Recreational Asymmetries: Public Housing Playgrounds in Postwar America, 1949–1976

Between 1965 and 1967, landscape architect M. Paul Friedberg designed two comparable playgrounds for public housing that drew on the same design vocabulary: modular timber climbing structures, sculpted landforms, and the slender steel arch carried from one project to the other. One was built at the Jacob Riis Houses on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, the other at Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis. Neither survives, yet their afterlives diverged sharply. Riis Plaza became a canonical work of postwar landscape architecture, widely published and exhibited, while the Pruitt-Igoe playgrounds are largely absent from the architectural record.

The contrast raises broader questions about the making of architectural history. Designed by the same landscape architect within two years for comparable public housing developments, the two playgrounds came to occupy markedly different positions in the historiography of postwar recreation because of the unequal conditions under which they were funded, documented, publicized, and preserved.

Play is something we never outgrow.

M. Paul Friedberg(1)

Recreation and the Housing Act of 1949 

Both playgrounds emerged from the legislative framework established by the Housing Act of 1949, which combined an ambitious program of slum clearance and public housing construction with stringent restrictions on construction costs.(2) Within this framework, recreational provision was treated as a secondary concern: playgrounds, landscaped open space, and other communal amenities were regarded not as essential components of housing but as expendable additions, among the first elements removed when budgets came under pressure.

The consequences were especially evident at Pruitt-Igoe. As Katharine Bristol and Roger Montgomery have shown, federal cost limits reshaped Minoru Yamasaki’s original proposal before construction. A scheme combining high-rise, mid-rise, and walk-up housing was replaced, at the insistence of the Public Housing Administration, by thirty-three identical eleven-story slabs, while landscaped open space and designated play areas were eliminated before the project opened in 1954.(3) Recreational provision was therefore constrained from the outset. Friedberg’s intervention thirteen years later sought to restore forms of communal space that had been removed during the project’s development.

Completed on Manhattan’s Lower East Side in 1949, the Jacob Riis Houses differed little. Its generous open space consisted largely of fenced lawns organized according to conventional planning principles rather than the everyday patterns of use that would later inform postwar theories of recreation. In both developments, outdoor space reflected federal housing priorities more than contemporary ideas about children’s play or communal life.

The two developments also occupied similar positions within the racial landscape of postwar public housing. Pruitt-Igoe opened under segregation and, following Brown v. Board of Education (1954), came to house an overwhelmingly Black population. At Riis the pattern was less absolute but evolved along similar lines. As Marisa Angell Brown has shown, the Lower East Side was then in demographic transition, its older white immigrant population declining while Puerto Rican and Black families became increasingly prominent. The children who used Friedberg’s playground were therefore disproportionately Black and Latino. These shared demographic conditions provide essential context for understanding the asymmetrical histories of the two playgrounds.(4)

Only in the 1960s did the two sites begin to follow different paths, when changing attitudes toward recreation created new opportunities to reconsider outdoor space in public housing. Friedberg was first commissioned to redesign the grounds of the Jacob Riis Houses and, two years later, to undertake a comparable project at Pruitt-Igoe.

Friedberg at Riis, 1963–1966

Friedberg’s involvement in public housing was made possible by private philanthropy operating within the framework of federal public housing. In 1963, a grant from the Vincent Astor Foundation supported his redesign of the courtyard and playground at the Carver Houses on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. A subsequent Astor grant of $700,000, toward a total project cost of $900,000, financed the redesign of the Jacob Riis Houses grounds in collaboration with the architects Pomerance & Breines. As a condition of the grant, the Foundation required the New York City Housing Authority to relinquish control of the design, shielding the project from the cost constraints that had long limited recreational provision.(5)

Riis Plaza represented a significant departure from the standardized playground solutions that characterized earlier public housing commissions. Replacing inaccessible lawns with what Friedberg described as a “total play environment,” the project integrated granite landforms, timber climbing structures, tunnels, spray pools, and a sunken amphitheater into a continuous recreational landscape. His principle of “linked play” dissolved the distinction between circulation and recreation, making movement through the site part of play itself. Timber posts functioned simultaneously as steps, seating, lookouts, and climbing structures, while the slender steel arch organizing the composition would reappear, with only minor modifications, at Pruitt-Igoe.(6)

The redesign reflected broader shifts in postwar American design culture. As Amy Ogata has argued, the ideal of the “creative child” linked imaginative play with independence and innovation.(7) Friedberg translated these ideas into an environment that encouraged exploration, but its realization depended as much on exceptional institutional conditions as on creative vision.

Riis Plaza opened in May 1966 at a ceremony attended by Brooke Astor and Lady Bird Johnson, then First Lady, and was quickly incorporated into the Lindsay administration’s commitment to public open space. Its reception was immediate and unusually broad. Architectural Record identified the plaza as a turning point in playground design, and Peter Walker later compared its composition to Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion(8); Richard Dattner’s 1966 Adventure Playground in Central Park adapted the principle of linked play first developed at Riis.(9) Friedberg himself repeatedly returned to Riis Plaza as the clearest expression of his philosophy of play.

Riis Plaza became the project through which Friedberg’s ideas entered the architectural canon, generating the publications, photographs, exhibitions, and critical attention that shaped the historiography of postwar playground design. Its prominence would, in turn, provide the benchmark against which his later work at Pruitt-Igoe has been measured—or overlooked.

Friedberg at Pruitt-Igoe, 1967

In 1967, the St. Louis Housing Authority invited Friedberg to redesign the grounds of Pruitt-Igoe, extending the work he had begun at Riis Plaza.(10) Despite its importance in his career, the project has received comparatively little scholarly attention. By the mid-1960s the housing complex was already experiencing physical decline, yet its population remained overwhelmingly young—approximately seven in ten residents were under eighteen—making the absence of recreational provision increasingly acute.(11)

The commission differed fundamentally from Riis in the extent of resident participation. Rather than relying solely on formal design, Friedberg worked directly with tenants, collaborating with community activist Macler Shepard and developing proposals through conversations with local children. As Michael Allen has observed, Friedberg regarded children as clients in their own right, believing they should help shape their environments rather than simply occupy spaces designed by adults.(12)

Although the surviving evidence is fragmentary, it allows the principal features of the playgrounds to be reconstructed. Modular timber climbing structures, sculpted landforms, open-ended play elements, and the slender steel arch repeated the design vocabulary established at Riis Plaza. Their significance therefore lay not in formal innovation but in adapting an established recreational language to a markedly different institutional and social context.

Contemporary reports refer to six playgrounds and a 250-seat amphitheater, yet no complete drawings, report, or office archive survives. Reconstructing the project therefore depends on fragmentary evidence: scattered photographs, newspaper coverage, and passing archival references. That scarcity exposes the uneven processes through which recreational landscapes entered architectural history.(13)

Children helped paint the timber structures using materials supplied by the housing authority, making construction part of the project’s social life. Friedberg later acknowledged that Pruitt-Igoe came closer than Riis Plaza to his ambition of creating environments that residents could continually reshape.(14)

Despite these qualities, the playgrounds never achieved the visibility of Riis Plaza. They attracted little professional attention, appeared only rarely in architectural publications, and played almost no role in subsequent accounts of Friedberg’s career or the history of postwar playground design. Unlike Riis, they lacked the philanthropic sponsorship, institutional advocacy, and sustained publicity that secured canonical recognition for modern recreational landscapes.

Demolition and Unequal Memory

Neither playground survives today, yet their places within architectural history have diverged profoundly.

The demolition of Pruitt-Igoe between 1972 and 1976 became one of the defining episodes in the historiography of twentieth-century architecture. Images of the implosions circulated internationally, and Charles Jencks’s interpretation of the event as the symbolic “death” of modern architecture transformed the site into a touchstone for subsequent debates.(15) Although later scholarship has challenged this reading, demolition continues to frame interpretations of Pruitt-Igoe. Within this dominant narrative, the everyday landscapes between the buildings—including Friedberg’s playgrounds—have remained largely invisible.

This absence reflects not deliberate exclusion but the uneven survival of evidence. The record of demolition proved far more reproducible than the fragmentary documentation of recreational space, ensuring that the destruction of the housing blocks became central to the site’s interpretation while its playgrounds slipped from view. Even major reassessments—including Katharine Bristol’s critique of the Pruitt-Igoe myth and Chad Friedrichs’s documentary The Pruitt-Igoe Myth—revised prevailing interpretations without incorporating Friedberg’s intervention.(16)

Riis Plaza took a different course. Its demolition in 2000 demonstrates that canonical status did not guarantee physical preservation. As James Trainor has argued, recreational landscapes serving low-income communities have rarely attracted the advocacy or institutional protection afforded more prestigious public spaces. Riis Plaza, despite its acknowledged importance, was demolished with comparatively little public opposition.(17)

Pruitt-Igoe remains one of the most extensively documented public housing developments in the United States, yet its playgrounds occupy only a marginal place within that record, while Riis Plaza retained its standing despite its demolition. Historical recognition and material survival, the comparison suggests, did not necessarily coincide.

Recreational Heritage and the Architectural Canon

Riis Plaza entered the architectural canon through an exceptional convergence of philanthropic investment, professional advocacy, media publicity, and scholarly attention. Although demolished in 2000, it survived through publications, exhibitions, and repeated citation. The Pruitt-Igoe playgrounds received none of it. Despite extending Friedberg’s ideas in equally ambitious ways—and doing so through far greater resident participation—they remained largely absent from the architectural record, not because they lacked significance but because the predominantly Black communities they served occupied the margins of the institutions through which architectural history was produced.

The contrasting histories of these playgrounds challenge conventional understandings of preservation. Recreational landscapes are inherently unstable: equipment is replaced, materials deteriorate, and everyday use continually reshapes them. Their historical significance therefore depends less on the survival of fabric than on the photographs, drawings, reports, and archival traces through which they can be reconstructed. As Mariana Mogilevich has argued of open space in Lindsay-era New York, such environments were central to postwar conceptions of public life, yet the records that preserved them were themselves produced selectively.(18) For recreational landscapes, the archive is not simply a supplement to preservation but one of its principal forms. Archival absence should therefore be understood not merely as a limitation of the historical record, but as evidence of the unequal conditions through which architectural heritage is constituted. Recovering these histories means extending preservation beyond surviving structures to include demolished environments reconstructable through archival investigation.

Taken together, Riis Plaza and the Pruitt-Igoe playgrounds demonstrate that the history of postwar recreation is also one of unequal remembrance, in which architectural significance depended on the production, circulation, and preservation of evidence. Addressing this legacy requires recognizing demolition, archival absence, and uneven visibility as central conditions in the writing of architectural history.

Notes

1. M. Paul Friedberg, quoted in Charles A. Birnbaum, “Remembering M. Paul Friedberg,” The Cultural Landscape Foundation, 2025, https://www.tclf.org/remembering-m-paul-friedberg.

2. Housing Act of 1949, Pub. L. No. 81-171, 63 Stat. 413 (1949).

3. Katharine G. Bristol, “The Pruitt-Igoe Myth,” Journal of Architectural Education 44, no. 3 (May 1991): 163–71; and Roger Montgomery, “Pruitt-Igoe: Policy Failure or Societal Symptom,” in The Metropolitan Midwest: Policy Problems and Prospects for Change, ed. Barry Checkoway and Carl Patton (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985), 229–43.

4. On segregation at Pruitt-Igoe and its aftermath, see Bristol, “The Pruitt-Igoe Myth”; and Lee Rainwater, Behind Ghetto Walls: Black Families in a Federal Slum (Chicago: Aldine, 1970), chap. 1. On the Lower East Side, see Marisa Angell Brown, “Radical Urbanism in the Divided City: On M. Paul Friedberg’s Riis Park Plaza (1966),” in Perspecta 50: Urban Divides, ed. Meghan McAllister and Mahdi Sabbagh (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017), 312–13, drawing on Christopher Mele, Selling the Lower East Side: Culture, Real Estate, and Resistance in New York City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 137.

5. Brown, “Radical Urbanism in the Divided City,” 304, citing The Vincent Astor Foundation, 1964–1968 (New York: Vincent Astor Foundation, n.d.), 6, Vincent Astor Foundation Records, New York Public Library. On Astor’s condition that the housing authority cede control of the design, see M. Paul Friedberg, oral history interview by Charles A. Birnbaum, May 22, 2008, New York, in Pioneers of American Landscape Design Oral History Series (Washington, DC: The Cultural Landscape Foundation, 2009).

6. M. Paul Friedberg and Ellen Perry Berkeley, Play and Interplay: A Manifesto for New Design in Urban Recreational Environment (New York: Macmillan, 1970), 44 (on linked play), and 25, 76. On Riis as Friedberg’s first total play environment, see Gabriela Burkhalter, “The Playground Project,” in 2013 Carnegie International, ed. Daniel Baumann, Dan Byers, and Tina Kukielski (Pittsburgh: Carnegie Museum of Art, 2013), 288.

7. Amy F. Ogata, Designing the Creative Child: Playthings and Places in Midcentury America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), esp. chaps. 1 and 4.

8. Peter Walker, quoted in Birnbaum, “Remembering M. Paul Friedberg” (the Barcelona Pavilion comparison dates to 2004); “Tribute: M. Paul Friedberg (1931–2025),” Architectural Record, February 20, 2025; and Katsuhiko Ichinowatari, ed., Process 82: M. Paul Friedberg: Landscape Design (Tokyo: Process Architecture, 1989), a chronological survey opening with Riis Park Plaza, with essays by Jonathan Barnett and William H. Whyte. On the plaza’s wider standing, see also Alison B. Hirsch, “From ‘Open Space’ to ‘Public Space’: Activist Landscape Architects of the 1960s,” Landscape Journal 33, no. 2 (2014): 173–94. On the plaza’s appearance in the popular press, including Life, see Birnbaum, “M. Paul Friedberg Biography,” The Cultural Landscape Foundation, https://www.tclf.org/m-paul-friedberg-biography; the plaza also received a U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development First Honor Award for design in 1966.

9. “Adventure-Style Playgrounds,” Central Park Conservancy, Plan for Play, http://planforplay.org/history/adventure-style_playgrounds.php: Dattner’s 1966 Adventure Playground “explored the idea of linked play articulated by Friedberg at the Jacob Riis Houses.” Dattner acknowledges Friedberg directly in his own account of the period, Design for Play (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1969). On Riis in the popular press, including Life, see Birnbaum, “M. Paul Friedberg Biography,” The Cultural Landscape Foundation.

10. Mildred F. Schmertz, “Designing the Spaces in Between,” Architectural Record 143, no. 3 (March 1968): 128; cited in Brown, “Radical Urbanism in the Divided City,” 308.

11. Michael R. Allen, “Incomplete by Design: Reconsidering the Death and Life of Pruitt-Igoe,” in Make New History: 2017 Chicago Architecture Biennial, ed. Mark Lee et al. (Zurich: Lars Müller Publishers, 2017). On the resident population, see Rainwater, Behind Ghetto Walls, chap. 1. The proportions cited here follow Allen’s reading of Rainwater’s survey data; exact figures vary between the 1965–67 survey waves. Former residents corroborate the participatory process: Sylvester Brown Jr., a child at Pruitt-Igoe, recalls being canvassed on what he wanted in the park, while Sharon Hodges describes a place where children had a voice. See Sylvester Brown Jr., “Remembering Pruitt-Igoe,” The Common Reader, Washington University in St. Louis, https://commonreader.wustl.edu/remembering-pruitt-igoe/.

12. Friedberg and Berkeley, Play and Interplay, 89.

13. Robert Adams, “Construction Work Begins on Pruitt-Igoe Amphitheater,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, August 27, 1967, 3A, cited in Allen, “Incomplete by Design.”

14. Friedberg, quoted in Gabriela Burkhalter, “M. Paul Friedberg,” The Playground Project, https://architekturfuerkinder.ch/m-paul-friedberg/. At Riis the playground had become an environment, but lacked the loose elements children could control themselves.

15. Charles Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1977), 9.

16. The Pruitt-Igoe Myth, dir. Chad Friedrichs (Columbia, MO: Unicorn Stencil, 2011).

17. James Trainor, “Reimagining Recreation,” Cabinet, no. 45 (Spring 2012), https://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/45/trainor.php.

18. Mariana Mogilevich, The Invention of Public Space: Designing for Inclusion in Lindsay’s New York (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020).

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Author

Aikaterini Karadima is an architectural historian, architect, and lecturer in the History and Theory of Architecture and the City at the Technical University of Crete, where she teaches in the five-year integrated architecture degree program. She holds a PhD in Architecture from the same institution and an MA with Distinction in Architecture and Historic Urban Environments from the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London. Her research examines twentieth-century architectural and urban transformation in relation to social, political, and economic processes, at the intersection of architectural history, urban studies, and cultural heritage. Alongside her academic work, she maintains an active architectural practice specializing in historic urban environments.