Flashback: At the turn of the century, Chicago’s children were hurting from too few parks. This movement changed that.
Delegates to the first convention of the Playground Association of America gathered in the Art Institute’s Fullerton Hall to hear famed social reformer Jane Addams explain her support for their cause. Then they went out to see the pioneering parks that had brought them to Chicago on June 20, 1907.
But not Grant Park or Jackson Park on the lakefront. Those grassy expanses, majestically landscaped in the tradition of the great parks of London and Paris, were designed for looking, not touching.
H. Chatfield-Taylor, in his 1917 book “Chicago,” remembered when Lincoln Park was “fastidiously provided with ‘keep off the grass’ signs to prevent joy and gladness.”
Whereas the Playground Association’s delegates were apostles of fun.
They knew that children need to run and climb, throw a ball and wrestle. So they visited Armour Square Park at 33rd Street and Shields Avenue. The tiny, 10-acre playground, which had opened two years before, would have a Chicago innovation known as a field house for cold-weather athletics.
The programming for the convention closed with a “play festival” in Ogden Park, at 65th Street and Racine Avenue. There were kindergartners' circle games; girls volleyball matches; boys and girls relay races; and Swedish, Hungarian, Lithuanian and Bulgarian dancers in traditional costumes.
Male members of the Playground Association’s executive committee spontaneously added an event. When their field trip stopped at Sherman Park, they joined the neighborhood boys in the swimming pool.
“It was the best show on the whole two days' program,” Mary McDowell, head resident of the University of Chicago Settlement, told a Tribune reporter. “The men seemed to have just as much boy spirit as the little fellows.”
At the turn of the century, the reality in Chicago was that access to parks had declined precipitously as the city had expanded. As the Tribune’s editorial board noted, in 1870 there was an acre of park for every 82 residents. That same acre served 128 residents in 1880, 375 residents in 1890, and 515 in 1900.
“This is not progress,” the 1902 editorial concluded.
Yet children’s play wasn’t universally applauded, thanks to the Puritan work ethic and the modern factory.
“Only in the modern city have men concluded that it is no longer necessary for the municipality to provide for the insatiable desire for play,” Addams wrote in “The Spirit of Youth and The City Streets,” published two years after she spoke at the Playground Association’s convention.
Instead, children as young as 10 went to work, prized as employees because they could be paid less than adults. Limits on child labor didn’t come until 1916, when Congress passed the Keating-Owen Act. But a few years later, the Supreme Court struck it down as unconstitutional, even as other reformers were seconding Addams' assertion that children were entitled to a little joy before becoming workers.
In New York, Jacob Riis documented, in words and photographs, the lives of slum children whose playground was a filthy alley between rows of tenements. He drew a civics lesson from what he and his camera witnessed.
“For, be it remembered, these children with the training they receive — or do not receive — with the instincts they inherit and absorb in their growing up, are to be our future rulers, if our theory of government is worth anything,” Riis wrote in his 1890 book, “How The Other Half Lives.”
For drawing attention to the difference between what children need and what the young of the urban poor get, Riis was made honorary vice president of the Playground Association. The honorary president was Theodore Roosevelt, who, while superintendent of the New York Police Department, walked alongside Riis through some of those alley playgrounds.
The “Playground National Song” echoed Riis' conception of the path from childhood to responsible adulthood.
While playing we learn our duties,
We owe to one and all,
For with fair play and square deal, too,
We are ready for our country’s call.
In Chicago, those lyrics were turned into public policy earlier than in most other cities. That is why Chicago was the natural host for the Playground Association’s first convention.
J. Frank Foster, superintendent of Chicago’s South Park System, came to a conclusion similar to Riis' about the remedy for juvenile delinquency.
“Foster said that with plenty of playgrounds, parks, and athletic games available to the children of the congested districts, the numbers at ... (children’s correctional) institutions would be depleted with amazing rapidity,” the Tribune reported of a speech he gave to the Chicago Society for School Extension in 1903.
One way to tackle Chicago’s park access problem would have been to enlarge the existing parks and retrofit them with athletic fields, swing sets and slides. But as Foster reported at the school extension meeting: “The class most in need of the public playgrounds cannot afford to pay car fares from their homes to the large, centrally located parks.”
So Foster concluded that if the children of the poor couldn’t get to the parks, the parks ought to be brought to them. He called for the establishment of at least 20 neighborhood parks for children “who are growing up in squalor and an atmosphere of immorality,” the Tribune wrote.
Trained as an engineer, Foster had precise specifications in mind for the new parks.
“The equipment of the ideal playground, according to (Foster), includes two ball fields, a running track, sand pits for small children, a swimming tank, a wading pool, and a building that can be used the year round for meetings of boys and girls' and neighborhood clubs,” the Tribune reported.
That building, known as a field house, reflected a shift in the ambitions of social reformers. Their great dream had been to get rid of the tenements. But as that hadn’t happened, they envisioned the park as an oasis in the midst of the slums.
It would be a place where a taste of middle-class values might inspire poor children to aim for better lives. At the least, it would give them a higher chance of survival.
Under a 1900 headline “To Fight Death with Parks,” the Tribune reported that West Side park officials had prepared a map of Chicago showing that the mortality rate was much lower in neighborhoods with parks than in neighborhoods that lacked them.
The year before, Chicago had established a special park commission to create what one alderman called “breathing places.”
Of the slums adjacent to Addams' Hull House, the Tribune reported: “Even a small park would be a blessing to the poor children, who know grass and trees only from hearsay and perhaps never have filled their lungs with pure air — never have the privilege of rolling and romping in the grass.”
The special park commission pushed for the creation of playgrounds across the city, most notably on the South Side, Chicago’s industrial heartland. Yet the South Park Board was inclined to rest on its laurels: Jackson Park and Washington Park.
A Tribune editorial demanded a course correction: “Cause a few gaps to appear in the huddled masses of tenement covered blocks.”
That message was echoed by Foster, the South Parks superintendent. He ceaselessly explained the small-parks philosophy to civic groups and churches.
In between those speeches, he spent endless hours reviewing plans for Russell Square Park, Hamilton Park, Ogden Park, Palmer Park, Sherman Park, Davis Square Park, McKinley Park, Mark White Park, Bessemer Park, Cornell Square Park and other “breathing places.”
So it was fitting that, in 1926, when construction began on a recreational facility for the young people of the Auburn Gresham neighborhood, it was named Foster Park.
The park’s 23 acres exist to fulfill what Foster fervently believed:
“Congested, small, overcrowded playgrounds do not fill the demand and do not exert the influence on the children exerted by the large playgrounds, where they can feel and enjoy their freedom, can play without restraint and direction, and will not be compelled by large numbers to await their turn.”
Have a Flashback idea? Share your suggestions with Editor Colleen Kujawa at ckujawa@chicagotribune.com
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