How City Kids Used to Play on the Streets of New York
Key takeaways
- Photojournalists worked out of their cars, and, at the end of the day, brought their film back to the office to be developed under the eye of the photo editor at the time, a hard-nosed woman named Susan Welchman.
- The photographer Martha Cooper was a staffer at the Post at the time.
- In my mind, the archetypal vision of street play in New York comes from the opening of the Spike Lee film “Crooklyn,” which shows an idyllic afternoon of hopscotch, jumping rope, and spinning tops.
Photographs by Martha Cooper Save this story Save this story Save this story Save this story In the late nineteen-seventies and early eighties, photographers for the New York Post were sent scuttling around the city, loaded down with rolls of film, to look for a lot of different things: politics, sport, sometimes art, and, because it was the Post, mostly crime and celebrity. Photojournalists worked out of their cars, and, at the end of the day, brought their film back to the office to be developed under the eye of the photo editor at the time, a hard-nosed woman named Susan Welchman. In between assignments, they tried to take what were called weather shots, which were typically photos of the actual weather. Snow, sun, rain. Someone holding up an umbrella, or walking sadly along in the cold. They ran feature-size if the paper needed to fill a page.
The photographer Martha Cooper was a staffer at the Post at the time. She had moved to New York a few years earlier, into a city on the brink of bankruptcy. It was the New York of headlines like “FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD,” where more people were moving out than moving in. Cooper worked a lot on the Lower East Side. When her photos came out of the darkroom—a process that the staff called souping—her weather shots often featured abandoned lots, trash and rubble, and scenes of children playing and passing the time outside.
Cooper, who is now best known as a groundbreaking photographer of New York’s graffiti, expanded on those photos for a series called “Street Play,” which is currently on display at the Bronx Documentary Center, as part of a retrospective of her work. In my mind, the archetypal vision of street play in New York comes from the opening of the Spike Lee film “Crooklyn,” which shows an idyllic afternoon of hopscotch, jumping rope, and spinning tops. The children of Cooper’s photos play with bits of scrap wood nailed together. “New York had fallen on hard times,” Cooper told me. “People didn’t really understand why I wanted to come here.” One of her photos shows a trio of young kids crouched around carefully assembled bottles and one plastic tub. She gave it the beautifully depressing caption “Playing with water in bottles.”