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Thursday, March 25, 2010

A ‘Jail’ for Children Stirs a Ruckus in Brooklyn - City Room Blog - NYTimes.com

A ‘Jail’ for Children Stirs a Ruckus in Brooklyn - City Room Blog - NYTimes.com

A ‘Jail’ for Children Stirs a Ruckus in Brooklyn

No more jail.Robert Stolarik for The New York TimesA maintenance worker prepared to paint over the word “Jail” at a playground at a public housing project in Brooklyn on Wednesday.

Playground controversies usually involve bickering parents, unruly dogs or bullies.

One exception is at the Tompkins Houses, a city housing project in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, where an orange jungle gym adorned with the word “Jail,” a cell door and prison bars has, six years after its installation, set off outrage in the neighborhood and the blogosphere, along with a hasty official response.

Children may play cops and robbers all the time, but putting a pretend jail in a public housing playground in a historically black community struck some residents as an insult.