I was walking to a classroom when I stopped in front of a half-dozen cafeteria tables at which students sat studying. I asked if I could have their attention for a minute. “What do you call this apparatus?” I asked, gesturing to the thing that stood next to the tables. The students were unanimous: they called it a jungle gym. I had always known it as the monkey bars.
In waking life I have always known it as the monkey bars. That was the term I knew in my Brooklyn childhood. But jungle gym seems to be the more common term. The NYC Parks website has a page about playgrounds with two great photographs of jungle gyms — that’s what the website calls them: 1, 2. The NYC Municipal Archives have many more photographs. Searching the Archives for monkey bars returns nothing.
Wikipedia: “In Australian English, the term ‘monkey bars’ is sometimes used to refer to the entire jungle gym.” But I didn’t grow up in Australia.
Post title with apologies to Duke Ellington’s “Money Jungle.”
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[“Only fools and children talk about their dreams”: Dr. Edward Jeffreys (Robert Douglas), in Thunder on the Hill (dir. Douglas Sirk, 1951).]
Wednesday, October 4, 2023
Monkey jungle
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In the Boston area in the 1960s, monkey bars and jungle gyms were two different things. Monkey bars were like a horizontal ladder on posts. You went from rung to rung with your hands until you made it across (or, if you were me, dropped to the ground after two rungs). Jungle gyms were more complex climbing structures, made out of pipe, usually vaguely dome-shaped, that you climbed up on.
I don't know what kids around here call them now -- maybe nothing, because I don't see either of these structures much any more.
I was a spectator at some monkey bars last weekend. That's what everyone called them. And I have to admit, I had no name for them.
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