Play Ground Zero

When I was a kid, our school didn't have a big chain link fence around it. Quite the contrary, it was set back across a sprawling field of grass on one side, and a vast sea of gravel and rutted turf where the children spent their recesses. We didn't spend time on the nice green grass, our recesses were on the scruffy side.
That meant if you had a mind to go and romp on the nicely mowed lawn, you had to show up on the weekends or after school. Nobody was anxious to hang around much after school, so it was on the occasional weekend that we got it into our heads to walk or ride our bikes the four blocks down to the school that we had full use of the open space.
Still, we didn't tend to go to the school when we didn't have to. This was true even though the playground was equipped with three sets of monkey bars, a pair of slides, teeter-totters,a basketball court with six hoops, a merry-go-round, and a couple of swingsets (one for the short set, and one for the fans of extra height). We tended to find our own fun on those Saturdays, leaving the playground for Monday morning and the enforced regimen of recess.
Contrastingly, there was always a strange allure to visiting another kid's school playground. I remember discovering this amazing merry-go-round at an elementary school a full half mile from our house. It had this bizarre crank mechanism that could be run with two kids facing one another, using their arms and legs in a rowing motion. It made me wonder if I wasn't enrolled in the wrong school after all. Another school still farther away had a series of tunnels built with concrete tubes for climbing and hiding and general mischief. At our school we had four kickball diamonds (not that we ever needed that many).
Yesterday I was planting daffodil bulbs at the school where I work. The kids have a play structure and a couple of basketball hoops. There are no backstops. There are no swings. There are no slides. There is no grass - just a vast stretch of asphalt. I picked up a lot of broken glass and saw a lot of graffiti. There are a lot of angry kids at our school. I guess I know one of the reasons why.