The Pushcart Journal

In the early mornings, the neighborhood’s Chinese residents practice tai chi on the western edge of park by the once grand but now silent and sadly deteriorated Jacob Schiff Memorial Fountain. Lunchtime sees postal workers gathering at picnic tables for a midday break, businessmen in suits enjoying sandwiches in the sun and young women gossiping about coworkers on a bench. Young children not yet in school have the run of the play structures while anxious mothers watch from nearby, calling out occasionally in Spanish, Chinese, Hebrew or English—“feet first down the slide please,” “give Ben a turn,” or “don’t you put that in your mouth!” Once the schools let out, the bigger kids take over–lanky teenagers dominate the basketball courts, precocious elementary school kids dictate rules to games of tag and the quieter ones gather in the shade of a tree to invent a world.

This scene, now common to city parks, was not always so. In fact, the 1903 opening of Seward Park, the first permanent municipal playground in the nation, marked an important shift in the social and political discourse of the time. With the push for child labor laws at the turn of the century, children released from the factory were turned loose to play in the dirty, dangerous, and overcrowded streets. The first play areas were established by private reform groups such as the Outdoor Recreation League, founded by settlement house leaders Charles Stover and Lillian Wald in 1898. After the city cleared rows of decaying tenement buildings between Essex and Clinton, leaving a dusty and vacant rubble heap, the ORL stepped in to clean it up, planting trees and grass, and building play equipment. Journalist and reformer Jacob A. Riis recounts this touching scene of the sight that would become Seward Park:

“The dusty square was jammed with a mighty multitude. It was not an ideal spot, for it had not rained in weeks, and powdered sand and cinders had taken wing and floated like a pall over the perspiring crowd. But it was heaven to them. A hundred men and boys stood in line, waiting their turn upon the bridge ladder and the travelling rings, that hung full of struggling and squirming humanity, groping madly for the next grip. No failure, no rebuff, discouraged them. Seven boys and girls rode with looks of deep concern—it is their way—upon each end of the seesaw, and two squeezed into each of the forty swings that had room for one, while a hundred counted time and saw that none had too much.”

(The Battle with the Slum; “Letting in the Light”)

I love his description of “the mighty multitude” and “squirming humanity.” Also, the kids playing on the seesaw “with looks of deep concern.” You can really feel how crowded and desperate the neighborhood was–even play required strict rationing and serious concentration.

In 1897, the Small Parks Advisory Committee was established by the city, with the goal of providing safe, structured play areas for children that would be a “healthful influence upon morals and conduct . . . for the physical energies of youth, which, if not directed to good ends, will surely manifest themselves in evil tendencies.” Playgrounds were envisioned by reformers to provide edifying spaces for training moral and upstanding citizens. In 1902, the City Parks Department began taking over the operation and improvement of the parks opened by the ORL. The following year, Seward Park was opened featuring a running track, an open play area, a children’s garden, marble bathes and a limestone and terra cotta terrace equipped with rocking chairs for mothers.

Seward Park, Opening Day

Structure and grand intentions aside, kids will be kids, and on October 17, 1903, 20,000 children, despite pouring rain, swarmed the gates of the Seward Park, climbed fences, and perched on rooftops and fire escapes to glimpse the excitement. Policemen were overwhelmed and speeches planned for the afternoon had to be canceled, reported The New York Times.

A lot has changed since that rainy October day more than a century ago. No more marble baths and rocking chairs, for one, and perhaps a little more space to breath. But the rainbow painted jungle gyms, the red and yellow tulips, the flourishing garden, still offer a welcome relief from the press of city life and a place where kids can make up the rules.

Sources:

• “Playgrounds in Parks,” City of New York Parks and Recreation
• “State of Play: How tot lots became places to build children’s brains,” Rebecca Meade, The New Yorker
• “Letting in the Light,” The Battle with the Slum, Jacob A. Riis (1902)
• Seward Park, City of New York Parks and Recreation
• Friends of Seward Park