They were designed by Jim Miller-Melberg. Loads more photos on some rando's website...
Mid century modern playground SCULPTURES is an ongoing photo series capturing the disappearing playscapes that were once ubiquitous throughout metropolitan Detroit and beyond - primarily focused on the works of Jim Miller-Melberg and the cast-concrete sculptures of his company, Form Incorporated. From concrete turtles, porpoises, and camels, to swiss-cheese looking castles, walls, saddles, and "moonhouses".
Miller-Melberg's playscapes were commonplace at Detroit parks, schools, and suburban apartment complexes. Along with the works of JMM, various other adventure play sculptures designed by David Aaron, Paul Friedberg, Game-Time Inc., and the Playground Corporation of America still dot the Detroit landscape.
Like most cast conrete or metal based playscapes, they've quickly vanishing in favor of mass-produced, modular plastic equipment. Photographed over the last 10 years, many of the JMM sculptures have been removed and destroyed, and virtually no metal sculptures still exist. All works are Jim Miller-Melberg unless otherwise noted.
Camels
I remember one park I went to as a kid had this like, wooden elevator operated by a rope pulley in the middle of it. Another one had a huge wooden castle thing with tunnels and a tower crows-nest thing in the middle. Another was a series of large wooden structures with like a bridge of giant tires connecting them. Unfortunately I don't have pictures of any of them, nor would I know where to look to try to find historical pictures of them.
Some time in the early 2000s all of them got torn down and replaced with that generic plastic and steel prefab stuff that's absolutely everywhere. I mean that's probably meaningfully safer than the old ramshackle bespoke ones (like of those three, I know I hurt myself multiple times on two of them, and the other one I only went to once), but it's just another way things have gotten blander and more generic because nobodies gonna pay for bespoke and safe designs. Still weird to think about how I caught the tail-end of the old, completely insane playground design, though.
One day when I was in middle school I was talking to my my mom about when I was little and we used to go to the park with the "really big dinosaurs". I said I wanted to like to see the dinosaurs again soon. We we moving and we were going to be hundreds of miles away. My mom smiled and said okay. She didn't elaborate but she said "They're probably a little smaller than you remember."
A week or so later we went to that park and I had a good laugh. In my memory they were huge. Maybe the brontosaurus was at least 15 feet high or so. In reality they were nothing special. The mighty brontosaurus was less than 5 feet high.