Prologue: The chief challenge for children on a playground is to figure out how to turn a seemingly safe facility into something as dangerous as possible.
While slides are designed for sliding down, most children prefer to climb up, ensuring a collision with the kid coming down.
While the intent of monkey bars is for children to hang down like monkeys, it’s far more tempting for these monkeys to shimmy up and stand precariously on top of the bars.
And then the swings. Ideally, one envisions beaming cherubs rocking gently while reciting Robert Louis Stevenson:
How do you like to go up in a swing,
Up in the air so blue?
Oh, I do think it the pleasantest thing
Ever a child can do!
In reality, the goal of the mini-Flying Wallendas is to pump that swing until the chains are parallel to the ground at which point they let go hurtling off hoping to land with only minor injuries.
Although the signs on playgrounds indicate that supervising adults should watch their charges, it is probably better to turn away, for to watch is to experience terror.
On to Hopewell’s playgrounds:
Let’s start with Kunkel Park in Pennington with its two playgrounds, one for little ones and another for very little ones. The sandbox, abutting the parking lot, is filled with broken sand toys and has the added feature of allowing you to go home with sandy children.
One downside of Kunkel is the frequency of birthday parties, which means being assaulted by a dozen shrieking princesses in pink tutus. If you stare hungrily, they might offer to share a piece of cake.
Kunkel was recently renovated. The broken-down basketball court is gone and new benches installed, perfect places on which to fall asleep when worn out watching children.
The Gazebo Playground in Hopewell Borough is equipped with painfully loud bells and a marimba, making sleeping difficult. It is near a grove of phragmites and a small bamboo forest. Both serve as mazes into which children can disappear and, with luck, reappear. (I once saw a mink swimming in the adjacent Bedens Brook.)
Also in the borough is the Train Station playground. Designed primarily for the littlest kids, a few years back one of those kids got his foot stuck between some boards and had to be extricated by the fire department. Presumably, that design flaw has been fixed.
Hopewell Elementary’s playground is a wild place after school, full of runners, jumpers and gaga players. Unfortunately, it’s less wild this year since the after-school program decided to hog the premises and keep outsiders out. Like, how mean can you get?
Bear Tavern Elementary’s playground is enormous with multiple swings and slides and creative climbing structures. (I saw a ribbon snake in the nearby tributary of Jacob’s Creek.)
Rosedale Lake playground features a fine abstract treehouse suitable for climbing and hiding. The setting by the lake would be superb if it weren’t for the warning signs about the water. As a result of run-off, “Rosedale Lake is considered to be in a eutrophic state because of the heavy algae blooms occurring within its boundaries.” Contact with the water may induce “rashes, allergy-like reactions, flu-like symptoms, gastroenteritis, respiratory irritation and eye irritation (NJDEP).” You can boat or fish, but don’t you dare eat those fish.
Perhaps if the waters are that toxic, it could be used to keep down the deer population. All that’s needed is a “Deer Welcome” sign.
The County Equestrian Center not only has real horses but also a diminutive equine-themed playground including bouncy ponies on springs. When the joy of the playground ebbs, the place is stocked with horses that love to have their noses stroked by little hands.
When horse petting wears thin, little kids are guaranteed to glow with excitement touring the Educational Garden and its exhibit of over a dozen different composting devices.
Not quite in Hopewell is Skillman’s Van Horne Park. The slides are thrillingly steep, and there is a long, wobbly floating beam to test the balancing skills of children and demonstrate the lack of those skills in grownups.
An added treat is that Van Horne is on the Princeton Airport flight-path. Oglers can track small airplanes and helicopters unsteadily taking off and landing. Presumably these are aspiring pilots taking flying lessons, since it’s the same planes taking off and landing over and over.
Hobler Park on the Great Road (not so great on a bicycle) is wide open and thus a bit hot in the summer, but it has a fine merry-go-round, remnant ruins of a sculpture garden, and broad paths cutting through large fields of wild strawberries and poison ivy.
Epilogue: I am omitting any mention of my favorite playground hidden in the Sourlands because I don’t want to encourage anyone else to go there. It’s just too beautiful.
Rosedale Park. (Photo courtesy Mercer County Park Commission.),
