How LA's first playgrounds brought respite to working class children

It was noon at Playground Number One in Los Angeles on a crisp October day in 1905. As schoolchildren swamped L.A.’s first public playground, on Violet Street in what is now the Arts District, a reporter for the LA Times took in the joyous scene.

“The playground is overflowing now with small humanity,” he wrote. “Swings are going, seesaws are elevating shrieking little girls to dizzy heights, small boys and big boys are almost bursting their throats with the pent-up glee they have been saving all morning, and innumerable kindergarteners and smaller babies are falling into the fishponds and tumbling about in the sand.”

While this is a common sight to Angelenos today, in the Edwardian era, public playgrounds were not only a novelty, they were a revolutionary act.

On Sept. 13, 1904, Los Angeles became a leader in the “playground movement,” when the city established the first municipal Playground Department in the country. “The test of whether a civilization will live or die,” proclaimed the department’s motto, “is the way it spends its leisure.”

"Americanizing" citizens

As Dominick Cavallo notes in Muscles and Morals: Organized Playgrounds and Urban Reform: 1880-1920 , the very idea of “modern adolescence” was a new concept to most 19th century Americans. In a country shaped by puritan ideals, maxims like “those who play when they are young will play when they are old” held strong.

But progressive reformers in the Northeast increasingly saw childhood play as a primary part of physical and social development and as a way to produce hearty “Americanized” citizens. In the early 1890s, Nobel Prize winner, activist, and social worker Jane Addams created a small playground on the grounds of Boston’s Hull House. Other playgrounds were soon created in other Northeastern cities, usually in high-density immigrant communities.

“In the quarter-century between 1885 and 1910, Americans redefined the social and moral implications of traditional child-rearing practices,” Cavallo writes. “In a sense, they rediscovered the child during these years, for the psychological and biological characteristics of this ‘new’ child were radically different from those of his mid-nineteenth century predecessor. “

These ideas quickly made their way out West. In 1897, an Angeleno named Elizabeth Walling advocated in the Los Angeles Times for the city to build an “open air gymnasium,” including a playground for the “poorer classes.”

“For this playground, large, shallow, boarded enclosures of sand are the first requisite,” she wrote. “No elaborate mechanical toy gives greater delight to the average child, rich or poor.”

Women advocates

Women took the lead in the fight for the creation of these new-fangled playgrounds across the country. As Becoming Citizens: The Emergence and Development of the California Women’s Movement notes, these activists were often middle and upper-class white women, who had the privilege and limited power to lobby for societal change.

Arabella Rodman, president of the Los Angeles Civic Association, led the charge. According to Paul R. Spitzzeri of the Homestead Museum, Rodman was a change maker in turn of the century Los Angeles, working with public schools, promoting the celebration of Arbor Day, forming a housing commission, and instituting programs to beautify the city.

Another powerful advocate was Bessie Stoddart, a social worker who worked with immigrant communities and considered playgrounds to be crucial spaces for young Angelenos. “On the playground fair play must be constantly practiced, self-control constantly maintained,” Stoddart stated. “This is the very essence of democracy. For to know how to associate, how to co-operate with one’s fellows is the foundation of our national form of government.”

Along with other progressive allies, Rodman and Stoddart lobbied the L.A. City Council and Mayor’s offices. Newspapers, including the LA Times, began to advocate for playgrounds in the poorer sections of the city. Although their aims were ultimately altruistic, there were disturbing paternalistic, classist, and xenophobic undertones.

“Americanization can take place more rapidly and with less expense on the playground than in most other institutions,” a representative for the mayor’s office noted.

The Los Angeles Times agreed: "It will usually be found that a boy who takes interest in manly outdoor sports is not likely to fall into bad habits, such as cigarette smoking and other practices that produce physical and mental degeneration… The establishment of a public playground is a good idea, from both a moral and hygienic viewpoint, apart from the pleasure which such an indication would afford to thousands of little ones."

Playground Number One

On June 8, 1904, Rodman and Stoddart went with LA City officials, including Parks Department representatives, to scout potential sites for L.A.’s first civic playground. They toured sites in the Seventh and Eighth wards of the city, east of downtown. The teeming area had around 50,000 residents, no public parks within walking distance and poor families who could not afford trolley fare. Children, cramped in small dwellings, had no choice but to play in the streets, an often-dangerous option which reformers feared would lead to “evil habits.”

On July 28, 1904, the finance committee of the L.A. City Council approved the purchase of fourteen lots at the intersection of Violet and Mateo Streets for $12,000. “The Violet street playground was put down in the midst of the storm center of juvenile offense against the law,” the Los Angeles Times reported. “The rough, rowdy youths of the neighborhood left nothing undone which their febrile brains could devise to cause trouble to others and their own undoing.”

Plans for the first L.A. City Playground were now underway. There was more progress on September 13, 1904, when the L.A. City Council passed an ordinance creating the country’s first major Playground Commission. Both Stoddart and Rodman were placed on the commission. The committee would oversee not only the Violet Street playgrounds, but all future public playgrounds in the city.

Using public funds and supported by many local organizations including the Chamber of Commerce, Playground Number One was built remarkably quickly for a public work. It featured a handsome bungalow for an on-site superintendent and his wife, and separate sections for girls and boys. The girls’ section included two giant sandboxes, several seesaws, a fishing pond teeming with goldfish, a summer house for tea parties, a garden, and a May Pole where young girls could fly “around madly in a joyous circle.”

On the boys’ side was an open-air gymnasium (which girls could use on certain days) with equipment including a trapeze, punching bags, showers, and parallel bars. There were also handball courts, seesaws, swings, and basketball courts, as well as other fields for games like softball and football.

Opening ceremony

On June 10, 1905, the first L.A. public playground opened with a rousing ceremony attended by Stoddart, Rodman, Mayor Owen McAleer, and playground superintendent C.B. Raitt. After the customary speeches, hundreds of local children participated in basketball games, handball, a gymnastics competition, and a jiu jitsu exhibition by the Central Japanese Club.

Unlike most playgrounds today, play was often highly structured and organized by male and female attendants in charge of the children. It quickly became a vital community center for children in the area and beyond, with the LA Evening Express claiming that an estimated 32,000 children had visited during its first six months.

Children and teenagers of all ages made the park their own. A clubhouse with a library was soon added, and the playground buzzed with activity. Teen girls formed a club where they met to play games like charades and sew. Others planted gardens, taking the fruit and vegetables they grew home. Christmas celebrations included a huge tree and performances by a local children’s choir.

In a cruel segregated age, the playground was open to all races and nationalities at all times. On July 4, 1906, the Los Angeles Herald listed the number of different nationalities who had children participating in the track and field events.

“In the evening the children took their fireworks to the playground and set them off,” the Herald reported. “Several hundred children residing in the neighborhood of the Violet playground spent the entire day yesterday enjoying the innocent amusements provided. No one among their number was hurt or burned and everyone had, as one of them expressed it, ‘just a dandy time.’”

Playground Number Two

In 1907, Playground Number Two opened in Echo Park (one of the few early LA playgrounds to still exist). At the dedication, one speaker said: “Playgrounds stand for good citizens. They are little republics, and the training a child receives in them is effective throughout life.” Soon integrated girls’ and boys’ teams from these two playgrounds were competing against each other in basketball games covered enthusiastically by the Los Angeles Herald .

According to Survey LA, other city playgrounds soon followed, including the Solano Canyon playground, Slauson Playground in Southeast LA, and Hazard Playground between Boyle and Lincoln Heights.

These accomplishments led the LA Times to brag that Los Angeles led all the West in playground development. By 1920, there were 22 playgrounds, not including Playground Number One, which closed that year due to increased industrialization in the area. But the movement continued to grow. By 1942, there were 52 playgrounds in LA.

Today there are hundreds of playgrounds throughout Los Angeles. Quite a difference from 120 years ago, when a space where kids could just be kids was still a novel dream.