Central Park’s Adventure-Style Playgrounds: Renewal of a Midcentury Legacy

Written by Marie Warsh, director of preservation planning with the Central Park Conservancy, Central Park’s Adventure-Style Playgrounds is the third volume in The Cultural Landscape Foundation’s series Modern Landscapes: Transition & Transformation, edited by Charles A. Birnbaum. Published by LSU Press, this latest volume documents the design trends, social motivations, and public engagement that made Central Park a kind of laboratory for playground design in the 1960s and 1970s. The Editor's introduction sums up the scope and objectives of the volume:

     Valuing a Layered Design Legacy

Welcome to the third publication in the Modern Landscapes: Transition and Transformation series. This volume takes a fresh look at the iconic Central Park, but instead of the picturesque landscape designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux based on their competition-winning “Greensward” plan of 1858, it focuses on the lesser-known period when modernism began to take hold in New York and in the park, contributing to the radical transformation of many of its playgrounds. Central Park’s Adventure-Style Playgrounds: Renewal of a Midcentury Legacy documents the design trends, social motivations, and public engagement that made the park a kind of laboratory for playground design from 1967 to 1979. It was during this period that the park’s existing playgrounds—collections of isolated play equipment set on asphalt pavement behind iron fences—were reborn as comprehensively designed environments where interconnected forms, such as pyramids, mounds, and steps, and basic materials, such as water and sand, encouraged new levels of creativity and interaction.

Architect Richard Dattner, who created six of the new playgrounds, summed up the philosophy behind his work: “The environment for play must be rich in experience, and it must be, to a significant extent, under the control of the child.” Responding to new attitudes and expectations about children’s play, Dattner’s designs were a synthesis of European adventure playgrounds, innovative landforms reminiscent of the work of artist Isamu Noguchi, and groundbreaking playgrounds designed by landscape architect M. Paul Friedberg. Beyond their functional role, the new play environments added another layer to the park’s rich design legacy and thus entered into dialogue with Olmsted and Vaux. By foregrounding an important aspect of the park’s twentieth-century history, we can gain new insight into that conversation and add to our understanding of Central Park as a whole.

Chronicling multiple sites within Central Park, the present volume(the first with Louisiana State University Press in the series) differs somewhat from its predecessors, which were dedicated to individual landscapes:Lawrence Halprin’s Skyline Park in Denver, Colorado (completed in 1975), and John Simonds’s Mellon Square in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (completed in 1955). Skyline Park, published in 2012, was written in response to the site’s controversial 2003 overhaul when much of Halprin’s design was demolished and a Historic American Landscapes Survey (HALS) was undertaken to document the park prior to its alteration (the first such recordation effort for a modernist work of landscape architecture in the United States). Mellon Square, a much happier story, was published in 2015 following the plaza’s complete revitalization by the Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy. The book is a case study that chronicles the research, analysis, and results of a collaborative undertaking between a client anda design team whose goal was to restore an exemplary modernist work of landscape architecture. The project is a remarkable example of what can be achieved when one generation strives to understand the design intent of another.

The need for intergenerational stewardship brings us back to Central Park and the work of the Central Park Conservancy, founded in 1980. In its early days, the conservancy was faced with the mammoth task of rescuing and rebuilding much of the park. The innovative modernist playgrounds—and all the park’s playgrounds for that matter—were not the utmost priority, even though, like many works of postwar landscape architecture, they were suffering from years of deferred maintenance and deterioration. With new concerns about playground safety overshadowing the value of the acclaimed designs, some of the playgrounds were threatened with outright destruction.

But in the late 1990s, the conservancy began to update the modernist playgrounds, responding in large measure to a grassroots movement aimed at preserving them. As with many of the stories of modernist landscape architecture, the public call to action compelled the conservancy to balance change and preservation as part of its work in the park, ultimately adding to its reputation as a model champion of innovative park stewardship in the United States. In its 2011 publication Plan for Play: A Framework for Rebuilding and Managing Central Park Playgrounds, the conservancy summarizes its approach to the stewardship of playgrounds, noting that “while their purpose and essential premise has remained consistent, playgrounds are constantly refined and reinvented to reflect evolving ideas and contemporary expectations about children’s needs and the role of play.”

The present publication illustrates just such a reinvention in response to evolving expectations, as well as the balancing act that designers and stewards must engage in to ensure the health, safety, and welfare of the public—a process made no easier by the fact that Central Park, the epitome of nineteenth-century landscape architecture in the United States, is also a National Historic Landmark and a global destination. In a 2008 interview, M. Paul Friedberg (standing in Central Park’s Billy Johnson Playground, which he designed in the 1980s) summed up the challenge of adding a new layer to the revered landscape by Olmsted and Vaux: “It was the lighter the touch, the better . . . the obligation went back, as well as forward.”

As Central Park’s Adventure-Style Playgrounds demonstrates, the commitment to look “back, as well as forward,” to use Friedberg’s simple but profound words, is not only a commitment to wise stewardship, it is also foundational to the quest for exemplary design.

Charles A. Birnbaum, FASLA, FAAR

The two previous volumes in the Modern Landscapes: Transition & Transformation series are Lawrence Halprin’s Skyline Park (2012) and Mellon Square: Discovering a Modern Masterpiece (2014), which, in 2015, jointly won an Honor Award in the Communications category from the American Society of Landscape Architects.  

Contributors: Written by Marie Warsh, with a foreword by M. Paul Friedberg and an essay by Charles A. Birnbaum.

Published by LSU Press and now available for purchase.