July 26, 2007 | Read Time: 2 minutes
Photograph by Robert Sabo/New York Daily News
Summer means play time — and, thanks to one New York charity’s efforts, the fun spills onto the city’s streets.
The Play Street program, run by the Police Athletic League, organizes recreational activities for kids at 110 sites throughout the city’s five boroughs. The program offers children safe places to play on closed-off streets, public playgrounds, and city Housing Authority property.
The roots of Play Street reach back almost a century to 1914, when John Sweeney, captain of the city’s police department, decided too many kids were on city streets with too little to do. He started organizing sports programs, and the effort grew.
Play Street sites are open eight hours a day on weekdays for seven weeks during the summer, and cost $1.4-million annually to maintain. The program is supported by a mix of government, foundation, and corporate grants.
The Play Street program has a presence in neighborhoods — such as Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant — where children have traditionally had few organized alternatives during the summer, but that’s changing, says Felix A. Urrutia Jr., the Police Athletic League’s executive director.
More nonprofit groups are offering services in those neighborhoods, and many areas of the city are gentrifying, says Mr. Urrutia, with some newer residents now objecting to closing public streets. So Play Street uses more playgrounds and Housing Authority properties, he says, but maintains a smattering of street sites.
Mr. Urrutia says the need for safe, supervised summer fun is still strong in the city. Each site draws roughly 200 children during the season for a mix of sports, arts and crafts, old-fashioned chalk-on-the-sidewalk hopscotch games — and some celebratory romping through the cool spray of the city’s fire hydrants, which are opened to kick off the program each year.
“The real attraction and the real purpose is to be with kids, to have them not on the streets by themselves,” Mr. Urrutia says.
