These Progressives wanted kids off the street. They proposed playgrounds as the solution. Playgrounds were supposed to be fenced and full of play matrons, soft grass, swings, slides, merry-go-rounds, and other play equipment. The goal was to create spaces where children could be safe and grow into healthy and moral adults, sheltered from what the reformers considered the moral quagmire of the modern city. At the Second Annual Playground Congress in 1908, George Johnson made these intentions clear. In his introductory remarks, he stated: “In our nation of diverse peoples there is special need of games which develop those qualities in the individual that are essential to social control.”
For the first decades of the twentieth century, playground advocates worked intensively. But until the 1930s, when planner Robert Moses began building his vision on the federal dime, playground construction could take years. In 1907, twenty years after the first playground was built in Boston, Jacob Riis lamented that many playgrounds “exist yet only on paper.”
By the late 1920s, even some of the strongest advocates for playgrounds, like Joseph Lee, president of the Playground and Recreation Association of America, had resigned themselves to the realities of street play. Lee conceded that “the street has the great advantage of being near the home. The mother can see from her window what goes on and when necessary have a voice or take a hand in it with salutary effect.”
Children agreed. The open space of the street, where kids could make their own rules, was an attractive haven for those living in cramped and crowded tenements. In his memoir A Lost Paradise, another Lower East Sider, Samuel Chotzinoff, fondly remembered the early years of the twentieth century, when he and his childhood companions “play[ed] on the sidewalks and in the gutter until the air grew dark and we could barely tell who was who.” After sunset, “in the light of the gas lamps,” he and his friends “played leapfrog over the empty milk cans in front of the grocery store. Each of us would vault over as many as seven cans!”
Many parents also preferred that their kids play in the street. When one neighborhood police officer asked in 1924 why so few children went to a nearby playground, a mother answered that women “want the children to play where we can see them and where they can hear us when we call them.” New York social workers routinely noted that most children played in the street.