This 6 minute documentary – originally produced for MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour in 1984 —  features a photographic project by Martha Cooper who began driving around the Lower East Side as a photographer for the New York Post back in 1977.   Her photographs reveal a neighborhood  of stressed 6 story walk-ups, housing projects, boarded up buildings and vacant lots strewn with garbage.   But that’s not the subject.

“I began concentrating on what kids were doing when adults weren’t around.” She  discovered a complex and fanciful world of children’s play there.

“I began to see all these creative things that kids were doing in the streets and empty lots with minimal materials.  They proved you didn’t need complicated playgrounds and  a lot of expensive toys to have fun.  The first toy that got me thinking was an airplane made from two pieces of found wood and a nail.”

Cooper documents handmade toys, “houses,” and all sorts of fun stuff.  “I became interested in the fantasizing that kids do with minimal props and how they constructa life apart from adults.  I was interested in this fantasy play rather than games with rules.”

Cooper also documented kids as urban naturalists…catching flies with found bottles in a vacant lot. “They were enjoying this as much as somebody  catching butterflies in a country field,” says Cooper.

Cooper’s lens also captures dangerous play — jumping off fire escapes into a pile of mattresses, or scaling high metal fences, and riding the backs of buses called “hitchhiking buses.”    “I was always attracted to the things kids would do that there mother’s wouldn’t approve of.”

While many of these activities on the Lower East Side could be considered universal for kids there’s one activity that is peculiar to New York and that’s the opened fire hydrant in the summer.  “While the fire department offers to put a device on it that can control the pressure, the kid don’t want that.  They prefer to take a tin can and punch the bottom out, then use it as a way to control the water.”

Cooper claims that when adults see these photos they feel nostalgic.  “What happens is that adults forget this stuff — Peter Pan and Wendy.  Instead, kids folklore is passed on from child to child…mostly these kids really know how to have fun.”

Black and white photos by Martha Cooper