Financing of Public Recreation
Women formed part of a New York group of public-spirited citizens that, in the summer of 1914, presented to the Board of Estimate and Apportionment, the budget-making authority of the city, an important memorandum dealing with the great problem of financing the urgent recreational facilities such as those we have outlined. The Survey published the following commentary on this memorandum:
Beginning with the statement that not more than 5 per cent. of the population is reached daily by all the intensive or active recreations under public control, the memorandum finds that “the mass of the people depend on commercialized amusements, notably saloons, motion pictures, and dance halls, and on the street, which is the demoralizing and dangerous playground of most of the children. We urge that wholesome recreation, publicly controlled, is needed by all the people, not by the small fraction now cared for.”
In other words, the signers of the memorandum regard public recreation as being as much a public function as education. “It is impossible,” says the memorandum, “for the individual to buy wholesome recreation. Wholesome recreation, in which the social and civic elements are present, can only be provided through community coöperation.” Public recreation is net only for the poor, but for everyone, and without it the rich are nearly as helpless as the poor.
Free recreation made available to the mass of the people would cost the city between $30,000,000 and $40,000,000, a sum impossible to raise by taxation. Yet, says the memorandum, “the people of New York gladly pay $10,000,000 a year for mediocre commercial motion-picture shows, but the city takes it for granted that they will or should pay nothing at all for amusements more attractive, including motion pictures, which can be offered on public properties. The 600 dance halls of the city are operated in considerable part by voluntary groups who pay for the privilege of using the halls, but the city takes for granted that its public properties cannot be operated, even in part, by voluntary groups, and that the people will not or should not pay.”
The mass of the people are thus paying for poor recreation which is not merely neutral, but often demoralizing. The memorandum goes on:
“It has been shown through complete investigation that most juvenile crime is directly due to the attempt to play in the streets or in other forbidden places. There is much evidence that crime among women, especially that which leads to the social evil, is due in large part to the influences which surround women in their search for recreation. Neither commerce nor public effort has provided family recreation places, and most wage-earning families in New York have no leisure resources beyond what they can find in their tenement homes, on the streets, or in a small class of commercial resorts.”
In other words, the memorandum is a challenge to the city to go into vigorous competition with commercialized amusements and develop all public properties to the limit for leisure purposes, as the only means whereby crime can be radically controlled, the family held together in its pleasures, or civic education carried ahead.
The memorandum proceeds to lay down a constructive program by which this wider use of all public properties can be put into effect in line with the social center idea. Its program involves neighborhood organization, the shaping of public amusement according to local needs. It involves equally self-government in the use of public properties for leisure purposes. It goes further and argues that local self-support is necessary before self-government can become a reality.
It urges, in the first place, that public recreation cannot be generally developed unless this be done in a partially self-supporting way, through dues, entrance fees, or the method of private concessions operated on public property. The tax burden would be impossible by any other plan.