April 08, 2026
Thom Carroll/for PhillyVoice
Smith Memorial Playground and Playhouse is building a time capsule for America's 250th birthday. It'll be sealed until the nation turns 300 years old.
A Philly playground is calling on kids to write and record messages to themselves that they won't see again until they're pushing 60.
Smith Memorial Playground and Playhouse is aiming to capture the sentiment of the city's youngest residents for a semiquincentennial time capsule. The vessel will be buried near the East Fairmount Park site's giant wooden slide, and stay there until the nation's next big anniversary — the tricentennial — in 2076.
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"It feels like a really important time to mark how people are feeling," said Frances Hoover, executive director of Smith Memorial Playground and Playhouse. "And in particular, we think it's a really great time to ask kids what they think life is like, think of their life to today and what they hope for in the future."
Hoover is aiming to collect 5,000 submissions before the capsule's sealing and burial ceremony on Nov. 7. The playground will accept letters, poems, stories, drawings, photographs and other paper contributions — just no objects, to maximize storage space and make preservation easier.
Kids also will be able to record video messages at one of several collection stations that Smith Memorial Playground plans to deploy across the city. These stations are one piece of the playground's outreach strategy, which also includes its "pop-up playhouse" bus and partnerships with the Girl Scouts of Southeastern Pennsylvania, schools, libraries and recreation centers.
Each child that contributes to the capsule will receive a certificate marking their participation. But Hoover also hopes to provide a "more substantial keepsake." She's fundraising to cover the costs of these mementos, as well as the capsule and the infrastructure and work required to execute the project. Smith Memorial Playground has secured a $125,000 matching grant from the Pincus Family Foundation, and needs to raise $125,000 of its own to secure that donation.
The playground, established in memory of the wealthy Smith family's son Stanfield, has been around for more than a century. Hoover sees the time capsule project as merely another link in its long history of entertaining Philly children.
"I spend a fair amount of time looking at our archives, which are really filled with all kinds of interesting information," she said. "I know how it felt to be able to connect with original information about what kids were doing and what was happening, say, when we opened in 1899 and what they were doing during the Depression in the 1930s and how Smith was handling issues of access (integration) during the '60s. It was all such important and rich information. And I feel like this is our contribution to that lineage, so that people can look back 50 years from now and really understand what was on the minds of kids back in 2026."
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