New York slum children will escape zip gangs with rooftop baseball diamonds
The April, 1957 issue of Mechanix Illustrated predicted that New York's slum children would escape "gang wars, fiercely fought with knives and zip-guns" by moving to high rooftop baseball diamonds:
PLAYGROUNDS IN THE SKY (Apr, 1957)
There, a few yards from the tenements where they live, on their very roofs, in fact, is a regulation-size baseball diamond with real springy turf! But the kids aren’t interested just now—they played ball all afternoon. Instead, they enter the locker room and in a few minutes are cavorting noisily in a big, broad and very cool swimming pool. Afterwards, they troop onto the ball field, where chairs have been set up, and watch a movie under the stars.What’s it all about? “This magic land for kids doesn’t exist in my city,” you say. No, it doesn’t—yet!
But it darn well could! It could exist in your town and in hundreds of other communities throughout the nation. Every city could construct huge, all-encompassing playgrounds and recreation centers, using the enormous, readily available space now going completely to waste on the rooftops of their congested areas!
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http://www.diggers.org/ringolevio.htm
Where will our solar panels go?
why not open up the golf courses to children
Not big fans of sunlight, I guess...
Some NYCity schools have rooftop exercise yards. Basketball courts at most.
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This all breaks down once those gang kids learn how to climb stairs.
No one would dare bring a knife or a zip gun to one of those. They'd all leave them at street level.
Do I hear Infrastructure Grants? Yoo Hoo? Any civil-minded construction contractors feel like giving thousands of people JOBS?
ANYONE???
The New Yorker artist and humorist Bruce McCall based his past-futuristic visual style on pictures exactly like this one.
Frinstance,
http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2006/09/19/dining/20diningcover.1.html
You know, most municipal rooftops that I've seen are pretty cluttered up already with antennae, satellite dishes, heating exhaust vents, etc. Just because you can't see it from the ground doesn't mean that the rooftops collectively contain an "enormous, readily available space now going completely to waste".
(Of course, that didn't prevent us from finding a place to play hackey sack on the rooftop of the science building when I was in university, but that could be a pretty smelly affair sometimes when the chemistry labs' fume hoods were in operation.)
Plus I'd hate to be the architect who gets informed that the municipality wants to retrofit their building to support a giant swimming pool on the top floor. I mean, it's just water. How heavy can it be?
This is actually a playground on the roof of a trash and water treatment facility...
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=New+York+City&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=46.946584,93.164063&ie=UTF8&ll=40.825274,-73.956227&spn=0.005513,0.011373&t=h&z=17
and
http://nysparks.state.ny.us/parks/info.asp?parkID=75
Baseball diamonds? Meh. I want to see a skate-park on every roof with ramps that allow the more daring kids to leap from building to building. Now that's the city of the future...
there is an unregarded world in your urban core. When your work takes you to the rooftops you suddenly realize that the entire ground level footprint you are so intimately familar with is mirrored in the negative. As suggested, the urge to leap like Mario wells up when you are confronted by the reality of this unused and invisible real estate.
#1 Antinious FTW.
Having said that - I've seen slummy buildings that can't even maintain their windows and doors to proper codes. You think they're going to keep a baseball diamond well maintained? Who's going to pay the guy to mow the grass on that "real springy turf?" Never mind the maintenance a frikkin' SWIMMING POOL requires.
That's funny, I went to high school in the city and we had a volleyball court on the roof. We did lose some balls...
Damnit, Antinous, I had my "don't chase that pop fly" joke all cued up. :P
There are also soccer fields on the roof Pier 40. Soccerballs flying onto the west side highway is common. Consider too the internet boom days when doubleclick had basketball courts on their roof. Hell i'm just happy with a cpl of lawn chairs on the roof of my apt building in bklyn. the bar doesnt have to be so high.
When those balls fall 20 storeys down, and hit the windshield of a school bus carrying 30 children ...
I am reminded of David Wingrove's "Chung Kuo" books. Just keep stacking buildings, and let the lower levels rot.
#9: Get out of my head. Everything but the gyroplane.
I knew a few schools in NYC that have rooftop recreation and it always looks like a good idea—I was envious of schools that had rooftop cages for basketball courts—until you realize how weird it all is... And it's just not the same feeling.
There are plenty of rooftop playgrounds on NYC schools. Generally they're caged over with chain link or something similar, as raining athletic equipment is painful.
Is that a SWIMMING POOL on the roof, overhanging a large expanse of air above a smaller building??!!
Now THAT'S engineering!
j. mascis: a true visionary.
What happens if it rains? Or snows? i.e. inclement weather. Is there a "Winter Solution"?
Cuts off sunlight to the buildings below, which would just be depressing in the summer, but make things wretchedly colder in the wintertime.
No like.
There are a few rooftop rec areas in the world, but most of them are privately-held. The half-hearted efforts at public installations is likely a result of the same attitudes that you see in this thread. People don't want this kind of thing to succeed. They actually prefer living in the boring, crappy environment they're used to.
I guess the gang kids will be too busy playing basketball at ground level to bother the rooftop baseball players.
Honestly, though, I avoided bullies by not going to where the baseball was being played. Or basketball. Or football. Or etc.