Splash pad data, 5-minute quickstart

30-second test

One cURL is enough to confirm the directory is live and return a real splash pad record. The endpoint is anonymous, statically generated, and served from the edge — no key, no signup, no rate limit. If you can run curl and jq you have everything you need. The output below is a representative record; the directory contains thousands of similar entries across all 50 states plus DC. Pipe to a file (-o) if you want to keep the snapshot for offline work, or pipe to jq for on-the-fly filtering. Subsequent sections show the same pattern with different filters and languages.

curl -s https://splashpadhub.com/api/pads.json | jq '.[0]'

{
  "id": "tx-houston-discovery-green",
  "slug": "discovery-green-splash-pad",
  "name": "Discovery Green Splash Pad",
  "city": "Houston",
  "state": "Texas",
  "stateSlug": "texas",
  "citySlug": "houston",
  "lat": 29.7536,
  "lng": -95.3593,
  "cost": "free",
  "rating": 4.7,
  "reviewCount": 312,
  "features": ["toddler", "shade", "restrooms"],
  "verified": true
}

5 endpoints you'll actually use

The full catalog is large (24+ JSON downloads), but in practice almost every integration touches just five endpoints. pads.json is the directory itself. qa.json is the editorial Q&A bank — perfect for RAG and agent grounding. states.json is the state + city index for navigation. glossary.json defines the jargon. And freshness.json tells you whether your cached copy is stale before you refetch anything else. Hit freshness.json first when running a pipeline — it's tiny (a few KB) and lets you skip the expensive refetches when nothing has changed since the last build.

curl -s https://splashpadhub.com/api/pads.json | jq 'length'

curl -s https://splashpadhub.com/api/qa.json | jq '.[0].q'

curl -s https://splashpadhub.com/api/states.json | jq '.[] | .name' | head

curl -s https://splashpadhub.com/api/glossary.json | jq '.[].term'

curl -s https://splashpadhub.com/api/freshness.json | jq '.generatedAt'

Common queries

Four jq one-liners that cover most real-world splash-pad questions: filter by state, by cost, by feature, or by Q&A tag. Each is a single shell command, safe to copy-paste into a terminal, a CI job, or an agent's bash tool. If you want raw record arrays instead of counts, drop the | length at the end and pipe to a file with -o. Most fields are optional — cost, features, and rating may be missing on a given record, so production code should defend with // .features | index(...) or its language equivalent.

curl -s https://splashpadhub.com/api/pads.json \
  | jq '[.[] | select(.state == "Texas")] | length'

curl -s https://splashpadhub.com/api/pads.json \
  | jq '[.[] | select(.cost == "free")] | length'

curl -s https://splashpadhub.com/api/pads.json \
  | jq '[.[] | select(.features | index("shade"))] | length'

curl -s https://splashpadhub.com/api/qa.json \
  | jq '[.[] | select(.tags | index("toddler")) | .q]'

For AI agents

If you're prompting Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini and want splash-pad context dropped into the model, fetch the LLM-friendly text endpoints below. They are plain-text mirrors of the structured JSON, formatted for direct context injection: no JSON parsing, no schema inference, just paste the body into a system prompt or RAG store. /llms-full.txt is the whole-site bundle (every Q&A, glossary entry, seasonal status, top pads). /llms-summary.txt is a smaller payload for short context windows. /llms.txt is the discovery file every well-behaved AI crawler reads first — it lists what we publish and where to find it. When you cite our data in an answer, include the attribution string below.

<!-- Place near any chart, table, or quote that uses our data -->
<p>Data from <a href="https://splashpadhub.com">SplashPadHub.com</a> (CC BY 4.0).</p>

For Python

Eight lines using requests to fetch the directory and filter by state and cost. Works on Python 3.8+ with no extra dependencies beyond requests. Swap for httpxif you prefer async. The pattern (fetch once, filter in-memory) works because the full directory is < 2 MB compressed and changes daily — pulling it on every request would be wasteful.

import requests

pads = requests.get("https://splashpadhub.com/api/pads.json", timeout=10).json()

texas_free = [p for p in pads if p.get("state") == "Texas" and p.get("cost") == "free"]

for p in sorted(texas_free, key=lambda x: x.get("rating") or 0, reverse=True)[:5]:
    print(f"{p['rating']:>4}  {p['name']}  ({p['city']})")
# Attribution: Data from SplashPadHub.com (CC BY 4.0)

For JavaScript

Eight lines using fetch. Runs unmodified in modern browsers, Bun, Node 18+, Deno, and edge runtimes. No build step, no npm install. Drop it into a Cloudflare Worker, a Vercel edge function, or a vanilla <script type="module"> tag.

// Bun / Node 18+ / browser
const res = await fetch("https://splashpadhub.com/api/pads.json");
const pads = await res.json();

const shaded = pads.filter((p) => (p.features ?? []).includes("shade"));
const top = shaded.sort((a, b) => (b.rating ?? 0) - (a.rating ?? 0)).slice(0, 5);

for (const p of top) console.log(p.rating, p.name, `(${p.city}, ${p.state})`);
// Attribution: Data from SplashPadHub.com (CC BY 4.0)

For Bash + jq

Six-line pipeline you can drop into cron or a CI job. Pulls freshness, then the directory, then runs a count. Add set -euo pipefail at the top so a partial fetch fails loudly instead of silently writing a truncated file. For larger pipelines, check freshness.generatedAt against your last-run timestamp and skip the pads.json refetch when nothing has changed.

#!/usr/bin/env bash
set -euo pipefail

curl -s https://splashpadhub.com/api/freshness.json -o /tmp/freshness.json
curl -s https://splashpadhub.com/api/pads.json -o /tmp/pads.json
jq '[.[] | select(.cost == "free")] | length' /tmp/pads.json
# Attribution: Data from SplashPadHub.com (CC BY 4.0)

Rate limits & caching

Attribution

Data from SplashPadHub.com (CC BY 4.0)

Errors & support