A NORMAL OUTLET FOR BOYISH ENERGY

More than one half of the 10,000 children with whom the children's court of New York City deals each year, are there through having no adequate place to play.

ERNEST K. COULTER,

Formerly Clerk of the Children's Court, New York

THE OPPORTUNITY OF THE DEPARTMENT FOR RECREATION IN BOSTON, MASS.

JOSEPH LEE

President of the Playground and Recreation Association of America, Boston, Mass.

The opportunity before the new department of recreation is an inspiring one. It has at its disposal some thirty-five playgrounds and some thirty baths, besides gymnasiums, parks and ponds, many miles of bridle path and driveway, an aquarium, a zoological garden and a civic orchestra.

And it holds all these opportunities for the use of a population of 700,000 people, some 200,000 of them between the ages of one and twenty-one, in every one of whom, of whatever age, there exists a primal and ineradicable instinct for play and recreation and the joy of life. It is a pretty good orchestra to play on and a pretty good audience to appreciate the performance. The task and the opportunity that faces the Reaching Everybody new commission is to reach with the varied and extensive resources at its disposal the great population for whose use and advantage these resources have been provided. It will be their duty, and no doubt their endeavor, to provide play for both sexes and for every age, from banks for the babies to roll down and sand for them to dig in, to pleasant walks for the old folks, music for them to listen to, scenery for them to look at, and a chance to sit down and watch the children play. Besides the ordinary provision found in all well equipped parks and playgrounds, there should be boats to row, donkeys to ride, creatures to pet, children's gardens, many places to coast, and ponds to wade in or skate on according to the season. Most of these things, indeed, we have already, but they can be made more general and accessible to all. Perhaps with the aid of the municipal orchestra it will be possible to provide at least the occasion for civic choruses such as exist in Germany.

Special effort should be made to provide opportunities for the older girls, who are now the most seriously neglected part of our population, so far as play and recreation are concerned. Girls have played ball from the time of Nausicaa; indeed it must have been before that that Atalanta lost the 220 by following the ball too closely. Folk dancing is another great natural resource

for girls, and even the dangerous subject of social dancing might finally be approached. Perhaps this last is more a problem for the school committee than for the new department, but at all events there should be platforms so that folk dancing, at least, can be carried on outdoors.

Perhaps the most successful form of play so far developed in our city, as well as the least expensive, is coasting. For this purpose there should be provided on every playground, in such manner as to interfere as little as may be with the skating, not a few narrow slides of the scoop variety but artificial hills of the simplest possible construction. Two inch spruce plank tilted at an exciting angle is all you need; and a total drop of some five feet would be enough to furnish perpetual amusement for the smaller children. The problem, here as elsewhere, is that of amusing not 20 or 30 on each coast, but a hundred times that number.

The evening use of playgrounds is another largely undeveloped resource. Boys will play football by electric light not only up to six o'clock but up to ten. Indeed you can see them playing under the lights on the common on your way home from the theatre on November nights. And lighting the playgrounds is well for other reasons.

Children

Want Games

Further development in the way of apparatus our playgrounds undoubtedly need. A sand. box is cheaper than a human attendant, and may do at least the work of one. But apparatus should not be the main reliance. The thing that children chiefly want is games. Gymnastics are drugery. Games are real life to the child and to the grown-up. The best thing of all that the department can do is to plant a crop of the good available games, not only baseball but its variations, and also such games as hill dill and prisoners' base, and others of the more roly-poly sort that are especially adapted to the younger children. To plant a set of healthy games means the coming up of a crop of healthy children later on. And good games permeate. They soak like soft water through the interstices of the city and come up like grass between the cobble-stones. You can hardly kill baseball, and the same would be true of many other games once they were well planted.