SAND MEN.(The Talk of the Town)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 29-JAN-07

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COPYRIGHT 2007 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

A couple of weeks ago, the Parks Department announced that the architect David Rockwell had designed an innovative playground to be constructed near the South Street Seaport. In the days that followed, the Times published five articles on the subject; one front-page headline read, "NEW YORK TRIES TO THINK OUTSIDE THE SANDBOX." Yet one of the more radical features of the new playground is that there actually is a sandbox--in fact, an entire "zone of sand." Sandboxes have disappeared from city-run playgrounds slowly, and many people are unaware that there are only fifty-two left. (In the nineteen-seventies, there were as many as eight hundred.) If the Rockwell...

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