It was noon at Playground Number One in Los Angeles on a crisp October day in 1905. As schoolchildren swamped L.A.’s first public playground, on Violet Street in what is now the Arts District, a reporter for the LA Times took in the joyous scene.
“The playground is overflowing now with small humanity,” he wrote. “Swings are going, seesaws are elevating shrieking little girls to dizzy heights, small boys and big boys are almost bursting their throats with the pent-up glee they have been saving all morning, and innumerable kindergarteners and smaller babies are falling into the fishponds and tumbling about in the sand.”
While this is a common sight to Angelenos today, in the Edwardian era, public playgrounds were not only a novelty, they were a revolutionary act…