Evening Republican, Volume 15, Number 4, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 January 1911 — Children Who Have No Place to Play [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

Children Who Have No Place to Play

MTSW YORK. —Almost the first thing a Is New York boy learns Is to hate the law. He soon finds that if he is going to keep on the absolutely safe side of It there won’t be much left for him to do but twirl his thumbs and kick his heels. If he's a tenement youngster he cant play In the house. Chasing the devil around the stump would be a roving life compared with the possibilities of play there. Anyway, when he's too big for hla mother to. step over him with ease if not grace she turns him out. First to the fire escape—his porch —from which he Is apt to take a short cut over the railing to the pavement below. There his broken and bruised little body is a witness, sometimes llv-

ing, sometimes dead, to the disadvantages of fire escapes as playgrounds. Oue family last summer lost two children that way. Dozens of others every year die or are crippled by falling from the roofs and windows and fire escapes to which the Pied Piper, Love of Play, has lured them. <slher dozens and scores and even hundreds die In the streets while plucking perilously at pleasure. New York kills so many more children than dogs in Its thoroughfares that It could get out a new version of an old phrase and talk of dying "like a child In the streets.” Even If the child succeeds in dodging death he has almost as hard work to keep out of the clutches of the law. The streets are his only playground and yet every inch of them and of the house walls flanking them is mortgaged for some pther purpose. The roadway belongs to traffic, the sidewalk to pedestrians. Even the air must be treated gingerly, for if it Is rent by the howls .of gleeful youth somebody's ears may suffer.