Two-year-old Keon Wallace struggled to the top of a jungle gym at Northeast Baltimore's Briscoe Park last week. From a height of 8 feet, he began sliding down a nearby pole, lost his grip and fell to the ground.
If the play lot had been safe he would have crashed into forgiving rubber or a foot of wood chips.
Because Keon fell in a typical Baltimore play lot, he went straight into concrete.
Eighty percent of the city's roughly 300 play lots are unsafe for children, according to a survey conducted in the fall by the Playing Safe Coalition, a group of nonprofit organizations.
All over Baltimore, in middle-class neighborhoods as well as in communities wracked with poverty, forlorn play lots are exposing children to serious injury, according to safety experts.
"You turn away for just a moment on this playground, your kid ends up hurt," Keon's mother, Bessie Woods, said as she comforted her son after the fall.
"Accidents like this happen here every week."
National Consumer Product Safety Commission guidelines, -- passed as law in some states and used in the survey as a benchmark -- call for all play equipment to stand on thick rubber cushions or wood chips. They also ban protruding bolts that can snag children's clothing and call for surfaces to be smooth and forgiving, with no rust, jagged edges or splintered wood.
But the surfaces of city play lots are frequently concrete or hard-packed dirt, the kind of surfaces that each year cause most of the estimated 211,000 serious playground injuries nationwide. The equipment is often old and rusty or splintered, resulting in children getting cuts and gashes.
Some equipment is so poorly designed it virtually invites kids to take long tumbles to the ground.
And the lots are often not well kept. Foot-tall weeds are common, as are shards of glass, bullet casings and condoms.
"A child could easily die while playing on a Baltimore playground," said Carol Gilbert, director of the Neighborhood Design Center, a nonprofit group working to fill in where the city has failed and initiate playground construction.
"Just what does it say to our children that the city is willing to let their public play spaces go to pot and look so bad? Does that tell our kids we don't value them?" asked Iris T. Smith, a Northwest Baltimore community leader who complains that in her part of town only one play lot is available.
No studies have been done on injuries in city play lots, experts say.
