It’s another reason the Dodgers never should have left Brooklyn.
If you had to choose one photograph to capture American childhood in the 1950s, you might pick an Arthur Leipzig shot of children playing stickball in front of the brownstones of Bedford-Stuyvesant.
Leipzig would have never published a photo like that from Los Angeles because he would have been documenting a crime.
In 1945 or so, the Los Angeles City Council passed a law regarding “STREETS – SIDEWALKS – PLAYING BALL OR GAMES OF SPORT.”
The law says, “No person shall play ball or any game of sport with a ball or football or throw, cast, shoot or discharge any stone, pellet, bullet, arrow or any other missile, in, over, across, along or upon any street or sidewalk or in any public park, except on those portions of said park set apart for such purposes.”
While Angelenos may have appreciated the missile ban on their sidewalks, this law also made a criminal of any father throwing with his son in the cul-de-sac or any children playing soccer on an empty, grassy field.
It took about 80 years, but on Jan. 13, the City Council decided to legalize catch, curbside games of HORSE, and pickup soccer.
This may be part of a trend because the same week, a large suburban county in Virginia reversed its own anti-pickup-sports measure.
Roundtree Park in Annandale, a suburb of Washington, D.C., used to have a soccer field and a baseball diamond. Fairfax County decided in recent years to decommission these fields, but to the mandarins’ dismay, people kept playing sports there.
The nominal problem was too much trash, but the county did not install any trash cans. Instead, in December, the parks and recreation department deployed a skid steer to place about 50 large boulders, evenly spaced out, around the fields.
Go kick your little round ball now, puny Annadalers!
The people of greater Annandale, though, are nothing if not skilled at lobbying. After some negative press in Fairfax Now and Annandale Today, the park folk relented. The skid steer rolled back out and removed the boulders.
Two cheers for Los Angeles and one cheer for Fairfax. In an era when travel sports are replacing Little League, and video games are keeping children indoors, we probably need a renaissance of informal sports and a return to the childhoods of the 1950s.
But let Los Angeles keep the Dodgers, those bums.