I am of the opinion that part of the melancholy of seeing old public structures destroyed by lack of care is an understanding, subconscious or not, that these things could be maintained but were discarded.
Like yes, that playplace is filthy, and dangerous. The spinning wheel is bent and broken and unsafe, the slides have collected water from sagging over the years. These are items visibly unwell.
But you can fix them. Screws can be repaired, safety can be built in, it can be okay again. But it won't be, because it needed to be maintained in the first place, and it wasn't. Nobody went in to fix a little wobble, or polish things up or even to move off the leaves. It ran until it broke and then we threw it away.
I think there are a lot of things like this in american society. Tired old buildings, busses that get painfully worn due to not having budgets for "non essential" repairs, declining malls, old amusement parks on their last legs.
You can't build a fun thing anymore. It has to be all utilitarian, because paint will chip and wear and the only kind of restoration we get is in museums to crystalize the past.
It makes me very sad. It makes me think about how we treat people this way as well - as objects to be run down and discarded. It's too expensive to rest, too expensive to heal. There isn't any place for whimsy anymore.
Everyone I know runs until they break, and waits to be thrown away. It's a sad state of affairs.
