I lived on the corner of Cedar and Seneca. Across the street, catercorner to my house, was the city-block occupied by Lincoln Elementary. The two-story, redbrick and granite-trimmed schoolhouse covered only a small part of the land. The building had eight classrooms, four on each floor, along with the Principal’s Office and one for the School Nurse. Seven of the rooms housed classes; the eighth was dedicated to school assemblies. In the center of the building two, well-worn sets of wooden stairs connected the floors, one set for going up, the other for coming down. On the outside there were eight, iron fire-escapes: forbidden territory, although very tempting for climbing adventures when school was not in session.
Perhaps the best feature of this block in the neighborhood was not the school itself, but its playground. It was a one minute walk from my house at any time of the year, but summertime was best. I devoted many hours to this piece of landscape.
Nearest to my house was the tall slide. It was probably not as tall as its name implied, but for young kids, it seemed like the top of the world. My speed sliding down was increased dramatically after a few descents on seats of wax-paper from my mother’s cupboard. How long I could sit on top of the slide and view the entire playground varied with the size of the next kid in line.
Not far from the slide were the teeter-totters. Depending upon where the fulcrum was placed, I could have one or two opponents sit across from me for a contest of who could shove off the hardest and see who lost his seat at the top of the arc. When no one else was around, it was a challenge to determine how long I could balance the board while lying on my back, or stomach.
Swinging was also competitive. How high could I pump with my head held back and look at the moving sky before I became too dizzy to continue any longer? The jungle-gym bars were not as competitive, unless you included how long you could hang from your knees, which I never tried. As for the nearby spinning-wheel ride, I hoped to have an older teenager with long legs stand on the far side and push off repeatedly to make the rotation faster.
When I was a first or second grader, my favorite site was the sand box, where I could use Klondike sticks in order to construct castles, until some older kid would bust them down. It was best to use the sand early in the summer, before the neighborhood cats found it for their personal hygiene.
The playground was large enough for softball, and there was a single basketball hoop near the school, itself, but they were used by teenagers. For some unknown reason, my immediate neighborhood did not have many boys who were my age. Girls in the area greatly outnumbered the guys.
Living so close to the playground I could pick and choose the times and sites for my pastime. I preferred to engage in actions I could do by myself. Besides, I never was really into team sports or athletics. Occasionally I would play ping-pong in the basement of the school building. There was a multipurpose activity-room and storage area, during summer hours it could be accessed through a ramplike cellar-door. For me, that site was primarily a cool place on a sweltering day, where I could do craftwork, making “stained glass windows” using glass and colored tinfoil from candy wrappers which had been painstakingly smoothed-out. The figures on the glass were shaped with heavy black paint to resemble the lead outlines of true stained-glass windows. I also enjoyed braiding wrist bands from narrow, colored leather straps; the results were presented as gifts to young relatives.
Although there were rules for the use of each piece of equipment (don’t bang the empty teeter-totter boards on the ground, don’t twist the chains on the swings or stand on them to pump higher, and don’t climb the fire escapes) the major concern for most kids, including me, was to be aware of those who really ruled the playground, the guys who ended each ball game with a wrestling match or those who did not climb the fire escapes but sat on them and smoked a cigarette or two, especially in the evening. School playgrounds offered opportunities for learning the rules of social life and things that went far beyond the learning found in schoolbooks.