National Post (National Edition)
Why you can't play on history's most thrilling piece of playground equipment
`GIANT STRIDE' DISAPPEARED FROM PARKS, SCHOOLGROUNDS BEFORE SECOND WORLD WAR
It was the most thrilling thing that had ever existed on a playground, before or since. In the words of Canadian history writer Anita May Draper, “those who've taken a spin on this ride agree it's the most exciting one of all.” Denver Post columnist Jack Kisling once eulogized the apparatus as “mad fun.” When Iowa's Quad-City Times canvassed its older readers for memories of the thing in 1991, they received a torrent of positive mail, with one woman even citing it as evidence that growing up during the Great Depression was “more fun.”
But it came at a ghastly cost: cracked skulls, shattered limbs, horrific lacerations and dead or permanently maimed children. In an age of radium toothpaste, lead-paint baby toys and decorating Christmas trees with asbestos, even this pleasure was deemed too dangerous for the world's children. This is the forgotten story of the giant stride, the most notorious piece of playground equipment in history.
In its simplest form, the giant stride is a metal pole topped by a wheel and hung with an assortment of knotted ropes. Children would grab the ropes and begin circling the pole. Within seconds, they would find themselves able to take “giant strides” through the air as the centrifugal force propelled them outward.
The danger quickly becomes obvious; with the apparatus quickly propelled to the speed of the largest and fastest child, riders who can't maintain their grip on the rope are flung outward at incredible speeds.
The giant stride also came in a much more gruesome metallic version. Here, the ropes were replaced by chains anchored with heavy metal handles. The design was more resilient to the elements, but increased the risk that, after ejecting its passenger, a handle would turn into a missile aimed directly at the heads of other children.
In a 2007 column for the Tampa Tribune, Floridian Carl Miller described an encounter with a giant stride in 1932 when he was seven years old. One of the stride's handles struck him in the head on one of his first days of Grade 1, leaving a two-inch gash. “It took six clamps to close the wound. I bear the scar to this day,” he wrote.
The danger of the giant stride was compounded by the fact that it had to be situated on hard ground. As one 1908 playground guide stated, giant strides “must have very hard surfaces under them or in a few weeks great holes will be worn in the ground.” Thus, after children went sent flying by the apparatus, they would be propelled into concrete, asphalt or — at best — cinders.
“It is no wonder why the nickname `Giant Strike' was given to it, no doubt, by many of the injured survivors,” a 2009 U.S. government report on playground safety reads.
As soon as researchers began tallying up the most dangerous corners of the playground, they found giant strides to be magnets for injury. But while other dangerous playground stalwarts such as merry-gorounds and see-saws would remain common into the 1990s, the giant stride began disappearing from parks and schoolgrounds well before the onset of the Second World War.
It was in 1921 that the U.S.-based National Recreation Association first recommended that giant strides be dismantled. After the 1924 death of a child in rural Pennsylvania, school board officials mandated the painting of “danger zones” around giant strides, and required teachers to lock up the equipment when not in use. If giant strides “were not fastened as prescribed, the instructors will be immediately dismissed,” read a public notice.
But the giant stride's downfall largely was assured by the fact it can't reasonably be made safe. Trampolines can be installed at ground level or fitted with protective netting. Merry-go-rounds can be configured with outward-facing seating to prevent riders from being flung off the equipment. But even the safest giant stride can provide only a cushioned surface for children inevitably sent flailing into the earth.
By the 1970s, virtually every giant stride had been banned and destroyed on North American playgrounds. Even YouTube, the world's greatest repository for dangerous recreational ideas, has only a handful of examples of giant strides in action. In 2008, a YouTuber fashioned one from a telephone pole and an old automobile bearing. There's also one at Glendurgan Gardens, a British outdoor recreation area in Cornwall.
When Toronto began opening some of Canada's first purpose-built playgrounds just before the First World War, giant strides were the featured attractions. One 1927 article in The Globe boasted about how a giant stride-equipped playground was keeping children “off the street and out of danger of motor and other traffic … to say nothing about developing brain and brawn of Toronto's future citizens.”
A century later, Canada's giant stride era has been purged from national memory, almost completely.
There only are five mentions of giant strides in the online archives of the Library of Canada. Notably, they are almost exclusively in early 20th century reports by the Department of Indian Affairs describing playgrounds within the country's notorious Residential Schools.
In recent years there has been a movement among playground designers to reverse the century-long march towards increasingly sanitized playgrounds. Known as “risk playgrounds,” these new designs incorporate uneven surfaces, areas for high climbing and the increasingly popular “log scrambles” — coteries of unevenly arranged logs that pitch less-well-balanced children into the ground.
These playgrounds are “where children learn what to fear and not to fear, and how to manage their own bodies as it pertains to risk,” Boston landscape architect Cheri Ruane told Architectural Digest in 2019.
But it's safe to assume that even the most liberal return to risky playgrounds will not rescue the giant stride.
NO WONDER... THE NICKNAME `GIANT STRIKE' WAS GIVEN
TO IT.