Friedberg’s favorite configuration was a Buckminster Fuller-esque geodesic jungle-gym with a pendant tire-swing set within a sand-floored stone crater, all atop a cobblestone mastaba.  He used it for both the P.S. 166 playground on what had been a vacant lot on West 87th Street (1967), and at Jacob Riis Plaza, the apotheosis of his work for public housing in its masterful integration of play for children and recreation and community activities for adults.  One month after a grand opening ceremony in May 19966 important enough to draw philanthropist Brooke Astor and First Lady “Lady Bird” Johnson, summer started early and the New York Times—with somewhat unaccustomed giddiness—was celebrating Riis as the first playground where kids could “Just ‘Let Go,’” and documenting such brand new games as “No Touching the Ground,” “Hot Peas and Butter,” and “Round-Up. ”8

AUGUST 2011

Jacob Riis Plaza, Lower East Side, New YorkFive men, all in their twenties and thirties, sit on park benches and reminisce for the benefit of a stranger. 

Guy #1: This used to be a stone playground.  All stone [gesturing to take in a 360-degree sweep of the uneventful plaza] everywhere.  You know, like the way streets in the city used to be.  Stones.  Over there, THAT was the giant igloo.  Down that way: that was the amphitheater.  And next to it, there, was the Cigarette Box. 

Stranger: The what? 

Guy #1: The Cigarette Box.  That’s what we called it.  This big box with water coming out of it.  That over there [gesturing at the totems with Gottlieb-like abstract hieroglyphics that survived demolition in the 1990s] is the Monument.  They’re all that’s left. 

Stranger: What happened to the playground? 

Guy #1: Aw, you know.  They didn’t take care of it.  It got old and messed up. 

Guy #2: That was the nursery.  It’s not a nursery anymore. 

Guy #3: Yeah, it was more fun then.  We used to play basketball using the wooden beams.  I broke my femur bone.  I was playing “Don’t Touch the Ground” [a game invented and named within a month of the playground’s opening was still a rite of passage a generation later] and I touched the ground!  It was rough. 

Guy #1: But things are too safe now. [ Much nodding.]  These kids are spoiled!  All this rubber n’ shit! [ They all laugh in agreement to this, pointing at the 2011-edition five-year-olds playing nearby on bright molded plastic equipment.] 

Guy #2: You wouldn’t believe it.  Ask anyone here.  Google it.  Everyone remembers it. 

1990 s

But now it is clear that not everyone loved it, or at least cared enough to stop its destruction.  The heyday of utopian playscapes didn’t, in the end, last very long—a little more than a decade.  And then it was over.  And most traces of the modern landscapes that formed an archipelago of play opportunities from Bed-Stuy to the Bronx were obliterated.  Tunnels were bricked up.  Volcano hatches welded shut.  Water features drained.  Play leaders fired.  Gates shut. 

The adventure playgrounds were undone in part by the social ills they were idealistically created to address.  The city’s fiscal implosion in the 1970s led to a withdrawal of funding for adequate maintenance and supervision, and to the somewhat faulty perception among a bewildered public increasingly fearful of a chaotic atmosphere of crime, vandalism, and drug abuse that the playscapes themselves were to blame for their misuse.  Innovations once championed were now seen as part of the problem.  Every syringe or condom rumored to have been found in a sandbox, every urban legend of molesters and junkies lurking in the tunnels, led to the conviction that the designs themselves had failed and were actively threatening the city’s children.  If public space is seen as permissive rather than liberating, then each tumble, bruise, and scrape is symptomatic of an encroaching anarchy.  Not coincidentally, by the 1990s the culture of parenting had changed, reflecting a broad shift in expectations about safety and danger.  The elimination of risk and chance, not only from play but from nearly every aspect of a child’s lived experience, seemed an attainable societal goal.  The subsequent fear of litigation and increasingly stringent federal safety codes tipped the balance and the playgrounds suffered a slow, largely unsung death by closure, “upgrading,” and invasive renovation.