A ‘Jail’ for Children Stirs a Ruckus in Brooklyn
By CARA BUCKLEY AND MICK MEENAN
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.