As I was trying to get faster and faster I tripped after jumping off the couch and struck my head against the table the tv sat on and got a small cut on my forehead from the corner of it. Also busted my eyebrow open against a wall corner after accidentally running into it with a beanie over my face.. that wasn’t a smart decision and teachers looked at my parents funny for a week or two I think. Even thought we were climbing and jumping off the playground structures (there was also a ramp we used to run up to then jump as far as possible. At some point managed to jump over the parks fence (it was pretty low but there was a non-negligible gap. Could have hurt a lot if someone had caught on the fence and faceplanted into the concrete alveolas we were landing on.)) I got hurt doing the boring and less dangerous looking stuff. Not gonna complain, those cuts weren’t that bad compared to faceplanting onto concrete.
@reedy_9619 You sound like me, having to walk it off a lot. 😁 My teachers learned quickly about me getting into stuff. I skipped nap in kindergarten. Still have the scar on my thumb, six stitches to sew up the cut. At least we survived childhood. 😅
My stupid kid moment was with a slide that we had put a shallow paddling pool at the bottom of. I thought it would be a good idea to go down the slide with a PVC tube in my mouth with the goal of blowing bubbles in the water as I hit the bottom. Luckily I only knocked a tooth out rather than ramming a pipe through my neck haha.
Huh, I have one in the exact same Place. Are you me from the future? Haha. I got mine from swinging on a table when I was a kid, so even making playgrounds “safe” didn’t help me haha.
@Internetzspacezshipz 😅😂🤣 I know I'm not future you. Maybe old geezer you from a past life or alternate universe. 😁😅😂 Like you, safe playgrounds wouldn't have helped me. I got all of my childhood injuries in other places. I grew up with the playgrounds everyone considers dangerous. For me, they were the safest place to be.😁🤣😅😂😭
Sometimes i wonder HOW i managed to make it through childhood as a kid? We played everywhere we could. When it didn't seem all that safe we played anyway but we were cautious and tried to be as careful as possible. With a lil bit of danger you also become a lot more aware of your environment and don't end up like "ah, it's all built safe. What could go wrong? I don't need to be careful." because that kind of mindset really does not benefit a child.
Reminds me of traffic. Where the safest roads are the ones that *seem* not so safe, but actually are. I'm still all for improving safety, but best in invisible ways.
I can verify, they will do it anyways. My absolute fondest memory as a kid was when I went to visit my best friend who had moved away quite a distance- I was in his company for two weeks, and fifteen years later, I cherish those two weeks fondly. He and I were talking about how our lives had changed since our parting of ways, we had just stopped off at the local convenience store for some cold drinks. We had a walked about halfway to his house where they had one of these mod-yard playgrounds, buddy was like “wanna see something cool? Nobody else can do this” as he mantles this very steep plastic roof on the highest platform, the kind of steep that professionals need to be tied off on to prevent injury. Bro gets to the top, in all his glory, tries to stand tall- but fate gripped his poor left paw and yanked it out from under him. He didn’t tumble, he slid, FAST, my jaw hits the floor, my heart merging with the core of the earth- he’s not just falling, he’s falling with his legs wide open, and there’s 2 levels of metal he missed, his testicular homicide rapidly approaching its conclusion. He lands of the ground level railing, he wasn’t very tall you see, nor was he coordinated. The ONLY THING holding him upright was his gooch, and the groan of horror, pain, and absolution that guttered from his maw makes me laugh to this very day. In comical fashion, the slow roll to the side, the second fall onto the shoulder, and the resultant 60 meter crawl to the gazebo up the way to vomit profusely made me laugh harder than I have ever laughed in my life. We had a really good time, life picked up after that, I got my first job in a pipe yard, his dad pushed him into his school and his faith. I respect the man very much, but he is not who he was back then. Man, cherish your good friendships while you can, they don’t ever really seem to last for very long before nine and five start to add up. I needed this :) thanks, dude with a playground fixation (in the non creepy way) Edit: bro the way buddies legs clapped the railing support bars was like a literal rag doll- knees all flat out, feet slightly angled behind, like watching a wizard fall onto a witches broom at near terminal velocity 😭😭😭 God I hope his kids come out okay
I am glad this one landed. I (inappropriately) laughed a lot reading about this slide and really wanted to get that vibe into the video. Credit to Sophie Cornish at The Dominion post for assembling this: www.stuff.co.nz/national/126288650/at-least-eight-children-break-legs-on-wellington-slide-due-to-be-dismantled
@@PaigeMTL i have never seen your videos before and the combonation of your humour and the niche subject matter really took me in, great work! Deffinitely subbed 😁
I love the clip at 8:01 with the girl actively hanging off the side of a spinning ride, with over 10 kids on it simultaneously, about to get trampled by their fellow playmate It sums the whole point up perfectly lmao
We went on a family holiday campervanning in New Zealand a long time ago. Any time I think of the trip, I can only recall a few things because I was not more than 7 at the time, but some of the most vivid memories I have was stopping in some random village and getting some fish n chips while I played in some playground with my brother. I never quite knew why the memories of the playgrounds in New Zealand stuck with me so much, but your video really does explain it very well. The world is becoming increasingly dull and standardised. Children need to explore, experiment and learn to balance risk and I'm so glad New Zealand recognised this and gave me the gift of these amazing memories - I can only hope that other countries pick up the same mentality! Greetings from Switzerland!
I'm 70. We used to have the concept of Accepted Risk: if you played on monkey-bars, you (and your parents) accepted the risk of falling and getting hurt. But now the Western World thinks life should be risk free, and if you get hurt someone owes you money.
Standardising a safe design language for playgrounds was a great idea. The issue was how there were 7 things in the language, and all of them gave kids 1 thing to do. A unified design language that was full of things to do and safe challenges was triumphed by ultra low cost injection molded playgrounds.
I watched this video randomly after seeing it on my suggested feed... and just happen to live in Wollongong, Australia. I had no idea who had designed the playground in our central mall but instantly recognised Hewsons style in this video! The same stone blocks and rubber paving!
It's funny. I see these same playgrounds everywhere around were i live, and now that i think about it, I don't think I've ever seen maybe 1 or 2 kids playing on them at any one time. Most of the time, they are deserted.
Very well done. I've seen some of your stuff before, keep it up. Still suffering the consequences of a smashed right elbow I got over 60 years ago in unsupervised play. Part of my life, wouldn't change it for the world - it made me ambidextrous.
Its such a shock when you visit a playground you wish you had as a kid. The playground in the centre of Greenwich park in London was an absolute joy, though I'm 2 feet taller than the intended height
I live in New Zealand and broke my arm in two places at intermediate school. the obstacle course which is what they claimed it was, was very dangerous and had wooden posts sticking out of the ground (which were made to walk on as like stepping stones) and was right next to the monkey bars. I was way too high above the monkey bars and ended up swinging too far and landing on my back right next to one of these posts not really knowing if I hit it or not. next thing I know I'm on my back looking up to see that I had broken my arm and could literally see the bone sticking out of my arm. the throbbing pain is one of the most pailful feelings I have ever felt in my life. I remember distinctly that they put in lots of rubber mats after this accident to try prevent this from happening again but never removed the wooden posts.
An informative, well presented, AND funny video. Nice work. Based purely on this one video I've subscribed, if only to see if this videos style is the norm here, or just an exceptional exception.
man I gotta say though my school had one of those massive wooden structures with metal slides, and no one got hurt on them... they replaced it with a modern "Safe" playfort and I cannot tell you how many times I slipped on the pile of shit because the plastic became slick once it got cold and the Plastic Slide got so slick in winter you would not slow down enough to stop at the bottom so you just got ejected. At least with wood it rarely froze over and most of the metal slides were frosted over enough to be sticky not slick
The UK has great playgrounds. I'm 21, and RAF Cosford's playground had me tempted, lol! It should be mentioned that Thompson, Manitoba, is not Wellington, New Zealand. The good people of Pickle Lake Ontario and too many communities to count need to be flown to the hospital because there's not a hospital within 300 kilometres and a 6-hour ambulance ride won't do them much good
man, i'm losing it at all the playground transitions 😂 such an interesting and cosmopolitan video. i would love for more cities to become part of this renaissance of community-solicited public spaces
As a kid, I always complained about the lack of screen time I was allotted. But now that I'm an adult and can look back on things, I can see that my mom made the right decision there.
Wiarton Ontario, (where THE groundhog is from) used to have this massive wooden boat style playground, it was just off the beach front, it was the best thing ever as a kid, easily some of my most vivid childhood memories are from there, about 5-10 years ago it was replaced by one of those post and platform pile of trash playgrounds. So sad my kids cant have the same memories as i do of that area, they dont see the beautiful little town the same way.
i love the mention of the gathering place because i live there in Tulsa and it really does live up to its name. if you dont like long lines then dont go there on a busy day, but besides that it is an amazing place for people of all ages to have fun. while i dont have much fun there because playground just arent fun for me anymore since ive grown up, its still a place worth 5 stars on any day.
i feel like it’s a lot less likely to be vandalised if it’s a long-lasting piece of the community rather than a piece of corporate play-gear that is technically counting as a park because you have a slide. it’s very easy to not care about what happens to slide hut #10578, but the bird tower that is modelled after a bird indigenous to the area that you personally played on feels a lot worse to damage
I think everyone should have to sign a waiver to play at parks or they'll eventually just level them all and tell kids to have fun in empty lots/fields. Parks have "progressively" phased out or replaced all of my childhood favorites. Seesaws, Merry-Go-Rounds, Tubes, Big metal slides, Solid jungle gyms(not rope), Sand diggers, Monkey bars, all have been removed or replaced by boring and overly safe equipment that kids are bored of after 10 minutes. Now parks cost so much to build you get one decent place per city/town instead of the variety we had to choose from when I was a kid. Kids prefer their phone and video games to these parks now primarily designed for unaccompanied babies.
Just look at what happened to the design of McDonalds. When I was growing up we had bright colors, huge play zones to socialize and even N64's built into the freaking walls with games to play. Now it's where kids go to get employed, dawn a soulless uniform and join a generic corporate structure inside of what has become the most depressing corporate design ever. The modern Mcdonalds in it's all black and grey drab.
im so glad youtube lets you preview vids from the home screen now bc i hovered over this thinking it had randomly recommended a weird conspiracy theorist about aliens bc i've watched a few 9/11 vids recently lolll, this is a fantastic video!!
The problem with public funding is everyone has a different idea. Its the old Sesame Street lesson. Everyone has $5. we will vote on lemonaid or crayons. Which ever gets more votes, everyone has to spend their money on.
My personal experience with kit playgrounds is that kids will make *anything* unsafe, and that these kits are not all as safe as they claim and are often worse because children are left to make the fun for themselves. I remember several incidents in primary school with a new playground that was touted as "a new step in playground safety" because children just made things up: - We made contests about jumping from platforms horizontally to grab onto the standard-length monkey bars to see how many bars you could skip with your starting jump (plenty of heads were hit). - There was a bridge with handrails about as tall as the average grade 4-6 kid, but we'd just climb between the bars and jump about a metre down as a common trick whilst playing tag on that playground (On more than one occasion, a kid jumped onto someone else running below because they're in a hurry and don't check). - There was this rotating wheel you could hang down from and spin on - one kid slipped off this whilst tucking their body in to rotate faster and the ambulance was called - And then, as a personal affront to people who think they can make playgrounds "safe", we made a contest of swinging from this single tall monkey bar and landing in a cool pose (it was literally just a bar between two vertical poles about 1.5m up, the simplest design you could ever make). Predictably, this ended poorly when I tried to do this after eating an oily sandwich, causing me to slip and fly off and fracture two wrist bones on landing. All I can say is that the older playgrounds we had, made from re-used wooden poles, tyres, concrete tubes and a dash of creativity to make cheap designs from leftover parts were far safer.
One of my favorite Canada facts here in Winnipeg, is Transit drivers have their own private washrooms all over the city, ONLY for them... When we could have spent a little bit more at some of the sites, and made them fully public...
This is the case in almost all Canadian cities. Quite often it is at extreme cost to, as they have to hire specific janitorial to clean these facilities available only to a tiny portion of the population. In BC, private facilities are often contracted - BC Transit pays money to restaurants and stores for permission for their drivers to relieve themselves. It's genuinely embarrassing.
@@onthewater4020 I shouldnt have phrased my comment as if it *only* happens in Winnipeg, and instead clarified that I can only speak of my experience living in Winnipeg all of my conscious existence... Thank you for confirming it happens elsewhere in Canada as well, as I very much suspected, but couldn't verify...
@@AH-lw2bj who are you talking to here? Me? Because I never once said they shouldn't have bathrooms... Full stop. I DID simply point out that the idea ONLY THEY can use them is kinda silly... Why not just make atleast SOME of them, especially along major routes, at certain locations like parks, etc etc, fully public washrooms? As the person above me stated, they will ALSO often just end up going into McDonald's/Seven Elevens, etc to just use their facilities... So instead of paying for the maintenance and cleaning staff, to send personal janitorial services all across the city to clean their personal bathrooms... We could just partner with a major company to use the other bathrooms along their route where it doesn't make sense to convert their private bathrooms to fully public ones... Or along routes where they don't have facilities...
An excellent video! Right up my alley. Free public spaces are extremely important. Especially these days, where it seems like everything costs something.
Toronto has had public washrooms for most of its history. They were removed due to the cost of operation. There is a good video showing where they were / still stand / what they looked like / when they were built / when they were removed uploaded by "NotSmoothSteve" called "Toronto's Strange Public Washrooms".
I work for a state government agency in the US. It is very frustrating. I have been there about a year and people have told me of a problem they’ve been working to solve for 15 years. They would not allow me to come to meetings or participate although I’ve solved problems like that in my career prior. I finally looked into it myself on the weekend and came up with a comprehensive elegant solution. When I shared it with people and demonstrated it, there was essentially no response. They just carried on like I was Bruce Willis in Sixth Sense. I became so frustrated I put in my notice, which honestly has me in a bit of a bind. I can find another job quickly, but I’m so downtrodden and frustrated by the experience, it has affected my mindset. It is a very strange experience to work for government. I’m not sure if they will ever adopt my solution or not. It has been so stressful and disappointing I’ve had to choose not to work on the matter any longer, as my health was being affected by the situation.
The favorite playground I ever went to as a kid was one built up almost entirely out of wood, had some different structures like a boat you could spin a wheel in crew and a big tower you could climb up. Most crucially however, there was space underneath all of the floorboards so if you dug out some of the wood chips you could wriggle around in this secret place _underneath_ the entire structure. Good times, good times.
The park we had when i was a kid was like a death trap. But it was the most fun you could ever have. Especially the big metal slide that would get hot in the summer. You slide faster when you risk getting burned. BRING IT Back!!
No... Non metal slides are just as slippery, except that they don't give kids third degree burns. There is 0 reason to give kids the same exact form of entertainment but with the risk of death added. I mean not that there's 0 risk of death in any slide, but you might as well mitigate it by removing wholly unnecessary risks.
je me rappelle quand j’étais jeune les balançoires à Laval étaient environ 4m de haut et tout le monde voulait toujours s’y balancer, même les adultes, on essayait d’atteindre les plus haut le plus vite possible aujourd’hui toutes ces balançoires ont étés remplacées pour ceux de 2m de haut où il est impossible d’atteindre une hauteur satisfaisante. je connais personne qui était content de ces changements
No way the guy in the bad webcam just said a playground doesn't need to have a slide or swing. Playgrounds can be art installations, but don't force art installations into playgrounds. We want slides! Love the video tho, definitely subbing!
The park I played in the 1980's, was built in late 1800's (my own great great grandma played there). All decorative iron.... huge tall long slides, tall swings, seesaws, a roundabout. They replaced them in the early 90's with some modular log lego, everything was a 3rd of the height, even the roundabout was ruined, it had a mechanism under it to stop it from going too fast.
I’m realizing now that all the fun stuff was taken out of the parks I used to play in. The hang slider rails, the swings, sea saws, the carousel, even the shorter rock walls.
Canadian Tire playground in Charlottetown!? I live there and I completely forgot that playground was CT themed right on Victoria Park. Great ice cream stand near it though. It's not as terrible but it just kind of...exists. I see way more people hit up the splash pad next to it
"In north america parks don't have public toilets" Speak for Canada, I've never been to a park that had a playground and no public toilet in the United States.
I've been planning on building my own community. Given, I fully planned on building my own skatepark as one of the facets of the community. But I could very well incorporate some of these ideas in adjacent parks in the neighborhood. Good shit bro!
I remember when I was in Kindergarten, we had this really fun playground near my home that was essentially a huge (to a kindergartener) wooden ship with lots of climbing spots and a slide, I loved it. In my first year of elementary school they renovated it and turned it into a few separate play things, a little slide, a seesaw, a low hanging swing, a sandpit and a spinny thingy. I remember being so excited for seeing how they could make the big ship even better and then being super dissapointed by the results. Even as a six year old I told my parents that they turned it into a playground for babies.
back in my old city whee i lived there was a tall metal slide and every summer you would go on that it would burn you as you went down the slide sad it got replaced cuz it was always fun seeing how slow you can go on with
My playground as a kid was nature. I climbed real trees, swam in the creek, walked animal trails, had a great deal of fun and occasionally found I needed stitches.
My local council in Australia has made litigation free zones in the city, like the local museum, skateparks and selected green spaces which now all have awesome playgrounds. Some of them more intense that what we had in the 80s. Kids love it.
The talk about toilets in NA vs NZ also comes with another important difference - it's not just about "investment" because it doesn't matter how much investment there is in public facilities if they're unusable even when available. It's like public transport - all the areas with "good" public transport aren't good just because it functions well, they're good because it's a pleasant experience. There are places with "bad" public transport that are just as reliable, but it's an uncomfortable experience to use it. There are public toilets in cities I'm happy to use, and there are ones I know there's no point even going into because they're always going to be disgusting, vandalized, full of crackheads shooting up, or all of the above.
1:44 I've been on that slide before. It was one of the best slides I have ever been on. The reason so many children received injuries is because they actively violated the age limit on the slide. The playground also required parent supervision, so that wouldn't be an excuse either. The reason it was demolished was because of stupid parents letting their toddlers go on a two-story slide.
The best playgrounds in 90s-00s Montreal were the abandoned factories like Stinky, Redpath and Jenkins as well as the spaces underneath the Ville-Marie Expressway/Turcot Yards.
Gosh, you know what I want more of? Playgrounds for adults. I feel the urge to swing around and act out my inner Nathan Drake, Indiana Jones, or Lara Croft. I want to move my body in interesting ways and scrap my knees like I used to when I didn't have to pay bills and taxes. I can't be the only one, right?
I live in Québec Canada and where I live its not like in the video, every park has toilets and some park are like you showed in new zealand with fake rocks and even some with trempolines that makes playgrounds better. I noticed they destroyed parks and made these newer ones here. I live in south shore of Montréal and i feel like quality of life here has increased compared to the rest of Canada, whave a new train the REM to go to Montréal easier and we can go in bike really quickly in all the city, this is all good for skiping traffic.
in high school the art classes had a trip to OCAD, when we're done inside we literally just played at Grange Park right next to it. it's all art themed and very fun to climb all over
I noticed a lot of your footage was shot in my local park in Centre-Sud in the Village when we used to live there from 2008 to 2016. We used to take our daughter to the playground there before it was renovated to it's sorry stale state it is now. Alot of the equipment there is confusing and unintuitive. On one trip to the playground with our daughter after it had been refurbished, a gentleman who was standing nearby introduced himself to my wife as the city project manager who was involved in the playground's recent refurb. He asked my wife what she thought of the new installations. She told him it was boring and asked him where had the swings gone. He wasn't pleased.
Watching this video, especially with the skate park that wasn't fenced in, it was clear you guys don't think about safety at all. Here in Ontario our fenced in skateparks got shut down and replaced almost everywhere. The only skate parks now are new ones like the ones in Uxbridge where I live. The fact it's surrounded by roads and not fenced in is a little dumb. I at least understand safety is our number one priority as the Russian hacker man would say
HA! He needed to hear that from the horses mouth.
EVEN JAPAN HAS Swings. Ffs ppl stopped paying attention when Reality TV came along. Literally this all hit a paradigm shift when Survivor and COPS took off. Just ghetto drama. What a waste of the greatest era in man kind
I was thinking the houses look like Montreal loll
@@patrickforrester8425 ok i was gonna ask a precise question cus centresud+village.... ouin haha. and those red bricks!
Playgrounds don't need to be complex and expensive to build and maintain. Kids can have a lot of fun with simple structures. Most often playgrounds seem to be designed to appeal to adults, not to kids. Make them simple enough to repair easily, and let kids use their imagination. A playground structure designed for just one activity will soon be ignored.
We work hard to keep children safe. So hard, in fact, that kids don't learn at an early age to recognize danger. When I was a kid, as long as I got home for supper, or maybe when the streetlights came on, nobody worried. I learned to look out for myself. I recognized places that were not safe or appropriate for play.
Exactly this too. We are seeing and are going to see more kids grow up and make these stupid mistakes or misjudgments as adults. I view parks as a vital tool for kids to learn as well. To learn how to know your limits, be safe, deal with other kids (good or bad), even see how the mechanisms work, and with art they can expand their creativity and imagination. All while getting their blood pumping running around being kids.
And I'd like to see more adult parks too because young adults that are still active are stuck going to bars, clubs, and home. Middle of the night grounders or wrestling with friends as young adults is a very fun experience.
Instead of playgrounds, kids should have music studios and art centers. Kids can play in a yard. Spend our tax money on something innovative. But we will never get a park here in Southern California lol
what kids need is forests not "playgrounds". They also need their mother to play with them instead of working.
@@AckzaTV Music and Art are all well and good until you realize 90% of those trying doing so all want to make a job of it but never will because they are vastly overflooded with people making music and art nowadays.
@@CommanderRedEXE Music and Art are good Hobbies but a career it is not for the vast Majority. We need people to find their own niche and not try to turn their life into bag chase. It wasnt into my Mid 20's i finally realized what i loved todo.
Thats building, not "Architecture" or "Engineering" but literal Construction, Woodworking and MetalWork. Things that are pretty much considered trash tier blue work by snobby desk jockeys and b-level management. But it's what I found I am not only good at but love todo.
it would have been great if i actually had something like Trade courses available in school, but it was pretty much exclusively geared towards Science and "Arts". While Fun, it was never something i actually cared about. We should be instead Diversifying our overall education outside of just math and art. if not as part of the main curriculum we would be encouraging "afterschool" programs are Part of the main school block to offer courses outside of the norm. not just clubs and sports
In 2008 I cut my leg open on a slide. No idea how I did that, don’t remember. Unfortunately they replaced that super fun leg cutty openy playground with plastic garbage. I hated it.
Well... that is part of the problem right? Instead of "fixing problems" they just change the problems around.
@@CD-vb9fiI never thought of it that way.
Give the safe plastic slide they replaced ol'cutty with a few years and the plastic will degrade in the sun and start breaking all over, becoming far more dangerous than the slide that could have simply used a little filing to dull the sharp edges !
This guy gets it
i remember we had these nice metal slides. sure, they burnt the hell of your legs when you slid down it but at least they actually worked unlike the crappy plastic ones they replaced them with.
I’m surprised you didn’t talk about the playground surfaces that for last decade turned from natural materials into these rubber mats that contain recycled tyres filled with carcinogens and are leaching microplastics into the environment. It’s a big scandal that hasn’t been covered yet.
The pebbled rubber ones are worse. It's like the pads, but the rubber isn't bonded.
I can feel your chinos burnishing on those slides 😬
I remember when I saw places do that that I ended up getting cuts and slashes all over my body compared to back when it was just gravel or chipped wood bits... which I find funny when something that you'd think would hurt more, actually hurt less.
Love how the dude completely ignored it.
My school playground used old tires extensively. If you weren't careful you could get scratched by wire sticking out of some of the worn out tires. Then there was the treated timber that the rest of the equipment was built with. There was no plastic used anywhere in its construction.
An extremely unsafe but popular playground in my area, Portsmouth Rhode Island, once known as the wooden playground, was replaced by a standard playground. Absolutely no one went there. It's been replaced again, by a much larger and engaging playground, and seems to have reattractive visitors.
I don't think you can call children attractive anymore bro
@@demonraptor1he never said that
@@fondbeebboop9705 He tried to make fun of the commenter for saying "reattractive" but his joke didn't seem to quite land
@@demonraptor1 I think re-atracted is what OP was going for. But that's just me looking at the context.
😂@@demonraptor1
The uhh.. closed caption typo @ around 0:44 had me on the floor rolling! The timing, the actions on screen, felt like one of the old parody dubs.
with the shape of those water sprayers, not sure if it was a typo 😭
'seeding with a thousand children'
'bouncing on airbags'
Fellow cc user I see
Lmao
I have dozens of playgrounds around me, and like you pointed out, they're all literally pulled from a catalogue. So if you've been to a couple of them then there's little new to see.
Even the kids are bored of them.
When I was a teenager, I used to love the park by my house. My buds and I would climb it, and fuck around, and then as I got older I'd go in the evening and smoke weed. Never vandalized it, everything was made out of metal.
They replaced it with a shitty catalogue park, and I complained to the councillor literally because it was shit and made for like toddlers, and I stopped going to the park to climb on anything and we got bored and started vandalizing the park and other shit. I'm not proud of that and wouldn't condone vandalism ever, but I think it's telling that it wasn't until they blandified the park that I enjoyed it even until I was a teen and respected the park.
Unfortunately its not about safety...Its about liability. When parents let their kids play unsupervised, serious injuries can occur.
It only takes one idiot to ruin it for everything.
Cities hate to be sued.
Insurance premiums suck. ;)
A daycare playground near me is a combination of a timber structure with that bright rubber ground matting.
one I grew up near was made out of reclaimed telephone poles and railroad ties. They were old and weathered enough splinters were very rare, and it had such a cool vibe, I remember as a kid playing pirates and stuff there felt so much more immersive when you're running in and out of little log cabins, climbing up hemp rope netting attached to old weathered wood structures, etc. It wasn't less safe, but it still got replaced just cus it was different, and old.
I remember a park in california had a giant 3 story rocketship in the 1980's.. Yeah, we climbed the outside of it to the top. Sadly this thing was dismantled decades later. No one ded, you learned to not fall.
Seeing the lawsuit conondrum slowly deteriorate the parks I was playing in as a kid in the USA was depressing.
They removed at least a solid 1/3rd of every park, and we'd have to explain to the younger kids that there used to be something there between the leftover poles.
The best was an open end second story structure that led into a wide climbing net. We literally learned how to jump off the ledge and catch ourselves by grabbing the net at the ground level. It felt like a movie scene everytime you did it.
They removed all the nets on that playground, and patched in a wall so that second level path became a dead end. They removed the rail zipline shortly afterward. Then they also removed a bounce tire thing you could jump on.
Oh and then they also removed a climbing rope that literally only went up 5 feet to reach a small ledge.
Lots of barren poles and support beams making people wonder what used to be there.
That sucks.. used to jump around those things as a kid.
Climbing and jumping was fun.
playing is not safe for kids, they should be kept in jail for safty. pink floyd made a song about this named mother back in the 70's
PF warned us about the now-ubiquitous helicopter mom. No one ever listened.
Mother do you think the slide will break my balls?
😊😊😊😊😊😊😮😊😢😮@@Shaker626
This reminds me of the whole safety 3rd thing. You 1st, me 2nd.
silence rodent
Built by some Canadian oligarchs **zooms into telus tower**
It's so true 😂
The best playground I ever saw when I was a kid we called “king’s castle”. It was a massive wooden jungle gym with rubber bridges and wooden towers and rooms in a sea of wood chips. Ignoring the bugs and wasps in the fall, it was amazing, even as an adult I thought it looked impressive! That is, until someone smoked cigarettes inside it at midnight and burned it to the ground…
My hometown when I was young had a similar playground, I can’t remember its real name but me and the other kids just called it Castle Park. It was awesome. Tons of fun memories there.
I remember always banging my head against it while playing tag lol
Unfortunately it seems like homelessness is a major reason for a lot of these older, sturdier, funner and wooden parks going out of fashion, due to them usually starting a fire there, whether intentionally or not it seems like the reason for a lot of downgrading for kids parks in Canada.
In previous era's, it was rare for homeless to constantly burn themselves or a piece of equipment in a kids park, but as it becomes more and more normal (with an increasing homeless population on the rise) we've had to spend less and less in repairs and rebuilding kids parks that also rarely get used for inteted use due to less and less kids each generation, thus leading to less and less of a reason to spend on said kids parks.
The park across from my house just got “upgraded” with a hideous lime green and bright blue plastic jungle gym monstrosity for $1.6M. smh looking at these gorgeous playgrounds
Ffs. For 1.6m... if I had that in 2005 I'd lowered have taken over the world by now. No hyperbolic Cap.
Well okay I'd have gotten shot but still..
1.6m? this shit could be built for $10k at most.
@@phantomaviator1318 I mean they need an excuse like this to give 99% of the money to corrupt politicians.
@@aarepelaa1142 True... Whatever would those poor politicians do without their constant million dollar bonus checks?
At this point it must be money laundering. There's no way plastic monstrosities cost that much in reality
I remember this one playground from when I was a kid that was near a beach, and much of the structure was built out of concrete tubes (probably for sewers idk) so that you could crawl around through these tunnels with escape holes underneath the rest of the playground. Kids make lasting memories at unique playgrounds like those - I certainly did.
Look up Caper Acres in Bidwell Park, Chico California. It still has its underhill sewer pipes, concrete Swiss cheese, crooked boot house and other original structures, as well as some new safety crud structures in garish colors.
I remember one when I was a kid that was a big wooden firetruck that had platforms and bridges on it, it was really fun. I saw it a few years ago and it’s just a generic playground now. Sad to see.
As a kid in the '80s, the playground was usually asphalt, and had stuff like monkey bars, a metal slide that would burn you on the way down on a hot day, a seesaw you'd use to try and launch your opponent with, and swings we'd jump off to see who could go the farthest.
The smell of the steel as the sun rose throughout the morning, the wear patterns of the paint on the merry-go-round, hunkering down inside Mayor McCheese's head to watch the everyday chaos unfold around you, firing handfuls of wood chips at each other- ah, golden memories.
@@EarlHildebrandt Darn you! Making me miss my childhood more than I already do.
I had a blast on the merry go round!
sounds like my russian city in 2010... and it hasn't changed...
I have a scar on the left side of my face, right next to my eye. It hard to see in amongst the wrinkles, but I know it's there. I had to ask my mom how I got the scar, because I was to young to remember how it happened. If i remember the age correctly, it happened when I was 4 years old. I had decided i could fly. So i got a beach towel, and tied like a cape around my neck. I climbed on the roof of my uncle's garage and I jumped. I got the scar from a pipe that was right by the garage. It was about 3 feet high. I just barely missed impaling myself on it. I did all of that in less than 2 minutes my mom said. Kids will be kids.😁
Wow.
I got two face injuries but probably less extreme..
Once I was running around the living room. Climbing on the sofa and running around the table (a but like those obstacle courses you have in PE). As I was trying to get faster and faster I tripped after jumping off the couch and struck my head against the table the tv sat on and got a small cut on my forehead from the corner of it.
Also busted my eyebrow open against a wall corner after accidentally running into it with a beanie over my face.. that wasn’t a smart decision and teachers looked at my parents funny for a week or two I think.
Even thought we were climbing and jumping off the playground structures (there was also a ramp we used to run up to then jump as far as possible. At some point managed to jump over the parks fence (it was pretty low but there was a non-negligible gap. Could have hurt a lot if someone had caught on the fence and faceplanted into the concrete alveolas we were landing on.))
I got hurt doing the boring and less dangerous looking stuff.
Not gonna complain, those cuts weren’t that bad compared to faceplanting onto concrete.
@reedy_9619 You sound like me, having to walk it off a lot. 😁 My teachers learned quickly about me getting into stuff. I skipped nap in kindergarten. Still have the scar on my thumb, six stitches to sew up the cut. At least we survived childhood. 😅
My stupid kid moment was with a slide that we had put a shallow paddling pool at the bottom of. I thought it would be a good idea to go down the slide with a PVC tube in my mouth with the goal of blowing bubbles in the water as I hit the bottom. Luckily I only knocked a tooth out rather than ramming a pipe through my neck haha.
Huh, I have one in the exact same
Place. Are you me from the future? Haha. I got mine from swinging on a table when I was a kid, so even making playgrounds “safe” didn’t help me haha.
@Internetzspacezshipz 😅😂🤣 I know I'm not future you. Maybe old geezer you from a past life or alternate universe. 😁😅😂 Like you, safe playgrounds wouldn't have helped me. I got all of my childhood injuries in other places. I grew up with the playgrounds everyone considers dangerous. For me, they were the safest place to be.😁🤣😅😂😭
Sometimes i wonder HOW i managed to make it through childhood as a kid? We played everywhere we could. When it didn't seem all that safe we played anyway but we were cautious and tried to be as careful as possible. With a lil bit of danger you also become a lot more aware of your environment and don't end up like "ah, it's all built safe. What could go wrong? I don't need to be careful." because that kind of mindset really does not benefit a child.
Reminds me of traffic. Where the safest roads are the ones that *seem* not so safe, but actually are. I'm still all for improving safety, but best in invisible ways.
@@bluerendar2194 A road that seems dangerous causes drivers to drive safe so yea
No better place to play than on a building site/rail line/shipping channel/swimming in a flooded quarry...!
Survivorship bias lol
Through childhood as a kid? I thought that was the only way lol
I can verify, they will do it anyways.
My absolute fondest memory as a kid was when I went to visit my best friend who had moved away quite a distance- I was in his company for two weeks, and fifteen years later, I cherish those two weeks fondly.
He and I were talking about how our lives had changed since our parting of ways, we had just stopped off at the local convenience store for some cold drinks. We had a walked about halfway to his house where they had one of these mod-yard playgrounds, buddy was like “wanna see something cool? Nobody else can do this” as he mantles this very steep plastic roof on the highest platform, the kind of steep that professionals need to be tied off on to prevent injury.
Bro gets to the top, in all his glory, tries to stand tall- but fate gripped his poor left paw and yanked it out from under him.
He didn’t tumble, he slid, FAST, my jaw hits the floor, my heart merging with the core of the earth- he’s not just falling, he’s falling with his legs wide open, and there’s 2 levels of metal he missed, his testicular homicide rapidly approaching its conclusion.
He lands of the ground level railing, he wasn’t very tall you see, nor was he coordinated. The ONLY THING holding him upright was his gooch, and the groan of horror, pain, and absolution that guttered from his maw makes me laugh to this very day.
In comical fashion, the slow roll to the side, the second fall onto the shoulder, and the resultant 60 meter crawl to the gazebo up the way to vomit profusely made me laugh harder than I have ever laughed in my life.
We had a really good time, life picked up after that, I got my first job in a pipe yard, his dad pushed him into his school and his faith. I respect the man very much, but he is not who he was back then.
Man, cherish your good friendships while you can, they don’t ever really seem to last for very long before nine and five start to add up.
I needed this :) thanks, dude with a playground fixation (in the non creepy way)
Edit: bro the way buddies legs clapped the railing support bars was like a literal rag doll- knees all flat out, feet slightly angled behind, like watching a wizard fall onto a witches broom at near terminal velocity 😭😭😭
God I hope his kids come out okay
The level of detailing in your description gave me a good belly laugh. Hope you're still in contact with said friend!
You're a great visual story teller.
I completely lost it when you said the words "Jimmy Saville of slides" 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
I am glad this one landed. I (inappropriately) laughed a lot reading about this slide and really wanted to get that vibe into the video.
Credit to Sophie Cornish at The Dominion post for assembling this: www.stuff.co.nz/national/126288650/at-least-eight-children-break-legs-on-wellington-slide-due-to-be-dismantled
@@PaigeMTL i have never seen your videos before and the combonation of your humour and the niche subject matter really took me in, great work! Deffinitely subbed 😁
11:49 was that just a casual eclipse footage that you decided to include in a video about parks???
love it!!!!
No, it's a once in a generation opportunity.
I love the clip at 8:01 with the girl actively hanging off the side of a spinning ride, with over 10 kids on it simultaneously, about to get trampled by their fellow playmate
It sums the whole point up perfectly lmao
We went on a family holiday campervanning in New Zealand a long time ago. Any time I think of the trip, I can only recall a few things because I was not more than 7 at the time, but some of the most vivid memories I have was stopping in some random village and getting some fish n chips while I played in some playground with my brother. I never quite knew why the memories of the playgrounds in New Zealand stuck with me so much, but your video really does explain it very well. The world is becoming increasingly dull and standardised. Children need to explore, experiment and learn to balance risk and I'm so glad New Zealand recognised this and gave me the gift of these amazing memories - I can only hope that other countries pick up the same mentality! Greetings from Switzerland!
all i'm seeing is the specs. but that extra you hired at 2:31 was next level. finally a third place video for kids like him.
I'm 70. We used to have the concept of Accepted Risk: if you played on monkey-bars, you (and your parents) accepted the risk of falling and getting hurt. But now the Western World thinks life should be risk free, and if you get hurt someone owes you money.
Standardising a safe design language for playgrounds was a great idea. The issue was how there were 7 things in the language, and all of them gave kids 1 thing to do. A unified design language that was full of things to do and safe challenges was triumphed by ultra low cost injection molded playgrounds.
I watched this video randomly after seeing it on my suggested feed... and just happen to live in Wollongong, Australia.
I had no idea who had designed the playground in our central mall but instantly recognised Hewsons style in this video!
The same stone blocks and rubber paving!
It's funny. I see these same playgrounds everywhere around were i live, and now that i think about it, I don't think I've ever seen maybe 1 or 2 kids playing on them at any one time. Most of the time, they are deserted.
Very well done. I've seen some of your stuff before, keep it up.
Still suffering the consequences of a smashed right elbow I got over 60 years ago in unsupervised play. Part of my life, wouldn't change it for the world - it made me ambidextrous.
Its such a shock when you visit a playground you wish you had as a kid. The playground in the centre of Greenwich park in London was an absolute joy, though I'm 2 feet taller than the intended height
I live in New Zealand and broke my arm in two places at intermediate school. the obstacle course which is what they claimed it was, was very dangerous and had wooden posts sticking out of the ground (which were made to walk on as like stepping stones) and was right next to the monkey bars. I was way too high above the monkey bars and ended up swinging too far and landing on my back right next to one of these posts not really knowing if I hit it or not. next thing I know I'm on my back looking up to see that I had broken my arm and could literally see the bone sticking out of my arm. the throbbing pain is one of the most pailful feelings I have ever felt in my life. I remember distinctly that they put in lots of rubber mats after this accident to try prevent this from happening again but never removed the wooden posts.
An informative, well presented, AND funny video. Nice work.
Based purely on this one video I've subscribed, if only to see if this videos style is the norm here, or just an exceptional exception.
Every playground in my town is build by locals, with the town paying for the materials. They're lovely.
man I gotta say though my school had one of those massive wooden structures with metal slides, and no one got hurt on them... they replaced it with a modern "Safe" playfort and I cannot tell you how many times I slipped on the pile of shit because the plastic became slick once it got cold and the Plastic Slide got so slick in winter you would not slow down enough to stop at the bottom so you just got ejected. At least with wood it rarely froze over and most of the metal slides were frosted over enough to be sticky not slick
The UK has great playgrounds. I'm 21, and RAF Cosford's playground had me tempted, lol! It should be mentioned that Thompson, Manitoba, is not Wellington, New Zealand. The good people of Pickle Lake Ontario and too many communities to count need to be flown to the hospital because there's not a hospital within 300 kilometres and a 6-hour ambulance ride won't do them much good
The world in which we occupy is a direct result of lawyers and Karens...
And greed compounding it
I absolutely LOVE!! you’re editing. Keep it up :)
Totally deserved viewership. Subbed
man, i'm losing it at all the playground transitions 😂
such an interesting and cosmopolitan video. i would love for more cities to become part of this renaissance of community-solicited public spaces
Don't play and interact with people, here is an iPad
As a kid, I always complained about the lack of screen time I was allotted. But now that I'm an adult and can look back on things, I can see that my mom made the right decision there.
Wiarton Ontario, (where THE groundhog is from) used to have this massive wooden boat style playground, it was just off the beach front, it was the best thing ever as a kid, easily some of my most vivid childhood memories are from there, about 5-10 years ago it was replaced by one of those post and platform pile of trash playgrounds.
So sad my kids cant have the same memories as i do of that area, they dont see the beautiful little town the same way.
i love the mention of the gathering place because i live there in Tulsa and it really does live up to its name. if you dont like long lines then dont go there on a busy day, but besides that it is an amazing place for people of all ages to have fun. while i dont have much fun there because playground just arent fun for me anymore since ive grown up, its still a place worth 5 stars on any day.
Describing a dangerous slide as "the Jimmy Savile of slides" caught me off guard
Awsome video paige well done loved the extras 👍
So exciting to see cool playgrounds making a reemergence!
i feel like it’s a lot less likely to be vandalised if it’s a long-lasting piece of the community rather than a piece of corporate play-gear that is technically counting as a park because you have a slide.
it’s very easy to not care about what happens to slide hut #10578, but the bird tower that is modelled after a bird indigenous to the area that you personally played on feels a lot worse to damage
I think everyone should have to sign a waiver to play at parks or they'll eventually just level them all and tell kids to have fun in empty lots/fields. Parks have "progressively" phased out or replaced all of my childhood favorites. Seesaws, Merry-Go-Rounds, Tubes, Big metal slides, Solid jungle gyms(not rope), Sand diggers, Monkey bars, all have been removed or replaced by boring and overly safe equipment that kids are bored of after 10 minutes. Now parks cost so much to build you get one decent place per city/town instead of the variety we had to choose from when I was a kid. Kids prefer their phone and video games to these parks now primarily designed for unaccompanied babies.
Ontairo Place was amazing in the 80's. Core memories made there.
That blooper reel at the end is pure magic
Just look at what happened to the design of McDonalds. When I was growing up we had bright colors, huge play zones to socialize and even N64's built into the freaking walls with games to play. Now it's where kids go to get employed, dawn a soulless uniform and join a generic corporate structure inside of what has become the most depressing corporate design ever. The modern Mcdonalds in it's all black and grey drab.
im so glad youtube lets you preview vids from the home screen now bc i hovered over this thinking it had randomly recommended a weird conspiracy theorist about aliens bc i've watched a few 9/11 vids recently lolll, this is a fantastic video!!
The problem with public funding is everyone has a different idea. Its the old Sesame Street lesson. Everyone has $5. we will vote on lemonaid or crayons. Which ever gets more votes, everyone has to spend their money on.
I love your video design, wonderfully done! I can’t wait to watch more videos by you!
im just leaving a comment here because this was awesome. watched the whole video, and even stayed around for the bloppers. loved it :]
My personal experience with kit playgrounds is that kids will make *anything* unsafe, and that these kits are not all as safe as they claim and are often worse because children are left to make the fun for themselves. I remember several incidents in primary school with a new playground that was touted as "a new step in playground safety" because children just made things up:
- We made contests about jumping from platforms horizontally to grab onto the standard-length monkey bars to see how many bars you could skip with your starting jump (plenty of heads were hit).
- There was a bridge with handrails about as tall as the average grade 4-6 kid, but we'd just climb between the bars and jump about a metre down as a common trick whilst playing tag on that playground (On more than one occasion, a kid jumped onto someone else running below because they're in a hurry and don't check).
- There was this rotating wheel you could hang down from and spin on - one kid slipped off this whilst tucking their body in to rotate faster and the ambulance was called
- And then, as a personal affront to people who think they can make playgrounds "safe", we made a contest of swinging from this single tall monkey bar and landing in a cool pose (it was literally just a bar between two vertical poles about 1.5m up, the simplest design you could ever make). Predictably, this ended poorly when I tried to do this after eating an oily sandwich, causing me to slip and fly off and fracture two wrist bones on landing.
All I can say is that the older playgrounds we had, made from re-used wooden poles, tyres, concrete tubes and a dash of creativity to make cheap designs from leftover parts were far safer.
Forgiveness does not change the past, but it does enlarge the future.
One of my favorite Canada facts here in Winnipeg, is Transit drivers have their own private washrooms all over the city, ONLY for them... When we could have spent a little bit more at some of the sites, and made them fully public...
This is the case in almost all Canadian cities. Quite often it is at extreme cost to, as they have to hire specific janitorial to clean these facilities available only to a tiny portion of the population. In BC, private facilities are often contracted - BC Transit pays money to restaurants and stores for permission for their drivers to relieve themselves. It's genuinely embarrassing.
@@onthewater4020 I shouldnt have phrased my comment as if it *only* happens in Winnipeg, and instead clarified that I can only speak of my experience living in Winnipeg all of my conscious existence... Thank you for confirming it happens elsewhere in Canada as well, as I very much suspected, but couldn't verify...
Where else would you like them to go to the bathroom???
@@AH-lw2bj who are you talking to here? Me? Because I never once said they shouldn't have bathrooms... Full stop.
I DID simply point out that the idea ONLY THEY can use them is kinda silly... Why not just make atleast SOME of them, especially along major routes, at certain locations like parks, etc etc, fully public washrooms?
As the person above me stated, they will ALSO often just end up going into McDonald's/Seven Elevens, etc to just use their facilities... So instead of paying for the maintenance and cleaning staff, to send personal janitorial services all across the city to clean their personal bathrooms... We could just partner with a major company to use the other bathrooms along their route where it doesn't make sense to convert their private bathrooms to fully public ones... Or along routes where they don't have facilities...
W personal bathrooms
An excellent video! Right up my alley. Free public spaces are extremely important. Especially these days, where it seems like everything costs something.
That footage from those old playgrounds of yesteryear was outstanding; we'd be lucky to enjoy spaces like that again.
Very well made, keep it up!
Toronto has had public washrooms for most of its history. They were removed due to the cost of operation. There is a good video showing where they were / still stand / what they looked like / when they were built / when they were removed uploaded by "NotSmoothSteve" called "Toronto's Strange Public Washrooms".
Randomly found this. Like your style, funny essay man.
I used to work for Parcs here in Canada, we installed, inspected and repaired most play grounds across all of Ontario.. I Built the RBJ schlegel park
The smallest act of kindness is worth more than the grandest intention.
The “good ol’ days” , before lawsuits and Karen’s became a trending fashion.
What matters is the value we've created in our lives, the people we've made happy and how much we've grown as people.
The fact that I did not know that park in Tulsa existed is criminal. Im about maintain my status cool uncle.
I'm here to thank you for the title alone, funniest thing I've seen all week.
Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds you plant.
I work for a state government agency in the US. It is very frustrating. I have been there about a year and people have told me of a problem they’ve been working to solve for 15 years. They would not allow me to come to meetings or participate although I’ve solved problems like that in my career prior. I finally looked into it myself on the weekend and came up with a comprehensive elegant solution. When I shared it with people and demonstrated it, there was essentially no response. They just carried on like I was Bruce Willis in Sixth Sense. I became so frustrated I put in my notice, which honestly has me in a bit of a bind. I can find another job quickly, but I’m so downtrodden and frustrated by the experience, it has affected my mindset. It is a very strange experience to work for government. I’m not sure if they will ever adopt my solution or not. It has been so stressful and disappointing I’ve had to choose not to work on the matter any longer, as my health was being affected by the situation.
I always recommend people in your situation find ways to leak to the media
The favorite playground I ever went to as a kid was one built up almost entirely out of wood, had some different structures like a boat you could spin a wheel in crew and a big tower you could climb up. Most crucially however, there was space underneath all of the floorboards so if you dug out some of the wood chips you could wriggle around in this secret place _underneath_ the entire structure. Good times, good times.
Congrats Paige on this video blowing up. Good work. Your work is very good and deserves more attention.
The park we had when i was a kid was like a death trap. But it was the most fun you could ever have. Especially the big metal slide that would get hot in the summer. You slide faster when you risk getting burned.
BRING IT Back!!
No... Non metal slides are just as slippery, except that they don't give kids third degree burns. There is 0 reason to give kids the same exact form of entertainment but with the risk of death added. I mean not that there's 0 risk of death in any slide, but you might as well mitigate it by removing wholly unnecessary risks.
@@catpoke9557 Definetly not. Clearly you havent used the rubber slides ever.
@@twosideable I've used plastic ones, not rubber. The plastic ones work fine
je me rappelle quand j’étais jeune les balançoires à Laval étaient environ 4m de haut et tout le monde voulait toujours s’y balancer, même les adultes, on essayait d’atteindre les plus haut le plus vite possible
aujourd’hui toutes ces balançoires ont étés remplacées pour ceux de 2m de haut où il est impossible d’atteindre une hauteur satisfaisante.
je connais personne qui était content de ces changements
Même sur les terrains de jeux dangereux, les balançoires ne semblent pas aller trop haut.
The Gathering Place in Tulsa, OK is one of the best parks I've ever been to. My baby sister loves going there!
this is a really good video bro how do you only have 17k subs.
No way the guy in the bad webcam just said a playground doesn't need to have a slide or swing. Playgrounds can be art installations, but don't force art installations into playgrounds. We want slides!
Love the video tho, definitely subbing!
The park I played in the 1980's, was built in late 1800's (my own great great grandma played there). All decorative iron.... huge tall long slides, tall swings, seesaws, a roundabout. They replaced them in the early 90's with some modular log lego, everything was a 3rd of the height, even the roundabout was ruined, it had a mechanism under it to stop it from going too fast.
I’m realizing now that all the fun stuff was taken out of the parks I used to play in. The hang slider rails, the swings, sea saws, the carousel, even the shorter rock walls.
Canadian Tire playground in Charlottetown!? I live there and I completely forgot that playground was CT themed right on Victoria Park. Great ice cream stand near it though. It's not as terrible but it just kind of...exists. I see way more people hit up the splash pad next to it
"In north america parks don't have public toilets" Speak for Canada, I've never been to a park that had a playground and no public toilet in the United States.
Amazing video! I had no clue about the Canadian Tire parks beforehand! I also saw a few of my local Montreal parcs around the video!
I've been planning on building my own community. Given, I fully planned on building my own skatepark as one of the facets of the community. But I could very well incorporate some of these ideas in adjacent parks in the neighborhood. Good shit bro!
Amazing insights! I'm so glad I stumbled into this video.
The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually fearing you will make one.
Excellent video!
I remember when I was in Kindergarten, we had this really fun playground near my home that was essentially a huge (to a kindergartener) wooden ship with lots of climbing spots and a slide, I loved it. In my first year of elementary school they renovated it and turned it into a few separate play things, a little slide, a seesaw, a low hanging swing, a sandpit and a spinny thingy. I remember being so excited for seeing how they could make the big ship even better and then being super dissapointed by the results. Even as a six year old I told my parents that they turned it into a playground for babies.
back in my old city whee i lived there was a tall metal slide and every summer you would go on that it would burn you as you went down the slide sad it got replaced cuz it was always fun seeing how slow you can go on with
My playground as a kid was nature. I climbed real trees, swam in the creek, walked animal trails, had a great deal of fun and occasionally found I needed stitches.
My local council in Australia has made litigation free zones in the city, like the local museum, skateparks and selected green spaces which now all have awesome playgrounds. Some of them more intense that what we had in the 80s.
Kids love it.
You nailed it
The talk about toilets in NA vs NZ also comes with another important difference - it's not just about "investment" because it doesn't matter how much investment there is in public facilities if they're unusable even when available.
It's like public transport - all the areas with "good" public transport aren't good just because it functions well, they're good because it's a pleasant experience. There are places with "bad" public transport that are just as reliable, but it's an uncomfortable experience to use it. There are public toilets in cities I'm happy to use, and there are ones I know there's no point even going into because they're always going to be disgusting, vandalized, full of crackheads shooting up, or all of the above.
1:44
I've been on that slide before. It was one of the best slides I have ever been on. The reason so many children received injuries is because they actively violated the age limit on the slide. The playground also required parent supervision, so that wouldn't be an excuse either. The reason it was demolished was because of stupid parents letting their toddlers go on a two-story slide.
The best playgrounds in 90s-00s Montreal were the abandoned factories like Stinky, Redpath and Jenkins as well as the spaces underneath the Ville-Marie Expressway/Turcot Yards.
Was surprised to see the gathering place in my home city and nice to see some interesting facts about it ya its an amazing place
He's back 🎉💥💫
Gosh, you know what I want more of? Playgrounds for adults. I feel the urge to swing around and act out my inner Nathan Drake, Indiana Jones, or Lara Croft. I want to move my body in interesting ways and scrap my knees like I used to when I didn't have to pay bills and taxes. I can't be the only one, right?
This is why climbing gyms got so popular haha
1:57 "Jimmy Saville of slides"
Really great video that touches on an aspect of the urban planning idea that outdoor spaces should be created by those who want to use them.
I live in Québec Canada and where I live its not like in the video, every park has toilets and some park are like you showed in new zealand with fake rocks and even some with trempolines that makes playgrounds better. I noticed they destroyed parks and made these newer ones here. I live in south shore of Montréal and i feel like quality of life here has increased compared to the rest of Canada, whave a new train the REM to go to Montréal easier and we can go in bike really quickly in all the city, this is all good for skiping traffic.
My playground in the USA was a pile of used tires
in high school the art classes had a trip to OCAD, when we're done inside we literally just played at Grange Park right next to it. it's all art themed and very fun to climb all over