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Two quick articles
One on the decline of street games
Anyone Up for Stickball? In a PlayStation World, Maybe Not
By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS and CASSI FELDMAN
On a few dirty squares of sidewalk in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, is a chalk drawing as mysterious to the uninitiated as hieroglyphics. Someone had, with great care, marked off a series of squares and given each a numerical value, although there did not seem to be any obvious pattern.
The drawing is a skelly board, for a game once so popular on the streets of New York that on some blocks adults had to walk in the street to avoid interrupting any of several games under way.
In a time before video games, trans fat or car alarms, in a city that seemed like a smaller version of present-day New York, screaming children ruled the streets. There was the whack of stickball on the asphalt, the singsong rhymes of double-dutch jump-rope on the sidewalk, the smack of curb ball in the gutter, the pained yelps arising out of a game called “booty’s up,” and the frantic counting of hide-and-seek in unexpected corners.
With joyous abandon, kids roller-skated, played ring-a-levio and steal the bacon, used sticks to roll discarded tires down the street, built go-carts and forts out of debris and wrenched open fire hydrants, drenching whoever dared go past.
Today, such loosely organized street play, outside of skateboarding and basketball, is on its last gasp in the city, a vestige of a simpler age for which a fast-paced world has little time.
“Parents drive children at a very young age to get them on the right track for success, so every waking moment is programmed, which doesn’t leave lots of time for play,” said Steven Zeitlin, executive director of City Lore, a nonprofit group on the Lower East Side of Manhattan that studies the nation’s cultural heritage. “A lot is being lost as these old forms of play die out.”
From the 1920s (and perhaps earlier) to the 1980s, the block in front of an apartment building in many neighborhoods was not just a child’s backyard, but an extension of the living room and the classroom — a place where children learned to play by the rules, the simpler the better.
If, like Stephen Swid, a kid was lucky enough to live a few blocks from Yankee Stadium in the 1950s, players like Mickey Mantle or Tony Kubek might stop by to take a turn at stickball. Sometimes, it got even better.
Mr. Swid, 66, former chief executive officer of Knoll International Holdings and Spin magazine, said he remembered a day when Mantle hit a ball over a six-story building on Sheridan Avenue. Another day, a rival stickball team showed up wearing uniforms — an unusual touch for a working-class neighborhood. Later, Mr. Swid learned the black and gold uniforms had been designed by one of the team’s adolescent players, Ralph Lifshitz, now known as Ralph Lauren.
The fun stopped, or moved inside, depending upon whom you ask, thanks to (pick two or three): television; two-income families; air-conditioning; digital technology; organized sports, crime; smaller families and roomier apartments; too much homework and other responsibilities; diverse, less cohesive neighborhoods; and perhaps most significantly, steady traffic, even on side streets.
Additionally, parents have not passed the games on to children, and newer immigrants have chosen to play soccer, cricket and badminton — sports not necessarily conducive to being played on the street.
While the games have largely faded away from city streets— and any sort of play beyond basketball, bicycle riding, handball or skateboarding has become unusual — some of the old games have held on, albeit with updated rules.
Brandon Santos, an 11-year-old with a crew cut who lives in the East Village, said his favorite is “off-the-ledge baseball,” which years ago would have been called curb ball. A player throws a rubber ball against the curb, sending it airborne over the street. If a member of the opposing team fails to catch it, the thrower gets to run the bases, although in Brandon’s version there is no running. Instead, the bases are accumulated in one’s head.
“It’s imaginary,” he explained. “We don’t run. We’re kind of lazy.” He and his friend Taylon Wilson, also 11, are part of a group of neighborhood kids that ebbs and swells as friends pass by on their way home, or appear from around a corner. The two, who had been playing handball, rattled off their favorite street games: fishies, fishies, cross my ocean; off-the-ledge baseball; booty’s up; manhunt; taps.
Just off Avenue C, Brandon showed where he and friends had spray-painted a skelly board on the concrete — a task that in years past had been done with chalk.
They play their share of video games as well, said Taylon, who speaks in excited bursts, but the boys sometimes prefer to play on the street.
“It’s kind of more fun,” he said. “You get to make it like your own. You get to design your game and make the rules.”
And besides, Taylon said about video games: “After a while, they kind of make your eyes water up. You start to drool.” He pretended to drool. “You get bored of them.”
As the boys came and went, Raynard Rembert, a 46-year-old security guard who grew up in the nearby Jacob Riis Houses, walked over after overhearing snippets of the conversation. His nickname, he said, is Radar.
One of Mr. Rembert’s favorite childhood games was “Johnny-on-the-pony.” The game, which had been among the most popular street games, involves two teams. One crouches into a single-file line, each person holding the waist of the person ahead of them. There are variations, but generally, members of the second team try one by one to hop atop the “pony” and to stay on for a certain amount of time before they are shaken off. Other versions involve jumping onto the pony, trying to make everyone fall to the ground.
Mr. Rembert said he had also played booty’s up, though he and his friends called it “bunky’s up” because they were not allowed to use the word “booty.”
That game involved throwing a hard rubber Spaldeen ball at someone’s backside from close range. Few people seem to remember the precise rules, and doubt there were many anyhow.
The old games, Mr. Rembert said fondly, are “physical and they’re challenging. They take coordination and balance and focus.”
Perhaps allowing the sepia-tinged haze of his memories to forget the many welts raised by a round of booty’s up and the noses bloodied during Johnny-on-the-pony, Mr. Rembert added, “It’s good to pass down sports where the kids are competing but aren’t trying to hurt each other.”
For several years, a diverse collection of people have sought to revive street play in the city, not only with an eye on their own nostalgic views of childhood, but also with the belief that such games contribute to social cohesion and to healthier children.
“It was expected that you would go out after school, roam the neighborhood and play these games, and then come home for dinner,” said Nick Green, a 53-year-old social worker who lives in South Jamaica, Queens, and operates a Web site, Streetplay.com, that celebrates the old games. “We didn’t realize it at the time, but that was probably the golden age for children.”
Last summer, Anthony Gigante, 48, of Brooklyn, organized a league to play what may be the most resilient of the traditional games — stickball — although its slow demise has been lamented for years.
The game is still played by a few adult leagues in the city, including the Major Stick-Ball League, which plays on schoolyard playgrounds, but Mr. Gigante wanted to teach the game to children after he learned that many could not afford the cost of participating in youth baseball leagues.
He got permission from the city to close Bay 22nd Street near Bath Avenue in Bensonhurst on Sunday mornings from 9 to noon. Every week, about 40 children, ages 5 to 11, showed up.
“We played ball every Sunday,” he said. “We played stickball, box ball, Johnny-on-the-pony. You don’t see kids playing on the street anymore because there’s so many cars. It’s a different culture.”
The old games were rarely complicated, although their rules and names would often vary from block to block.
Skelly, for instance, is also known as skully, skilsies, skelsies, bottle caps and dead box. The game calls for players to use pieces, typically bottle caps, to navigate a board drawn on the pavement. The object is for a player to navigate through the board’s 13 squares and back again. That player then has the right to roam the board, harassing other players, including “blasting” a rival’s piece off the board.
Last year in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, 58-year-old Delores Hadden Smith organized a street festival at the Gowanus Houses and had adults teach children games with candy-coated names that sounded like the made-up concoctions they were.
There was red devil; box ball; bluebird, bluebird through my window; hot peas and butter; a variation of ring-a-levio called cocolevio; steal the bacon; look who’s here punch-a-nella; knockout; and duck duck goose.
“The older people said, ‘No, that’s not going to work, these children are too bad,’ ” Ms. Hadden Smith, a public school teacher, said triumphantly. “In the end, we had more than 300 people register, and we went all day without a single curse word.”
Actually, Ms. Hadden Smith didn’t last until the end of the day. She went to bed about 11 p.m. The games continued past midnight.
“We laughed and we hollered and we cried,” she said. “We had the time of our lives.”
It didn’t matter that none of the children had known how to play the games, including performing simple tasks like turning a jump-rope, she said.
“Who’s going to teach them?” she asked. “You don’t see a lot of people jumping rope, do you?”
This summer, Ms. Hadden Smith expects an even larger turnout.
“The children were children like when we were children,” she said. “They weren’t little fidgety adults or little thugs or thugettes. Every single weekend since then, I can’t go out to the corner store without them coming up to me saying, ‘I’m ready! I’m ready! When are we going to do that again?’ ”
On social sites with religious leanings (I don't know a better way to describe it!)
Web Space Where Religion and Social Networking Meet
By KATIE ZEZIMA
Caitlin Todd enjoys making friends on social networking Web sites, but is turned off by content that she believes is inappropriate on a number of popular pages.
So Caitlin, 16, meets people only on Christian social sites like www.hisholyspace.com and www.xianz.com, where profanity is prohibited, prayer is urged and content is strictly monitored.
“I use Xianz because it is a place that I can come to and have fellowship with friends. Sharing God’s word and helping others," Caitlin wrote in an e-mail message. “Xianz is like a big church!”
Numerous religious-themed social networking groups are now on the Internet, allowing users to create prayer groups, discuss movies and find potential significant others. Creators and users say the sites are family-friendly alternatives to networking sites like MySpace, which says it has more than 100,000 religious groups but also contains content that some, like Robbie Davidson, founder of Xianz.com, find offensive.
“There’s a lot of people tired of seeing half-naked women in ads” on networking sites, said Mr. Davidson, who started his site last year. He says it has about 30,000 members. “I wanted to provide a safe alternative that was family friendly for the Christian demographic,” he said.
Xianz.com bills itself as a “Faith-Based MySpace,” while www.mypraize.com calls itself a “Christian MySpace Alternative.”
Not all the sites are Christian-oriented. Muslim users can log onto www.muslimspace.com, www.naseeb.com and www.muslimsocial.com. Jewish sites include www.shmooze.com and www.koolanoo.com.
Many of the sites are patrolled by users or employees who report users who post obscenities, sexually explicit content or derogatory language. Mr. Davidson said he had kicked people off the site and, in one instance, reported a user to the authorities.
Last month, MySpace agreed to hand over the names, addresses and online profiles of convicted sex offenders after attorneys general from eight states demanded that the site, which is owned by Fox Interactive Media, do so. MySpace also deleted the profiles of 7,000 convicted sex offenders.
Judith Donath, an associate professor at the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who studies social networking, said many users of social networks explored only parts of the sites that were of interest of them. New niche networking Web sites are an extension of that and part of that, she said.
“I imagine groups that break off find social-networking technology useful and want to maintain a fairly closed group that is not interested in interacting with a large group of people whose lives are antithetical to their own,” Professor Donath said. “This might happen especially if someone has a very specific set of cultural mores and wants a particular symbolism, reminding everyone what the site stands for and believes in.”
Susan Botros of Louisville, Ky., joined www.muslimspace.com last year after receiving some “nasty e-mails about the religion” on MySpace, which she had joined to promote the Muslim faith.
Ms. Botros said she felt comfortable on muslimspace.com and delved into religious topics that non-Muslims would be unfamiliar with.
“I like it for the simple fact that I feel like I’m part of a big family,” she said. “I can post things there that if I posted on MySpace people wouldn’t understand.”
Reuven Koret, an Internet entrepreneur who founded www.shmooze.com, got the idea for the site after helping to create an African-American-focused Web site.
“I thought this seems like something good for far-flung Jewish people to explain and connect people to the state of Israel,” Mr. Koret said.
The site has about 5,000 members and allows them to delve into different aspects of the faith.
“It gives us the ability to get a little more into the diversity of Jewish content and Jewish groups,” Mr. Koret said. “People who meet at Shmooze have at least one thing in common, and that creates a feeling of intimacy.”
While the Web sites allow users to branch into a larger religious network, some worry that it might weaken local faith communities.
“Can this diminish the person’s experience of their local community and local church?” asked Mark Regnerus, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Austin.
Ms. Botros said she considered muslimspace.com to be an extension of her religious community, and often shared some of the things she encountered on the site with members of her mosque and children at the Muslim school where she teaches.
“I take what I get online and bring it back to the people here,” she said.
Shawn Ireland, 22, of Mishawaka, Ind., uses www.holypal.com, to discuss matters of faith with others, and learns from people who might not agree with him.
“I just like being able to talk to other people about the Lord,” Mr. Ireland said. “It’s a place you can go and always have someone to talk to, whether you agree or not.”
Anyone Up for Stickball? In a PlayStation World, Maybe Not
By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS and CASSI FELDMAN
On a few dirty squares of sidewalk in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, is a chalk drawing as mysterious to the uninitiated as hieroglyphics. Someone had, with great care, marked off a series of squares and given each a numerical value, although there did not seem to be any obvious pattern.
The drawing is a skelly board, for a game once so popular on the streets of New York that on some blocks adults had to walk in the street to avoid interrupting any of several games under way.
In a time before video games, trans fat or car alarms, in a city that seemed like a smaller version of present-day New York, screaming children ruled the streets. There was the whack of stickball on the asphalt, the singsong rhymes of double-dutch jump-rope on the sidewalk, the smack of curb ball in the gutter, the pained yelps arising out of a game called “booty’s up,” and the frantic counting of hide-and-seek in unexpected corners.
With joyous abandon, kids roller-skated, played ring-a-levio and steal the bacon, used sticks to roll discarded tires down the street, built go-carts and forts out of debris and wrenched open fire hydrants, drenching whoever dared go past.
Today, such loosely organized street play, outside of skateboarding and basketball, is on its last gasp in the city, a vestige of a simpler age for which a fast-paced world has little time.
“Parents drive children at a very young age to get them on the right track for success, so every waking moment is programmed, which doesn’t leave lots of time for play,” said Steven Zeitlin, executive director of City Lore, a nonprofit group on the Lower East Side of Manhattan that studies the nation’s cultural heritage. “A lot is being lost as these old forms of play die out.”
From the 1920s (and perhaps earlier) to the 1980s, the block in front of an apartment building in many neighborhoods was not just a child’s backyard, but an extension of the living room and the classroom — a place where children learned to play by the rules, the simpler the better.
If, like Stephen Swid, a kid was lucky enough to live a few blocks from Yankee Stadium in the 1950s, players like Mickey Mantle or Tony Kubek might stop by to take a turn at stickball. Sometimes, it got even better.
Mr. Swid, 66, former chief executive officer of Knoll International Holdings and Spin magazine, said he remembered a day when Mantle hit a ball over a six-story building on Sheridan Avenue. Another day, a rival stickball team showed up wearing uniforms — an unusual touch for a working-class neighborhood. Later, Mr. Swid learned the black and gold uniforms had been designed by one of the team’s adolescent players, Ralph Lifshitz, now known as Ralph Lauren.
The fun stopped, or moved inside, depending upon whom you ask, thanks to (pick two or three): television; two-income families; air-conditioning; digital technology; organized sports, crime; smaller families and roomier apartments; too much homework and other responsibilities; diverse, less cohesive neighborhoods; and perhaps most significantly, steady traffic, even on side streets.
Additionally, parents have not passed the games on to children, and newer immigrants have chosen to play soccer, cricket and badminton — sports not necessarily conducive to being played on the street.
While the games have largely faded away from city streets— and any sort of play beyond basketball, bicycle riding, handball or skateboarding has become unusual — some of the old games have held on, albeit with updated rules.
Brandon Santos, an 11-year-old with a crew cut who lives in the East Village, said his favorite is “off-the-ledge baseball,” which years ago would have been called curb ball. A player throws a rubber ball against the curb, sending it airborne over the street. If a member of the opposing team fails to catch it, the thrower gets to run the bases, although in Brandon’s version there is no running. Instead, the bases are accumulated in one’s head.
“It’s imaginary,” he explained. “We don’t run. We’re kind of lazy.” He and his friend Taylon Wilson, also 11, are part of a group of neighborhood kids that ebbs and swells as friends pass by on their way home, or appear from around a corner. The two, who had been playing handball, rattled off their favorite street games: fishies, fishies, cross my ocean; off-the-ledge baseball; booty’s up; manhunt; taps.
Just off Avenue C, Brandon showed where he and friends had spray-painted a skelly board on the concrete — a task that in years past had been done with chalk.
They play their share of video games as well, said Taylon, who speaks in excited bursts, but the boys sometimes prefer to play on the street.
“It’s kind of more fun,” he said. “You get to make it like your own. You get to design your game and make the rules.”
And besides, Taylon said about video games: “After a while, they kind of make your eyes water up. You start to drool.” He pretended to drool. “You get bored of them.”
As the boys came and went, Raynard Rembert, a 46-year-old security guard who grew up in the nearby Jacob Riis Houses, walked over after overhearing snippets of the conversation. His nickname, he said, is Radar.
One of Mr. Rembert’s favorite childhood games was “Johnny-on-the-pony.” The game, which had been among the most popular street games, involves two teams. One crouches into a single-file line, each person holding the waist of the person ahead of them. There are variations, but generally, members of the second team try one by one to hop atop the “pony” and to stay on for a certain amount of time before they are shaken off. Other versions involve jumping onto the pony, trying to make everyone fall to the ground.
Mr. Rembert said he had also played booty’s up, though he and his friends called it “bunky’s up” because they were not allowed to use the word “booty.”
That game involved throwing a hard rubber Spaldeen ball at someone’s backside from close range. Few people seem to remember the precise rules, and doubt there were many anyhow.
The old games, Mr. Rembert said fondly, are “physical and they’re challenging. They take coordination and balance and focus.”
Perhaps allowing the sepia-tinged haze of his memories to forget the many welts raised by a round of booty’s up and the noses bloodied during Johnny-on-the-pony, Mr. Rembert added, “It’s good to pass down sports where the kids are competing but aren’t trying to hurt each other.”
For several years, a diverse collection of people have sought to revive street play in the city, not only with an eye on their own nostalgic views of childhood, but also with the belief that such games contribute to social cohesion and to healthier children.
“It was expected that you would go out after school, roam the neighborhood and play these games, and then come home for dinner,” said Nick Green, a 53-year-old social worker who lives in South Jamaica, Queens, and operates a Web site, Streetplay.com, that celebrates the old games. “We didn’t realize it at the time, but that was probably the golden age for children.”
Last summer, Anthony Gigante, 48, of Brooklyn, organized a league to play what may be the most resilient of the traditional games — stickball — although its slow demise has been lamented for years.
The game is still played by a few adult leagues in the city, including the Major Stick-Ball League, which plays on schoolyard playgrounds, but Mr. Gigante wanted to teach the game to children after he learned that many could not afford the cost of participating in youth baseball leagues.
He got permission from the city to close Bay 22nd Street near Bath Avenue in Bensonhurst on Sunday mornings from 9 to noon. Every week, about 40 children, ages 5 to 11, showed up.
“We played ball every Sunday,” he said. “We played stickball, box ball, Johnny-on-the-pony. You don’t see kids playing on the street anymore because there’s so many cars. It’s a different culture.”
The old games were rarely complicated, although their rules and names would often vary from block to block.
Skelly, for instance, is also known as skully, skilsies, skelsies, bottle caps and dead box. The game calls for players to use pieces, typically bottle caps, to navigate a board drawn on the pavement. The object is for a player to navigate through the board’s 13 squares and back again. That player then has the right to roam the board, harassing other players, including “blasting” a rival’s piece off the board.
Last year in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, 58-year-old Delores Hadden Smith organized a street festival at the Gowanus Houses and had adults teach children games with candy-coated names that sounded like the made-up concoctions they were.
There was red devil; box ball; bluebird, bluebird through my window; hot peas and butter; a variation of ring-a-levio called cocolevio; steal the bacon; look who’s here punch-a-nella; knockout; and duck duck goose.
“The older people said, ‘No, that’s not going to work, these children are too bad,’ ” Ms. Hadden Smith, a public school teacher, said triumphantly. “In the end, we had more than 300 people register, and we went all day without a single curse word.”
Actually, Ms. Hadden Smith didn’t last until the end of the day. She went to bed about 11 p.m. The games continued past midnight.
“We laughed and we hollered and we cried,” she said. “We had the time of our lives.”
It didn’t matter that none of the children had known how to play the games, including performing simple tasks like turning a jump-rope, she said.
“Who’s going to teach them?” she asked. “You don’t see a lot of people jumping rope, do you?”
This summer, Ms. Hadden Smith expects an even larger turnout.
“The children were children like when we were children,” she said. “They weren’t little fidgety adults or little thugs or thugettes. Every single weekend since then, I can’t go out to the corner store without them coming up to me saying, ‘I’m ready! I’m ready! When are we going to do that again?’ ”
On social sites with religious leanings (I don't know a better way to describe it!)
Web Space Where Religion and Social Networking Meet
By KATIE ZEZIMA
Caitlin Todd enjoys making friends on social networking Web sites, but is turned off by content that she believes is inappropriate on a number of popular pages.
So Caitlin, 16, meets people only on Christian social sites like www.hisholyspace.com and www.xianz.com, where profanity is prohibited, prayer is urged and content is strictly monitored.
“I use Xianz because it is a place that I can come to and have fellowship with friends. Sharing God’s word and helping others," Caitlin wrote in an e-mail message. “Xianz is like a big church!”
Numerous religious-themed social networking groups are now on the Internet, allowing users to create prayer groups, discuss movies and find potential significant others. Creators and users say the sites are family-friendly alternatives to networking sites like MySpace, which says it has more than 100,000 religious groups but also contains content that some, like Robbie Davidson, founder of Xianz.com, find offensive.
“There’s a lot of people tired of seeing half-naked women in ads” on networking sites, said Mr. Davidson, who started his site last year. He says it has about 30,000 members. “I wanted to provide a safe alternative that was family friendly for the Christian demographic,” he said.
Xianz.com bills itself as a “Faith-Based MySpace,” while www.mypraize.com calls itself a “Christian MySpace Alternative.”
Not all the sites are Christian-oriented. Muslim users can log onto www.muslimspace.com, www.naseeb.com and www.muslimsocial.com. Jewish sites include www.shmooze.com and www.koolanoo.com.
Many of the sites are patrolled by users or employees who report users who post obscenities, sexually explicit content or derogatory language. Mr. Davidson said he had kicked people off the site and, in one instance, reported a user to the authorities.
Last month, MySpace agreed to hand over the names, addresses and online profiles of convicted sex offenders after attorneys general from eight states demanded that the site, which is owned by Fox Interactive Media, do so. MySpace also deleted the profiles of 7,000 convicted sex offenders.
Judith Donath, an associate professor at the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who studies social networking, said many users of social networks explored only parts of the sites that were of interest of them. New niche networking Web sites are an extension of that and part of that, she said.
“I imagine groups that break off find social-networking technology useful and want to maintain a fairly closed group that is not interested in interacting with a large group of people whose lives are antithetical to their own,” Professor Donath said. “This might happen especially if someone has a very specific set of cultural mores and wants a particular symbolism, reminding everyone what the site stands for and believes in.”
Susan Botros of Louisville, Ky., joined www.muslimspace.com last year after receiving some “nasty e-mails about the religion” on MySpace, which she had joined to promote the Muslim faith.
Ms. Botros said she felt comfortable on muslimspace.com and delved into religious topics that non-Muslims would be unfamiliar with.
“I like it for the simple fact that I feel like I’m part of a big family,” she said. “I can post things there that if I posted on MySpace people wouldn’t understand.”
Reuven Koret, an Internet entrepreneur who founded www.shmooze.com, got the idea for the site after helping to create an African-American-focused Web site.
“I thought this seems like something good for far-flung Jewish people to explain and connect people to the state of Israel,” Mr. Koret said.
The site has about 5,000 members and allows them to delve into different aspects of the faith.
“It gives us the ability to get a little more into the diversity of Jewish content and Jewish groups,” Mr. Koret said. “People who meet at Shmooze have at least one thing in common, and that creates a feeling of intimacy.”
While the Web sites allow users to branch into a larger religious network, some worry that it might weaken local faith communities.
“Can this diminish the person’s experience of their local community and local church?” asked Mark Regnerus, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Austin.
Ms. Botros said she considered muslimspace.com to be an extension of her religious community, and often shared some of the things she encountered on the site with members of her mosque and children at the Muslim school where she teaches.
“I take what I get online and bring it back to the people here,” she said.
Shawn Ireland, 22, of Mishawaka, Ind., uses www.holypal.com, to discuss matters of faith with others, and learns from people who might not agree with him.
“I just like being able to talk to other people about the Lord,” Mr. Ireland said. “It’s a place you can go and always have someone to talk to, whether you agree or not.”