One other thing about our home town. The Commons Mall is a pretty cool place in downtown Columbus. Its one of the many “architectural wonders” there, the building itself and the sculpture inside called Chaos I

The Commons is a strange place. It is a mall (although the shopping portion seems to be dying),  a playground, food court, live theater and movie theater all in one. As a kid I saw all kinds of cool stuff there. Chinese Circus, talent shows, a puppet version of The Griffin and the Minor Canon (the coolest puppet show I’ve ever seen. People dressed all in black manning these life-sized, totally wicked looking puppets). Junior and Senior proms were there. Oh, and the first date I had with Karen was to see Heywood Banks there.

The playground there is an indoor city playground.

 It used to be an awesome playground, back in the day. That 4 foot mound used to have this giant circular monkey bar thing that was about 8 feet high. We could climb and sit on top of it… 12 feet off the ground.
You can’t see it all in the picture but the thing the slide on the right is in is one of two, 2 story cylinders made of bars. They both have platforms (enclosed by bars) on top and they exit out into the upstairs of the mall (right by the movie theater entrance.) The second cylinder had stairs that now just go to the top of the slide but they used to go all the way up to the platform on top. And the cylinder with the slide used to have two fire poles, one that went from the top platform to a second platform that was where the top of the slide is now, and a second pole that went from there to the ground.
It was all very dangerous but to an 8 year old kid it was like heaven.

They are supposed to be tearing it all down and building some new playground. I’m sure they will make it all “safe” and remove all possibility of “broken limbs” and “severe head trauma” but there is no way it will be as fun as it was when I was a kid.