MetaChat - Imagine a backyard.

MetaChat is an informal place for MeFites to touch base and post, discuss and chatter about topics that may not belong on MetaFilter. Questions? Check the FAQ. Please note: This is important.

18 September 2007

Imagine a backyard. And a front yard. And a stoop. And a porch. And a side yard.→[More:]I'm working on an exhibit plan for the new family discovery center that's going in at my museum. I'd love your help.

Backstory: My museum depicts a changing New England waterfront neighborhood over the course of 350+ years, 1695 - 1958.

When I got to the museum we piloted a brand new children's center. After a two-year pilot, it was deemed successful, and I now have funding to make it a permanent exhibit.

The exhibit will be located on the ground floor of a prominent red house that's part of the preserved neighborhood.

In the house will be 1 room devoted to domestic life over time, one room devoted to toys and games over time, and one room structured around neighborhood people and occupations. Plenty of hands-on, dramatic play, etc.

What I'm working on now: The exterior.

I'm envision the creation of a sort of Backyard of All Time, with features that will spark parent and grandparent nostalgia and still be really engaging for young kids.

We'll be able to enclose the back and side yard with some kind of fence, and then I'm hoping to have a "Street Play" installation on the streetscape in front.

This is your typical outdoor history museum - a big open neighborhood, set aside, with no cars in the actual area nearby. We can use the street. But anything not fixed in place will have to be brought in at the end of the day.

So, close your eyes. Imagine your outdoor neighborhood play as a child. What were the magical parts of it? What did you love? What does the Classic Neighborhood Yard need to contain?

The only limiting factor is that we don't want to feature anything that became common only after 1958 (our outer limit time period).

Some ideas we're already thinking about...
A sandy pad for playing marbles
An asphalt 'driveway' for chalk art, 4Square, and hopscotch.
A mailbox
A birdbath, pond, or other water feature
A tire swing....

post by: Miko at: 11:03 | 26 comments

A tree with lots of low branches for sitting in and climbing-on (goes along with your tire swing).

posted by muddgirl 18 September | 11:10

I guess slingshots won't be allowed. And the hula hoop was apparently trademarked and marketed starting in 58.

A slide? Other playground equipment...monkey bars, teeter-totters, merry-go-rounds, etc?

What about a clothesline? We still have posts from a long forgotten clothesline out back.

I'm assuming there's already a flagpole on the grounds.

posted by fluffy battle kitten 18 September | 11:13

• A Schwinn in the driveway
• A treehouse in the back yard, of course
• Is the house "inhabited"? Like, by fake children? Because an old-fashioned garden plot or two marked with the fake kids' names could be nice. These were especially common in the late 1800s and early 1900s, if my history lessons serve me right.
• On the porch, a porch swing
• A hoola hoop resting against the side of the house, or a wire/metal hoop for rolling, like kids did before plastic hoola hoops
• Is there a side porch, or a back one? You could do a "sleeping porch" from the period during which it was thought that it was best to sleep in the fresh air.

Can I come play at your museum?

PS. The treehouse could instead be a "clubhouse" in a little section of trees, on the ground, like girls used to make with old bits of their mother's chipped china, etc.

posted by brina 18 September | 11:14

A see-saw and a really giant humongous towering sliding board.

posted by mrmoonpie 18 September | 11:15

Oh, a victory garden, of course!

(In the 80s, my mum grew her own herbs in our front yard, and we had a lemon tree. This was pretty easy to do in California, but I don't know if the weather will support them in New England!)

posted by muddgirl 18 September | 11:22

a gate to swing on
a clothesline with clean sheets hanging from it that you could hide behind or run through

posted by iconomy 18 September | 11:24

Nothing to add, but sounds like a fantastic museum!

posted by typewriter 18 September | 11:40

The backyard has to have a table made out of a big wooden spool:

≡ Click to see image ≡

posted by BoringPostcards 18 September | 11:42

I imagine the house in Portland, Maine, where I lived until I was seven. It was maybe a hundred years old in the seventies.

- The lilac tree in the side yard, where I could curl up inside the nest made by the diverging branches and listen to the bees hum, the leaves screening me from view.

- The hitching posts left from the days of horses.

- The granite foundations to our wrought-iron fence, and the granite stepping-stone embedded in the brick sidewalk. I always imagined it was there to allow ladies to step up into carriages. (Ah, childhood sexism I didn't even remember.)

- The wooden play stove, the size of a small bookcase, with a door that opened out like a real oven. I would bake cookies in my EZ Bake and sell them, along with lemonade, using the wooden stove as a storefront: lemonade on top, cookies inside, and a sign up top.

- The red-berries pricklebushes with little teardrop leaves that smelled faintly of pickles.

- The stump in my best friend's yard where we held tea parties.

We lived on a school campus, so we kept all our seesaws, swings, etc. in the high-fenced backyard where passing children wouldn't use them unattended.

I am absolutely coming to see this museum.

posted by Elsa 18 September | 11:45

-A little red wagon
-A lemonade stand in the front yard

I want to see this museum!

posted by sisterhavana 18 September | 12:10

The other challenge I have is naming it. The pilot ran under the title "Family Discovery Center [yawn]." I'm at a loss for a more engaging name. History Playhouse? Time Travel House? 123 Memory Lane? I'm a bad namer. It's been a career bugbear.

These are fabulous suggestions. Many of them have already proved their worth - we do have hula hoops, and a Victory Garden, for instance, and those will definitely get carried over. I'm looking into ordering a repro 1950s Schwinn...there is a repro Phantom, but it's $1200! We do have a "Red Robin" trike and a wagon, and they'll stay.

We probably need some sort of yard shed or small 'garage.'

I'm wondering about a spigot and hose and sprinkler for warm days. Getting kids wet is not always popular with parents. But we did have great success doing laundry outdoors with a tub and washboard, and kids got plenty wet.

posted by Miko 18 September | 12:22

- A wooden screendoor, slammable by visitors, because the thing being exhibited is the sound it makes. (If Mary's dress could sway while the radio played, that'd be ok too)
- A bicycle, because in 1900, cycling was bigger than baseball.
- A box for milk bottle deliveries (that gets turned into a fort for green army men)
- A HAM radio antenna strung from the basement window out to a tall tree
- Some way to acknowledge the fear of Polio (?)

On Preview: I have a 95% original pre-war Schwinn DX boys' bike that I would consider loaning to a museum for a few years.

posted by Triode 18 September | 12:31

Getting kids wet is not always popular with parents. But we did have great success doing laundry outdoors with a tub and washboard, and kids got plenty wet.

Here's my completely uneducated guess about that:

Kids getting wet or dirty or messy under the guise of learning about Good Hard Work = educational experience; kids getting wet or dirty or messy while larking about = grouchy parents.

Under this (utterly made-up) guide, for example, kids getting splashed while using a washboard is educational backsplash. Kids running around under a sprinkler is darned tomfoolery, and hurf durf doesn't that museum know better than to get my kid all wet?

I'm not a parent, and would probably huck my nieces and nephews costly-shoes-first into a pool or under a spigot, so take my blahblahblah for what it's worth: very little.

posted by Elsa 18 September | 12:32

Bottle caps! I guess the technical name is "skully," but I've always known it as "bottle caps."

My dad talks a lot about playing "half ball" as a boy, but I'm having a hard time sorting through the google results. He also speaks wistfully of pimple balls. I'm not even going to try searching for that term with a kid on my lap.

posted by jrossi4r 18 September | 12:42

And as for water--soaking a kid without warning makes it hard to get them home and can ruin plans to stop for lunch or whatever. Moderate splashing is good fun, though.

posted by jrossi4r 18 September | 12:49

- '58 would be the dawn of the Space Race, so how 'bout some rockets?
- Tether cars & Control-line planes. I spent many hours of my youth kneeling in the street, trying to get a Cox .049 engine to run for more than 30 seconds...

posted by Triode 18 September | 12:59

Brilliance! Brilliance!

Triode, you make me glad I asked here: I guarantee you no one at the museum would come up with these ideas.

posted by Miko 18 September | 13:09

Some way to acknowledge the fear of Polio (?)

Digression: The summer before last, I went with my parents to check out Sunnyside Gardens, an erstwhile progressive hotbed in Queens, where both sets of my great-grandparents lived at one point, and where my dad had spent a lot of time as a boy. (Those of you who know the area: my great-grandfather planted all those plane trees along Skilman Ave.!)

One of the things we visited was the community-association park at the end of the road, including the very swimming pool where my dad presumably contracted polio! His case wasn't too bad; he needs shoes in two different sizes, but he gets around fine. The pool's since been drained, but still it was lovely.

But back to the point. You mentioned marbles, but also jacks. Skipping ropes, real rope ones with wooden handles -- the short one-person type plus a long one for groups. A see-saw, for the laws of physics. Various balls to bounce against a wall for hours on end in the event that they haven't yet invented the Internet. Ooh, and clamp-on roller skates.

posted by tangerine 18 September | 15:24

The other challenge I have is naming it

Call it "Two Nails in the Coffin of a Nation: Air-conditioning and Television"

posted by Triode 18 September | 15:54

Spot-on, Triode.

TV was bad enough, but I think it was AC that really did it. When I was a kid, we had plenty of TV and even cable, but people still sat on their porches in the evening. My parents used to do a nightly walk around the block after supper, and we kids played outside until the streetlights came on. WE had everything there was today, with the exception of internet - phone, TV, video rentals. Seems like everyone's got climate control now, though, and in those days if anyone did, at least in the North, it was one window unit for the master bedroom.

posted by Miko 18 September | 16:31

Kids running around under a sprinkler is darned tomfoolery, and hurf durf doesn't that museum know better than to get my kid all wet?
Plus, kids playing under sprinklers is absolutely verboten in these days of chronic water shortages, so you have the conflict between it being part of history, but not being a positive experience for the family because who wants to drag wet kids around in the car? If parents know in advance, it's fine because they can prepare, but springing something like this on them makes everyone miserable - the clothes washing wouldn't have got kids as wet as a sprinkler.

Is there some way to portray the whole "kids playing in the street until full dark without any parental supervision needed, because all the adults in the neighbourhood watched out for them" thing, because that epitomises the neighbourhood vibe of the past to me?

Yeah, I think aircon has killed off a lot of the neighbourhood friendliness - it used to be that the most comfortable place on hot summer days was outside in the shade, but now it's inside in the lounge where neighbours can't interact.

posted by dg 18 September | 17:28

the clothes washing wouldn't have got kids as wet as a sprinkler.

You weren't there. You can't know.

J/K. Seriously though - it did -- the kids were half immersed in the tub and their clothing was dripping, but most people were all right with that. It was featured in the heat of the summer.

Water shortage shouldn't be an issue (every now and then we get a car-wash/lawn-watering ban, but it's far from a shortage and sprinklers here aren't verboten). Anything like that we did would be a short-duration supervised program, anyhow. But I think it would indeed be more problematic than it's worth. Leave it to do at home, along with the Slip'n'Slide and wading pool.

posted by Miko 18 September | 18:44

Yeah, what was I thinking - kids, tubs of soapy water - recipe for disaster ;-)

I am so jealous that you can use sprinklers - I think the last time we were allowed to use them here was at least 3 years ago. In fact, the latest studies have confirmed that, rather than a drought (inferring that things will get better one day), we are in a position of "permanent dry" conditions and that things will get worse (maybe much worse) long before they get better, if they ever do. My younger kids may never experience the joy of running through a sprinkler or ripping their skin off when the skid off the end of a slip-n-slide onto the grass. Unless they visit your museum, I guess.

posted by dg 18 September | 21:04

Wow, that's interesting, dg. I had not idea things had reached such a level of severity. What are the causes people attribute the 'perma-dry' conditions to?

posted by Miko 19 September | 09:14

Well, it is primarily the standard "OMG global warming will be the end of us all!" stuff, but the state government has put a lot of resources into working out whether this is just part of the great cycle of things or a permanent trend and what has been reported in the press is that current indications are, as a result of the climate changes happening across the globe, we are going to get less and less rain, which will continue to make it impossible to grow anything across huge tracts of the state. This map gives some idea of the scale of the problem in this state alone and the majority of Australia is facing similar conditions and projections. For context, the state of Queensland is twice the size of Texas and six times the size of the UK, covering 25% of the land mass of Australia. There is some interesting information here, although it is a bit shallow.

I don't really have time at the moment to research this as much as I would like, but it might make for an interesting thread on its own in the near future. I do know that we are facing level 6 water restrictions later this year unless significant rains fall before then, although the government is tight-lipped about what that will mean, apart from that it will include a total ban on all outdoor use of water, including the removal of the current ability to water gardens by bucket three days a week for restricted hours. There has been a lot of talk about mandating the 140 litres per day per person that is currently used as a target - if this was the case, I don't know how they could police it without massive numbers of people reading meters regularly, but maybe it will come to that. As it is, households using more that 800 litres per day on average are being asked to explain why.

posted by dg 19 September | 18:45

Agreed, it would make an interesting thread on its own.

posted by Miko 20 September | 10:05

← I'll be in Seattle Oct 8-11, and || No Internet for old memes →

HOME || REGISTER || LOGIN