Reimagining Recreation by James Trainor

Reimagining Recreation By James Trainor SPRING 2012 There was a child went forth every day, / And the first object he looked upon and received with wonder, pity, love, or dread, that object he became, / And that object became part of him for the day, or a certain part of day, or for many years, or stretching cycles of years. —Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 1856 MID-1970S I’ll pin the blame on Robert Moses for this one. After all, it was one of his playgrounds, one of the safe, drab, battleship-gray ones whose WPA- era design had changed little since Moses assumed power as New York City’s parks commissioner in 1934 (during his twenty-six-year reign, 650 playgrounds were built). The banal swing-set. The bone-jarring seesaw. The galvanized slide. The joyless sprinkler. Each static feature was set far apart from the others, as if to avoid cross-contamination of respective functions, all of it embedded in a vast expanse of summer-blistered asphalt and concrete. I was five years old and with a sizable gash in my forehead, blood streaming down my face (eight stitches, lots of iodine, Roosevelt Hospital emergency room); it was my first and last major mishap in a New York playground, one that instantly implanted a lifelong phobia of pebble- dashed concrete. Along with asphalt (a “resilient” surface, Moses once proudly explained, that prevents children from “digging and eliminates dust”), it was the most unlikely play surface ever concocted by bureaucratic city planners charged with the safety of Gotham’s young. (Artificial agglomerate, it was thought to give traction to little feet running through sprinkler basins, but had the added benefit of acting like a human cheese-grater for unexpectedly airborne kids.)1 The obvious irony in all this was that this standard-issue trauma did not occur in what the kids in my Upper West Side neighborhood fondly nicknamed “the dangerous playground” just up the hill—the one that called out with its siren song of massive timbered ziggurats and stepped pyramids with wide undulating slides, the vertiginous fire-pole plunging though tiered tree houses, the Indiana Jones-style rope bridge, the zip line, the Brutalist-Aztec watercourses, and tunnel networks. There, I received not so much as a scratch. And there wasn’t just one dangerous playground; these so-called adventure playgrounds were sprouting up everywhere, siphoning off, Pied-Piper-like, any kid with a scrap of derring-do suddenly bored to death with the old playgrounds, places that now had all the grim appeal of a municipal parking lot. Satisfied customers at Richard Dattner’s West 67th Street adventure playground, 1966. Photo Richard Dattner. Throughout my childhood, as I recall it, my parents would take my sister and me on periodic expeditions—every few months, it seemed—to check out the newest adventure playground to open. Large and small, they sprung up in public parks, but also in the ill-used plazas of public housing complexes, school yards, derelict vest-pocket lots between old tenements cleared by fires or demolitions, and reclaimed backyards. There was what people would later call buzz: in February 1972, New York magazine’s plaintively celebratory “101 Signs that the City Isn’t Dying” cited the continuing construction of adventure playgrounds as reason number four to resist the inexorable flight to the suburbs. And in their way, grownups who had come of age under the beneficent, autocratic rule of Moses were as dazzled and beguiled as their kids, slightly wary and unsure, but visibly switched-on in their body language. And the kids could barely contain their manic, unnameable joy, bursting onto the latest labyrinthine landscapes of play like animals reintroduced into the wild. APRIL 1956 For this, we can thank, in part, Jane Jacobs and the mothers of Manhattan’s West Side. It was just inside Central Park at West 67th Street that Moses found that his unchallenged authority had limits after all. Here, a young mother taking her son to a small locally popular playground came across blueprints, idly left behind by a parks department engineer, detailing the imminent destruction of the playground and surrounding glen to make way for an expanded parking lot for the ritzy Tavern on the Green restaurant nearby.2 News spread fast, and within a day neighborhood mothers had mobilized to petition Moses. Moses responded two days later with hurricane fences and construction equipment. The “Battle of Central Park” was thus engaged, as newspapers chronicled a community rallying to defend its children’s rights (and a playground that Moses himself had installed in the 1930s), and ran stark photographs of activists like Jacobs joining mothers and children facing off against bulldozers. For a week, the so-called “baby-carriage brigade” successfully outflanked attempts at demolition. Then in the wee hours of Tuesday, 25 April 1956, Moses sent in a work crew that began bulldozing trees before sunrise. The popular outrage was universal, and Moses found himself at the center of a perfect PR disaster, truculently defending the rights of parked cars against the toddlers of a sophisticated, educated, and newly civic-minded voting block. A still- baffled Moses backed down in the face of a court injunction, but not in time to salvage his reputation as the man who “got things done” for the greater public good. The shady knoll proved to be his Waterloo. 1966 As if commemorating this small civic victory in the early history of grassroots urban activism (seven years before the destruction of Pennsylvania Station and the defeat of the proposed Lower Manhattan Expressway, usually credited as watershed events marking the birth of the modern urban preservation movement), the knoll became in late 1966 the site of New York’s first stand-alone adventure playground. (Earlier that year, Jacob Riis Plaza, located in a public housing complex in the Lower East Side, had undergone a radical transformation at the hands of landscape architect M. Paul Friedberg; his design included a playground that presaged these later innovations, but it was part of a larger, mixed-use space.) The playground on the knoll at West 67th Street, designed by the young architect Richard Dattner with the support of the new iconoclastic parks commissioner Thomas P. Hoving, was an instant success . Page from The Instant Playground, a 1969 brochure advertising Richard Dattner’s PlayCubes. The brochure, for a New York-based company named Playstreet, Inc., described the cubes as “a clustered grouping of fiberglass units, interlocked and tunneled for safe, creative play. Each unit is light, easy to assemble, and when connected into a crystalline structure, forms a practically indestructible play unit of irresistible appeal to children.” Almost overnight, Dattner and Friedberg became the Young Turks of radical urban playground design, a professional discipline that hadn’t even existed until their respective projects somewhat inadvertently invented it. The act of designing for children suddenly gained an urbane, avant-garde hipness. The two men preferred the term playscape, an important distinction auguring the end of play as a series of dull interactions with one isolated object after another and offering a new conception of creative play as a fluid, freeform, open-ended map of imaginative experiences and sets of decisions, outcomes, and strategies—a differentiation that reflected a revolutionized understanding of the vital importance of play in mental and physical development. Inspired by the work of pioneering child psychologists Jean Piaget and Erik Erikson, among others, and their theories regarding the connection between cognitive development, adaptive intelligence, and play, Dattner and Friedberg both designed environments to unleash children’s natural instincts to choreograph their own experiences through a non-prescribed network of features enabling individual exploration, social interaction, and a dynamic sense of growing mastery over a variety of challenges. Play, as Friedberg noted in his 1970 book Play and Interplay, was not merely an “expenditure of excess energy,” as previous generations had been accustomed to treating it. (He was thinking of Moses’s pronouncement that the primary purpose of a playground was to “intercept children … and provide a place in which excess energy can be worked off without damage to the park surroundings.”3) In contrast, play was “essential to a culture”4 and designers had a civic duty to facilitate opportunities for both children and adults for creative interactions with the urban environment. Bold, geometric, and unapologetically monumental, the new playscapes were everything the dull and instantly outmoded playgrounds were not. They were the rebellious New Left’s answer to the authoritarian WPA steamroller approach to public recreation. Like the civic awakening that took place a decade before, the new landscapes were about self-empowerment rather than over-determining, one-size-fits-all behaviors. While each of the new play environments was unique, they were constructed using a budget-conscious inventory of inexpensive and durable materials: cobblestones, bricks, telephone pole timbers, nautical rope, wooden planking, galvanized metal pipes, beach sand, formed concrete. They were the elemental materials of old working-class New York—the building blocks favored also by downtown minimalist sculptors with a romantic regard for the perceived authenticity associated with labor and production— repurposed into futuristic designs that seduced both children and adults. Aerial view of Friedberg’s Jacob Riis Plaza. Courtesy M. Paul Friedberg & Partners. In rapid-fire succession, Dattner received commissions to completely re-imagine five of the twenty “necklace” playgrounds dotting the periphery of Central Park. In contrast, Friedberg took aim at the blighted corners of the inner city: the grim, utilitarian spaces of New York’s public housing blocks; rubble-strewn lots on the West Side awaiting “urban renewal” mega-projects; disused public school yards; and the liminal spaces of the city that progressive urbanists like William H.

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