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List view has the same places as a keyboard-navigable list.
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You appear to be here right now
Picked up where you left off.
One last thing, and it matters: should everything you didn’t pick be recorded as not here?
playdar uses your location to show playgrounds near you. It stays on your phone.
Your phone will ask for permission next. We never send your location anywhere, and we never store it. If you would rather not, everything in playdar still works — you can browse the map and the full list without it.
playdar shows 1,781 places to play, and they are not the same kind of record. Which one you are looking at changes how much playdar can tell you, so it is marked everywhere — a different pin on the map, a label in the list, and a plain statement at the top of every detail page.
| Type | How many | What we know |
|---|---|---|
| Parks playgrounds | 1,015 | Everything below. Accessibility, bathrooms, hours, equipment. |
| School yards | 300 | Where it is, and its outline. Nothing else is published. |
| NYCHA play areas | 466 | Where it is, and which development. Nothing else — including whether the public may use it. |
The accessibility, bathroom, sprinkler and sensory filters work on the 1,015 Parks playgrounds, which is where that detail is published. The Type of place filter narrows to any one group.
School yards are Department of Education yards, open to the public outside school hours. Their names come from DOE building records, matched on each site’s building code — all 300 matched. Where a building holds more than one school, the name shown is the building’s.
NYCHA play areas come from the New York City Housing Authority’s own maps, taken from the asset system their maintenance work is scheduled against — good evidence a play area is really there. Whether the public may use one is a separate question, and each NYCHA page carries the number to call. NYCHA records 652 play areas; we group ones within about 60 m into a single place, which gives 466.
NYC Parks publishes an accessibility record for each playground, and playdar reads all of it. For all 1,015 Parks playgrounds in the city it has a yes-or-no answer on ten things — with no gaps:
Wheelchair ramps · transfer platforms · adaptive swings for under-5s · adaptive swings for ages 5–12 · companion seating · benches with backs and armrests · accessible game tables · accessible drinking fountains · quiet or sensory-friendly spaces for children with autism · multi-sensory play.
That means when playdar says a playground has no wheelchair ramp, that is a recorded “no” — not a gap in our data. Some of these are scarce citywide: only 215 playgrounds have ramps and only 108 have an adaptive swing for ages 5–12.
Those ten fields cover accessible and adaptive equipment, which is the part the city records per site. A general inventory — how many swings, whether the climbing frame suits a toddler — along with fencing, shade and age suitability, is not published by any source we could find, and OpenStreetMap covers it for under a tenth of these playgrounds. Each playground page lists its sources under Where this comes from.
Seven City of New York sources, of noticeably different ages:
| Source | What it gives us | Dated |
|---|---|---|
| NYC Parks playground pages | The ten fields above, bathrooms, hours | scraped |
| Directory of Playgrounds | Wheelchair access, locations | unknown |
| Play area outlines | Shape of the fenced area | 2026-07-09 |
| Public Restrooms | Changing tables, opening status | 2025-06-27 |
| Schoolyard to Playgrounds | The 300 school yards, and their outlines | 2026-07-17 |
| DOE building records | School names for those yards | 2023-01-04 |
| NYCHA Playgrounds | The 466 NYCHA play areas | 2026-03-13 |
The accessibility detail comes from the Parks website and is as current as their pages. The wheelchair-access flag and the locations come from a published dataset that carries no publication date we can verify — the file it is served from is rebuilt daily whether or not anything changed, so a recent timestamp on it would mean nothing.
Every playground page shows exactly which source said what, and when, under Where this comes from at the bottom.
On 232 playgrounds the city’s own sources contradict each other about whether a bathroom is accessible. We show you both, with their dates, and pick neither. On 150 of those, the older source says not accessible and a newer one says accessible — we do not promote the newer one. Being told a bathroom is accessible when it is not can strand you; being told to check costs you a phone call.
363 playgrounds show this, and on 361 of them two independent city sources agree. That is a strong signal, and like everything here it is a record of what the city publishes.
The Parks page for each playground records whether it has a quiet or sensory-friendly space for children with autism (733 playgrounds do), and which senses its multi-sensory play is designed for. That is site-specific, and it is what the Sensory filter uses.
Separately, an open dataset carries a blanket “sensory-friendly” flag on 72% of all playgrounds, which looks like a policy label for newer sites rather than an assessment of any one of them. We never filter on that one.
Shown for the 720 playgrounds where NYC Parks publishes them, with the date we read them.
977 Parks playgrounds and all 300 school yards show the outline of the site as well as a pin. On 22 playgrounds the city’s coordinates are precise to roughly a kilometer; those show as a dashed ring, and their page points you to the cross-streets instead.
For anything you would make a trip for, reach NYC Parks Accessibility at 212-360-2715. playdar is a starting point, not an authority.
playdar uses your location to show playgrounds near you. It stays on your phone — we never send it anywhere and we never store it. You can use the whole app without granting location at all.
We use privacy-friendly analytics that set no cookies and collect no personal data, so we can see which features get used. We don’t sell or share anything. Read the full privacy policy.
Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors. Playground data from NYC Parks and NYC Open Data.