In the late nineteen-seventies and early eighties, photographers for the New York Post were sent scuttling around the city, loaded down with rolls of film, to look for a lot of different things: politics, sport, sometimes art, and, because it was the Post, mostly crime and celebrity. Photojournalists worked out of their cars, and, at the end of the day, brought their film back to the office to be developed under the eye of the photo editor at the time, a hard-nosed woman named Susan Welchman. In between assignments, they tried to take what were called weather shots, which were typically photos of the actual weather. Snow, sun, rain. Someone holding up an umbrella, or walking sadly along in the cold. They ran feature-size if the paper needed to fill a page.
The photographer Martha Cooper was a staffer at the Post at the time. She had moved to New York a few years earlier, into a city on the brink of bankruptcy. It was the New York of headlines like “FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD,” where more people were moving out than moving in. Cooper worked a lot on the Lower East Side. When her photos came out of the darkroom—a process that the staff called souping—her weather shots often featured abandoned lots, trash and rubble, and scenes of children playing and passing the time outside.
Cooper, who is now best known as a groundbreaking photographer of New York’s graffiti, expanded on those photos for a series called “Street Play,” which is currently on display at the Bronx Documentary Center, as part of a retrospective of her work. In my mind, the archetypal vision of street play in New York comes from the opening of the Spike Lee film “Crooklyn,” which shows an idyllic afternoon of hopscotch, jumping rope, and spinning tops. The children of Cooper’s photos play with bits of scrap wood nailed together. “New York had fallen on hard times,” Cooper told me. “People didn’t really understand why I wanted to come here.” One of her photos shows a trio of young kids crouched around carefully assembled bottles and one plastic tub. She gave it the beautifully depressing caption “Playing with water in bottles.”
A lot of the photos seem less like kids at play and more like kids at scavenge. They make worlds out of bed frames, bottlecaps, and broken wood. In one of my favorite images, six boys stand around, having a great time, holding what initially appear to be balusters detached from the handrail of some grand staircase. When I asked her about the photo, Cooper told me that the railings had actually come from a discarded crib, which was just as unexpected, if more poetically loaded. “That was just the Lower East Side,” she said. “It was full of abandoned lots, and the lots were full of trash.” In another photo, the chassis of a go-kart is constructed from a police barricade.
Cooper’s work recalls classic Tenement-era images of city dwellers making the most use of the city around them. One picture, of a child bouncing on a trashed mattress, has the verve and frozen dynamism of a Simone Biles action shot. Cooper catches the child in a full flip, folded like a pin, as if he’s just rebounded from a sprung floor. I was curious how much Cooper knew about these children and what their lives were like. She told me they were mostly the children of recent immigrants and “working families who were struggling to make a living.”
As we walked around the gallery, Marty Rogers, a local who helps run a community garden next door, wandered in and shook Cooper’s hand. Rogers, who wore a blue Yankees cap and cargo shorts, had grown up in the Bronx in the sixties, playing many of the same street games. “This was our life, man,” he said, pointing to a photograph of a boy holding a hollow tin can over a roaring fire hydrant. “We called that shooting the pump. You tried to control it like a rodeo.” They played it on sweltering summer days. “When it was hot, hot, hot, somebody opened the pump,” Rogers explained. “You tried to hold it as long as you could. You could reach the second floor of a school with the arc.”
Right outside, Rogers said, had been what was called a playstreet. Some days, the police closed the block off from cars, and children came out to play stickball, and skelly, a game reminiscent of marbles. “These are games kids don’t play anymore!” Rogers said.
Earlier, I’d asked Cooper what her favorite picture was in the series. It was one she’d taken of a go-kart race down an abandoned stretch of the West Side Elevated Highway. Two groups of kids are screeching down the road. Other boys are sitting on the guardrail, or strolling and watching from a distance. It’s otherwise empty—just the kids and the road. Like almost all of Cooper’s photos, the scene is fleeting, a remnant of a New York that no longer exists. That highway was demolished, and, though Cooper saved one of the go-karts, and exhibited it at the Museum of the City of New York, she wasn’t able to keep it. In the seventies, when Cooper took these photos, she already knew that what she was seeing was temporary. “I would drive around Alphabet City, and I would see these things,” she said. “But they might last for a couple of hours. If I saw it one day, generally, it wouldn’t be there the next.”
