Boston's Innovative Playgrounds Exemplify New Kinds Of Play

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• "The Boston area has become a hotbed for innovation in playground design. And the Kemp Playground—which opened in 2009 with a island adventure theme featuring a dragon-headed sailing ship (Ryerson reconstructed the boat, but didn’t carve the head), huts, slides built into hills, climbing ropes and water troughs—is a national landmark of the new art of public play."

• "It has never been easy to be poor and a child. This was no less true in Boston’s North End at the end of the 19th century, when the streets teemed with dangerous traffic and open space could feel practically non-existent. The plight of the neighborhood’s immigrant families touched the city’s philanthropic types, and in 1885, one charitable group decided to offer something of an experiment to the local children: a pile of sand, deposited for the summer in the yard of a chapel on Parmenter Street. Little did any of them know how much it would change the experience of childhood in America."

• "It’s still morning, but someone has already started a fire in the tin drum in the corner, perhaps because it’s late fall and wet-cold, or more likely because the kids here love to start fires."

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