Bronx Public School 67: How School Yards Shape Young Lives

Architects design buildings to house particular functions or activities. A city public school is constructed to gather people in clusters we call class rooms in which the chairs face toward the front blackboard. The corridors facilitate movement between those class rooms and the exits/entrances. They contain clocks so students know the correct time to arrive and depart. Because of those structured designs and together with a little nudging from teachers, students comply with the implied function and do gather in their respective classroom at the specified hour and face forward. This is a controlled environment, it is controlled by the very design of it. The children's behavior is, for the most part, predictable. But that's not the half of what goes on, in and around predictable places, and the other half makes all the difference.

I don't know about you, but I have a lways preferred to be unrestricted, unpredictable and self directed. The corollary also holds. I dislike and function poorly in places where freedom is absent.

Bronx Public School 67 the NY City public elementary school, down the block from the five story walk up apartment building with fire scapes, in which my family lived, was a typical public school building with a very large concrete covered school yard behind the red brick, irregularly U shaped building. The entire expansive school yard was surrounded by a fourteen foot high steel fence that the best athletes among us could readily surmount to retrieve lost balls or just for the hell of it. 

The school yard, not the school, was the center of my life for my teen age years, even after I went off to junior high and then high school. After school hours, a school yard is just a big irregularly shaped open space without furniture, without formal corridors, without clocks and without teacher oversight. You could make it into whatever you wanted it to be. It was, for us, a blank canvas. 

It was a place to meet and hang out. We could play softball and touch football, handball and two and three man basketball weekday afternoons and into the evenings and then again all day weekends. But it was more than those typical sports for it included many informal and made up games. Stick ball and pitching in with broom sticks and spaldines. Off the wall, where you throw a spaldine so it keeps ricocheting against a succession of angular school building walls and fences. The trick was to have the ball travel so erratically that your opponent could not catch it before it reached the ground. The thing is, if you had enough players, you could play any game you want, any time you wanted. 

Then there was the time we discovered an old beat up abandoned jalopy with broken windows and an open rumble seat on the street. We pushed it right into the middle of the school yard where nothing could have looked more out of place and ridiculous. 

It was in the school yard where I first learned how to ride a two wheeler. My so called friend Fernando, the only hispanic in the entire neighborhood, helped me on, gave me a push and it was happening. What a thrill, till I realized he hadn't told me how to stop. In a sense I'm still going, not really looking for the brakes.

And it goes on and on, not only the bike but the creative use of space. This kind of unplanned activity is certainly not limited to school children in school yards: think about people who read in the bathroom or joggers who use streets designed for vehicular traffic as if they were running tracks.

The point of this whole thing is to illustrate that people often use spaces in unintended ways and it can be a good thing. But good things are not guaranteed to last, at least not in exactly the same form. I just googled P.S.67 my old school and came across the following description given more recently.

From the outside, P.S. 67 in the South Bronx looks like a bitter parody of America’s mythic little red schoolhouse. The four-story brick building, barred and begrimed, sits alongside an empty lot strewn with plastic bags, foul rags, and weirdly contorted metal refuse and in front of a vacant “playground” whose concrete surface must be cleared of crack vials periodically so children can improvise their games. Across the street is the boarded-up Happy Land Social Club, where a disastrous flash fire killed 87 people in 1990."

That across the street was where my cousin and other friends once lived.

In addition, the population mix has been drastically changed. All the students are currently hispanic or african american and come from poor families. It would be my guess that their activities in the school yard are no less creative than those I remember and probably more so, even if unrecognizable to me. Creative life goes on and outlives our particular version of youth.