Children and seniors will partner up this week to create mementos for a time capsule to be sealed and buried next to the giant wooden slide at Smith Memorial Playground.
In honor of the Fairmount Park institution’s 125th anniversary, which it celebrated last year, 20 children aged 6-10 who are attending the park’s summer camp have been invited to draw, write poems, craft letters to their future selves or submit other creative works that depict life as a child in 2025. On Friday, they’ll be placed in a time capsule that will eventually be sealed until 2075.
The park will also host a shared play time where the kids will show off modern toys with seniors from the Martin Luther King Older Adult Center who will share toys from 50 years ago. Children will then interview a senior about their memories and childhood experiences, and they’re encouraged to write about it for the time capsule.
Smith Memorial Executive Director Frances Hoover said Friday’s gathering is just the beginning of collecting items for the capsule, which won’t be buried until November. From now until then, she said the park will be working with local schools for paper-based contributions, such as poetry groups that write about the trees. Visitors, including adults, will also be able to deposit their submissions at the playground in the coming months.
“Our goal is to collect materials from the children of the city today, asking them about how they characterize their life today, what their predictions are about the future, and to bury those memories and dreams and then to have the time capsule reopened 50 years from now, so that those kids who may be 6 now could come back as 56 year olds with their families, their grandkids, their friends and take place in the reopening of the time capsule and share those memories with their families,” Hoover said.
Smith Memorial Playground was opened in July 1899 after wealthy Philadelphians Richard and Sarah Smith willed the money for it to be built in honor of their son, Stanfield. The 6.5-acre space was one of the first playgrounds to open in the country as part of the larger movement in the early 1900s to develop public play spaces for childhood health and development. Its iconic slide was built about five years after opening.
In 2003, the park formed a nonprofit and raised $7 million for repairs to the playground that would have resulted in its closure. Another $9 million later went to a renovation on the Playhouse.