News Communities Irving


The last of its kind in Irving, a children's kingdom falls


Avi Selk/Staff Photo

The steel jaws of a fearsome monster, also known as an excavator, attacked and brought down one of the towers at Castle Kingdom on Monday. A generation of children grew up among the maze of forts and bridges. Plans are to replace Irving’s least safe playground.

Castle Kingdom stood guard for 25 years against lava monsters, pirate raids and all imagined dangers of Victoria Park.

The vastest playground in Irving, it sheltered countless hide n’ seekers in its tunnels. A generation of princesses and princes reigned from its steepled towers.

The children were gone on Monday, when a wrecking machine with dragon-sized jaws ripped those towers from the sand.

Grownups watched the kingdom’s demolition—city officials with plans to finally replace the oldest, most troublesome playground in Irving.

Because, through an era of wild imagination and rising safety standards, Castle Kingdom could protect children from every danger but its own.


It took less than an hour to knock a maze of forts and bridges into a heap of sun-greyed wood. In 1989, it took five days and more than 1,000 volunteers to build the playground.

The mayor proclaimed it Castle Kingdom month when they raised that forest of beams in central Irving. Children helped screw the planks on, mugging for photos with electric drills.

“It was the Taj Mahal of playgrounds,” said Chuck Majors, who oversaw both its construction and demolition for the city. “You could go all through the playground and never touch the ground.”

Despite its name, Castle Kingdom could have served as a jungle fort, or a pirate ship, or a tunnel city. To the thousands of children who crawled across it, hid inside it and dug beneath it, it was all those things and more.

But for every child who took home sand in her shoes (one grandmother collected it in a bucket across two generations) another got a splinter in his toe. As the years passed, boards began to rot and towers sometimes swayed.


Once a national craze, wooden playgrounds fell from favor with safety-minded cities.

Castle Kingdom’s climbing beam and balance bar were taken out in the late 1990s. When standards tightened, the tire bridge had to go to clear a safety zone in front of the swings.

Eventually, even the chemical preservative soaked into the playground’s wood was outlawed.

Before it fell, a city inspector had to walk the kingdom at least three days a week—early in the morning to avoid the mobs of kids—to spot loose nails or rotting planks. The binder of Castle Kingdom service calls is so full it won’t shut anymore.

“This is the only wooden one left in the city,” said playground inspector Nathan Frettoloso as he watched the wrecker swipe a tower down. “It’s a maintenance nightmare.”

Earlier this year, Frettoloso helped a committee of children decide what they’d like to replace the kingdom.

They’ll get Castle Kingdom 2.0— with brightly colored towers and a smiling cartoon dragon. Plastic instead of wood, and wheelchair-accessible rubber instead of sand.

It will be shipped from Minnesota and assembled in the fall.

“It will be safe and maintenance-friendly,” Frettoloso said. But it won’t be the same.

“You’re not going to be able to replace the tunnels and the wood and the play value,” the inspector said, waving towards the old kingdom’s rubble. “Here, it’s left open to the imagination.”


There’s treasure hidden under Castle Kingdom. On the night before it opened, its founders buried a time capsule stuffed with memories from the 1980s.

Majors was fresh out of college then, in his first job as assistant parks supervisor. He marked the burial spot on a map and took it back to City Hall.

Decades passed. Majors had children of his own, got promoted and placed over other parks and playgrounds. Now he can’t find the map, or remember what was in the capsule.

So in Castle Kingdom’s final week, just before it fell, Majors led a search crew through the playground. With shovels and machines, they dug deeper than any child had managed in a quarter century, straight through the sand to the gravel beneath.

They stared into the pit they’d made, pored over scrapbook photos and wracked their memories, but they couldn’t find the capsule.

Majors said he’d keep looking—into the playground’s second era, if he had to.

Castle Kingdom has fallen. Long may it live.

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