Suburbanites Engage
In New Playground Battles

When Angela Brown and a friend saw an impressive new playground near their home in Pace, Fla., the two mothers had only one thought: to get one of their own, only bigger.

In April, they got it, sprawling over five acres, with mockups of two fighter jets (the town is near a military base) plus a helicopter model, a scaled-down school bus, and, of course, a tree house and slide. "We're just so proud," Ms. Brown says. The best part? The playground did turn out bigger than the neighboring town's. "Theirs cost $100,000," she says. "Ours cost $250,000."

It's becoming the latest tussle for bragging rights in the suburbs: Who has the best playground? All over the country, there has been an unabated building boom of so-called destination playgrounds, elaborate structures that sprawl over thousands of square feet and feature everything from tree forts to circus tents to fake swamps. The biggest cost as much as $1 million, even though community members do the actual construction. And with families traveling less these days and parents looking for amusements close to home, uber-jungle gyms may get more attention. "Building the playground brought us together," says Tracey Peymann, who led the drive for one in St. Peter, Minn.

Superplayground Industry

While no one closely tracks the megaplayground market, the Community Build Association, a trade group, estimates the number of these playgrounds has grown 15% in each of the last five years. There is actually an entire superplayground industry, complete with its own niche builders. Want a giant wooden fort? Call Leathers & Associates, an Ithaca, N.Y., company specializing in fantasy structures that go as high as $1 million. Landscape Structures, Delano, Minn., will put in a metal-and-plastic one for about half that (they built 600 last year). There is even a company that does "environmental" playgrounds; they put back the stuff -- rocks, fallen trees -- that developers get rid of when they build houses. "It is kind of ironic," says Rusty Keeler, president of Planet Earth Playscapes, whose designs cost as much as $150,000.

Experts say the rash of splashier, more expensive projects is being driven by everything from increasing worries about playground safety -- which have towns investing in one big playspace with the latest safety features -- to parental guilt. A lot of people feel they don't spend enough time with their kids these days, says Joseph Frost, a professor of early-childhood education at the University of Texas in Austin, "so they try to give them something else that costs a lot of money." A destination playground has the added cachet of being hand-built by local parents, rather than being bought off-the-shelf.

And with the country's new emphasis on community, playground projects may become even more appealing. "It plays to the old myth of barn-raising," says Northwestern University sociologist Albert Hunter. Indeed, Ms. Peymann, a mother of three, says building St. Peter's $250,000 playground on the site of one destroyed by a tornado helped the town bond. And where the old one had pretty basic equipment, the new version, dubbed Tree-Mendous, stretches over 10,000 square feet and includes not only a circus tent and log cabin but also a steam ship and a plywood "bear cave" that kids can explore.

Designer playgrounds cropped up back in the '70s, when architects and educators decided old-fashioned playground equipment wasn't stimulating enough. Back then, says Mark Leathers, who runs his own design firm, small groups of parents would show up to help with things such as old tires and wire spools. Those days are long gone; now, every Leathers playground is built of specially treated pine, with a fall-absorbing wood-chip floor, and ladder rungs spaced carefully so kids can't get stuck. At the elaborately orchestrated "build," as many as 15,000 people can show up to volunteer.

About 3,000 people, including 300 local Marines, showed up to construct the Pace superplayground, Ms. Brown says. Her two children play on it constantly; the two-year-old can sit in the tree fort for hours. In Minnesota, Ms. Peymann's kids like to run through the maze-like tunnels of their playground, with the smaller children hiding from bigger kids in its various nooks.

See-Saws Not Allowed

But don't expect to find anything as old-fashioned as a swing set (too prosaic) or a see-saw (too dangerous) at one of these places. Destination playgrounds come with things like "misting stations" (sprinklers), or, in Lake Charles, La., a particularly twisty "Louisiana Hurricane Slide." At Planet Earth's playground for the Skaneateles, N.Y., Early Childhood Center, Mr. Keeler put in a sprawling sand area and an apple orchard. The kids like it so much, there are now plans to add a swamp. "We'll let the kids make forts, turn over rocks, and do what kids have always done," says the childhood center's Sarah Redding. The water, of course, won't be too deep, in case anyone falls in.

Critics of the big play yards say they are so overdesigned and built that they are more about parents' fantasies than children's. Dr. Frost, of the University of Texas, notes that inventive as the new playgrounds may be, they can't replace the experience of playing in the woods. "That might seem too dangerous today," he says, "but we learned to take care of ourselves." Another complaint: The sprawling structures are so big and imposing, children get lost, says Frank Comeau, recreation director for the town of Bangor, Maine, which tore down its Leathers project. And Janet Knox, an environmental consultant in Bainbridge Island, Wash., took her eight-year-old twins, Theo and Xander, to the megaplayground the Seattle suburb built last spring, but they haven't been back. "They're not interested," Ms. Knox says.

In fact, the biggest problem at the Skaneateles playground has been that kids ignore the fancier stuff to play in the sand. When upscale parents see their kids digging with tin cans, Ms. Redding says, they say, "Hey, what's this?"

Playing in the big leagues: 'Tree Mendous' in St. Peter, Minn., has a tree fort and tent; Lubec, Maine's boat theme; Pace, Fla. has planes for tykes.

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