![]() ![]() decided the solution, “not without some inconvenience,” was to have sand brought in from a faraway beach and dumped in their yard, steps from the back door. A., decided their boys did not have enough to do at their summer cottage 20 or 30 miles outside Boston. Stanley Hall, the psychologist who pioneered the study of child behavior, grew fascinated by the societies that spring up around sand play. ![]() Older children were sometimes turned away due to fears that they might get bored and cause trouble, but superintendents found that 1 in 3 would soon come back with a young relative, asking to “mind baby in the sand.” In 1907, neighboring Cambridge opened its own gardens, using local schoolyards. When Boston mayor Josiah Quincy VI was inaugurated in 1897, he proclaimed every ward should have a playground, and the city followed through. The Hull House playground was more elaborate, with sandpiles, swings, building blocks, a giant slide, and ball courts for older children. One opened in New York that year and another, in Chicago, in 1892 at reformer Jane Addams’s Hull House. A 10-acre “outdoor gymnasium,” with aboveground play equipment like swings and seesaws as well as sand, opened in the West End in 1889 as well as 20 other playgrounds in Boston. Country children had plenty of dirt, while wealthier city children likely had yards it was poor children who needed access to free, communal play spaces.Īs the number of such gardens increased, they began to be located in schoolyards and eventually became the property of the school board and parks department. By 1887 there were 10 sand gardens, mostly located near the settlement houses that served recently arrived immigrant families. The success of the first sandpile spurred subsequent summer installations on Parmenter Street and Warrenton Street, each supervised by a matron. ![]() The idea came from Germany, where such “sand gardens” were introduced in Berlin’s public parks in 1850 as an offshoot of Friedrich Froebel’s emphasis on the garden part of kindergarten. “Playing in the dirt is the royalty of childhood,” said Kate Gannett Wells, chair of the Massachusetts Emergency and Hygiene Association. They paid for a pile of sand to be poured into the yard of a chapel on Parmenter Street at the beginning of summer. In 1885, a group of female philanthropists decided that the immigrant children of Boston’s North End needed somewhere other than the increasingly crowded and dangerous streets to play. The first American playground had no climbing bars, no seesaws, no swings. This essay is excerpted from The Design of Childhood: How the Material World Shapes Independent Kids by Alexandra Lange, out now from Bloomsbury. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |