The boy himself is blissfully untroubled by any serious thoughts about his background; and to him these streets are as a matter of course a place to play in. This point of view is perfectly natural for several reasons:
In the first place, he has never known any other playground. At the earliest possible stage of infancy he is turned out, perhaps under an older sister’s supervision, to crawl over the steps of the tenement or tumble about in the gutter in front of it, watching with large eyes the new sights around him. Here he is put to play, and here he learns to imitate the street and sidewalk games of other boys and girls. He is scarcely to be blamed for a point of view so universally held that it never occurs to him to doubt it.
In the second place, the street is the place that he must play in, whether he wants to or not. There is no room for him in the house; the janitor usually chases him off the roof. Excepting De Witt Clinton Park, which, as has been shown, is small, restricted, and inadequate, there is no park on the West Side between Seventy-second and Twenty-eighth Streets. Central Park and New Jersey are too inaccessible to be his regular playgrounds. And besides, not only will a boy not go far afield for his games, but he cannot. He is often needed at home after school hours to run errands and make himself generally useful. Moreover, to go any distance involves a question of food and transportation; so that except at times of truancy and wanderlust, or when he is away on some baseball or other expedition, the street inevitably claims him.
Bounce Ball with Wall as Base
Property is safe
Bounce Ball with Steps as Base
Windows in danger
And in the third place, just because this playground is so natural and so inevitable, he becomes attached to it. It is the earliest, latest, and greatest influence in his life. Long before he knew his alphabet it began to educate him, and before he could toddle it was his nursery. Every possible minute from babyhood to early manhood is spent in it. Every day, winter and summer, he is here off and on from early morning till 10 o’clock at night. It gives him a training in which school is merely a repressive interlude. From the quiet of the class room he hears its voice, and when lessons are over it shouts a welcome at the door. The attractions that it offers ever vary. Now a funeral, now a fire; “craps” on the sidewalk; a stolen ride on one of Death Avenue’s freight trains; a raid on a fruit stall; a fight, an accident, a game of “cat”—always fresh incident and excitement, always nerve-racking kaleidoscopic confusion.