In the same vein, I grew up in the town of Amherst, MA. Amherst college there happens to have God’s Own Sledding Hill, officially known as “Memorial Hill”. It’s sloped at about 30 degrees, starts at about 25 yards wide and ends at about 100 yards wide, is perfectly flat, and is about 100 yards long. The sole obstacle is a 24” drainage ditch at the bottom where the hill opens out onto the college playing fields. When I was a kid, the hill was open to all, and during the winter was the main destination for kids to sled. There were usually two well-packed tracks going down the center of the hill, and often some college kid would build a ramp off to one side (or even sometimes a small one on one of the tracks). The slog to get back up the hill was exhausting, but it was worth it for the ride down.
Shortly after I graduated high school, the college declared the hill to be closed, and would stop the usual weekend-day sledding festival, though people could still sled it on their own unofficially later in the day or evenings. A few years after that, I found that they had closed it completely, and the campus cops would patrol the area when there was snow, to prevent anyone from using it at all.
When I was a kid we live on a street that had a really serious hill. The town would actually close the street to traffic (except residents, of course) so kids could use the street for sledding. It was NEVER plowed. Whenever a car showed up, the kids would move aside and then went right back to the business at hand.
On a snowy Saturday, there would easily be 100 kids or more out there from sunup to sundown. After dinner, we would go back out and sled by the streetlamps. That was better as it wasn’t as crowded.
We used to scrounge big cardboard cartons and fill them with kids to groom the slope for better speed.
The more adventurous kids would go back in the woods behind the houses and use a trail there, the only problem was the creek at the bottom. You made sure you made a quick turn at the bottom, or you got wet.
The people who lived on that street never complained, even the ones without kids.
It’s all different now, of course, with all the lawyers and people who bitch if their street isn’t plowed before the last flakes stop falling.