Union Square Playground

Though using many of the same materials and equipment as other city playgrounds, Union Square went out of its way to be extra creative, and the result is a quirky, mold-breaking kid mecca. The playground is best known for its gleaming hemispherical dome, which challenges kids to scale its enormous gleaming surface, but other features—checkerboard rubber flooring, various stainless-steel slides, spiral climbers and horns sticking out of the ground that are redolent of Dr. Seuss’s Horton Hears a Who—deserve props too.