If you’ve ever been a caregiver to someone under the age of 10, you know Soft Play; you just might not know the name. For more than four decades, the company has been designing and crafting play equipment for malls (a two-story replica of the Paw Patrol Lookout Tower in Minnesota’s Mall of America), museums (an 18-foot-diameter model of the sun in the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Florida), and private clients (a giant, climbable hot dog at Coors Field). And no matter where you encounter Soft Play’s brightly painted, slightly squishy-to-the-touch sculptures, they likely hail from the same place: an industrial facility in southeast Englewood.
Pieces start as 16-by-four-by-three-foot blocks of Styrofoam, which are roughly shaped by computer-controlled cutting machines. From there, Soft Play’s seven sculptors use a hodgepodge of tools—fillet knives, jigsaws, horse brushes, sandpaper—to chisel in everything from log bark and tire tread to eyeballs and dragon wings.
Following the sculpting and chiseling, the works are covered with fiberglass, molded with Soft Play’s signature soft foam, coated with rubber for durability, and hand-painted by a team of six artists…