Parks and Re-Creation

In 1893, San Francisco’s first playground was, to use the parlance of the time, a real jim-dandy. Children would hurtle toward springboards, plant one foot (or sometimes both feet—the optimum technique being a matter of serious playground debate), and launch themselves into space, hoping to touch down a shade further than the line marking the day’s current champion. Elsewhere, swings—full from the time the park opened to the time it closed—had other children, in the words of one San Francisco Chronicle writer, “express[ing] their satisfaction in shrieks of laughter.” A gaggle of girls piled on to the pommel horse, striving to help just one more join in the dangling mass. And at the overhead rings, “Small boys, half-grown boys and even little girls stood about wistfully awaiting their chance to test their strength and agility on the swinging rings.”