Playground design

In the Moses universe, playground design allowed for little variation. From The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (1974):

These designs were banal, containing for the most part nothing but benches for mothers and standard “active play” equipment — swings, seesaws, jungle gyms, wading pools, slides — for children. The equipment was surrounded by fences that only a mother could love: either dreary chain-link or high, black bars that made the playgrounds look like animal cages. And they were set in a surface that even a mother had to hate — a surface cheap to lay down and easy to maintain (that was why Moses’ engineers had selected it) but hard on the knees and elbows of little boys and girls who fell on it. Comfort stations, squat and unadorned, looked like nothing so much as concrete or brick pillboxes. A neighborhood committee might request some particularly desired facility — a bocci court, for example, for an Italian neighborhood — but few substitutions were permitted.

And one choice detail:

Some playgrounds were situated atop hills and their entrances were set with flights of steps despite the fact that the most frequent users of these parks were mothers with baby carriages, which were difficult to maneuver up steps, and entrance to these playgrounds could have been made easier for them by simply making the entrances ramps instead of steps.

But Moses no longer had much time for detail.

Here, from an episode of Naked City, are some glimpses of Moses’s dystopian playground equipment. Bonus, not from Naked City: a photograph of me, not yet one, in a Moses baby swing.

In my Brooklyn neighborhood, bocci (or bocce) was a game played on (largely) disused railroad tracks.

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