Outdoor Rooms

For city dwellers, small neighborhood playground-parks are supposed to be outdoor, year-round rooms. Some rooms! Almost invariably the floors are asphalt, the walls are chain-link fences, and for furniture there is a never-changing assortment of head-chopping swings and lethal slides. Green areas are inevitably posted with KEEP OFF THE GRASS signs; when the signs are not obeyed, the grass wears down to dirt, seemingly overnight. When these outdoor rooms are also forced to function as community centers for all ages, chaos results.

In Place of Sterility. Last week, at the 19-year-old Jacob Riis public-housing project on Manhattan's Lower East Side, Lady Bird Johnson dedicated a new three-acre open space that is likely to be a trend setter for cities across the nation. Financed by a $900,000 grant from the Vincent Astor Foundation, Riis Plaza offers not one but four rooms to replace a sterile, downtrodden mall.

In designing Riis Plaza, architects for the New York City Housing Authority took a hard but human look at how playground-parks are used, tested their ideas by interviewing many of the project's 7,500 residents, largely Negroes and Puerto Ricans.

Grass, the designers decided, simply does not work; they replaced it with a variety of textured paving. Kids are going to climb all over the sculpture anyway; they made sure that it came with built-in handholds to make it easy for them. Ground-level planting beds are sure to be trampled; they were raised so that their rims serve as benches. Smooth surfaces invite childish scribbles; here they are rough to discourage them. Women are afraid of mugging; gay, indestructible plastic-globe lamps replaced the previous dim lighting. Finally, the existing plane trees were saved and new ones added so that even without grass the plaza is green.

Bach in the Park. To break up the two-block length and provide a measure of privacy for each activity, the four "rooms" are at different levels. For adults, especially women with baby carriages, the architects provided a peaceful, elevated sitting area, walled in to keep out wind and noise. Next to it they scooped out a sunken 1,000-seat amphitheater; it has already been booked throughout the summer for free concerts and sing-alongs, ballet and amateur talent shows, and will be used this June for local high school graduation exercises.

Testing the amphitheater's loudspeaker system with a Bach cantata recently, audio engineers got a big surprise: when they turned it off, residents complained about losing "all the nice music." As a result they now hear Bach and other classical composers nightly.

Progression of Delights. Unquestionably, the plaza's most immediate triumph is its playground. Architect Simon Breines, who grew up playing stickball on the streets of Brooklyn, provided Riis Plaza children with a stupendous place to play. With Landscape Architect Paul Friedberg, he designed rough pyramids made of granite paving stones, over which kids clamber, shrieking as they go. Last week children were lining up to crawl into the stone igloo; once inside, they scrambled up a ladder through a hole in the top and, with a whoop, scooted down a slide kerplunk into a sand pit.

The play area is a progression of delights. From the sand pit, wood-block stepping stones lead hippety-hop to a tree house, added at Mrs. Astor's special request. Next comes a child-size maze made of rough concrete emblazoned with abstract symbols painted in bright primary colors. "It was all planned," says Friedberg, "as a continuous play experience, rather than a collection of static objects attached to an asphalt base."

It works. Kids and mothers love it.

And so does Lady Bird. "Oh, how nice; oh, how lovely," she remarked again and again. "We read a great deal about what is wrong with the city. What has happened at Riis Plaza is what is very right about cities."

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