es and enthusiastic women, with the object of
"obtaining recognition of the necessity for recreation and physical
exercise as fundamental to the moral and physical welfare of the
people." Together with the School Reform Club and the Federation of
Churches and Christian Workers, it maintained a playground on the
up-town West Side where the ball came into play for the first time as a
recognized factor in civic progress. The day might well be kept for all
time among those that mark human emancipation, for it was social reform
and Christian work in one, of the kind that tells.

[Illustration: The East River Park.]

Only the year before, the athletic clubs had vainly craved the privilege
of establishing a gymnasium in the East River Park, where the children
wistfully eyed the sacred grass, and cowered under the withering gaze of
the policeman. A friend whose house stands opposite the park found them
one day swarming over her stoop in such shoals that she could not
enter, and asked them why they did not play tag under the trees instead.
The instant shout came back, "'Cause the cop won't let us." And now even
Poverty Gap is to have its playground--Poverty Gap, that was partly
transformed by its one brief season's experience with its Holy Terror
Park,[35] a dreary sand lot upon the site of the old tenements in which
the Alley Gang murdered the one good boy in the block, for the offence
of supporting his aged parents by his work as a baker's apprentice. And
who knows but the Mulberry Bend and "Paradise Park" at the Five Points
may yet know the climbing pole and the vaulting buck. So the world
moves. For years the city's only playground that had any claim upon the
name--and that was only a little asphalted strip behind a public school
in First Street--was an old graveyard. We struggled vainly to get
possession of another, long abandoned. But the dead were of more account
than the living.

[Footnote 35: The name bestowed upon it by the older toughs before
the fact, not after.]

[Illustration: The Seward Park.]

But now at last it is their turn. I watched the crowds at their play
where Seward Park is to be. The Outdoor Recreation League had put up
gymnastic apparatus, and the dusty square was jammed with a mighty
multitude. It was not an ideal spot, for it had not rained in weeks,
and powdered sand and cinders had taken wing and floated like a pall
over the perspiring crowd. But it was heaven to them. A hundred men and