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Newark, New Jersey, squeezes half the population of Charlotte, North Carolina, into a tenth the area: 280,000 residents within a mere 24 square miles. It also boasts the New York region’s busiest airport, four colleges and universities, and even some 2,700 cherry blossom trees. Yet Newark has just ten park playgrounds–for its 76,000 children.

According to the non-profit Trust for Public Land, Newark has fewer park playgrounds per capita than any other major American city, at a quarter of the national average. And even those facilities have, over several decades, gradually fallen into disrepair. At her school in the city’s North Ward, recounts Karen Jones, an educator and mother of three. Five years ago we would not take the kids outside.” At home across town in the Weequahic neighborhood, immortalized by native son Phillip Roth, she and husband Gottfried “would never take [our] kids to the park to play” due to unsafe conditions.

A local mantra holds that “wherever American cities are going, Newark will get there first.” For years this meant decline: losing forty percent of its population and much of its confidence.

Newark has recently begun to experience renewed growth and optimism, and its playgrounds have followed a similar arc. After the Second World War, growing suburbanization left urban playgrounds as an afterthought, or entirely neglected. Starting in the 1970s, however, private actors ranging from corporations to non-profits stepped into this void, introducing new funding in Newark and elsewhere. Playgrounds today reflect both the promise and the particular agendas accompanying such private funding.

The Rise of Fast Food Play

As in many communities, Newark’s fast food restaurants provide a significant number of play facilities. While the City of Newark only operates ten public park playgrounds, McDonald’s operates fifteen playgrounds within 7.5 miles of the city center, including three in Newark itself.

McDonald’s opened its first Playland in 1971 and now has over 8,000 such centers, making it the largest private playground operator in the country. Today, three general types of commercial playground providers exist. First are companies like McDonald’s or furniture superstore Ikea that incorporate free facilities into a non-play business. Second are those that incorporate children’s play into a larger recreation-centered business, such as a Chuck E. Cheese, which became popular in the ‘80s. Third are those that operate children’s playgrounds as a standalone pay-for-play operation. Discovery Zone developed this market in the late ‘80s and ‘90s, before declaring bankruptcy. Today firms trying to make this market work include the Gymboree Play & Music franchises, which emphasize value-added programming including play, music, and art classes.

Private play operates with an obvious incentive–money. If McDonald’s failed to increase the bottom line, it would drop Playlands as fast as the ArchDeluxe. Not coincidentally, the first McDonald’s playground opened just as urban renewal funding ebbed and the public sector disinvested in park playgrounds. By the reckoning of Eric Schlosser in Fast Food Nation, “As American cities and towns spend less money on children’s recreation, fast food restaurants become gathering spaces for families with young children.”

Private play became popular not just because of a dearth of public funding, but also because it provides a sense of security. Enclosed venues like Gymboree offer a controlled environment, while those connected with fast food restaurants are small and sufficiently busy that they require less maintenance and monitoring than public parks. As put by an article in industry publication FEC Management, children’s “access to play environments outside the safety of their homes is continuing to be restricted by the ‘Boogie Man syndrome’–parents’ exaggerated fears for their children’s safety.” This fear generates “market forces [that] will continue to create a demand for safe children’s entertainment and edutainment centers.”

Right Equipment, Wrong Message?

Companies like McDonald’s and Burger King have become playground superpowers. With over 11,000 play facilities combined, their purchasing power dwarfs that of even the largest municipalities. Their influence on the industry has resulted in positive changes to playgrounds – while raising a host of new issues.

These companies have used their influence to shift industry standards to safety-first equipment. The hazards of older metallic equipment led to legal and regulatory action against the companies – with costly results, like McDonald’s 1995 multi-million dollar settlement with the Consumer Products Safety Coalition. In response, these companies have required manufacturers to use new materials like plastic and rubber tubes that reduce injury risk.

But some critics argue that health benefits from decreased injuries are offset by the companies’ overall mixed messages on kids’ health. Critics object to McDonald’s – whose unhealthy fare was the subject of the recent documentary Super Size Me – mixing Kids Meals with playtime. Also, because private operators will only locate where they can make a profit, the distribution of private play often mirrors existing economic disparities – a troubling result since the product in question is to some degree a public good. For instance, Newark has several unsupervised fast food playgrounds but no Gymboree franchises with age-appropriate programming – though a few are located in nearby, more affluent communities.

Still, in a city underserved by public play facilities, where small lots and multiple-family dwellings often make backyard play sets infeasible, market demand makes at least some types of private play profitable, as the McDonald’s playgrounds in Newark attest. And to the degree that public playgrounds remain available, they often exacerbate disparities since not all communities have the money necessary to upgrade their playgrounds, children are exposed to different levels of injury risk based upon the economic resources of their neighborhood. Only through the added involvement of other private parties, notably non-profits and their benefactors, have cities like Newark been able to begin narrowing this divide.

Private Funding for Public Playgrounds

Newark’s resurgence, combined with its small size, has led to fierce competition over available land. The number of residential units built annually zoomed nearly 140 percent between the first and second half of the 1990s, both intensifying demand for playgrounds and reducing space available for them. Groups like the Ironbound Community Corporation, historically focused on housing, began to demand planning for recreational facilities as well. Rebuilding existing school playgrounds and parks became particularly attractive as such space was already available, designated, and in the case of schools, supervised.

Legislation passed in 2000, in response to New Jersey’s long-running Abbott v. Burke litigation on statewide educational funding disparities, provides an eye-popping $1.6 billion for Newark school facilities – seemingly sufficient to fund school playgrounds. Yet while Steve Morlino, Executive Director of Facilities for Newark Public Schools, says that “every effort is being made to include play spaces in new construction,” with over 70 school buildings paid for from a fixed pot, other priorities inevitably intrude. Simone Mangili of the Trust for Public Land contends that “the Abbott school construction program is underfunded and does not include funding for outdoor recreational resources.” Consequently, private organizations largely finance playground redevelopment.

The Trust launched its Newark program in 1995, “as a response to the overwhelming need for additional safe playgrounds in the underprivileged communities of New Jersey’s largest city.” As part of a national initiative rebuilding 420 parks across 190 cities, the Trust has channeled $3 million into Newark over the past decade, transforming rundown asphalt lots into model play spaces used by an estimated ten thousand children.

The first phase of the Trust program encompassed six school playgrounds. One of them, McKinley Elementary School, formerly offered its thousand students only a sea of uneven asphalt as a playground. Surrounded by high chain link fences looking out at an increasingly rebuilt neighborhood, students had little more “equipment” than an old fire hydrant, its base perilously raised inches above ground level.

The new McKinley Playground incorporates a wide array of vibrantly colorful, safety-conscious equipment. Students took a substantive role in the design process from conception to completion, influencing materials, layout, and equipment. Marion Bolden, superintendent of the Newark Public Schools, observed at the playground’s opening that instead of “cracked cement, there is now a beautiful multicolored track, a basketball court, and play equipment” well utilized by the school’s children.

Other private groups have infused public playgrounds with additional cash and attention. A partnership between the NFL Youth Football Fund and the national non-profit Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) helped to rebuild Newark’s Frederick Law Olmsted-designed West Side Park. And KaBOOM!, a non-profit founded in 1995, has raised $10 million from corporate sponsors and others for playgrounds in Los Angeles, Chicago, and other cities facing challenges similar to Newark’s.

Funding often does not end with construction. Many private organizations fund playground management and maintenance through “stewardship agreements” with local community groups after finishing renovations. They recognize play cannot be supplied by infrastructure alone, and that actively involving community groups in programming and maintenance increases a playground’s value to a neighborhood.

Ongoing projects and plans for new playgrounds in Newark will require an investment of over $10 million. Most of these funds likely will come from private sources, such as Newark-based Prudential Financial, which has provided major support for the Trust’s program.

Real Results from a Century-Old Ideal

As documented by the Association for Children of New Jersey in its 2002-2003 Newark Kids Count survey, “Newark’s children are less likely to receive immunizations, more likely to fail in school, and more likely to suffer from health problems than children living in other parts of New Jersey.” Approximately one third live in poverty. Given these conditions, it would be easy to dismiss playgrounds as a superficial concern. Yet playgrounds can contribute vitally to solving a wide variety of problems surrounding children.

In her work with preschoolers, Karen Jones sees children’s health benefit from the use of playgrounds: “It helps some of them physically and mentally because they are using their gross muscle skills, their fine muscle skills.” Though less widely recognized, the social aspects of play are also significant. Today on Newark’s revived playgrounds, “you see parents interacting more, kids interacting more instead of being by themselves,” Jones says.

In 1907 President Theodore Roosevelt wrote “in favor of public playgrounds” in the inaugural issue of the Playground Association of America’s magazine. He argued that “since play is a fundamental need, playgrounds should be provided for every child as much as schools.” Both Roosevelt and the Playground Association envisioned collective responsibility for playgrounds, delivering moral and social benefits through political means. While social scientists later substantiated these benefits, practice has since moved away from this Progressive ideal.

And it is not clear that even universal public provision of playgrounds created ideal results–as a report by the Children’s Institute for Learning and Development notes, “too many costly public playgrounds end up as deserted monuments, often erected to satisfy adult needs to provide a place for children to play.”

Newark’s progress in providing recreational opportunities for its children is thus all the more remarkable. Thanks in large part to national corporations and non-profits, together with local government, sometimes inadvertently and sometimes working together by design, Newark has playgrounds that work for kids.

This system has one major drawback– because most playground developments in Newark are owned or funded by private groups, they are vulnerable to the vagaries of commerce, corporate profits, available funding levels, and private agendas. Dependent on sporadic investments that are often dictated by market conditions, Newark has the disadvantage of being unable to direct its playgrounds according to a single, central plan.

But without private investment, Newark’s children would almost certainly have fewer recreational opportunities, in kind, number, and quality, than they do today. Given the realities of funding and conflicting public agendas, an unlikely alliance of private actors is sometimes the only way to bring new life to a city’s playgrounds and to the children and families who use them.