{"id":848272,"date":"2026-06-06T10:24:13","date_gmt":"2026-06-06T10:24:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/848272\/"},"modified":"2026-06-06T10:24:13","modified_gmt":"2026-06-06T10:24:13","slug":"how-city-kids-used-to-play-on-the-streets-of-new-york","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/848272\/","title":{"rendered":"How City Kids Used to Play on the Streets of New York"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"paywall\">Cooper\u2019s work recalls classic Tenement-era images of city dwellers making the most use of the city around them. One picture, of a child bouncing on a trashed mattress, has the verve and frozen dynamism of a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/sports\/sporting-scene\/the-international-federation-of-gymnastics-needs-to-keep-up-with-simone-biles\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Simone Biles action shot<\/a>. Cooper catches the child in a full flip, folded like a pin, as if he\u2019s just rebounded from a sprung floor. I was curious how much Cooper knew about these children and what their lives were like. She told me they were mostly the children of recent immigrants and \u201cworking families who were struggling to make a living.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"paywall\">As we walked around the gallery, Marty Rogers, a local who helps run a community garden next door, wandered in and shook Cooper\u2019s hand. Rogers, who wore a blue Yankees cap and cargo shorts, had grown up in the Bronx in the sixties, playing many of the same street games. \u201cThis was our life, man,\u201d he said, pointing to a photograph of a boy holding a hollow tin can over a roaring fire hydrant. \u201cWe called that shooting the pump. You tried to control it like a rodeo.\u201d They played it on sweltering summer days. \u201cWhen it was hot, hot, hot, somebody opened the pump,\u201d Rogers explained. \u201cYou tried to hold it as long as you could. You could reach the second floor of a school with the arc.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Cooper\u2019s work recalls classic Tenement-era images of city dwellers making the most use of the city around them.&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":848273,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5122],"tags":[5229,7667,405,403,5226,5225,5228,5227,236257,346727,6135,27029,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":["post-848272","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-america","tag-childhood","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-newyork","tag-newyorkcity","tag-ny","tag-nyc","tag-playing","tag-retrospectives","tag-streets","tag-trash","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116702679657928121","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/848272","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=848272"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/848272\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/848273"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=848272"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=848272"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=848272"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}