How City Kids Used to Play on the Streets of New York

Cooper’s work recalls classic Tenement-era images of city dwellers making the most use of the city around them. One picture, of a child bouncing on a trashed mattress, has the verve and frozen dynamism of a Simone Biles action shot. Cooper catches the child in a full flip, folded like a pin, as if he’s just rebounded from a sprung floor. I was curious how much Cooper knew about these children and what their lives were like. She told me they were mostly the children of recent immigrants and “working families who were struggling to make a living.”

As we walked around the gallery, Marty Rogers, a local who helps run a community garden next door, wandered in and shook Cooper’s hand. Rogers, who wore a blue Yankees cap and cargo shorts, had grown up in the Bronx in the sixties, playing many of the same street games. “This was our life, man,” he said, pointing to a photograph of a boy holding a hollow tin can over a roaring fire hydrant. “We called that shooting the pump. You tried to control it like a rodeo.” They played it on sweltering summer days. “When it was hot, hot, hot, somebody opened the pump,” Rogers explained. “You tried to hold it as long as you could. You could reach the second floor of a school with the arc.”