Kids’ Games Vanish as Danger Stalks City Streets : Leisure: Video amusements drive out traditional ones, sending their players indoors. Supervised sports take a toll on hopscotch, jacks.

Esther and Oscar Hirschman were childless themselves, but in the 1930s and ‘40s they roamed the streets of this city, watching its children at play and meticulously recording thousands of rhymes, games, dances, calls, tricks and taunts.

As they listened to rhymes that originated in Victorian London and joined in games that dated back to ancient Rome, they remembered the universal joy of being 8 years old and outdoors on a sunny day.

“Enter an old playground again with us,” they urged readers of their 1,100-page, never-published manuscript, “and be filled with the simple pageantry we parade.”

Forty years later, the parade is over. Childish amusements that endured for hundreds of years and survived plagues, famines, wars and revolutions, are disappearing from the streets of many cities near the end of the 20th Century.

Jack be nimble, Jack be quick,

Jack jump over the candlestick.

The time is now, the scene is the playground of a public housing project in Brooklyn where girls are skipping rope. But their rhymes can be traced back to medieval England, where every Nov. 25--the day before Advent--the lace makers of Wendover jumped over a candle for good luck.

Perhaps the most amazing thing about children’s play is the durability of its forms. Archeologists have discovered ancient hopscotch boxes marked on the pavement outside the Roman Forum, and drawings from the period show boys playing Johnny-on-the-pony against the wall of the Coliseum.

When photographer Arthur Leipzig first saw Bruegel’s 1559 painting Kinderspielen , or Children’s Games, he was struck by the fact that many of those games still were being played in 1950 on the streets outside his Brooklyn apartment, including leap-frog, marbles, jacks, Johnny-on-the-pony, king of the mountain and hopscotch.

But most of the games the two men depicted over a span of three centuries have become endangered or extinct in the last 40 years.

The sounds of city play--the clatter of jacks, the scuffing of potsie (also known as hopscotch), the cry of “ring-a-levio!”--are increasingly the sounds of the past.

“It’s all over for these games,” says Bill Castro, head of recreation for the city Parks Department. “Kids see them as boring. They’re into technology and into organized sports.”

Traditional games are vanishing wherever cities are too dangerous for street play or suburbs are too spread out for it. But the loss is particularly poignant in New York, where the densely settled, working-class communities once were hothouses for street play.

When seven people lived in three rooms, asks Sylvia Lass, who grew up in the 1920s on the Lower East Side, “How could the life not be in the streets?”

The street was so familiar, its details so well known, that when someone said, “Meet you on the fourth stoop,” you knew where to go. Even adults, says urban folklorist Steve Zeitlin, “treasured the life of the stoop” and enjoyed watching kids play.

Jerry Demers, the parks department’s Bronx recreation director, was startled the other day to see several children playing marbles in the dirt.

“I hadn’t seen marbles for years,” he says. “But when I got closer, I saw they were Korean kids. They didn’t speak English. They’d just come over, and they brought marbles with them.”

Martha Cooper has roamed the city for a decade, photographing children at play.

“I haven’t seen anything that made me stop my car and jump out for a long time,” she says. “If there were a sighting of a child-made go-cart, I’d go a long way to see it.”

The biggest reason for the decline in street play is that fewer kids are in the streets.

Virtually every technological advance--television, air conditioning, the telephone, the car--and virtually every social problem--crime, drugs, homelessness--have made the streets less inviting and indoor play more popular.

Traditional games are being replaced by video games, which can be played alone and indoors; by organized sports, which rigorously structure play and assign winners and losers; and by “performance” play such as break-dancing or graffiti writing, in which the player has one eye on an audience that often includes adults.

In the old days, Zeitlin says, “Kids didn’t expect to grow up to become famous players of marbles.” But now graffiti artists are hired to paint wall murals, break-dancers seek prizes in sponsored competitions and rappers angle for recording deals.

In a book to be published this fall entitled “City Play,” Zeitlin and his wife, Amanda Dargan, lament the steady move away from “free play”--the kinds of things kids do when they are outdoors and unsupervised. Video games, they complain, “don’t create communities. The world they create is on the screen--in the mind--not on the block.”

Video games and other manufactured amusements also demand less invention and imagination. When parents can afford to buy toys, their children have little need or interest in building their own soapbox cars or making peach-pit rings by rubbing a pit against a stoop until a hole forms in the middle.

New York kids always have had to fight for a share of public space, and adapt their play to the changing city.

The paving of dirt streets and sidewalks killed marbles--you couldn’t dig a little hole for the agate--so kids switched to skelly, which used a disc, such as a bottle cap, that could be flicked into boxes marked on the smooth pavement. Similarly, when row houses began to fill the sandlots that served as baseball diamonds, kids started playing stickball in the streets.

No one claims that the new play, much of it indoors or under close supervision in parks, is all bad.

Brian Sutton-Smith, a student of children’s play, argues that the old games prepared children for an economy dependent on physical skill and strength. The new ones, he says, train children for an information economy that values the manipulation of signs and symbols. Skill at a computer screen is more important than skill with a slingshot.

Many city kids still play in the streets, and some play traditional games, especially in poor, crowded neighborhoods like Bedford-Stuyvesant and the Lower East Side. Boys there have been known to build a go-cart out of a police barricade, and girls still like double-dutch jump rope.

But even where vestiges of the old play endure, there is little of the density or complexity--the dozens of variations of hopscotch--the Hirschmans discovered.