For our 2023 Graduate Student Blogging Contest, we asked for stories about projects that faced “stumbling blocks.” There were a multitude of them placed in the path of Mabel E. Macomber, a Progressive Era playground advocate, written about by Alexandra Miller in our fifth entry. To see all entries from this year’s contest check out our round up here.

“It is true that my life has been threatened as the leader of this playground campaign,” wrote Mabel E. Macomber in 1929 from Brooklyn’s Bedford neighborhood.[1] By then, she had spent eight years fighting a single fight, one which would only reach its conclusion after her death in 1933 (due to natural causes, not murder). Though her letter to the editor of the New York Times contained the only reference she made to receiving a death threat, casting some doubt on its veracity, Macomber did see her fight as a matter of life and death, just not for her. Like other playground advocates, Macomber saw her chief goal as the managed and healthy development of children, with playgrounds as the vehicle. In her neighborhood, Macomber believed a playground at the old Rusurban estate was “pathetically necessary,” due to the site’s physical character and its location within a dense population of children. To that end she battled city aldermen, local businessmen, and public opinion, raising tempers to a boiling point and, as noted, reportedly having her life threatened.[2] Regardless of whether this particular incident really happened, the Rusurban playground fight did, and it electrified the Bedford neighborhood for over a decade.

Macomber was an active member of a much larger network of playground advocates, which stretched across the United States and around the world. Playgrounds were one strand of the much larger web of urban reforms which characterized the Progressive Era. Many people distributed their interest across several similar movements like the playgrounds, the City Beautiful, and Temperance movements. In each of these movements and others, proponents saw the opportunity to advance their vision of society in a rapidly changing world. These social reform/control movements emerged while the United States was experiencing an unprecedented era of immigration, nativist reaction, and urban growth. To combat what she and others saw as decaying city conditions, Macomber espoused the playground movement’s larger goals of building parental supervision, and collaborative control, into urban play by locating fenced playgrounds near homes and staffing them with trained directors. She and other playground advocates promoted child safety, reducing juvenile delinquency, and training children to live in urban society. Macomber’s work, and especially her twelve-year Rusurban fight, illustrates the main characteristics of the broader playground movement. The movement, though headed by such illustrious figures as Jane Addams, Jacob Riis, and Theodore Roosevelt, was actually enacted at the local level by women’s club members and civil servants. Macomber was both. Additionally, playground advocates faced significant pushback from urban residents and municipal officers who felt that money could be better spent on other projects or saved.

Born in 1873 to a middle-class family full of civil servants, Macomber was the textbook stereotype of a Progressive Era clubwoman.[3] Clubwomen were generally white, educated, middle-aged, unemployed, middle-class to elite, urban, and Protestant, and Macomber ticked nearly every box. More importantly though, the clubwomen used their time to join organizations, many of which focused on enacting social and urban reforms. Historians have identified clubwomen as a driving force behind many Progressive reforms.[4] Macomber was a member of several local clubs, and both founded and led the City Playground League. In 1903, when Mabel was thirty, she and her sister Anna L. Macomber both got their first jobs and entered the civil service as playground directors. Anna remained in this position for most of the rest of her life; however, Mabel soon left her post on Poplar Street and moved to Brookyln’s Seward Park Playground, then left the profession entirely, hoping to promote the playground cause from within the municipal government and devote more time to working for her clubs. She went in and out of city employment, often fired “for the good of the service” due to absence or “insubordination.” Macomber’s superiors made clear that she had been so difficult to manage that prominent city leaders left office to avoid her.[5]

After being relieved of her duties in the New York Park Supervisor’s Office in 1911, she transferred back to her old station at Seward Park. In the three years that followed, she transformed the playground from “the most congested district in the world” to “a great attraction” where she and her fellow directors take “special pains…to provide for the spectator…and that the playground may be a neighborhood affair.” Macomber’s vision of the ideal playground at Seward depended on building both professional and communal supervision in the form of directors and spectator neighbors into the play landscape. Her staff moved children through orderly play to maximize efficiency and “social training.” Playground and Recreation Association of America President Joseph Lee commented that “this is done with an eye also to loafers of the district who can thus be all watched at once.”[6] It was through this work that Macomber became irrevocably convinced that not only were playgrounds useful for improving neighborhood conditions, but also that capable directors and a proper, or central, placement within a dense population of children, were integral to their success.

Macomber serves as a microcosm of the larger park and playground movement because she faced twelve long years of a fight over the construction of just one playground, all the while holding dear to the ideals of location and supervision she had adopted from the national movement. After leaving Seward Park, she turned her attention to her own playground-less neighborhood of Bedford. Here, Macomber wanted to recreate what she saw as Seward’s great success by building a centrally located playground, with an even pitch and natural shade, which would be staffed by a capable director, possibly even herself.

In 1922, she began advocating that the city purchase an unused estate called Rusurban.[7] She rallied many of her neighbors to her side, including the Borough Civic Association, local Aldermanic Board, Bedford YMCA, Bedford Boy Scouts, and many schools, churches, and individuals, such as State Senator Marcellus H. Evans. By involving children in this and other playground campaigns, Macomber and other advocates hoped to embed playgrounds further in their communities and teach young people how to work with local government, thus making playground advocacy a sort of training ground for active citizenship. She even wrote a song called “Yes! We Have No Playground” to the tune of “Yes! We Have No Bananas” for children to sing and “make their plea through song” for the Rusurban playground.[8] Macomber also drew on her influence in women’s clubs, including the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, the City Garden Club, and of course the City Playground League, and she wrote dozens of editorials and letters to the editors of newspapers across New York, all advocating for her playground. Along with her allies, Macomber lobbied the New York Park Board first to buy the land. After only two years, in 1924, the city purchased the one-acre plot for $164. Then the hard work began. Macomber continually lobbied for the city to both not sell the land for commercial use and instead to develop the land by equipping and staffing a playground.[9]

Macomber continually rooted her pro-Rusurban arguments in what she saw as the great need for small, centrally located neighborhood playgrounds. In 1925 she argued that the city should provide for the 529 children that lived in walking, seeing, and hearing distance of the site. The two parks within a mile of the location, Macomber claimed, could never fully serve the high-density, multi-dwelling homes that packed the area around Fulton Street and Classon Avenue. By 1929, Brooklyn newspapers reported that nearly ten thousand children would be able to play there.[10] The playground’s location would enable the director and neighborhood adults to supervise the equipment and children, thus building supervision into the landscape, just as she had witnessed at Seward Park.

Macomber and her fellow Rusurban advocates faced resistance from every angle. One major hurdle was funding. The Park Board customarily paid for playgrounds and parks by local assessment, a special tax only on nearby residents. Macomber and her allies resented this funding method and argued that the city should fund playgrounds from its own coffers or by bond issue.[11]

However, funding was not the only issue at play. Residents like Mrs. R.C. Talbot-Perkins contested Macomber’s figures and her assertions about the need for the playground in a shifting neighborhood.[12] New York City Comptroller Charles W. Berry was particularly opposed to a playground at the Rusurban site because he rented two buildings on the property.[13] His personal dislike of the project and Macomber’s general unpopularity—Mayor John Francis Hylan called her a “professional propagandist”—may have contributed to her difficulties in getting Park Board and Alderman hearings for the playground.[14] The Park Board and Comptroller resisted her lobbying with months of delays, flat-out rejection, and even underhanded tactics like rescheduling a hearing so she could not appear in favor of the playground.[15] One Bedford resident, Hevlyn D. Benson, led local business interests in lobbying the city to sell the site for commercial development.[16] Some residents complained that the Rusurban site was no longer attractive after apartments went up nearby. Others complained that the Fulton Street subway would make the site useless. And after Black people began to integrate the Bedford neighborhood, some white residents, previously in favor of the park, began to argue that it was no longer necessary or would become a gathering place for “disreputable people.”[17]

Macomber died in January 1933, never having seen her playground dream for Bedford come to fruition and uncertain that the city would ever use the land. Since the 1924 purchase, she and her allies seemed constantly on the verge of success but ever short, with the project repeatedly delayed and under threat. In 1934, the Park Board finally voted to develop the land, and the city dedicated the site as Crispus Attucks Playground in October 1934. In the end, many of the issues that Macomber’s opponents had raised became moot. As for funding, Frank da Cruz posits that all New York playgrounds built 1934-1938 were completed wholly by federal New Deal funding and labor.[18] And despite some white residents’ pushback over the neighborhood’s racial integration, the playground, which by this point was located “in the centre of a colored section,” became the first park in New York City to be named for a Black person. The name came after George E. Wibecan waged a month-long campaign on behalf of the Crispus Attucks Community Council of Brooklyn and other Black Brooklynites. Wibecan argued that “the residents would feel honored in having the playground named after one of their own.”[19] As Wibecan suggested, playgrounds were meant to reflect their community, both by their close location and by their name. Macomber’s name was also considered for the site.[20]

Today no one remembers the woman who stirred up a neighborhood, whose rhetoric inspired such ire. Even the New York Parks Department makes no mention of her in their notes on the playground’s history. Although they spent twelve years overcoming stumbling points to get Crispus Attucks Playground built, Macomber, and many other local-level female reformers, are not remembered in history books. Their places have been filled by the work of men, municipalities, and movements. Mabel E. Macomber may not have been successful in her lifetime, or even well-liked, but she and women like her shaped the cities we live in today. Our urban landscapes, full of tiny green spaces, cool shade in the summer, and the sound of children playing, stand as testament to their work and represent their legacy. We should take greater notice.

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Alexandra Miller is a doctoral student at George Mason University. She previously studied at Truman State University (BA History) and the University of South Carolina (MA Public History). Miller researches green spaces, most recently urban parks and playgrounds in the American Progressive Era. Her primary interest is in using spatial history as an investigation method, and she has applied this methodology to race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and gender. Miller has previously worked in museums and archives, including the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library and Museum, the Missouri Judicial Archives, the Del and Norma Robison Planetarium, and the John Wornall and Alexander Major Historic Homes.

Featured image (at top): “Astor Playground” (ca. 1915), Bain News Service, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress

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[1] Mabel E. Macomber, “Playground Assessments: Objection to Payment is Holding Up a Needed Improvement,” letter to the editor, New York Times, March 23, 1929.

[2] Mabel E. Macomber, “A Park Project Blocked: Governor’s Attention is Directed to Brooklyn’s Bedford Section,” letter to the editor, New York Times, Aug 12, 1928.

[3] U.S. Census Bureau, United States Census, 1880; U.S. Census Bureau, United States Census, 1900.

[4] Lydia F. Dickson, “Toward a Broader Angle of Vision in Uncovering Women’s History: Black Women’s Clubs Revisited,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 9, no. 2 (1987): 62-68; Lisa G. Materson, “African American Women, Prohibition, and the 1928 Presidential Election,” Journal of Women’s History 21, no. 1 (2009): 63–86; Lynn Dumenil, “The New Woman and the Politics of the 1920s,” OAH Magazine of History 21, no. 3 (2007): 22-26; Thomas C. Henthorn, “’A Nation’s Need—Good and Well Trained Mothers’: Gender, Charity, and the New Urban South,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 32, no. 1 (2011): 71-101; Joan Marie Johnson, “’Drill into us…the Rebel Tradition’: The Contest over Southern Identity in Black and White Women’s Clubs, South Carolina, 1898-1930,” Journal of Southern History 66, no. 3 (2000): 525-562; Sarah Judson, “Civil Rights and Civic Health: African American Women’s Public Health Work in Early Twentieth-Century Atlanta,” NWSA Journal 11, no. 3 (1999): 93-111; Mary Jane Smith, “The Fight to Protect Race and Regional Identity within the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, 1895-1902,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 94, no. 4 (2010): 479-513; Kate White, “’The Pageant is the Thing’: The Contradictions of Women’s Clubs and Civic Education during the Americanization Era,” College English 77, no. 6 (July 2015): 512-529; Suzanne M. Spencer-Wood, “Turn of the Century Women’s Organizations, Urban Design, and the Origin of the American Playground Movement,” Landscape Journal 13, no. 2 (1994): 124-138; Alexandra Miller, “The Widened Hearthstone: Urban Playgrounds as the Architecture of Social Control, 1900-1930,” (MA thesis, University of South Carolina, 2023); Jayne Morris-Crowther, “Municipal Housekeeping: The Political Activities of the Detroit Federation of Women’s Clubs in the 1920s,” Michigan Historical Review 30, no. 1 (2004): 33-34.

[5] “Transferred to Playground: Miss Mabel E. Macomber Loses Place on William J. Lee’s Staff,” New York Tribune, June 1, 1911 (quotation); City of New York, The City Record (New York: New York City Department of Administrative Services, 1873-present), 1907, 35:10237:198, 35:10303:3186, 35:10315:3735; 1908, 36:10683:7111; 1911, 39:11711:9526; U.S. Census Bureau, United States Census, 1910; U.S. Census Bureau, United States Census, 1920; U.S. Census Bureau, United States Census, 1930.

[6] Joseph Lee, quoted in Clarence E. Rainwater, Play Movement in the United States: A Study of Community Recreation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1922), 63; Mabel E. Macomber, “Crowds in Playgrounds: Their Management,” Journal of Education 62, no. 3 (1905): 72-73.

[7] The site is on the border of Bedford-Stuyvesant and Clinton Hill neighborhoods, a few blocks from Prospect Heights and Crown Heights.

[8] Playground and Recreation Association of America, The Playground 23 vols. (New York: Playground Association of America, 1907-1910, Playground and Recreation Association of America 1910-1929), 1924, 17:488.

[9] The City Record 1922, 50:5457, 7413, 7572, 7726, 8152; 1923, 51:1315, 1583, 3005, 5473, 6519; 1924, 52:589, 2046, 2775, 2990, 7457; 1927, 55:2266, 3344, 3688, 4159, 4395; 1929, 57:3064; 6073-6074, 6233, 8511, 8915; “Ask Rehearing on Sale of Playground Site,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Feb. 11, 1930; Mabel E. Macomber, “Rusurban Play Park,” in The Playground 18:651; Mabel E. Macomber, “Struggles of a Playground League,” Journal of Education 102, no. 6 (1925): 152; “Intensive Fight for Playground: Borough Civic Association Among Many Fighting for New Park,” The New York Amsterdam News, March 13, 1929; “Inconsistent in Playground Fight: Whites Are Now Reversing Themselves Because of Negro Property Owners,” New York Amsterdam News, April 10, 1929.

[10] Mabel E. Macomber, “Rusurban Play Park,” in The Playground 18:651; Mabel E. Macomber, “Struggles of a Playground League,” Journal of Education 102, no. 6 (1925): 152; “Intensive Fight for Playground: Borough Civic Association Among Many Fighting for New Park,” The New York Amsterdam News, March 13, 1929.

[11] The City Record 1929, 57:6073-6074; Macomber, “Rusurban Play Park”; Mabel E. Macomber, “Struggles of a Playground League,” 152; “Special Tax Urged To Buy Playgrounds: League Wants Entire City, Instead of Local Areas, to Assume the Burden of New Sites,” New York Times, Feb. 27, 1927; Mabel E. Macomber, “A Park Project Blocked”; “Intensive Fight For Playground”; Mabel E. Macomber, “Playground Assessments: Objection to Payment is Holding Up a Needed Improvement,” New York Times, March 23, 1929; Mabel E. Macomber, “A Need Unfulfilled: Dilatory Tactics by City Hold Up Playground Development,” letter to the editor, New York Times, April 11, 1929; Mabel E. Macomber, “A Grave Responsibility: Board of Estimate Faces a Decision of Unusual Importance,” letter to the editor, New York Times, May 22, 1929; Mabel E. Macomber, “The Rusurban Playground: Opposition to Site is Said to be Due to Misconception,” letter to the editor, New York Times, June 10, 1929.

[12] “Play Center Groups Face Hylan Inquiry: Mayor Announces Coming Investigation After Hearing of $200,000 Collected by One Association Hylan Still Has Hopes Mayor’s Assistant Says City Cannot Afford to Purchase Art Center Site,” New York Times, Mar. 29, 1924.

[13] The City Record 1929, 57:6233.

[14] “Playgrounds Again Arouse Hylan’s Ire: Threatens Inquiry Into Organization that Fought Grab of Park Site,” New York Times, Mar. 29, 1924.

[15] The City Record 1922, 50:5457, 7413, 7572, 7726, 8152; 1923, 51:1315, 1583, 3005, 5473, 6519; 1924, 52:589, 2046, 2775, 2990, 7457; 1927, 55:2266, 3344, 3688, 4159, 4395; 1929, 57:3064; 6073-6074, 6233, 8511, 8915; “Ask Rehearing on Sale of Playground Site,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Feb. 11, 1930.

[16] The City Record 1929, 57:6234; Hevlyn D. Benson, “Rusurban Site Opposed: Proposed Playground for Brooklyn is Regarded as Misplaced,” letter to the editor, New York Times, June 14, 1929.

[17] The City Record 1929, 57:6073-6074; Macomber, “Rusurban Play Park”; Macomber, “Struggles of a Playground League”; “Special Tax Urged To Buy Playgrounds”; Macomber, “A Park Project Blocked”; “Intensive Fight For Playground”; Macomber, “Playground Assessments”; Macomber, “A Need Unfulfilled”; Macomber, “A Grave Responsibility”; Macomber, “The Rusurban Playground”; Benson, “Rusurban Site Opposed”; Mabel E. Macomber, “More Playgrounds,” letter to the editor, New York Times, Apr. 1, 1930;  “Mabel Macomber Dies At Age of 57: Known Throughout Country as a Pioneer in the Playground Movement, Organized City League, Advocated Playgrounds as One of Best Means for Combating Juvenile Delinquency,” New York Times, Jan. 16, 1933; “Inconsistent in Playground Fight.”

[18] Frank da Cruz, “Crispus Attucks Playground – Brooklyn NY,” The Living New Deal, Aug 22, 2016, https://livingnewdeal.org/projects/crispus-attucks-playground-brooklyn-ny/.

[19] NYC Parks, “Crispus Attucks Playground,” New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, https://www.nycgovparks.org/parks/crispus-attucks-playground/history; Walter E. Lofton, “Happenings Among the Colored People,” Brooklyn Times Union, Dec. 2, 1934; “Hail Attucks Name for New Play Area,” Brooklyn Times Union, Dec. 20, 1934.

[20] “George E. Wibecan Seeks to Have Brooklyn Playground Named After Crispus Attucks,” The New York Age, Dec. 1, 1934.