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Splinters in the Dust. Chief holdout is old New York. In a memorable exchange in 1948, Architectural Critic Lewis Mumford accused Park Commissioner Robert Moses of creating playground spaces "that are merely leftovers, bleak asphalt wastes, marks of an absence of human interest and an almost positive distaste for beauty." To parents' demands that sawdust be substituted for cement, Park Commissioner Newbold Morris replied with a pungent comment on the problems of the great big city. "Sawdust gets full of splinters, broken glass, empty cigarette packages and debris. We're experimenting with a rubber compound, but it's been ripped with knives. We have $450,000 a year in willful damage to park property."
In an effort to smuggle some imaginative ideas into the city, Architect
Louis Kahn and Sculptor Isamu Noguchi have produced a design for a $1,000,000 playground to be carved out of Riverside Park. Proposed as a memorial to the late Philanthropist Adele R. Levy, the layout includes a grass-covered amphitheater, a pyramid and some handsome free-form sculptures designed to tempt the clambering young. But by the time the park engineers, the evaluators, the experts and the mayor are through with the plans, many a moppet may well have hair gone grey at the temples.