How many times have you played street bocce or jumped off the dock for a dip in the Hudson?
Pouring through some of the 180,000 hi-res digital images just released to the public domain by the New York Public Library, we were especially fascinated by all the images of recreation and leisure. We tend to relate the Lower East Side’s history to, say, Jacob Riis’s photos of grungy, overcrowded tenements, but over and over photos jumped out from the archives showing kids from the turn of the century swinging in new playgrounds, reading books at Hamilton Fish Park, or playing a massive game of London Bridge in a back alley. We’ve gathered some of them in the slideshow below.
