Creative Playthings

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In parks here and there around Los Angeles stand a few lingering monuments to a space race unknown to most of the youngsters who scale them--blunt-nosed rockets, bug-eyed robots, gangly space stations. Regardless of model, their construction is nearly identical: towering sculptures of steel ladders and bars and the slickest slides imaginable, which launch children out into the sand like so many human missiles. They are hard to overlook, these 30-year-old relics that are closer cousins to the park’s metal bike racks and cyclone fences than to the newer generations of wood-and-plastic climbing apparatus.

Playground historian Joe Frost included a nod to them in an article for the winter 1989 issue of Children’s Environments Quarterly: “By the early 1960s a wide array of novelty equipment, including Western theme villages, novel slides, theme equipment such as sharks and octopus rockers and rocket play structures inspired by Sputnik, were springing up around the country.”

The sharks and octopuses are long gone, and rivet by rivet, bolt by bolt, the rockets, too, are giving way to the amalgamations of bridges, platforms and spiral slides that now populate the world of play. At Arcadia Park, the decline began when entire floors of a multistory rocket were barricaded because of liability concerns. Then cyclical paint touch-ups were halted, supplanted by blooming rust. Finally, a virtual city of primary-colored equipment arrived, replacing the rocket shell.

Still, the survivors stand proud. The 30-foot rocket at Vincent Lugo Park in San Gabriel had its metal nosecone traded for a fiberglass one, which has been liberally adorned inside by “Sereno” and his tagging buddies. Last year’s overhaul of the park left the Gemini (not its official name, but it does have two reclining seats) virtually untouched save for fresh paint on its two fins. It dwarfs the newer structures, drawing children’s attention. Yet mothers of preschoolers steer them away in Spanish, Chinese and English alike. Not that one. Too dangerous. Tai wei shen. Cuidado. Be careful.

Marion Pepe once brought her grandson to play wildly on the canary yellow robot that dominates Glenoaks Park near her Glendale home. Twenty years later, she comes with her 18-month-old great-grandson, not to play yet, but to watch older kids climb to the top and send sand bombs down the slides. “They get around to painting it once in a while,” she remarks.

Asked if the galvanized giant has a name, Glenoaks Park visitors are as likely to say “The Rocket” as “The Robot.” Beyond that, not even Pepe has a clue of its history. Perhaps references to this country’s surprise and shame when the Soviets “beat us” by launching the first satellite, touching off a years-long obsession with things space, are just too obscure. Not one of the structures looks like the more familiar space shuttle.

Just a canyon away from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in Altadena, 3-year-old Nicholas Stover is manning the radar tower that protects a space station in Farnsworth Park. Asked what he’s doing, he says, “Driving.” Is he headed for Venus, Mars or even the moon? “No,” he says. “I drive a car.”