Where have all the street games gone?
The strategic sliding of bottle caps across a city street known as Skelly, the heroic dodging and weaving of Ringoleavio, the fast-moving batting of Boxball — these and other classic street games are all but extinct in New York.
There was a time when avenues were the playgrounds of choice for city kids, and their games were homegrown variations of popular national pastimes, or modern versions of childhood classics that have been around since the Roman Empire. It was the essence of an urban childhood.
Not anymore.
Even stickball, the quintessential New York street game, is in danger of dying out, says Bronx-born Matt Levy.
“I loved my childhood, and I grew up playing these games. Before my grandfather died, about 20 years ago, we had a conversation once about our childhoods, and I realized my grandpa in the 1920s and 1930s was doing the same things I did. All these games carried through,” said Levy, whose family comes from the Pelham Parkway area.
The story of New York’s street games — and the shifting cultural patterns that have caused their demise — is the topic of Levy’s new documentary, “New York Street Games.”
Through archival footage of stoopball and stickball games, black-and-white photos of hopscotch, handball and tag, Levy resurrects a long-gone New York that nobody under age 35 is likely to remember — the halcyon days when games weren’t something that adults had to manage.
That kind of freewheeling playing is all but outlawed now. Fears of injuries, fights, or inappropriate touching have led some schools across the country to do away with rougher games, like Red Rover, and even tag. Since 1995, there’s even been a program, “Peaceful Playgrounds,” that some states have adopted to ensure play periods remain mild and sedate.
But along the way, kids have lost something they need — freedom to explore, and freedom to play.
Without those elements, Levy believes, today’s kids are missing a chance to develop vital problem-solving skills, social skills, even language skills.
“Sure, there’s a risk in sending your kids outside,” Levy said. “But it’s no more dangerous than it was 30 years ago. It’s just our perception that the world is more dangerous. Parents today have a lot more information about a lot of things. Maybe 30 years ago you didn’t know there was a sex offender living down the block. They were there, you just didn’t focus as much on it.”
LEVY’s 76-minute documentary opens with the words: “Before cellphones, BlackBerries and Facebook . . . before a neighbor’s doorstep required an invitation . . . before ‘playdates,’ there was play.”
Back then — according to the star-studded cast of middle-aged New Yorkers who appear in Levy’s documentary — play could mean a wild game of Steal the Bacon (two teams competing to grab an object from a circle), a frantic bout of I Declare War (a primitive version of dodge-ball) or even a bruising round of Johnny-on-the-Pony (which in Brooklyn was known as Buck Buck).
Johnny-on-the-Pony has actually been around for millennia — it’s derived from a Roman pastime known as Mullhorse. It requires one team to line up in a row, bent over from the waist, while members of the other team jump on their backs one by one until the combined weight forces everyone to fall to the ground.
It was rough and raucous, but it had many fans — among them C. Everett Koop, former US surgeon general for Ronald Reagan, who grew up in Depression-era Brooklyn.
“I was a heavy kid, so I was valuable for that game,” Koop recalls.
“People would throw elbows,” said New Jersey-born actor Joey “Pants” Pantoliano, who also had fond memories of Johnny-on-the-Pony. The way he describes it, it’s the type of game that would get outlawed by overprotective parents and administrators today.
“Oh, that game is dead today, dead. Nobody plays it anymore,” said Levy. “We’re a litigious society, everyone is looking to sue each other for something.”
Another victim of the nanny state is Ringoleavio, a hard-core type of hide-and-seek that sends one team of kids hunting for another — in the old days that chases stretched from city streets to city roofs, said Koop.
“We figured if we had so much fun playing on the streets, why not play on the roofs? We got there by climbing the heavy metal fire escapes in the back,” Koop said, noting that nothing like that would be tolerated today.
For Queens comedian Ray Romano, stickball was king.
Romano used to play in front of his old school, PS 144, with his best buddy.
“He liked the Yankees and I liked the Mets,” said Romano. “We would play entire games, just the two of us, between the Yankees and the Mets. We’d go through the entire batting rotation. If a left-handed batter came up, we’d bat left-handed. If he started lighting me up, I’d change pitchers.”
In the days before video games and computers, Romano said, “We had to be our own Nintendo.”
Not everybody in the city was a fan of stickball, which involved whacking a bouncy rubber orb — called a “spaldeen” in New York because the local accent corrupted the Spalding brand name — with a sawed off broom or mop handle.
Cops who spotted kids playing the game in the street confiscated the bats — sometimes breaking the sticks across their knees. Kids became adept at hiding the sticks underneath cars or outrunning policemen when squad cars turned down their street.
“There was always someone watching out the window,” said actor Hector Elizondo, who narrated “New York Street Games.”
Elizondo, who grew up on 107th Street in Manhattan, had such prowess with a bat that he was scouted by pro ball teams in his high school days. “Everybody knew everybody back then. The kids were part of the community.”
BUT things have radically changed since then — so much so that younger New Yorkers have no memories of playing in city streets, and only know games like stickball and stoopball from the movies or the foggy reminisces from their parents.
Since the 1970s, the area outside the home that parents are comfortable letting children play unsupervised has shrunk by 90%, according to Richard Louv, author of “Last Child in the Woods,” a book exploring the growing disconnect between kids and nature.
Louv cites numerous studies that show “stranger-danger” is a major factor in parents’ refusal to allow children to roam — yet national statistics show that child abductions are no higher since 1970 than the decades before. Consistently, child abduction rates hover around 100 a year.
There’s been a corresponding decline in outdoor activities since the 1970s, Louv writes. Bike riding is down 31% since 1995, according to American Sports Data, a research firm. Only 6% of children ages nine to 13 play outside on their own, Louv writes. Kids, especially those in low-income communities, are spending 40 hours a week with electronic media, according to the Kaiser Foundation.
“I worry that we’re going to be a society in 50 years of computer kids, people who are desensitized to other human beings,” said Levy. “I love my BlackBerry, but if I start using technology to talk to you on a full-time basis, that’s a problem.”
Levy took four years to piece together his documentary — which will premiere at the Village East Theater in Manhattan on May 20. The film was financed out of Levy’s pocket and with loans from friends and family, he said.
“It was a real labor of love. It wasn’t a shoestring production, but definitely low budget,” said producer Craig Lifschutz, whose Bronx roots got him interested in backing the film.
“My dad is from The Bronx and he taught me all these games. I have kids, and looking at the games children play now got me thinking about the stories my dad and uncles would tell me, so different, about their childhood.
“There’s definitely more options for kids today, things for them to do that didn’t exist before, but I’ve seen a fair amount of evidence that If you take kids today and just show them the games, they think they’re fun and they play them,” Lifschutz said.
In fact, evidence shows that many of the games played by the likes of Levy and Whoopi Goldberg — who shows up in the documentary to share her childhood memories of playing stoopball in Chelsea — are the same or very similar to those painted by Pieter Bruegel in his 16th-century oil painting “Children’s Games.”
In his 1560 masterpiece, the Renaissance painter from the Netherlands has children tumbling through city streets — sans adult supervision — playing things like Get the Hat, which in modern times is known as Steal the Bacon.
In the 1940s, photojournalist Arthur Leipzig started working on his first photo essay — an exploration of how many children in New York’s five boroughs still played some of Bruegel’s games.
Back then, the connections were startling, he said.
“The streets were like a second home to kids, especially in the poorer neighborhoods where apartments were too small to socialize in,” he said. “I found them playing the same games found in Europe hundreds of years ago.”
But the vibrant street culture Leipzig captured is now gone.
“I always look for kids playing when I walk around. The last time I saw a group was maybe 10 years ago, on a block in the 90s, just past Park Avenue,” said Leipzig.
“I’m sure kids are busy now watching TV, but that’s a lonely thing. In my day, you had a group of friends and we played,” he said. “I’m sure I sound like an old fogey, but it was nice.”
There are still a few places where street games can be found in New York City, but it’s more a product of adult nostalgia than spontaneous youthful playing.
In The Bronx, along a stretch of road known as Stickball Boulevard, fungo stickball is played nearly every weekend in summertime.
“We love stickball, most of us grew up playing it and we want to pass it on to our kids, and other kids in the community,” said Richard Marrero, head of the Emperor Stickball League, which hosts the games.
The league has been around for 22 years, and flourished after former Mayor Ed Koch agreed to close Stickball Boulevard to traffic on weekends so teams could play.
One member, Richard Mojica, has branched out, teaching the art of street games to local kids through a program called Weeds and Seeds that gets federal funding.
“Up here we’re dealing with gangs, with constant threats to kids’ safety. They get stuck inside, playing video games. These kids can’t believe the fun I can teach them just with a rubber ball,” Mojica said. “But to do that, we need to bring street games back.”