Re #1:

One hundred and twenty-four years ago. O_o

Re #7:

"So I sez to Mabel I sez to her..."

In the picture of the girl jumping at Coney, I thought maybe that was a half-built Parachute Jump in the background on the left ... but I was off by about 53 years.

Three boys walking near an elephant from the Barnes Circus which is walking down the middle of Atlantic Ave. near Nevins. June 1891.

those fucking hipsters. take themselves too seriously.

http://gothamist.com/2010/01/29/flashback_2.php?gallery0Pic=1#gallery

The Death Of Buster Brown.

www.forgotten-ny.com

Think how far we've come: now the governor's son gets arrested for playing cards on the street!

Do kids in Brooklyn still burn a bunch of Christmas trees in a HUGE bonfire on the sidewalk before Sanitation can take them away? That tradition started with the Dutch.

Do they still make carpet (linoleum) guns that your mother would tell you would "knock your eye out"? (Or zip guns that shot real bullets and could kill you, for that matter?)

Do they still make ice balls that also could knock your eye out? Or play King of the Mountain on tall piles of snow?

Or load socks with chalk on Halloween that would terrorize the adults? Or play stickball or box ball or or curb ball or stoop ball? Or rough tackle but without equipment? Or biffo? Or kings? Or 'hot ass', where if you lost in 'kings', the loser would have a Spaldeen hurled hard at his butt from a close distance?

Or card games like 'knuckles', where the loser would get the edge of a deck of cards slammed down against their knuckles repeatedly.

Do they still make scooters from milk crates and skates?

Or are their newbie Yuppie mothers taking them to bars to disturb drinkers or to soccer practice so that they don't have time for a real childhood?

For more, check out a 1961 recording: When I Was a Boy in Brooklyn by Israel Kaplan, about life on the streets in Brooklyn around the time of WW 1. The games mentioned above are from half a century later, so Kaplan doesn't refer to them.

http://www.folkways.si.edu/albumdetails.aspx?itemid=317

didn't grow up in Brooklyn, and I'm only 27, but we did a lot of those things where I grew up.

we didn't call it "Hot Ass" though, we called it "Butts Up" and I don't know what a Spaldeen ball was - we usually used a Tennis ball or those small handball things.

also - we played "Bloody Knuckles" which was like hot hands but with knuckles. didn't use cards, just our own knuckles.

If you don't mind, where is that approximately that you grew up? I would love to learn the geographic distribution of these childhood games.

A lot of the NY games likely came from the Dutch. Check out this great 450-year old painting by Flemish artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder: Children's Games.

Note how many of the games still existed until very recently.

http://www.mezzo-mondo.com/arts/mm/bruegel/BRP002.html

i grew up in Los Angeles. west l.a. to be more specific.

i could go through them one by one if you'd like.

burning trees - that wouldn't fly in LA, i'll be honest.

we made potato guns, not out of linoleum carpet.

didn't have snow, but we played king of the hill - usually in a playground or a park, sometimes on a parents bed or something like that.

played streetball, played a lot of full-contact football without equipment. no idea what biffo or kings is, but we played "Butts Up" like I said.

like i said - we played "Bloody Knuckles" which is essentially "hot hands" with closed fists. i don't remember any knuckles actually bleeding though. swollen, maybe.

we had skateboards - it was LA in the 80s and 90s. never had to make anything like that.

Amazing.

"Kings" was a type of handball game played on a sidewalk against the wall of a building, with any number of players who would each have to stay within the width of the sidewalk 'paver', i.e. the slab of pavement.

The other ball games were variants of baseball played by striking a 'spaldeen' against the curb or stoop. (Spaldeen' was Brooklynese for a highly resilient rubber ball (like a superball) made by Spaulding. I bet a lot of these games stopped when Spaulding stopped making that rubber ball.

There was also punchball, just like stickball, another baseball variation, again with a spaldeen that was not hit by a stick, but punched.

Biffo was a prank where one kid would unexpectedly quickly swipe the fingertips against the behind of another kid, which stung. It was more of a bully's prank than an actual game.

I have never seen any of these games played in years and years. Even the classic stickball is just done by old or middle age men, and it is so rare that the papers report it.

Skateboards were definitely cooler than scooters made from milk crates. I guess plastic milk crates prevent that.

I just googled 'potato guns'. Wow, that looks like fun. Linoleum guns were much different. Hard to describe, a complex kind of slingshot that used a long rubberband nailed to a long 2" x 4" to propel very rapidly a one-inch square of linoleum. Ouch!!!

Anyway, thanks for your info. Glad to see somewhere kids still play real kids games and not 'recreation' supervised by parents.

Let's see...

No.

No. (No.)

Yes. Yes.

Dunno. Yes. Yes. Don't know. Don't know. Yes.

Yes.

No.

Sometimes.

Shush! C'mon man, you're gonna give the overgrown man-children in Williamsburg some ideas of how they can continue to not grow up until their late-late 30's!

I can't get over the attire worn by the late 1800's kids! I also just watched Ken Burns' documentary on the building of the Brooklyn Bridge; it's amazing to see photos of men in suits, bowties, and tophats building brick & mortar infrastructure.