Dreaming of a day when there will be a real playground in her own neighborhood, a little girl is ecstatic when she learns that a local playground has been planned, in a story inspired by the construction of the first playground built by the KaBOOM! national nonprofit.

Before today's safety-minded structures of wood and plastic, America's playgrounds were full of tottering seesaws, dizzying merry-go-rounds, and towering metal slides. Documenting the evolution of American playgrounds between 1920 and 1975, Once Upon a Playground is a visual tribute to these iconic structures, celebrating their place in our culture and the collective memories of generations. In it, contemporary photos of vintage pieces of playground equipment are juxtaposed with images of the very same pieces as they were shown in classic catalogs, postcards, and photographs. The result is a haunting time capsule showing a rapidly vanishing part of our country's cultural heritage. Whatever the playgrounds of your childhood looked like, the gorgeous photographs in this book will transport you back in time and remind you of just how important play can really be.

Poor design and wasted funding characterize today's American playgrounds. A range of factors--including a litigious culture, overzealous safety guidelines, and an ethos of risk aversion--have created uniform and unimaginative playgrounds. These spaces fail to nurture the development of children or promote playgrounds as an active component in enlivening community space. Solomon's book demonstrates how to alter the status quo by allying data with design. Recent information from the behavioral sciences indicates that kids need to take risks; experience failure but also have a chance to succeed and master difficult tasks; learn to plan and solve problems; exercise self-control; and develop friendships. Solomon illustrates how architects and landscape architects (most of whom work in Europe and Japan) have already addressed these needs with strong, successful playground designs. These innovative spaces, many of which are more multifunctional and cost effective than traditional playgrounds, are both sustainable and welcoming. Having become vibrant hubs within their neighborhoods, these play sites are models for anyone designing or commissioning an urban area for children and their families. The Science of Play, a clarion call to use playground design to deepen the American commitment to public space, will interest architects, landscape architects, urban policy makers, city managers, local politicians, and parents.

A compelling history, a manifesto, and a manual for change.

In New York’s Central Park, some of the playgrounds constructed as part of the midcentury experimental “playground revolution” still remain. In Central Park's Adventure-Style Playgrounds, Marie Warsh tells the engrossing history of these playscapes built in the 1960s and 1970s, exploring their connections to the art, recreational design, urbanism, grassroots movements, and child-development theories of the period. She further details the Central Park Conservancy’s efforts decades later to preserve and renew these playgrounds. So-called adventure-style playgrounds featured interconnected forms including pyramids, mounds, and steps, and basic materials such as water and sand, encouraging new levels of creativity and interaction. By the end of the 1970s, ten of Central Park’s twenty-two existing playgrounds—formerly paved, sterile, standard-equipment-filled lots dating to the 1930s—had been transformed according to the new design ideals. With time, deterioration prompted concerns about safety, and much of the equipment was removed. However, community interest led the Central Park Conservancy to update and preserve the playgrounds that remained in the park. Building on successful aspects of the playgrounds, designers incorporated new technologies, materials, and equipment that reflect contemporary ideas about children’s play and approaches to urban park management. They also developed strategies to better integrate them into the landscapes of the park. Today, Central Park’s adventure-style playgrounds represent significant works of renewed modern landscape architecture as well as models for new thinking about playground design.