On a recent sunny afternoon, a 6-year-old boy picked his way through a scrap heap on Governors Island.
It contained old doors, shredded lawn chairs, a decrepit exercise bike and a bundle of metal crutches. At the center were a pile of tires and a few dozen planks, balanced precariously against a spiral column, like pickup sticks.
As the boy, Zayne Cowie, climbed up the pile of tires, he passed an old car seat, a painted canvas. When he reached the highest tire, he ducked between two planks and kept going. As his mother watched in silence, he pulled himself onto the top of the column. He crouched and waved. Then he shouted.
“How am I going to get down?”
This was not just any scrap heap awaiting a garbage truck or a bonfire, but the raw materials for Play:ground, an adventure playground opening this weekend on a long strip of lawn behind Building 12, a stately brick structure that once served as officers’ quarters for the Army.
Unlike conventional playgrounds, adventure playgrounds, which date to the 1940s, require only scavenged junk, some adults to look on and a fence — as much to keep parents out as to keep materials in. The children do the rest.
[For more of this story, written by Annie Correal, go to http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05...-adventure.html?_r=1]
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