The Ankle Buster

Janelle illustrates the Pittsburg, NH Crown Slide’s most alluring and dangerous feature, the “suspended bar of broken ankle injuries.”

PITTSBURG, NH – New Hampshire’s northernmost town comes through with a Awesome and Dangerous favorite; the Crown Slide. This deadly beauty was sometimes called the Platform Slide, or Fort Slide, named for the caged-in area at the top where children can sit, play and inevitably gets their heads stuck in the rusting bars.

This slide has all the standard features: loose-fitting bolts ready to pop at any moment and send a child crashing to the ground, rusty hinges just looking for tetanus shot victims and the classic steel slide base that has burned many a young behind over the years.

But the Pittsburg slide is special. As Janelle immediately displayed, this masterpiece has an extra roll bar at the top of the stairs. It’s designed, one supposes, to give kids some needed balance when climbing up. But in reality, it’s easily and mostly used for hanging out over the steps and swinging in a potentially risky move I like to call the “Suspended Bar of Broken Ankle Injuries.”

Janelle illustrates the move in the picture above.

In the soft, plastic world that is playground slides today with their blunted edges and wood chip platforms, this slide is a true classic. It’s a lost relic of an era not too long removed when the playground truly was the final frontier.