Opinion

May 26, 2023

Opinion

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Photographs by Adrian Eli René

Text by Airea D. Matthews

Mr. René is a photographer based in Philadelphia. Ms. Matthews is the poet laureate of Philadelphia.

Where can our children safely play?

In big cities, dense with buildings and people, bustling with traffic, this question has beleaguered generations of parents. And it was one I asked myself when I moved back with my four children in 2017 to Philadelphia after two decades away.

I was happy to return to the city to start a new job teaching poetry at Bryn Mawr College, but my children — especially the two oldest, who were high schoolers — were not. The grief of being pulled away from their friends and the pressure of learning new routines in a strange place weighed on them.

Toward the end of that first year, an old friend, also a Philadelphia native, reminded me of a valuable resource that might ease my children’s isolation — recreation centers. I immediately scoured the Philadelphia Parks and Recreation website for camps, anything that might help recreate their lost communal magic. I quickly found a teen adventures camp for my two eldest and an ecological camp and visual camp for my two youngest.

Through these programs my kids found friends with whom they could talk through the grief of moving, while figuring out new techniques in watercolor or filmmaking. “The rec” — as these centers are affectionately known in the city — helped my children tenderly carry their loss and move forward in community.

I was reminded of my family’s experience when I saw the work of Adrian Eli René — a young Haitian American photographer who moved to Philadelphia in 2020 and soon set out to get to know his city through the lens of his camera. His images capture young people at play and at ease with one another in and around Philadelphia’s recs.

In her book “All About Love,” bell hooks writes that “friendship is the place in which a great majority of us have our first glimpse of redemptive love and caring community.” Mr. René’s photos are mirrors of this idea. Two children clad in white T-shirts, standing back-to-back on a playing field, each seemingly measuring the shape of their respective horizons. A boy mid-daydream, leaning against a chain-link fence. A child reversing time as he jumps off the lip of a public pool.

Philadelphia has a long history of commitment to community space. In the 1880s, during the second Industrial Revolution, the first public baths — which would become public swimming pools — opened to provide working-class families access to bathing. By the early 20th century, Philadelphia’s philanthropic leaders partnered with the municipal government to create playgrounds and, later, recreation centers that housed any number of activities.

These new centers proved to be critical developments in the cultural life of poor urban neighborhoods. Equipped with an array of otherwise scarce facilities — basketball courts, fields, art studios — these spaces enshrined play as a means of not only strengthening communal ties but also affirming the community’s collective humanity. They powerfully disrupted the unjust socioeconomic logic that recreation is a luxury that poor people couldn’t afford and didn’t deserve. Subtly, recreation pointed toward a rising awareness that communal health begins with public spaces, particularly those devoted to inclusion and wellness.

We are now in the fifth Industrial Revolution, and the needs of working families remain unchanged. Philadelphia, despite limited funding, is still committed to meeting those needs. According to the Parks and Recreation Department, the city has about 150 staffed centers and more than 300 unstaffed neighborhood parks. Parks consist of some 10,000 acres, roughly 10 percent of the city’s land mass. The demand still exists for public gathering spaces where children are not in danger, and that’s the work of the rec.

These places of refuge, and the people who run them, do work beyond the obvious social good. At the rec, children can exercise creative agency, often deciding on their own how to use the space. The centers exist outside the prescriptive obligations, duties and expectations of schools or churches. They give children a place to work through, as my own children did, their triumphs and losses; innocence, immaturity and growth are valued. There, the children know they are free.

Adrian Eli René is a photographer based in Philadelphia. Airea D. Matthews is the poet laureate of Philadelphia. Her most recent book is “Bread and Circus.”

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