At Play in Central Park’s Modern Landscapes: An Interview with Marie Warsh
Interviewed by Katie Uva
Today on the blog, Katie Uva talks to Marie Warsh, the Historian at the Central Park Conservancy and the author of the recently-published Central Park’s Adventure-Style Playgrounds: Renewal of a Midcentury Legacy. These playgrounds, which became popular in the 1960s and 1970s, demonstrate New York City’s effort to create dynamic, creative play spaces and also provide a window into the city’s history of public-private partnerships.
For those who haven’t heard the term before – what is an adventure-style playground? What are its defining characteristics?
Central Park's Adventure-Style Playgrounds: Renewal of a Midcentury Legacy
by Marie Warsh
LSU Press, 2019
224 pages
Adventure-style playgrounds were built during the 1960s and 1970s and influenced by playgrounds built in postwar Europe, known as adventure playgrounds. These names are confusingly similar, but the distinction is important. The European adventure playground contained no equipment or designed features; instead, it involved adults encouraging and guiding children to build with tools and materials. In these playgrounds, building and creating was the central play activity and resulted in an interactive, almost entirely child-built world. This concept, quite radical at the time, caught the attention of American designers and park administrators seeking to revitalize New York City’s playgrounds. However, the child-built playgrounds never took off in New York, or in the United States.
Architect Richard Dattner’s first playground in Central Park, opened in 1967, was typical of what developed instead. Rather than a collection of standardized equipment, this playground was a comprehensively designed environment with a variety of unique play features, including a pyramid, a maze, and a conical form that integrated a tunnel and slide. These sculptural forms, often interconnected, were a defining feature of the adventure-style playground, as were elaborate water features and the use of sand as surfacing. Dattner, who named his first playground “Adventure Playground” as an homage to the European precedents, intended to create opportunities for choice, exploration, and creativity through design and materials. He and other designers of the period hoped that the child’s experience in these designed playgrounds would be similar to those in the adventure playgrounds.
Why did New York City embrace this style?
The adventure-style playgrounds were one of the most prominent examples of how New York City’s Parks Department sought to revitalize the city’s public spaces through art, culture, and design beginning in the mid-1960s. This effort was a response in part to widespread criticism of the city’s parks system as not only unsafe and dilapidated, but also dull and uninteresting. Parks Commissioner Thomas Hoving and his successor, August Heckscher, sought to enliven the city’s parks and inspire new forms of community gathering and recreation through new types of programming and designs. These administrators and other civic leaders invested in the public realm as one way to counter a period of profound social and economic instability. The adventure-style playgrounds in particular were central to this aspiration. For low-income communities, they provided sorely needed space for gathering and play; those located in Central Park, near middle- and upper-class neighborhoods, were envisioned as an attraction, a way to encourage families to stay in the city. Advocates for new playgrounds promoted them as fostering creative play, which they believed was not only beneficial, but critical to the development and well-being of all urban children.
How was the Parks Department able to commission and install these new playgrounds at a time when the city as a whole and the park itself was facing fiscal problems and decline?
How so many of these playgrounds were built during a period of fiscal decline was one of the more surprising aspects of this story. All of the playgrounds in Central Park, and many of the other most notable examples in the city, were created with private funding from foundations and/or individual donors. Because of declining resources, this is something that the Parks Department embraced and, in some cases, actively sought out. The adventure-style playgrounds were also more expensive to build than standardized playgrounds, so required additional resources. Many of the public art projects and events during this period were also privately funded.
We typically understand the 1980s, with the formation of organizations such as the Central Park Conservancy and the Prospect Park Alliance, as the beginning of private investment in parks. But the history of the adventure-style playgrounds shows that citizen investment in parks and forms of public-private partnerships were happening much earlier. In Central Park it seems that momentum begins with advocacy and funding for new playgrounds but then shifts during the early 1970s, as citizens become more concerned about the park and its deteriorating condition.
How did adventure-style playgrounds reflect contemporary ideas about child development and landscape design?
One of the reasons that adventure-style playgrounds are so interesting to me is that they bring together many currents and ideas. Understanding these playgrounds has involved learning about urban design, child development, art, and social movements, and the work of people such as the artist and designer Isamu Noguchi, the psychologist Jean Piaget, planner and activist Jane Jacobs, and the artist Alan Kaprow.
Some playground designers, such as Richard Dattner, were specifically drawing from child development theories, especially those focused on creativity. Dattner also found inspiration in how children played in the street (something more prevalent in New York City in the 1960s); he observed children playing and exploring more freely and interactively in city streets than in traditional, equipment-filled playgrounds. He aimed to incorporate this sense of the unexpected and this richness of experience into his playgrounds as a way to stimulate the imagination and foster creativity. Landscape architect M. Paul Friedberg also studied children’s play in the city and interaction with the built environment and sought to make play spaces more integrated into the urban fabric, a move away from the typical paradigm of playgrounds as fenced-in, separate spaces. Like other designers such as landscape architect Lawrence Halprin and contemporary artists staging performances and artworks in the streets, Friedberg was thinking about how to remake the city as a stage for new forms of social and spatial interaction.
What are the challenges of maintaining these playgrounds now?
The Central Park Conservancy has renovated or rebuilt all the adventure-style playgrounds in the park that still exist to preserve their character-defining features while updating them for contemporary use. Because the adventure-style playgrounds have many custom features and incorporate a variety of materials, they do require more maintenance than playgrounds that are comprised primarily of standardized equipment. As with all of the Central Park’s twenty-one playgrounds, the Central Park Conservancy’s role both designing and maintaining playgrounds allows the organization to design with maintenance in mind and also experiment with maintenance-intensive features, while considering how best to accommodate the intensive use of many of the park’s playgrounds.
Sand, for example, is a material that is not typically used in city playgrounds, but Conservancy designers recognized its important role in the adventure-style playgrounds and so sought to include it when renovating or rebuilding these playgrounds. Sand formed almost the entire surface of the original playgrounds, functioning as a soft surface in the case of a fall but also a material to play with and manipulate. The main reason sand as surfacing is not feasible now is actually that sand provides a barrier to those who are disabled. In recent playground projects the Conservancy has incorporated it in smaller quantities on the ground and sometimes in conjunction with a safety surface that has an appearance of sand. In one playground, formerly Discovery Play Park (built in 1973 and located at West 100th Street), the Conservancy created a small sandbox for toddlers, which also had a water spigot to facilitate children’s desires to mix sand and water. This also hopefully discourages children from bringing sand to the water features, which sometimes causes maintenance challenges. The design of all these elements and how they work together are very carefully considered.
What are your favorite examples of adventure-style playgrounds in Central Park and in the broader city?
Currently my favorite of these playgrounds in Central Park is Heckscher Playground, because of the way that the design of the playground feels connected to the design of the park. The main play feature—a series of ramps and platforms connected to ladders and slides, activated by water in the summer—is set against a huge rock outcrop so that it looks like the concrete forms are emerging from the rock. You often see children scrambling on the rock and then onto the structure. While these features look very different—the contrast between the natural and the human-made is strong—there’s a continuity in the type of exploration they encourage.
I am also fond of Ancient Playground, because of playing there as a child in the early 1980s. My aunt often took me to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and afterwards we would always have a picnic in the park and then visit the playground. I have distinct memories of climbing on the pyramidal play features, which incorporate tunnels and slides, and really feeling like they were challenging, and a little scary, to explore. The entire playground was filled with mystery and surprise. I also had this sense that it was different from other playgrounds in the city—it definitely seemed a lot more exciting than the typical playgrounds with swings, slides and seesaws, most of which were quite dilapidated.
Writing this while playgrounds in Central Park and throughout the city are closed, I’ve been reflecting on the role of playgrounds in urban life. Many of the adventure-style playgrounds were community-initiated and-funded projects (and in a couple of cases even designed by local architects). At a time when the city was struggling, parents and other playground advocates highlighted their value not only as play spaces but as gathering spaces for the neighborhood. It’s hard to see them closed right now during this crisis because of this loss of community they still provide, a loss that is one of the most difficult aspects of this time of quarantine.
Yet it is heartening to see how Central Park can still provide some sense of community as well as numerous opportunities for play and exploration. In today’s Central Park you see children and families playing on the park’s lawns, wandering through the woodlands, and observing the unfolding of spring—all connecting to the park’s original purpose as a place of respite and for contact with nature, and reminding us of the vital importance of all our public spaces for play and recreation.
Marie Warsh is the Historian at the Central Park Conservancy, and the author of Central Park’s Adventure-Style Playgrounds: Renewal of a Midcentury Legacy (LSU Press, 2019).