““In 1906 Gulick and others founded the Playground Association of America (PAA) to spread the New York gospel to the country. (Crucial funding would come from the Russell Sage Foundation.) Honorary President Theodore Roosevelt wrote in the organization’s magazine, the Playground (1907), that cities must find “some other place than the streets” for children to play “if we would have our citizens content and law-abiding.” Members were ecstatic about playgrounds’ ability to produce “more loyal as well as more efficient citizens.” One PAA director noted in 1907 that Tompkins Square Park, where once “the rally to the red flag” had been commonplace, was now “the scene of games . . . and other forms of patriotic play.” Another suggested that six weeks of playground interaction between Jews and Italians so reduced animosities that “they did not know whether they were Jews or Italians.””
![“I did not see anything [New York 1886] to help my people. I could see that the Wasichus [white man] did not care for each other the way our people did before the nation's hoop was broken. They would take everything from each other if they could, and so there were some who had more of everything…” quote by Black Elk](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/bd8/black-elk-6745_old-ways_i-did-not-see-anything-new-york-1886-to_2511198.jpg)
