Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 4.djvu/183

 THE MOVEMENT FOR SMALL PLAYGROUNDS 1 65

The many forces working to establish playgrounds combined and organized this year what is known as the Outdoor Recieation League, the objects of which are declared to be :

1. To obtain recognition of the necessity for recreation and physical exercise as fundamental to the moral and physical welfare of the people.

2. To secure the establishment in the city of New York of proper and sufficient recreation places, playgrounds, and open-air gymnasiums for the people.

The league has opened open-air gymnasiums in West Sixty- ninth and West Ninety-fourth streets, is about to do so in Division and Hester street parks, and maintains a boys' camp at Pelham Bay park. Through its influence gi 5,000 was appro- priated for school playgrounds by the school board, and twenty schools were opened. The New York schools have no yards, but large basements, and in some schools roof spaces, which have been equipped fully, and a magnificent work is under way. The equipment consists in sand piles, parallel bars, horizontal bars, hitch and kick standards, see-saws, swinging ladders, over- head ladders, and basketball. Small blocks for building are furnished and the spaces arranged for shuffleboard, handball, hop scotch, ringtoss, prisoners' base, hand tennis, etc. Six custodians, usually two men and four women, are assigned to each school — a director and two assistants in the morning from 8 to I o'clock, and the same in the afternoon from i to 6 o'clock.. From one to five hundred frequent the grounds at one time. The custodians are working out the problem of their own par- ticular group of children, who must be differently handled according to their nationality and surroundings.

There is a small circulating library in each of fourteen play- grounds, and on each of the three recreation piers maintained by the city kindergartners, bringing joy to the little ones who formerly listlessly sat about.

Where permission has been granted in the parks, large tents have been set up, in which, too, a care-taker helps to amuse and occupy the children.

This work is under the same management as the vacation schools — that of Superintendent Seth T. Stewart, to whom each