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Ours got torn down recently and the ground is so contaminated with arsenic (from the pressure-treated lumber) they town doesn’t know what to do with the site.
https://twitter.com/B_Holmer/status/1783284591249563805
I kind of like the idea of an imaginary place that all of the townsfolk develop a lore for, and you aren’t sure where it exists or if it really did exist. Like a kneejerk joke residents will concoct a tale with a straight face. A collective injoke of a place. I thought of this with the Abbey Lane playground growing up and discussing it with my cousin. It’s taken on a surreal vibe, as being a place that was pre-internet and destroyed before it could be documented. I’m sure photos exist, glimpses and probably even VHS somewhere. But for all of us, like my cousin or whoever visited, it is just memories, and we construct different architectures of it and features based on these memories (like a distributed playground). I recall the base of it was gutted out, and kids would shimmy under the structure and then crawl within it and under it. Funnily I was randomly searching and I found years ago what must have been the company that made it (it was a wooden one, that soaked up much child blood with sharp corners). So I was able to see variants of the same one that I recalled, just slightly different but transplanted to different places like Washington etc. I think what’s kind of poetic about it is that as far as I can tell they were called “design-a-dream” playgrounds from Ithaca NY and people just got the plans pre-internet and made them, so presumably people in the area still have memories of building it? “Splinter city” was the joke name, which also is fitting in the way it’s kind of a splintered, sharded memory. Shows up on nostalgia sites
Now that I think about it I’m actually going to consider a hunt — I wonder how many still exist, if any. It’d be a curious act to hunt one down and visit it. Stepping into a childhood like walking into a blockbuster.
My understanding what that they were community builds, close to when we were born. I don’t know if it’s true for our local park, but apparently a foreman would come down and the community would help build under their instruction. There was also often a survey period where the local kids were questioned about features they wanted included, which makes that splintered dream-like sense to them even more potent because they were literally child hivemind influenced. Honestly, I wish there was a long documentary on the subject.
Gaussian Splatting
I wonder if techniques will exist in formulating a recreation of these split up kid memories and bits of photographs. This occurs to me as an analogy of “3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering” where 3D volumetric representations are made out of sequences of 2D data. But even considering our own internal representation of this place long lost. Could we recreate these lost playgrounds of memories?