Stickball League Looks to Expand Beyond Being Just a New York Street Game | New York Post

The tradition of stickball is kept alive in the Bronx, where players gather every Sunday to play in the streets.

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From 'What happened to New York’s storied street games?'

There was a time when avenues were the playgrounds of choice for city kids, and their games were homegrown variations of popular national pastimes, or modern versions of childhood classics that have been around since the Roman Empire. It was the essence of an urban childhood.

Even stickball, the quintessential New York street game, is in danger of dying out, says Bronx-born Matt Levy.

The story of New York’s street games — and the shifting cultural patterns that have caused their demise — is the topic of Levy’s new documentary, “New York Street Games.”

Through archival footage of stoopball and stickball games, black-and-white photos of hopscotch, handball and tag, Levy resurrects a long-gone New York that nobody under age 35 is likely to remember — the halcyon days when games weren’t something that adults had to manage.

That kind of freewheeling playing is all but outlawed now. Fears of injuries, fights, or inappropriate touching have led some schools across the country to do away with rougher games, like Red Rover, and even tag. Since 1995, there’s even been a program, “Peaceful Playgrounds,” that some states have adopted to ensure play periods remain mild and sedate.

LEVY’s 76-minute documentary opens with the words: “Before cellphones, BlackBerries and Facebook . . . before a neighbor’s doorstep required an invitation . . . before ‘playdates,’ there was play.”

Back then — according to the star-studded cast of middle-aged New Yorkers who appear in Levy’s documentary — play could mean a wild game of Steal the Bacon (two teams competing to grab an object from a circle), a frantic bout of I Declare War (a primitive version of dodge-ball) or even a bruising round of Johnny-on-the-Pony (which in Brooklyn was known as Buck Buck).

Johnny-on-the-Pony has actually been around for millennia — it’s derived from a Roman pastime known as Mullhorse. It requires one team to line up in a row, bent over from the waist, while members of the other team jump on their backs one by one until the combined weight forces everyone to fall to the ground.

It was rough and raucous, but it had many fans — among them C. Everett Koop, former US surgeon general for Ronald Reagan, who grew up in Depression-era Brooklyn.

Not everybody in the city was a fan of stickball, which involved whacking a bouncy rubber orb — called a “spaldeen” in New York because the local accent corrupted the Spalding brand name — with a sawed off broom or mop handle.

Since the 1970s, the area outside the home that parents are comfortable letting children play unsupervised has shrunk by 90%, according to Richard Louv, author of “Last Child in the Woods,” a book exploring the growing disconnect between kids and nature.

Louv cites numerous studies that show “stranger-danger” is a major factor in parents’ refusal to allow children to roam — yet national statistics show that child abductions are no higher since 1970 than the decades before. Consistently, child abduction rates hover around 100 a year.

There’s been a corresponding decline in outdoor activities since the 1970s, Louv writes. Bike riding is down 31% since 1995, according to American Sports Data, a research firm. Only 6% of children ages nine to 13 play outside on their own, Louv writes. Kids, especially those in low-income communities, are spending 40 hours a week with electronic media, according to the Kaiser Foundation.

In fact, evidence shows that many of the games played by the likes of Levy and Whoopi Goldberg — who shows up in the documentary to share her childhood memories of playing stoopball in Chelsea — are the same or very similar to those painted by Pieter Bruegel in his 16th-century oil painting “Children’s Games.”

In The Bronx, along a stretch of road known as Stickball Boulevard, fungo stickball is played nearly every weekend in summertime.

The league has been around for 22 years, and flourished after former Mayor Ed Koch agreed to close Stickball Boulevard to traffic on weekends so teams could play.

One member, Richard Mojica, has branched out, teaching the art of street games to local kids through a program called Weeds and Seeds that gets federal funding.

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