SAND MEN.(The Talk of the Town)

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 model catches on, it may herald the return of sand to New York City playgrounds. And this is likely to mean the return of the question that led to the disappearance in the first place: Are those things clean?

An informal survey of parents and nannies at sandboxes across the city finds that people fall into two categories: those who have never thought about how often the sand is cleaned, and those who think about it frequently and don't want to know. "People talk about how rats come at night and use it as a litter box," a woman at Mariner's Playground, in Central Park, said. "I wash my son's hands when he comes out." Another woman recounted a story about friends who found a syringe in a sandbox: "They just packed up and moved out of the city. To Darien, I think."

Bob Redmond, the director of capital projects for the Manhattan division of the Parks Department, is quick to dispel these fears. Not only are the city's sandboxes sifted clean regularly, he said, but every year--or at least every other year--every sand pit in the city is shovelled out and replenished. According to Redmond, the most vulnerable sandboxes are those which are hidden from the street. "If sandboxes are not in protected areas, people run their dogs through them," he said. "You don't want kids to take dog waste and put it in their mouths. They put everything in their mouths." So when the city began refurbishing playgrounds, in the ...