When my daughter was much younger, we’d always spend a day at Camelot Playground on trips to see family in Pinehurst, North Carolina. It’s a massive outdoor wooden playground adorned with towers, hidden passageways, bridges, and a lot of magic. The whole thing sits tucked beneath a canopy of tall pines on a single shaded acre, and the smooth wooden structure forms a maze that feeds into castle towers and archways, an apple-shaped slide, a treehouse, and climbing ramps that wind upward like something out of a storybook.
There are wooden cars with steering wheels for the littlest kids, swings, tunnels, and walkways built from recycled tires. A baseball diamond backs up against one fence, and more pine trees shade a picnic shelter beyond it. It’s the kind of playground where you can tell the parents on the sidelines are resisting the urge to run around themselves. Built in 1996, Camelot came about when two local moms set out to “replace the old and modest playground equipment in favor of an acre of happiness.”
The effort required fundraising, and when it became clear that the initial $25,000 target would not bring the kind of wonder the women envisioned, they went big and raised nearly $100,000. The city allocated about 15% of that sum for upkeep in the next year’s budget.
Magic, it turns out, is expensive. Today, that operating budget would be closer to a quarter of a million dollars, to say nothing of the premium on wood. Today’s playgrounds are a sea of sanitary plastics, safety-first slides, and low-hanging bars, with liability always top of mind. Americans, young and old, have taken notice of how lame playgrounds have become and even investigated when the magic died.
Researcher and YouTuber Phil Edwards recently put out a deep dive on what happened to these playgrounds, like Pinehurst’s Camelot. It’s no surprise that federal regulators and lawyers are part of the problem — but so are we, the everyday adults.
The Radical Concept of Parental Involvement
From the 1970s to the 90s, Leathers and Associates, founded by architect Bob Leathers in Ithaca, New York, led the way in constructing parks defined by epic wooden castles and mazes. Leathers was being called the “Johnny Appleseed of playgrounds” by 1989 because he insisted that community members and families partake in the construction of the playgrounds.
“The camaraderie is wonderful, and it guides us,” Leathers said. “In these cynical times, we put people together. … As long as people work closely, person to person, society will be alive and well.”
It also didn’t hurt that volunteer labor halved the cost of such projects, cutting out the famously corrupt bidding process for city projects.
The idea was that parents should be invested in the fun their children would have at the park, and so volunteer involvement was non-negotiable for his projects. Leathers even turned down a famed New York developer, Donald Trump, for a major wooden playground installation, because it wouldn’t allow for community labor.
Then Government Cracked Down, But So Did We
The most obvious culprit in the death of these parks is arsenic. The wood used in these playgrounds was pressure-treated with chromated copper arsenate — CCA — the industry-standard preservative used on decks, fences, and picnic tables across the country. In the early 2000s, studies found elevated arsenic levels around CCA-treated play structures, and the Environmental Protection Agency ordered a phase-out of the chemical for residential and playground lumber.
As it turns out, Bob Leathers’ designs were used for Pinehurst’s Camelot, which was raised just six years before the EPA’s rule on CCA-treated lumber.
But the EPA didn’t force the public to tear down these playgrounds. Yes, the agency restricted new construction, but there was no finding that showed these wooden castles were poisoning children. Zero kids got sick by playing hide-and-seek in these fortresses. But the media hammered on the “arsenic” finding, and the headlines drove a nationwide panic.
Towns across America voluntarily demolished the parks. The way this goes is that a study shows a chemical is “linked to” a certain risk, but nobody asks at what dose or in what context, and the public goes far beyond what regulators suggest. A recent example of this is the national freak-out over artificial sweeteners such as aspartame.
Blaming the government is easy, but the tough truth is that “we the people” panicked. More hammers fell on the wooden castle parks, including recommendations by the Consumer Product Safety Commission and strict ADA regulations. The mandates imposed made it challenging to build upward and encouraged a more “suburban” sprawl for playgrounds, while discouraging roofs and requiring slides be designed to force kids into sitting down.
Sight lines were mandated so that children could never be out of sight. Every new rule adds a few thousand dollars to the projects, and with community labor made a thing of the past by petty lawsuits, playgrounds devolved into the charmless, rules-driven wastelands we so often encounter today.
The deep tragedy of the modern playground isn’t about how something was stolen from us. Like most freedoms, Americans gave the magic away and constructed for themselves and their children a bubble of false safety. We changed from a society that built things together and took a stake in raising our children to a people content to outsource everything from education to recreation.
Bob Leathers thought the 1980s were a cynical era in need of a communitarian revival. How sad he would be for us, and the children of America, now. It’s not too late for us to return to an anti-fragile mindset and rediscover the magic of risk-taking that delights children across generations.
Magic, like a fire, can always be rekindled.
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Stephen Kent is the media director for the Consumer Choice Center and founder of Geeky Stoics.
This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.
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