Swing Set Smokestack (Homegirls Rush Camera & Pose)

Brooklyn Playgrounds (No. 3)

Singers, Statesmen, and Saints

Singers, statesmen, and saints, among others, have left their mark on the Brooklyn landscape in the form of parks and playgrounds bearing their names. It’s a great tribute to a person to give his name to a public space. What better way is there to keep the name if not the sprit of a person alive than by turning it into something concrete and functional?


Whenever I pass by Harry Chapin Playground in Brooklyn Heights, nestled between the BQE and some charming houses with lush, sun-dappled yards, I can’t get his signature tunes, “Cat’s in the Cradle” and “Taxi,” out of my head.

The Playground: A Microcosm of Childhood

The playground is a microcosm of childhood, where archetypal agonies and ecstasies are revealed through fleeting glimpses . . . Abandonment issues on display: [little girl whimpering] “Mommy, mommy I thought you had left me!” The playground is aswirl with Freudian dynamics, a pageant of trauma and pleasure.


The snake pit of childhood is on full display at the playground. Taunting and teasing and ample coercion; preliminary stabs at exclusivity; the emergence of pecking orders; evidence of impulses to categorize and discriminate . . . Meathead-bully-predator-dirtbag: playground silhouette. Crew cut, sleeveless T-shirt, low-slung pants; the Neanderthal gait and the roving, hungry-cruel eyes.


The paradise of childhood unfolds at the playground . . . Children and pigeons, so fun to watch: a study in juvenile fascination. The endlessly endearing sight of children enjoying things adults would find mundane (or worse). Little girls running around in circles nonstop. Tykes, semi-alone—facing outward, in the subjective cocoon of the stroller—repeating the same word over and over with different inflections. Continual experimentation and the constant thrill of discovery—like no other time in life.


Youth—their image, their presence, their influence in the culture is a constant prod, a ready glimpse of innocence, and a gnawing reminder of times past, desires unfulfilled/never to be fulfilled. The shadow of youth ever looming—especially at the playground.

The Road Through Leisure

Brooklyn Playgrounds (No. 2)

The Brooklyn playground is a functional thing, often installed (seemingly as an afterthought) beneath ramps and overpasses and next to expressways. This is a legacy of Robert Moses, whose auto-centric vision of New York melded transportation and leisure in a perverse way that was oblivious to humanity and aesthetics.


Nonetheless, this is the landscape we’ve inherited, and it’s oddly stimulating. Maybe this is a result of the collision between Moses’ anti-humanist vision and the power of social adaptability, that assertion of humanity in the face of hostile forces.


This hopeful attitude is diminished, though, when one sees these concrete-and-metal-filled spaces barren of people (as they often are). Then it becomes apparent that there’s really something uninviting about these playgrounds, these footnotes to the highway.


I still like the highway playground, in the same way I might like an old dysfunctional radio that looks just right on the window sill. But I mostly appreciate the highway playground because it’s essentially, undeniably Brooklyn.

Brooklyn Playgrounds (No. 1)