Martha Cooper's 'Street Play' Photos Capture NYC Kids' Inventive Games

A retrospective of photographer Martha Cooper at the Bronx Documentary Center features her series 'Street Play,' documenting children's resourceful play in New York City's abandoned lots during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Cooper, a former New York Post staff photographer, captured kids building go-karts from police barricades, playing 'shooting the pump' with fire hydrants, and crafting toys from discarded crib railings and bottlecaps. The photos, taken on the Lower East Side and other impoverished neighborhoods, show a city in decline where children turned trash into entertainment. Cooper noted that the scenes were fleeting, often disappearing within hours. The exhibition includes images of a go-kart race on the now-demolished West Side Elevated Highway. Local resident Marty Rogers, who grew up in the Bronx in the 1960s, identified games like stickball and skelly that are no longer played. Cooper's work is a poignant record of a bygone New York.