It Happened In Hillsborough: The Municipal Playground

Spending years as a stay-at-home dad, I naturally became familiar with Hillsborough’s parks. In fact,
about 20 years ago, I enlisted my kids to help me with a series I was writing about the parks by having
them travel with me around town and test all the playground equipment. I confess, a lot of it was the
same. Except for one spot. You know the one. The playground so unique that parents brought their kids
from other towns to come and play!

The Municipal Playground

The playground at Hillsborough’s municipal complex (sometimes referred to as “Castle Park”) looks
unique today, but when it opened in 1992, such wooden, community-built playgrounds were all the
rage.

In 1971, Robert Leathers was an architect working in Ithaca, New York, when he decided to design a
playground for a local school. It was so successful that it became a sideline, then a full-time business –
Leathers and Associates. From the start, the business was about more than just building playgrounds; it
was about building community.

The company would actively involve schoolchildren in developing the design. Then the community
would have to fundraise to pay for the plans and materials (around $60,000 in 1992) and use their own
volunteer labor, supervised by personnel from Leathers, to construct the playground from start to finish
over five days.

By the early 1990s, Robert Leathers-designed playgrounds numbered more than 800 nationwide and
had invaded central New Jersey. After visiting one in Chatham, volunteers formed “Parents for a
Hillsborough Community Playground.” The Hillsborough Township Committee provided 15,000 square
feet of space adjacent to the parking lot of the new municipal complex, and Leathers and Associates was
contracted to design the space.

Fundraising took many forms, from rummage sales to business donations to the popular “buy a fence
board.” Over five days at the end of September 1992, hundreds of Hillsborough volunteers, divided into
skilled, unskilled, and “willing to try”, constructed the towers, slides, and bridges that made
Hillsborough’s playground special.

The playground has been updated over the years, but still retains much of its charm. Sadly, wooden
playgrounds like this can no longer be installed due to accessibility, sightlines, and other issues (not that
those aren’t valid concerns). Leathers and Associates are still building playgrounds, using different
materials, and many of their older playgrounds have been torn down. Still, I am glad my kids were the
right age to catch the tail-end of the first Leathers Playground era.

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Gregory Gillette has been writing about local history for 20 years, starting with his Courier News column
“Gillette on Hillsborough” and continuing today with a Facebook page of the same name. A recipient of

the Somerset County Cultural and Heritage Commission History Award for Education/Leadership in
2018, he was named as Hillsborough’s first Local Historian in 2025.