How Children’s Play Has Shaped New York City, Part 3: Segregated Playgrounds
The New York Public Library’s Center for Educators and Schools provides curricular materials you can easily integrate into your teaching in addition to other tools and programs. On our For Teachers blog channel, the Curriculum Development team spotlights primary sources from the Library’s collections and draws connections to the classroom.
This three-part series highlights photographs and newspaper articles on early playgrounds from collections at the Library. Part 1 considers how playground organizers sought to regulate children’s behavior by moving play from the street to playgrounds. Part 2 explores how children helped to found the first municipal playground in New York City and how playground supervisors and children clashed over these early spaces. Finally, this post analyzes segregation and racial inequities in spaces of recreation. We hope this series provides an opportunity to reflect on how young people have changed the urban fabric of New York City and encourages students to see their rights to the city and its public spaces.
This post is the final installment of a three-part series about the history of playgrounds.
"San Juan Hill Backyard Playground," n.d., in Lillian Wald, The House on Henry Street (New York: H. Holt and Company, 1915).
Racism’s Legacy and Ongoing Impact
Though the 20th century was dubbed “the century of the child,” Black children were often left out of reform measures intended to improve the lives of young Americans. Historian Robin Bernstein analyzed pervasive racist stereotypes to show how Black youths were frequently perceived by white Americans as not child-like and not in need of protection. These racially prejudiced beliefs had enduring consequences on urban policy and reform. The scholar Marcy Sacks has observed that, in the early years of the 20th century in New York, “Black neighborhoods in general boasted no parks or playground space, even as other areas in the city began enjoying publicly funded park development.” White playground organizers in the early decades of the 20th century tended to focus their attention on white immigrant areas, and photographs in the Library’s Digital Collections largely document those efforts.
"Harlem Children’s Aid Society Playground," 1932, in Owen Lovejoy, The Negro Children of New York (New York: Children’s Aid Society, 1932).
African American reformers responded to the dearth of public recreation space in Black neighborhoods by setting up their own backyard playgrounds. In San Juan Hill (where Lincoln Center is located in the Upper West Side today), Black women persuaded the white-led Henry Street Settlement to establish an outpost and converted the backyard of their settlement house into a playground equipped with a swing and seesaw for local children, as shown in the image that opens this post. Further uptown, the New York Urban League opened an experimental playground in Harlem in 1911 to try to convince the Parks Department to build recreational spaces in the area. The prominent Black weekly newspaper, New York Amsterdam News—accessible via the Library’s databases—reported that the New York Urban League used the rear of their Central Harlem building in the 1920s to build a playground, which expanded in 1926 to take up neighboring backyards at the agreement of their owners. Swings, slides, and a sand pile greeted children visiting the space—as did a supervisor. Though small, these facilities were vital, because Black children often faced harassment and discrimination when traveling to public playgrounds in white neighborhoods. A few years later, the African American women’s group, Utopia Neighborhood Club, convinced the white-run charitable organization, the Children’s Aid Society (CAS), to join these efforts, and CAS opened two large playgrounds in Harlem for young Black New Yorkers in 1930 (seen in the image on the left). Eventually, the municipality also expanded public spaces for play during the New Deal, adding pools to existing small parks and play areas to new public housing projects.
Despite these measures, Black youths still had fewer recreational spaces at their disposal than their white peers. Racist policing also meant that NYPD officers more intensely surveilled young Black New Yorkers and charged them with juvenile delinquency at higher rates than white youths. Owen R. Lovejoy’s 1932 report The Negro Children of New York—housed in the collection at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture—showed that young Black people made up 11.7% of those accused of delinquency though African Americans were only 5% of the city’s population.
Racial inequities in access to recreation have disquieting legacies in the present day. The 2021 Trust for Public Land’s Park Equity Plan for New York City revealed that “communities of color have 33.5 percent less park space per person within a 10-minute walk compared to white communities.” Furthermore, the working-class majority Black and Latino children living in public housing in New York City face challenges in finding spaces to play near their homes. More than one-in-ten New York City Housing Authority playgrounds were closed in 2021 due to safety concerns following decades of poor maintenance of the equipment and persistent lack of funding, and the number of closures only increased in 2022. Despite recent measures to rehabilitate community parks in low-income areas, spaces of play still reflect broad social inequities, which have material consequences on the lives of young New Yorkers.
Studying photographs, fire insurance maps, and newspaper articles documenting New York City’s early playgrounds can teach students about how reformers and children constructed spaces of protected play for kids on top of provoking questions on access, equity, and justice. This history also foregrounds the frequently contentious relationship between young people and the adults working on their behalf and highlights the importance of talking to the youth about what public spaces they want to see in their city. Playgrounds are vital sites that can greatly improve children’s quality of life and aid working families, but are too often unevenly distributed and maintained. Learning about the origins of these spaces offers an opportunity for young New Yorkers to reflect on how they might remake their city through play.
© Alexander Alland, "Play area outside Harlem River Houses," 1938. Original caption: Manhattan: 7th Avenue - 151st Street, 1938
Teaching Ideas
Use the following primary sources and the accompanying questions and activities to facilitate discussion on the subject of playing in public spaces in your classroom.
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Picture Collection, The New York Public Library. "Lawn-tennis and volley-ball games as played by girls in the William H. Seward Park" New York Public Library Digital Collections. Accessed April 28, 2023. Image ID: 806207
Then and Now: Race and the Right to the City [Grades 2+]
Compare and contrast photographs of organized play in Seward Park (found here and here in the Digital Collections) with the photograph of the San Juan Hill Playground (the image that opens this blog post). What are similarities between the photos? What is different about the two spaces for play, and why might that be?
Teenagers’ Rights [Grades 7+]
Ask students: Are there different rights for teenagers compared to children and adults? Have students make a list of the rights that they think teenagers should have. What spaces in the city are for teenagers? Are there public places? Are the spaces segregated in any way? Have students reflect on these questions and propose an area for teenagers that they would like to see in the city.
Have older students read “Yes Sitting, Yes Skating, Yes Music,” which was authored by six teenagers from the South Bronx with the artist Chat Travieso for Urban Omnibus. This piece addresses issues brought up in the discussion questions. After reading the article, have students review rules at public spaces at their school or in city parks, and ask them to create their own rules of conduct for a playground or a recreation space for teenagers. What would they allow, encourage, or celebrate? How do their rules differ from those at their school or city parks? Have students reflect on what the comparison between their rules and the official rules shows about how adults try to regulate young people’s behavior in public spaces.
Additional Resources
We've curated a selection of library resources to help you and your students continue exploring the themes of this blog post.
Books and E-Books
These books can be used to further analyze the history of race and childhood.
The Criminalization of Black Children: Race, Gender, and Delinquency in Chicago’s Juvenile Justice System, 1899-1945
In the late 19th century, progressive reformers recoiled at the prospect of the justice system punishing children as adults. Advocating that children’s inherent innocence warranted fundamentally different treatment, reformers founded the nation’s first juvenile court in Chicago in 1899. Yet amid an influx of new African American arrivals to the city during the Great Migration, notions of inherent childhood innocence and juvenile justice were circumscribed by race. In documenting how Blackness became a marker of criminality that overrode the potential protections the status of “child” could have bestowed, Tera Eva Agyepong shows the entanglements between race and the state’s transition to a more punitive form of juvenile justice.
Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights
Beginning in the mid-19th century in America, childhood became synonymous with innocence—a reversal of the previously-dominant Calvinist belief that children were depraved, sinful creatures. As the idea of childhood innocence took hold, it became racialized: popular culture constructed white children as innocent and vulnerable while excluding Black youth from these qualities. Actors, writers, and visual artists then began pairing white children with African American adults and children, thus transferring the quality of innocence to a variety of racial-political projects—a dynamic that Robin Bernstein calls “racial innocence.” This phenomenon informed racial formation from the mid-19th century through the early 20th.
Before Harlem: the Black Experience in New York City Before World War I
In the years between 1880 and 1915, New York City and its environs underwent a tremendous demographic transformation with the arrival of millions of European immigrants, native white people from the rural countryside, and people of African descent from both the American South and the Caribbean. While all groups faced challenges in their adjustment to the city, hardening racial prejudices set the Black experience apart from that of other newcomers. Through encounters with each other, Black people and white people, both together and in opposition, forged the contours of race relations that would affect the city for decades to come.
Whose Harlem Is This, Anyway?: Community Politics and Grassroots Activism During the New Negro Era
In Whose Harlem Is This, Anyway?, Shannon King vividly uncovers early 20th century Harlem as an intersection between the Black intellectuals and artists who created the New Negro Renaissance and the working class who found fought daily to combat institutionalized racism and gender discrimination in both Harlem and across the city.
Historic Newspaper Articles in the Black Press
You can use your Library Card to learn more about this topic by looking closely at articles printed in the Black Press by searching the ProQuest Historical African American Newspapers database. Below, we’ve selected three articles from the New York Amsterdam News to get you started. The first two newspaper articles document the advocacy of Black reformers for more playgrounds in Black neighborhoods, and the third indicates how white New Yorkers resisted such expansions of public space for young Black people.
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“Recreational Programs Urged: Municipalities Should Provide Parks and Playgrounds For Negro Children and Citizens,” 6 May 1925, Amsterdam News.
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“Urban League Opens Playground,” 7 July 1926, Amsterdam News.
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“Inconsistent in Playground Fight,” 10 April 1929, Amsterdam News.
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