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Showing posts from December, 2021

Scaffoldings

I received the Tish Murtha book, “Elswick Kids” a few days ago. In the book is an introduction by Mark Richards, and further along, a picture of several kids climbing up the scaffolding of a building. The scaffolding picture is ebullient. The kids are having a blast; a group of six or so of them are at various stages in their climb up the side of the building having levered boards down in a few places to more easily scale the thing.  Meanwhile, the book’s introduction laments, To those of us who lived through this time the images will look strangely familiar - like a mirror of our own existence for we children who were lucky enough to be born free. and I’ve got to say, in some ways I think kids are still born free, can still play like the kids in this book, but in other ways.. Well, it made me think of our own scaffolding experience a few weeks ago. Plugging away at my standing desk in front of the Old Fed Reserve, I noticed the kid’s feet were no longer on the ground. She’d launc...

Fire Hydrants

Fire hydrants! What are they really for anyway? Are they to put out burning buildings? Firemen speeding to the scene, pivoting a hose into place to extinguish the blaze? Yeah, certainly, they’re good for that.  Are they for opening up to create sprays and puddles for kids to cool down in the summer? Maybe. I mean, I’ve sen pictures of kids doing these sorts of things with fire hydrants. We all have right? All the pictures I’ve seen were old though. Do kids really do that anymore? I dunno. And besides we’re in San Francisco where it rarely gets hot enough for that sort of thing, and when it does—you know, those three days of the year—we’re more of a bus to the beach sort of crowd. What about hydrants as an integral part of a citywide playscape? Oh! Yeah! That’s what I see hydrants used for the most. They’re used to balance on; they’re used as quasi-barstools while kids wait for the bus; and they’re used as platforms to launch onto other makeshift play equipment like... I dunno... Ye...