Beloved wooden playground in NJ is being torn down

I grew up in Rahway by the middle school where there is a huge piece of mostly open land. When we were kids we used to call it “Green Fields” and I don’t know, maybe they still do.

All I know is I spent what felt like endless summer days there running around, making up adventures, riding our bikes, etc.. When my oldest kids were little and I moved them back to my home state I took them there a few times. It was sweet seeing them run around on the same grass that I did so many years before.

I can only imagine that’s the way a lot of young parents feel about a certain wooden playground called Field of Dreams. It’s in Deptford. It’s been there since 1996 when it was built with love by community volunteers.

If you played there when you were 8 you’d be the perfect age to be starting your own family and dream of taking your own kids there. But that’s not possible now. It’s being torn down.

It was made of wood and looked somewhat like a castle. It had slides and swings and a sandbox. There were many of these wooden-type play structure playgrounds built back then across New Jersey. But they were phased out for safety reasons.

Sure enough, that’s exactly what led to the sad news that the wooden castle playground at Field of Dreams is being demolished.

It fell into disrepair over the years and even though they tried fixing it up about a decade ago it still didn’t match today’s much more stringent playground safety regulations.

Inspectors deemed it unsafe and the playground was closed down by Deptford last summer. Further inspection showed the basic structures there wasn't even worth fixing.

“We recognize the park represents a piece of our beloved community, and in an effort to preserve the lasting legacy of Field of Dreams park, West Deptford crews are carefully working to remove sponsorship bricks and fence pickets in hopes to return them to the original donors, without whom the park would not have been possible,” Township Administrator Tyler Rost told nj.com.

No word was given on the exact date this place full of memories will be destroyed.

Opinions expressed in the post above are those of New Jersey 101.5 talk show host Jeff Deminski only.

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