By Gus Saltonstall
Three seesaws sit in the back right corner of River Run Playground in Riverside Park near West 82nd Street.
On Tuesday morning, the seesaws rested in a pocket of shade as children navigated the less than half-full play area. West Side Rag visited the playground for 10 minutes that morning, and during that time, a line formed at only one play feature — not the swings, not the slide, not the sandbox — but the seesaws.
The trio of seesaws, which rise 32 inches off the rubber mat below, are among the last remaining in all of New York City, including on the Upper West Side.
But their days are numbered.
River Run Playground is receiving a $7 million renovation and redesign, and while the first plans submitted by the New York City Parks Department are not finalized, the seesaws were removed in the initial redesign draft.
The decision by the city to remove the seesaws from River Run Playground should not come as a surprise.
As outlined in The New York Times 2016 article, “The Downward Slide of the Seesaw,” seesaws were fixtures of more than 600 New York City playgrounds constructed under the direction of Robert Moses between 1934 and 1960. However, federal safety guidelines enacted in the early 1980s for playgrounds began to limit their use and new construction.
“The older seesaws were wooden planks that often hit asphalt directly, leading to occasional tailbone and spinal injuries, falls and pinched fingers, not to mention splinters. Children could slam each other by dismounting suddenly. Playgrounds that retained old seesaws were exposed to lawsuits,” The Times wrote in its 2016 article. “Current federal guidelines state that fulcrum seesaws can be installed safely if car tires are embedded under the seats and adequate space is left around them in case of a fall. But they are not recommended for toddlers or preschoolers, and they take up a lot of space. So the reaction to the guidelines in New York City, and many other places, was just to phase seesaws out.”
The River Run Playground seesaws are among the more recently constructed version of the play equipment, which were first installed in the 1990s, and feature the embedded car tires, and are made out of metal.
While it seems that the River Run Playground’s seesaws will soon become a memory, there are even rarer nearby seesaws that don’t have any current removal plans.
A few blocks away at the Classic Playground within Riverside Park at West 74th Street, there are two sets of the old-school wooden seesaws.
There are also still seesaws at the Heckscher Playground in Central Park.
If there are any other seesaws on the Upper West Side, please let us know in the comments.
The Parks Department will present its revised version of the River Run Playground redesign, which also included the controversial removal of the river element of the play space, to Upper West Side Community Board 7 on October 20. The Rag will keep an eye out for whether the Parks Department remains committed to removing the seesaws, when those new plans are presented.
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Shhhh – keep doing that, and you’ve just told the See Saw Police where their next bust is!
It’s no wonder this generation needs protected bike lanes everywhere. They never learned to see saw.
“This generation needs protected bike lanes” because 25-30 cyclists are killed on our streets every year.
in 2018 10 “cyclists” were killed. The number increased in 2023 to 30 largely due to the increase in e-bike use and their higher speeds. In a city of 8.5 million people that is insignificant.
“30 people killed is insignificant” – ok!
Also, the size of the average car has grown due to CAFE laws being skirted. Now, SUVs loom over pedestrians where drivers can’t even see if there’s a child walking in front of the car. We need protected bike lanes to not DIE from being on the same road with these vehicles.
We spend some time in Sweden and Japan and have found some awesomely “dangerous” playgrounds there that defy all cultural norms in the US. Insanely high slides (where one could easily fall to one’s death… but no one seems to). Four year olds with access to wood saws, sawing away. Many, many things where one could pinch ones fingers and jar one’s tailbone. My heart leapt to see these and wish that crazy tort liability didn’t prevent our kids from having all this fun / learning all these important life skills.
There’s lots of ‘dangerous’ stuff in parks for kids — dogs off leashes, dog poop (parasites) everywhere, etc. Maybe Sweden and Japan could import some of our wonderful ideas!
Go to the new play area on the Hudson at 57th. There’s a slide about 20′ high. Kids need to climb a complex rope system to get up, and it’s mostly covered coming down.
My 9 year old great nephew totally loved it.
Bring back steel slides that heat up to sizzle, the merry go round that spun you flying off, real playground equipment weeds out the dumb kids.
Is that how they got you?
How much fun we had at these unsafe and even dangerous playgrounds!.We could fall and get splinters, and it felt adventurous and hilarious. Our parents didn’t mind and didn’t interfere in our games and fights. Somehow it never amounted to anything presenting a serious adult concern, bless them. Maybe that’s why we grew up a different bunch – with no safe spaces and no fear of micro aggression, able to stand our ground. Of course, it is our own helicopter parenting that is at fault, and the playgrounds is just a manifestation.
nasty
I remember the good old metal monkey bars. Those were the days, my friend.
I think there might still be some monkey bars in the lower Riverside Park at 74th St. I loved those as a child. We played tag on them and never touched the ground. I love seesaws and merry-go-rounds too. Even my sandbox in River Run Playground can be dangerous if children are not careful. The beloved river is a trip hazard but the children LOVE IT and it should NOT be removed!.
Metal monkey bars with hard asphalt underneath 🙂
The see saw also taught you the importance of learning who was trustworthy as soon as some joker just jumped off when you were at the highest point sending you crashing down.
One way to find out who your friends are. More than once I ‘hit bottom” when the other person hopped off. Lived to tell about it, obviously.
I liked hopping off
There isn’t a piece of playground equipment in existence that doesn’t pose some sort of hazard. You must prepare your children for the playground, not prepare the playground for your children.
Good, never see many kids playing on the seesaws anyway
Well, I know some adults who will be heading over to use them this weekend!
Those don’t go nearly high enough- they’re not fun!
(May as well recommend excellent Bluey episode Seesaw)
Bluey is excellent!
For an elementary school teacher of science, seesaws provided a perfect introduction to the principle of the lever- how distance and weight affect force, how balance makes a scale, how many tools work. Other playground equipment was also helpful: a swings for learning about pendulums, slides motion and gravity. Many of us will miss seesaws.
The next meeting on the proposed removal of the river from River Run will be at the CB7 full board meeting on October 20 at 6:30pm. Please show up online or in person to have your opinion on River Run heard!
They are vanishing now, the seesaws. Parks phase them out in quiet prudence: liability, injuries, quarrels. It is the smart thing, yes—but with each removal, a plank of childhood is lifted from the earth.
Playground seesaws fade,
safety smooths the edges down,
silence takes their place.
I remember the sting of betrayal: a child’s fight, sudden air beneath me when the other kid jumped off. Hanging, jolted, beaten. A small body learning the weight of trust—and its collapse.
Trust breaks in mid-air,
gravity the final judge,
dust blooms where I land.
What a metaphor we once rode. Balance, rhythm, the back-and-forth of human hope. And always the human factor undoing it: impatience, mischief, cruelty, or simply letting go.
Wooden board tilts hard,
human hands cannot sustain
the fragile balance.
Still, I miss the joy. The sudden lift into the sky, the laughter spilling like coins from a pocket, the brief illusion that life could be shared evenly.
Childhood arcs upward,
downward thud reminds the heart—
all games end in ground.
Perhaps it is right the children of tomorrow will not know this pleasure. After all, the lesson is already written into every life: that we all grow up, that the world is made of ups and downs, and that sadness is the truest teacher of balance.
Seesaws disappear,
but the rise and fall remains—
the world tips us all.
“Children could slam each other by dismounting suddenly.” And that’s cited as a con??
Also, ‘grounding’ is very important for kids’ health — and everyone’s health. How can you walk barefoot on grass in a park full of dog doo??? Other countries are cleaner……
I’m all for keeping children reasonably safe, but to turn all playgrounds into cookie-cutter-nothing-really-to-explore-or-learn-or-dare-to-do, kind of beats the purpose of letting children explore and learn and find out their limitations within a reasonably safe space. Put something at the end of see-saws? Sure. Remove the lot? Why??? What’s next, removing all ladders because children might slip between the rungs? See-saws teach so many things! That’s a sad removal, IMO.
This is truly stupid and unnecessary. the article claims, “The older seesaws were wooden planks that often hit asphalt directly, leading to occasional tailbone and spinal injuries, falls and pinched fingers, not to mention splinters. Children could slam each other by dismounting suddenly. Playgrounds that retained old seesaws were exposed to lawsuits.”
First, my two brothers and I, and our many friends, played on those seesaws for years – not ONE single injury. And if we DID get minor injuries (like pinched fingers or splinters), we simply lived through them. We put on a Band-Aid or removed the splinter. No lawsuits were filed. Also, dismounting suddenly and “slamming” each other was part of the fun. And again, no injuries and no lawsuits. (Only bruised egos.)
In fact, it says that those playgrounds were “exposed” to lawsuits. But how many were actually filed? My guess is: few or none.
Kids are resilient. We slid down metal slides that were 200 degrees in summer, yet never complained, rarely got burns and, again, NO lawsuits. We swung swings to their maximum – and then even further. AGAIN, no injuries, and no lawsuits.
The idea of creating some kind of “perfectly safe” world – PARTICULARLY in a playground – defeats the purpose of allowing children to learn and grow – yes, maybe get a splinter, maybe get a small burn, maybe even cry. But that’s OKAY.
I find this whole thing silly, stupid, unnecessary, and downright idiotic in the extreme.
I’ve been watching swingsets disappear for years, due to overblown safety concerns. Now it’s the seesaws. All in a day’s work for the Committee to Crush the Human Spirit!
The classic playground is an undervalued quite space for those parents that need a break from the raucous of almost every other playground.
Just have to watch out for the occasional teen smoking marijuana cigarettes!
I can’t believe that they’re removing the water feature from the River Run playground! The map of the Hudson is so cool and it gives kids a water experience without having to go to a pool.
The seesaw and the monkey bars were my go-to adventures in the park. So sad to see so much of childhood fading away. Maybe I’ll grab my husband early Sunday morning and go for one last teeter-tot. If you see a 60 and 70 year old whooping it up in the 74th street playground, stop and say “hello”.
This cover story from The Atlantic from 2014 really says it all: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/04/hey-parents-leave-those-kids-alone/358631/?gift=itWo9A2_YNh7QOmAIFF2g047ql8XK15XVgeODHIRKjk&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share
[…] The Likely Last Days of One of the Upper West Side’s Last Seesaw Sets […]
More dangerous are the sprinklers without any rubber underneath. The one at 68th/CP comes to mind and there’s another one that comes to mind in the 90’s RS Park. Seesaws are so fun if there’s rubber protection underneath for safety.
Sad that they’re being removed
Playgrounds that have been upgraded have gotten rid of many staples of my children’s childhood memories.
Maybe the redesign of these playgrounds are filled with the same people responsible for the redesign of the even more dangerous loop in CP, which protects e-vehicle riding over pedestrian safety!
Wow
Even 1 e-vehicle crash is too many.
I was hit 3 yrs ago by a moped.
I am left partially paralyzed and can no longer play cello at all…my career as it was or even for my own enjoyment.
Sadly I am not the only 1 statistic. Right before me there was Lisa Banes killed, and after, Priscilla Loke and many more killed, and permanently injured.
In EVSA which was created in part because of my crash and the crazy unregulated e-bike riding, we painfully have 150 victims and that number continues to go up everyday!!
And those stats that were quoted represent only a fraction of what’s true. Stats are only now catching up to any real numbers. Thanks to Alex Bores passing legislation for it!