Children: Safety in the Trees

When he was a boy in Trenton, N.J., Edward Munson fell out of his tree house one day and cut his arm. Apparently the scar was lasting. Now, as building inspector for the rural Long Island town of Riverhead, N.Y., Munson, 53, has started a controversial campaign to make tree houses safer. Recently, after a Riverhead resident complained about an unsightly tree house, Munson began to require parents to obtain tree-house building permits, and issued a detailed set of specifications governing their construction: the houses must be no more than 12 ft. off the ground; walls must be at least 42 in. high and floor boards at least 1 in. thick; the houses must be framed by two-by-fours and attached, with 16-penny nails, to branches no less than 5 in. in diameter for hardwood trees or 7 in. for softwood. So far, the inspector has served violation notices on eight families.

Munson is in dead earnest—and so are Riverhead parents who have swamped him with calls accusing him of being an ogre who is blocking the natural development of children. "Everywhere I go, people come up and call me the Big Bad Wolf or worse," says Munson. "They say I'm taking the fun out of childhood, when all I'm trying to do is remove some of the danger."

"It's a boy's right to build a tree house and do what he wants with it," retorts a Riverhead housewife, Mrs. Robert Hulse. The Hulses have been threatened with a summons after ignoring two official complaints that their son Gregory's tree house is too close to the street. When another parent, William Sypher, received a notice for building without a permit, his two sons tacked a sign "Bird Feeding Station" on the house and nailed on feed pans—but the ruse failed and the notices kept coming.

"Our children spend hours playing in it," says Sypher's wife Doris, who is prepared to fight the code in court, if necessary. "They build new things into the tree house to make it over into what ever their imaginations believe it is. How can it meet building specifications when the boys continually change it?"