In the 1960s, landscape architect M. Paul Friedberg designed two comparable playground schemes for public housing: Jacob Riis Plaza in New York and Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis. Both drew on the same design vocabulary, yet their afterlives diverged sharply. Riis became a canonical example of postwar playground design, while the Pruitt-Igoe playgrounds are largely absent from the architectural record. Their contrasting fates reveal how race, philanthropy, public visibility, and federal housing policy have shaped the preservation and remembrance of modern recreational landscapes.

This essay examines how the Silver Springs and Paradise Park attractions in Ocala, Florida, reflect the changing beliefs of the time within the cultural landscape. It focuses on three different managers and the themes of segregation, progress, and modernity. The authors look at the parks in parallel as thriving attractions and the various changes they go through. The essay highlights Silver Springs and the visions of progress seen in the construction of the Tourist Center by architect Victor Lundy and the slow shift away from his modern vision for the spring.  At the same time, the authors showcase Paradise Park’s importance in the community and its closure and erasure. The essay concludes with recent preservation and interpretation efforts that have begun to acknowledge these histories.

In 1948, a new kind of recreational landscape opened on San Antonio's South Side. The Mission Drive-In Theatre brought automobiles, neon, Hollywood movies, and family entertainment to the edge of Mission San José, one of the city's historic Spanish colonial missions. Rather than enclosing its audience within a conventional theater, the drive-in transformed a large tract of land into an outdoor auditorium: here, cars became seats and the building became the screen. The Mission Drive-In Theatre, now nown as the Mission Marquee Plaza, placed a distinctly modern, commercial form of leisure alongside a historic landscape increasingly shaped by preservation and tourism. Its history offers a window into the ways that mid-century San Antonio negotiated modern recreation, cultural heritage, and racial access.

Over the past sixty years, the plaza at the heart of the West Los Angeles Civic Center has experienced an unexpected and thrilling evolution. Confronted with ongoing redevelopment pressures, negative public perceptions, and limited resources, diverse community coalitions have effectively defended and enhanced a treasured global destination that allows people of all backgrounds, interests, and abilities to connect, create, and thrive.

By the end of the nineteenth century, children were beginning to acquire places of their own within the city. Playgrounds were among them, providing an alternative to streets increasingly considered dangerous for play. But they soon became something more complex: carefully bounded spaces where freedom was promised but only granted on adult terms. Across a century of design experiments—from picturesque parks to radical landscapes—a question persists: can a space protect children without prescribing how they should play? This essay traces how landscape thinking has offered alternatives to the standardized playground, and what that history reveals about childhood, public space, and design.

La Laguna de San Gabriel is an otherworldly playscape in the San Gabriel Valley of Los Angeles County, built in 1965 by master concrete artist Benjamin Dominguez. One of the last surviving midcentury fantasy playgrounds, it was saved from demolition by local historians and grassroots advocacy. Six decades on, it demonstrates that artist-designed playscapes, rooted in the land and surrounding culture, can anchor public life, uplift intergenerational community, and nurture belonging tied to place.

In 1969, American artist Paul Selinger unveiled Shek Lei Playground, a sculptural landscape of cast concrete forms, painted rock faces, and abstract play settings — Hong Kong's first playground conceived as a work of art. Though erased by later renovations, its influence has quietly resurfaced in recent play spaces across the city. Fan Lok-Yi revisits Selinger's lost masterpiece and its unexpected afterlife in contemporary Hong Kong play design.