Kids Designed Those Giant Wooden Castle Playgrounds

If you grew up in the United States in the 1980s or 90s, there is a good chance you spent afternoons climbing through a sprawling wooden fortress with towers, tunnels and rope bridges at a park that looked like nowhere else in the country. What almost nobody realized at the time is that kids had designed the whole thing themselves.

A Design Day at the School

The man behind most of these castles was an architect named Robert "Bob" Leathers, based in Ithaca, New York.

Leathers built his first community playground in 1970 at his son's elementary school in Ithaca. He founded Leathers and Associates in the early 1980s and spent the next two decades repeating the same idea in towns across the country.

Before any lumber was cut, Leathers or a member of his team would visit the local school for what the company called a "design day." Children were asked to draw and describe their dream playground.

Those drawings, full of towers, drawbridges, secret tunnels and dragons, became the starting point for a real architectural blueprint.

A Modern-Day Barn Raising

Once the design was locked in, the town took over. Parents sawed boards and hammered nails, local businesses donated lumber and tools, and volunteers organized food for the crew.

"The basis of the success of these projects is to involve the children from the beginning all the way through to when it is built," Leathers told The New York Times in 1989.

A single build usually took about five days of long shifts and could pull in thousands of volunteers from one town. In Chehalis, Washington, roughly 2,000 volunteers built the town's Penny Playground in five days flat in 1993.

The Castle That Named Itself

In Chehalis, local schoolchildren even named their own playground. They chose "Penny Playground" after a school penny drive helped raise money for construction, and Chehalis Middle School students pitched in their own fundraising toward the project.

The pattern repeated itself in towns of every size. In Doylestown, Pennsylvania, a team of local architects and Central Bucks schoolkids helped shape a design that Leathers was brought in to refine. It opened in 1997 as Kids Castle and still stands in the town's Central Park today.

Still Standing

The idea spread far beyond any one town. In 1986, two separate Leathers-built playgrounds were featured on the PBS children's shows Mister Rogers' Neighborhood and Sesame Street. By 1989, the Chicago Tribune was calling Leathers "the guru of contemporary playground design."

By the company's own count, Leathers and Associates has now completed 3,346 projects with the help of more than 3 million volunteers since 1971. Independent reporting puts the more conservative figure at over 2,000 playgrounds built across the United States, plus projects in Israel and Australia.

Leathers himself has estimated that of the more than 2,000 playgrounds his company built, about 1,500 are still standing today, still holding the shape of drawings a bunch of second graders handed him decades ago.