The indoor plastic playground known as the Discovery Zone looks as if it were designed by candy kingpin Willy Wonka. Like so many Oompa Loompas, young boys and girls frolic in pools of Jujube-colored balls, or clamber over Slurpee-blue foam mountains.
But unlike Wonka's fictional chocolate factory, this futuristic FunCenter manufactures a product appealing to those stress-coated confections with soft centers of guilt: modern parents. For a two-hour admission price of $5.99, parents can supervise their children from inside the "Quiet Zone," a sound-quilted fortress with such grown-up toys as a pay phone. If they wish, they can pay extra and leave their kids feasting on amusement while they shop or run errands.
"It's durable. It's safe. I think it's wonderful," says Ramona Boxwell, 42, who, along with her 7-year-old son, David, is a biweekly regular at what the culturally clued-in simply call "the Zone." "I like this. It's enclosed. There is no way someone could run off with your child."
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Asked how her childhood in balmy Southern California would have been different if there were Discovery Zones back then, Boxwell hesitates not a moment before saying she wishes there had been.
She pauses, thinking of those Ozzie and Harriet days of her youth -- coming home from a bike ride at dusk, from the beach with shorts full of sand or from the playground with palms rubbed raw by the jungle gym. As she looks through the glass for the face of her son, sweetly flushed with excitement, a small frown tugs at the corners of her mouth.
"When I was a child, you only played outside or at a friend's house," she says.
Welcome to the bold new world of "pay for play," coming soon to a shopping center near you.
The Discovery Zone vision of childhood made cleaner than mud pies, safer than tree swings and less competitive than hopscotch sprang to life in 1989, when the first FunCenter opened in Kansas City. By the end of last year there were more than 165 nationwide. Now, after years of blissful innocence, the Washington area is getting Zoned-out.
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Smaller Discovery Zones had opened in the past two years in Germantown, Falls Church and Annapolis. But this spring, a new FunCenter opened in Rockville's White Flint Mall, occupying 13,500 square feet of the closed I. Magnin department store that had been designed by I.M. Pei, the architect who created the new wing of the Louvre.
White Flint is no longer positioned as an elite fashion center. It has been ailing since the real estate boom glutted Washington area shopping. So, to discover new uses for a hurting mall, White Flint is being marketed as a place for regular folks to mix a little entertainment with their consumption.
Befitting its unusual status, the new Discovery Zone was planned as something of a Taj Mahal. It has a "Micro-Zone" for babies as young as 6 months, a huge eating area where children can munch on dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets, four rooms where birthday parties are held every 45 minutes, and the latest play stations, such as a jungle gym made out of bungee cords.
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Historically, adults have been admonished not to use the Zone and its high-school-age "Kidz Coaches" as babysitters, although some still did. But demand for the "KidzWatch" program was strong, and so parents who are willing to pay are outfitted with beepers that let them leave for a few hours, perhaps to catch a movie across the hall or to be pampered at a "day spa" set to open next door. In their absence, their children wear wrist-band sensors just like the kind used in maternity wards to prevent kidnappings.
Shannon Dorman, a Chevy Chase resident who took her two daughters to the Germantown Discovery Zone before the White Flint site opened, says the franchise holders were right to give in to parental pressure.
"Why encourage them to violate the policy when your policy is not the '90s anymore. You have to keep up with what the trend is, and the trend is people need a place to keep the kids," says Dorman, who retreated to the Quiet Zone with a stack of New Yorker magazines one recent Saturday.
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According to the Discovery Zone philosophy, FunCenters should be a family experience; that is why parents are admitted free and the Zone rents adult-size knee pads for 99 cents. Some adults do in fact follow their children down the rabbit hole. But Dorman, who volunteers part time at her daughters' school, is not one of them.
"If they have been in school all week and you have been at work, it can be a stress releaser," she says. "If you have a letter to write or some reading to catch up on, you sit in here and they go out and play and everyone is happy."
Safety Pays
The pair behind the Zoning of Washington is the husband and wife team of Don and Teresa Hinton, both 33, who have three young children and live in Potomac. Veteran entrepreneurs, the couple own a string of carwashes and the Germantown shopping center where they opened the area's first Zone.
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They acknowledge that in a perfect world a business like theirs would not exist, or at least not be quite so successful. Don, who grew up in Cabin John and was a national gymnastics champion in college, remembers when Montgomery County maintained a petting zoo at his neighborhood playground and subjected public school pupils to PE class every day. No more.
The Discovery Zone is "filling a void that is unfortunately necessary because of the times," Don Hinton says. "With the video age and both parents working, kids hide in their bedrooms all day playing games."
"We don't let our kids play in the front yard. They can't ride their bikes around the neighborhood, play kick the can," Teresa Hinton says.
"The kids are looking for a bright, safe place to play," says Don.
The Hintons, perhaps more than most entrepreneurs, clearly understand what a powerful commodity safety has become. In an era when 12-year-old girls are murdered after being snatched from their slumber parties, pop music superstars are accused of abusing their popularity and adolescent boys, and kids are taught that a classmate's bloody nose could kill them if it contains the AIDS virus, it is no wonder the Discovery Zone appeals to anxiety-ridden parents.
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"There is something reassuring about knowing your kids are protected, knowing where your kids are. You can sit down and have a cup of coffee, read the paper and know your kid is safe," Teresa says.
Share this articleShareThat's the opportunity Teresa saw during a visit to her parents in Phoenix. She took her two boys to a Discovery Zone and was impressed by the long lines. A sign advised her that the company was looking for franchisees. She immediately called Don.
After the couple underwent two weeks of training on topics ranging from hygiene to financial planning and invested in what they say is $1 million in equipment -- including a moon bounce and a trapeze -- a suburban star was born. More than 33,000 families, some of them from as far as West Virginia and Delaware, have come to Germantown in search of the latest in clean fun. The Hintons like to boast that their computer contains one of the largest lists of families with children in the country.
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But while their Zone remains one marketed as a place for kids to wiggle their waggles away, it is still absent any discoveries of thorns, snails or fresh air.
"We have had absolutely beautiful days in May when it amazes me people are willing to come inside," says Tony Scivolette, a former toy store executive who manages the Hintons' two original Zones. "People like the atmosphere, that it's safe. When you slide, you land on a smooth tube. There are no splinters, no wooden parts you get from an outdoor playground."
Ramona Boxwell, a part-time bank teller and a self-described veteran of "the mother's circuit" that includes such kids' activities as Gymboree and MarvaTots & Teens, likes the Zone better than Chuck E. Cheese, the pizzeria-cum-parental purgatory that was the rage among the 12-and-under set a few years back. David always seemed to catch a cold there after playing in the plastic ball bins, she says.
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Boxwell's friend Julie Einhorn is not quite as big on the concept of McFun. She thinks the Zone costs too much, so she takes her 7-year-old son, Seth, an average of once or twice a month as a special treat, as opposed to every week.
"We live in a small town house and he can't really run around and he gets all this excess energy," she says. "My husband likes the quiet room. He works in a jail."
Germantown is one of those communities that have been developed on farmland far from downtown Washington for commuters who can not afford closer-in suburbs. It is a logical site for a Discovery Zone. Busy fathers who may not see their kids until close to bedtime have someplace to take their children on Saturday without yet another long haul.
Roger Borg, 35, a computer programmer who lives in Rockville, sometimes takes his daughter Erin, 4, the oldest of his three children, to the Zone so she gets his full attention.
"It's a time for she and I to be together, to have fun," he said.
Like Boxwell, Borg grew up in a sunny climate and spent most of his childhood outdoors. But he says he doesn't mind having to shell out a few bucks for the pleasure of his daughter's company. "There isn't anything anymore you don't have to pay for," Borg says.
Inside the Zone
Adults who enter the Discovery Zone are transported back to a familiar, fast-moving world of low drama and high voices where everything matters with unvarying intensity. While the precepts of modern parenthood have changed, as has the playground, the laws of childhood remain.
Josh Lorenzo, 16, is one of the high school students who work as "Kidz Coaches" in Germantown, helping half-pints use the play equipment without getting injured or into a fight.
"It's a lot more upbeat than my other job," said Lorenzo, a junior at Germantown's Seneca Valley High School who used to work at Sears. But the Zone has its liabilities. After four hours of work on the weekend, Lorenzo says, he is useless until he gets a nap. And then there was the time a little boy peed on him as the teenager pushed the tot up a slide.
"He was so excited, I don't think he even realized what happened," Lorenzo says.
To get the true Zone experience, let's go to the Ball Bath Wade, where Brittany Gomes and Julie Griffin, both 5, are whooping it up at a preschool classmate's birthday party. Like nearly every other little girl in the Zone on this Saturday morning, both are wearing hot pink, the color of Julie's dress and Brittany's hair bow.
Brittany: "I've got a hiding place! Here, let's play ball!"
Julie: "La-la-la-la-la-la."
Brittany: "Let's hold hands together and slide down. Okay, Julie, it's almost our turn! Do you know I lost a tooth?"
Both: "Weeeeeeeeeeee!!!"
Suddenly, at the bottom of the moon bounce, a crisis develops as the 5-year-old birthday girl, Katie Ware, grabs the docile Julie by the shoulder, squeezes her into a hot pink hug and whisks her off to the next attraction. Left standing alone, Brittany feels the sting right away.
"Katie didn't talk to me. It hurt my feelings," she sniffles, her bottom lip protruding at a 90-degree angle. She runs after Katie and Julie.
Allyson Lieberman, 5, starts to follow them, but then stops in her tracks, face red, and shouts, "I'm going to tell!" with the sight of Brittany's tongue, unmistakably pointed in her direction, burning in her memory.
Small Bodies, Big Business
The Hintons will not say exactly how much money they have made since opening their original store. The average Discovery Zone brings in about $1 million a year, and their site in Germantown has done better than average, they say. They pay $20,000 for liability insurance that costs about 2 percent of their gross income. Do the math.
For in the end, for all the talk of fun and safety, profit is what the Discovery Zone is all about. When children poop-out on the playground, they move on to the "Skill Zone," a series of arcade games touted for their ability to improve hand-eye coordination. In reality, the games and the 25-cent tokens they require look as though they came straight from a carnival. There are old-fashioned favorites like skeeball, the basketball shoot, and an air gun that shoots balls into a clown's mouth. The machines spit out tickets that the kids trade for plastic trinkets like yo-yos, bracelets and rulers.
The connection to a carnival does not end there. At the entrance, displays with movie-theater-size boxes of candy, pizza, soda and popcorn are kept at kid's-eye level. In the "Take Me Home Zone," cups, stickers and sweat shirts with the "DZ" logo offer parents still more ways to part with their money.
And part with it they ultimately do, although not without some griping, according to the Hintons. Some parents, it seems, have not gotten used to the idea of paying for something as ephemeral as fun.
"One thing that cracks me up is some people think we have a million-dollar playground as a public service and not as a business," Don Hinton says. "They will say, 'Oh, my kid is only 18 months old.
" 'Why should he have to pay?' "
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