This photo was taken at Manhattan’s East River Park in July of 1974. I was born that month, roughly seven miles away in neighboring Queens, making the kids in this image only a handful of years older than me. They were the kind of kids I looked up to as a young boy, as experienced and worldly as my brain could conceive at that age — when the space between being six years old and ten years old seemed like a monstrous height to climb.
My memories of growing up in the city are not as rusty and blighted as the New York in this picture, but vibrant and dynamic and submissive to childhood imagination. To a kid with no sense of law or vandalism, graffiti is simply art. To a kid with no access to a clean swimming pool, running through the sprinklers is how you swim. To a kid whose older brother has already moved on to more “big boy” games, sitting on one end of a seesaw by yourself is just what you do. You can always jump up and down until the wood burns the insides of your thighs.
You’d think these kinds of pictures of old New York would correct personal histories and outdated impressions with empiric credibility, but a reproduction is still limited by its frame: The young boy in the blue shirt, staring into the eye of the camera and returning the photographer’s gaze, could just as easily shoot an entirely different picture.
