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| Street Play, by Martha Cooper |
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Street Play, by Martha Cooper
In another time, in another world—a time when New York City's Lower East side wasn't lined with velvet-roped nightclubs and high-rise condos, but crumbling tenements and tire-strewn lots—in a world where there was no Xbox, no Ipod mini, no cell phones with Tetris—children made the streets of Alphabet City their playground.
Shooting as a staff reporter for the New York Post in the late 1970s, Martha Cooper generally turned to her favorite element of the vivid street life downtown—kids at play. The images in Street Play, set against a backdrop of urban blight, reflect the ingenuity and resourcefulness of children armed with nothing but their imaginations and each other, along with the metal caps off chair legs, a cardboard box, the remnants of a police barricade, and a flock of pigeons in a rooftop aviary. On the stoop or in the abandoned lots between tenement buildings or roofs above, Cooper shows us the hidden clubhouses, chalk masterpieces, deftly improvised stilts and mattress trampolines.
The book also presents the immeasurable dangers facing Cooper's subjects, be it homemade rockets or sketchy fire escapes—famed graffiti artist Carlos (Mare 139) Rodriguez writes in his introduction, “There were times when your kicks or play were not on the streets but five floors up atop a burnt down tenement building rooftop where a myriad of troubles awaited.” But it's the energy and intimacy that shine in these images, and above all it is a testament to the rich culture and street life that existed in that frame of time before urban renewal and gentrification. As Cooper prefaces the work, “All in all it's a change for the better but I haven't seen a child with a go kart or a skelly cap in years.”
(Street Play, Martha Cooper, From Here To Fame, $35)
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