Sunday, December 20, 1998

Kids may demand street-playing rights

By Dale McFeatters

As if it didn't have enough problems, Washington is home to another ominous social development.

An upscale Virginia suburb has banned kids from playing on its streets. Mind you, these are lightly traveled local streets and cul-de-sacs, not interstates. There was much high-minded talk about the kids' safety, but the real motivation for the ban seems to be, as always, fear of litigation.

Our agrarian past is truly gone and with it vacant lots and large yards, and the pursuits of today's small fry -- skateboarding, bikes, roller hockey, basketball -- require pavement.

I sympathize with the kids of this subdivision, which labors under the improbable name "Colonies of Madrillon."

When I was a kid, we played on the streets all the time. Our parents wanted us on the street. That way, they knew where we were and what we were doing. If they wanted to check on us, they could come to the front door.

If a kid was bored or lonely, he could go out to the middle of the street and begin kicking a football or riding his bike in circles. Soon, one kid, then two, then the whole neighborhood would show up. We played marathon games of touch football, telephone pole to telephone pole and long after dark, thanks to the streetlights.

Apparently the kids at the Colonies would sometimes block off the street with orange traffic cones. That's a bit much. Our adults believed they had every bit as much right to drive on our street as we had to play on it.

Once Mr. Blackburn took to trying to disrupt our games by parking his car three feet from the curb in the middle of the field. But soon wily field generals were using his Buick as a pick on the defender, and after he lost several antennas to quick out-patterns, he went back to parking in his driveway.

I imagine the Colonies was built new the way my old neighborhood has become over time. We had vacant lots, but they were all either ravines or impossibly steep, and we even had a ramshackle, hard-luck little farm adjoining the neighborhood. The farm is now a large shopping mall, and all the lots, improbably, have been built on, including one showy house cantilevered Fallingwater-style over what in my day was an open storm drain.

Houses with large, flat lawns suitable for play were few. My grandmother in a nearby town had one, and it entertained a more-or-less continuous touch football or Wiffle ball game. She said she didn't mind the permanent worn patch in her backyard because she liked to know where the kids were and what they were doing, even though they weren't her kids.

If the Colonies kids had a vacant lot, the owner, on the advice of counsel, almost surely wouldn't let them use it. Some kid might fall down and hurt himself. And if there is a large yard nearby it is probably marked with those little flags saying the lawn care company had sprayed it with chemicals that cause little kids to grow second heads.

The news photos show that the townhouses at the Colonies open directly on the sidewalk. Kids in search of a game step out of their houses, and they're almost right on the street, on which they are prohibited from playing.

So what are the kids to do? They could do the '90s America thing. They could sue.

Scripps Howard News Service