we used to have nice things in America.... and then we stopped caring about the country and went into deficit spending to get the most impressive toys for the military who hasn't won a war since WW2.

In the early 1960s, an old Washington DC police impoundment lot for abandoned vehicles was an eyesore in an impoverished Shaw neighborhood that had few amenities for children, until attorney general Robert Kennedy spurred an effort to build a playground there.

Funding came from the flamboyant head of D.C. Transit, who chaired the nonprofit National Committee on Playgrounds for Young America and raised $150,000 to build the playground, which was designed by John Carl Warnecke, the architect who designed John F. Kennedy’s grave at Arlington National Cemetery.

The Air Force donated two T-33 training jets, the Army a tank. A 64-foot tugboat — the Blue Horizon III — was towed through the city from the Navy Yard and deposited in the playground. There was a World War II-era landing craft. There were two streetcars. (Chalk had access to plenty. The last one had rolled three years earlier.) There was an 1876 Baldwin steam locomotive called the Jupiter that had spent its career hauling bananas and coffee in Guatemala.

by the 70s, malaise had set in, and the park was a criminal mess after dark. Soon it was trashed, and recycled by removing the planes, and sending the steam locomotive to the Smithsonian, where no one is allowed to climb on it ever again.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/remember-that-time-uncle-sam-gave-dc-kids-a-tank-and-jet-airplanes-to-play-on/2016/09/03/99a5ff80-7074-11e6-9705-23e51a2f424d_story.html