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.
