Ahoy again, all. Sorry for the slowdown, but it’s been a busy week at both home and at the office. Also trying to get my ducks in a row in divining the way forward with the book project about Cop Shoot Cop I mentioned a couple of posts back. That will doubtlessly be an ongoing thing for quite some time. Suffice to say, it’s odd to be writing about a New York City band that broke up two decades ago. To my ears, their music still sounds endearingly fresh and entirely distinctive, but the New York City that spawned and inspired them is now a totally different place. It will certainly be a challenge, but I’m greatly looking forward to getting it officially off the ground.
In any case, I spotted the photo below earlier this week, and it immediately resonated with me, so I thought I’d address it here. Click on it to enlarge.
This is an image by photographer Bruce Martin, taken during June of 1985.
Personally speaking, I think it’s a remarkable, beautifully composed photograph no matter how you slice it. I wonder if Martin stood poised waiting for the very precise moment he ended up capturing, of if he just got lucky. There’s so much texture and life in the image, I can’t seem to stop looking at it.
But there are two other reasons why I’m captivated by it.
First and foremost, I was drawn to the photo in that it depicts the Downing Street playground, a little, walled-in plot of play-space where Bleecker Street intersects with Downing Street and Sixth Avenue. It abuts a little circular garden to its north called Winston Churchill Square. The playground is a spot I know quite well, as I used to bring my own children to it on a regular basis.
We never called it The Downing Street Playground, however. My kids referred to it as “The Dinosaur Playground,” as – until five or six years ago, I suppose – there’d been a large, yellow dinosaur sculpture therein that little folks could climb on. That is, of course, until someone decided to bash in that dinosaur’s head for no readily apparent reason. Now, all that remains of the dinosaur are its footprints still etched into the concrete.
Regardless, the Downing Street Playground was a long-time favorite destination, especially after we’d collectively tired of the playgrounds on offer in Washington Square Park (to say nothing of the further flung reaches of Tompkins Square Park). Rivalled only by the more expansive playground at St. Luke’s Place (another staunch favorite), the Downing Street Playground provided a seemingly secluded suggestion of idyllic privacy. It almost looks like a stage-set for a play.
I say “suggestion” as that’s all it was -- and remains. Though walled-in by the hustle and bustle of its abutting streets, this space is by no means cut off from the general public. Quite the deceptive opposite, in fact.
While entering the Downing Street Playground might feel like stepping into an exclusive children’s oasis, it’s prudent to note the homeless population that frequently camps-out on the adjoining grounds of Winston Churchill Square just outside its northern gate. To that same end, at its westerly entrance on Carmine Street, there are some frankly dodgy public restrooms that seem to frequently serve as makeshift accommodations for a coterie of transients. While I don’t harbor a phobic disdain for the homeless, I would maybe think twice before sending my children into those quarters unaccompanied.
Back in the main area of the playground, the fact that the space is set apart from the street makes it attractive for those looking to evade scrutiny. On a few occasions, I have encountered gaggles of truant teens furtively smoking or engaged in illicit trysts within the playground’s walls, fleetingly hidden from view of the seeking eyes of the street.
That didn’t necessarily bother me, but I do take great exception to teenagers loitering on swing-sets inarguably meant for children several years their junior (as sneerily asserted here).
And while I have volumes of photographs of my children happily at play in the Downing Street Playground, my most visceral memory of the place involves an overcast afternoon one Autumn when I brought my little son Oliver. At first, there were only two other individuals in the playground – a young mother and her own little toddler. Oliver and I minded our own business as he happily scampered up and down the curly slide. After several minutes, the energy and the atmosphere in the playground seemed to suddenly change. I looked over at the young mother just as she was trying to catch my eye. At that moment, a portly, disheveled man had entered the playground from the Sixth Avenue gate and stood expectantly just inside the door, his eyes fixed on the young mother and her child. While he didn’t look especially intimidating, his demeanor seemed a bit hard to discern. Then, he started moving intently around the perimeter of the playground.
We hadn’t yet shared a single syllable, but the young mother scooped up her child and moved closer to me as the newcomer started to edge closer to where she’d been standing. In a moment, the visitor had circled around the jungle gyms where we’d been situated and was staring a second go-around, seemingly on some sort of concentric trajectory known only to him. The mother shot me a concerned glance, and we both wordlessly gathered up our kids and made for the exit together. Seeing that we were heading out, the man broke off his circular path and started walking right towards the mother, before stopping in the center and – again – standing dead-still with his eyes locked on her. With my oblivious little Oliver in one arm (he was considerably lighter, then), I held open the heavy, iron gate for the woman’s stroller to squeeze out, trying to assert some calm to the uncomfortable situation. We left the man standing in the middle of the Downing Street Playground, looking out.
That little almost-horror story notwithstanding, I still have nothing but fond associations with the Downing Street Playground as – apologies for getting slavishly melancholy, here -- we don’t seem to go anymore. My children are growing up. At ages 12 and 10, respectively, Charlotte and Oliver have basically graduated out of the playground class. The notion of spending hours on the swings no longer really thrills them. They both have myriad interests and hobbies and favorite activities and gaggles of similarly inclined friends to engage in same with. Their days of going to playgrounds with Daddy are basically over, and they slipped away far too quickly and without a great deal of fanfare. My kids love to go out and explore the great, big world around them, but they no longer feverishly petition to be taken to the playground. And that’s just how it all goes.
Let’s bring back Bruce Martin’s photograph again…
Captured here in 1985, it’s reasonably safe to assume the two children pictured playing in the sprinkler here are now deep into their respective thirties. And they, too, probably have their own very specific and very special memories of playing in the Downing Street Playground. And, as with my own children, there was probably only a relatively brief window of years that they routinely played there before suddenly no longer feeling the desire to. And just like that, their family probably just stopped taking them.
How many generations of children have passed through that playground over the years, each with their own precious memories of it? Sure, some of the details have changed – that jungle gym in the background, for example, was long gone by the time my kids got there – but the place still retains its character, which rendered it immediately recognizable to me when I first spotted Martin's photo of it on the Manhattan Before 1990 page on Facebook.
But there was still one more thing that I was preoccupied by.
Like I said, the jungle gym in the back was long gone when we first started going, but every other detail seemed so familiar but also somehow wrong.
I couldn’t put my finger on it, until –- as with this similar dilemma with a photo of the Stranglers from a couple of years back –- I figured. It out.
The picture is reversed. It should actually look like this….
The area in the background is now where the swings are, and that bench has been ripped out. The sprinkler area is now a few feet to the east. The big tip off was that terrace up top.
Here’s a glimpse of it now, snapped on my way home this evening….
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