Commercial Recreations in New York

From, Michael M. Davis, Jr, The Exploitation of Pleasure
A Study of Commercial Recreations in New York City
(New York: Department of Child Hygiene of the Russell Sage Foundation, 1911, 3-5.

Read for the author’s nostalgic tone in describing the past. Listen as he identifies a problem and then offers a solution.

Home sweet home! To the well-to-do novel-reader and to our Colonial forefathers “home” meant a house big enough for a family of five, or seventeen, to sleep and eat, work and play in. All the natural activities of life centered themselves about the home, and most could express themselves within its physical limits. Consequently, home was the spiritual center of life, and, particularly for the children and the adolescents, formed most of its circumference as well.

How the city changes all this! The home shrinks to a nest of boxes tucked four stories in the air, or the half of a duplex house huddled upon its neighbors. There is space to sleep and eat, but not to live. The habitation becomes a sleeping box and eating den—too often no more. Specialized industry, the basis of the modern city, makes it possible for large numbers of people to live and support themselves within a restricted area. This crowding of population creates a human pressure under which most of the normal tendencies of life must find new forms or at least new modes of manifestation. This is a result of the mere fact that the physical limits of space fall so far beneath the minimum human demand for self-expression.

When each of ten thousand girls could learn to dance in her own home society might have little concern with the matter; but when no more than ten of those ten thousand are able to learn to dance elsewhere than in academies commercially established and run for profit, the quality of these academies becomes a matter with which the state that cares for its citizens has every need to concern itself. When five hundred boys may vent their energies upon five square miles of hill, wood and greensward around their town we may leave their doings to their parents; when those five hundred must play upon a street a quarter-mile long, crowded with traffic, shops and saloons, the city should, and must, have something to say about the conditions that shall exist on that street. The individual parent is helpless before a condition which may mean the physical and moral destruction of his child.

In a word, recreation within the modern city has become a matter of public concern: laissez faire, in recreation as in industry, can no longer be the policy of the state.

The natural divisions of the Recreation side of life are three: The spontaneous, the communally organized, and the commercially organized. In the large city most of the spontaneous recreation activities must seek some facilities through which to manifest themselves, and these facilities, we observe, must as a rule be provided by the city government, by philanthropic benevolence or by commercial enterprise. The men’s lodge must have its meeting place in saloon or public hall; the boy’s gang must use the street, park or playground; the social circle must go to the settlement or to the recreation center. A hundred activities which in the Fifth Avenue home find their loci in parlor, study, den and garden, must among the mass of the people be somewhere outside the limits of the home. Where outside, is a matter of vital importance to the public welfare.

Thus the spontaneous effort for recreation is thwarted or nullified unless conscious communal or institutional effort steps in. Here the settlements have led the way; public institutions have followed now, all settlements, Young Men’s and Young Women’s Christian Associations, and a large proportion of churches, recognize the public demand, and do the larger part of their social and educational work through the offer to their social and educational work through the offer to their clientele of opportunities for recreation. The municipality, recognizing recreation traditionally in the establishment of parks, first faced the modern problem in relation to the school system; and, in an urgent and militant form, in connection with the playground movement.

In devoting public funds to indoor and outdoor playgrounds, parks, lectures, libraries, museum, recreation centers, vacation schools, music, and popular festivals, civic leaders recognize that the municipality is not only offering its people something of positive value, but is also counteracting influences which are generally detrimental, and against which only the power of the municipality can effectively work. The recreation policy of the modern city, even to the slight extent thus far developed, is twofold: it offers recreation opportunities, and it counteracts certain opportunities already offered. Reformers and legislators are beginning to see that this counteractive effect can best be gained through counter-attraction rather than through the old blue-law policy of repression. Yet, as we shall see, certain types of repressive laws are important factors in a recreation policy.