In the 1930s and 1940s, double Dutch was not the only form of jump rope on the sidewalks of New York—there was double Irish, double dodge, French fried, French Dutch, and double Jewish. Passersby could hear and see hundreds of different games and their variants on the city's sidewalks and playgrounds. When we arrived in New York, we were struck by the way that New Yorkers spoke so passionately about the games that they played as children on the city's streets. Inspired by this emotion and by the way our own children played in a back alley in our urban neighborhood of Sunnyside, Queens, we began to look at the evolution of city play (Dargan & Zeitlin, 1990).
As folklorists interested in both the past and the present, we conduct fieldwork and publication projects on New York City's folklore and oral history through City Lore, an organization that brings artists into the classroom; conducts residencies on building literacy through oral history, folklore, and storytelling; and offers staff development on intercultural programming in the schools. Our research about this one aspect of youth culture has ramifications for both teachers and parents.
Place, Rules, and Time
We begin with the idea that we can understand a place—in this case, New York City—by exploring the traditional activities that give it meaning. These highly localized and repeated activities shape our experience of the city. Through play, harsh and imposing city objects are imbued with human values, associations, and memories. Play is one way that we develop a sense of neighborhood in a large city. Play is one way that a city street becomes "our block."
Barging out of doors with play on their minds, city children confront telephone poles, lampposts, cars, brick walls, concrete sidewalks, and asphalt streets. Children leaping from the doorways as Zena, Anakin Skywalker, Captain Ben Sisko, or the Knights of the Round Table have at their disposal an array of swords and shields that to the uninitiated more closely resemble discarded umbrellas and dented garbage can lids. For the would-be circus performer or ballet dancer, the stoop provides the perfect stage. Those with ball in hand have manhole covers, cars, hydrants, and lampposts to define a playing field. Jumping off ledges or riding bikes up ramps made from scrap wood, city children enjoy the dizzying thrills of vertigo.
In play, rules and boundaries are defined by the players themselves. This step is first base—and so it is. This sidewalk square is jail, this broken antenna is a gun—and through the magic of play, they are. Transformation is the process of recasting the rules, the boundaries, the images, and the characters of the real world within the boundaries of play. This is at the heart of play: taking a space or an object and devising a new use for it, thereby making it one's own. As they transform the city for play, children manifest a remarkable imagination. A playful order prevails. The hydrants, curbs, and cornices of the city become a gameboard. The castoffs of city living—bottle caps, broomsticks, and tin cans—become the playing pieces.
Within play worlds, time has its own measures: "We played until it got too dark to see," many people tell us. Children play while the last reflection of twilight still dimly silhouettes a flying ball; they play while hunger is still possible to ignore. Play time is measured not by minutes and hours but by the rules and structures of play. Time often goes by in a split second, metered by the turning of a rope or the rhythm of a rhyme: "Doctor, doctor will I die? / Yes, my child, and so will I. / How many moments will I live? / One, two three, four..."
Play Today
Today, far fewer city blocks preserve that confluence of lifestyle and urban geography that sustain traditional games and outdoor play. Large groups of children choosing up sides and organizing traditional games, such as Red Rover, ring-a-leavio, and Johnny on the pony, are no longer a commonplace sight. Rather, one, two, or sometimes three children play on their own in empty lots or on broken sidewalks.
In the poorer neighborhoods of Harlem and the Lower East Side, children still do play outdoors, creatively manipulating their environment. In these neighborhoods, interiors are smaller, less comfortable, and often unairconditioned. The street offers open space and fresh air, and the neighborhoods have the concentration of children necessary for group activities. In some areas, such as Bedford-Stuyvesant's Marcy projects, half a dozen jump ropes still turn on a hot day.
The changes in city play over the past 100 years are tied to the changes in city life. Today, when children gather after school and face the recurrent question of what to do, street games are only one possibility; they must compete with organized sports and commercial amusements, television, and radio.
When life is full of an ever-changing round of fads and fancies, ranging from a new, must-have CD to the special effects of George Lucas on the local movie screen, unrewarded perseverance at the old traditional games seems pointless. Traditional games, whose only reward is the enjoyment of playing them, cannot compete with these other influences. That any such games still persist is testament to the intrinsic importance and meaningfulness of those games to the players.
Other activities, deliberately antagonistic to public, polite adult society, thrive on the streets but have as their purpose engaging the interest and attention—and sometimes the rage—of the adult world. Graffiti, which may seem a kind of random vandalism to the uninitiated, is a game played for the "fame" that comes from having one's code name read all over the city by one's peers. Breakdancing, which has some roots in mock fighting, is largely a performance genre, played for recognition, for prizes, for prestige, for the money that can come from street performance, and for a ticket out of the ghetto. Similarly, rapping, a street tradition of competitive verbal artistry fostered originally at block and playground parties in black neighborhoods, is now intimately tied to the recording industry, which promotes and markets the music. These activities are a long way from marbles or skelly played to while away an afternoon.
A Lost Sense of Community
Children's games and toys, though store-bought, are often creative. Certainly, they are well suited to our times; the same is true of many television programs. But although bought toys, television, and video games may encourage certain kinds of individual play, they don't create communities. They are placeless; the world they create is on the screen and in the mind—not on the block. With television, and now the Internet, people don't necessarily live where they are. The media can't replace the real experiences of growing up and getting to know a city street; it can't create a sense of place.
In the television-soaked United States of today, young people become frustrated with communities—and games—that have none of the glamour of the world depicted on television; advertisements remind them constantly of what they do not have. Local communities have been devalued in contemporary American life, which emphasizes success stories and celebrities in the constant barrage of the media.
Children whose lives really turned on the block drew the most minute distinctions about their environment. Hamilton Fish Armstrong (1963) writes about roller skating down his Sixth Avenue block and knowing who lived in each house without looking up—he could tell by the particular buzz created by the pavement on his feet. Other children distinguished among "kite hill" and "vulture's hill" and "dead man's curve." They knew such exotic place as the Casbah—a nickname for the railing (the "caz-bar") leading to the entrance of P.S. 1 in Long Island City, Queens. The block was a place to be from.
The children who do still play on the streets of New York not only play together, but also often see one another every day in many contexts. They learn how to share spaces together and to build relationships and bonds with the neighborhood. Their communities do not revolve around a single interest, such as Little League. When social interaction moves beyond a single interest and people become involved in a multiplicity of ways, communities are born; relationships move beyond a simple exchange and take on new meaning. As one New York taxi driver put it, a real neighborhood is where the butcher comes to your funeral.
The Role of Adults
Where do adults fit into this world of play? Many of the games that still flourish on the streets of New York illustrate the influence of the adult world. Double Dutch jump rope, for example, thrives partly in competitive, adult-run forums, such as the annual double Dutch competition at Lincoln Center. Even the ghetto-fostered style of gymnastics performed on discarded mattresses and box springs has become a formal, adult-sponsored performance with groups such as the Flip Boys.
But adults have another important function on the community block. They create a web of sociability and unobtrusive vigilance that enables children to create secret societies and play worlds out of harm's way. The measure of this city of New York—and of other cities—is the degree to which it can nurture and protect this core activity. As Marian Wright Edelman has said, we must make the streets of our city safe for children because streets that are safe for children are safe for adults. The quality of playfulness must be cared for, protected, and nurtured. Children and adults need the space—both physical and emotional—to play, to develop their own indigenous arrangements and solutions, and to give their imagination free rein.
The memories of the many New Yorkers who have spoken with us present a case for the role of play in building multifaceted communities rooted in place; street games contribute to a neighborhood life that made growing up in the city memorable. We cannot turn back the clock, and, in truth, we probably cannot reintroduce the old games so that they will take hold again. Nor can we simply curse the modern world and paint television and organized games and sports as ogres that would eat our children. But we must prevent these forms from becoming the predominant influence on our communities.
Ultimately, we must learn from the indigenous adaptations and transformations of children at play. Teachers must encourage free play on school playgrounds; urban planners must learn to build cities that children and adults can use for both work and leisure; parents and teachers must understand the importance of safe havens for play. We must make a conscious effort where once none was required. As individuals and as communities, neighborhoods, cities, and nations, we must come to understand what was and is meaningful about our communities and what about them can be conserved in a changing world.
