Washington Post, Aug 11, 1922

Children Hold Fete As Playground Opens

The Plaza playground, second street and Massachusetts avenue northeast, was formally opened last evening. The playground is being operated this year for the first time by the municipal playground department.

Scores of visitors and several hundred children took part in the exercise. Boys and girls who play on the Plaza ground had their play space elaborately decorated with Japanese lanterns. The exercises were in the form of a lawn fete and an exhibition of playground activities.

A variety of the dances taught on the playgrounds were presented and specimens of the industrial work done by the children was exhibited. Mrs. Katherine Swanson is director and Miss Helen Einstein assistant director of the new ground.

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Washington Post, Aug 17, 1922

Few Playgrounds for 15,500 Children

Northeast Washington, compromises an extensive area of the city, with few playgrounds. In the opinion of those in charge of playgrounds, it furnishes a good illustration of the experience Washington in not only lacking sites in an area where there are many children, but in having lost sites through failure to make the necessary appropriation of money before the land was acquired by private interests.

The northeast includes the largest and probably the best equipped large playground operated by the municipal system, but is far removed from the only other playground for white children in that section. For colored children there is but one municipal playground. The Lovejoy school, Twelfth and D streets, has been kept open this summer by the playground department to help fill this need.
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The Plaza playground, as the sites as Second street and Massachusetts avenue are known, compromise five and a quarter acres of play space. On one piece of the ground the Liberty hut once stood. A full sized baseball diamond where all school games for that part of the northeast are played, and the girls basketball and tennis course are on this playground. One section is reserved for the little people and a variety of things are provided for them. The Plaza playground is loaned by the Federal government.

That's quite the pumpkin head, far left, front row. Mom is probably still describing that ordeal to her neighbor.

Top row, second from right, that child is not getting cheated at feeding time.

Lots of love and motherly compassion in those faces. Hope all the moms reading had a special day today. My Mom has been gone three years. Miss her.

If we are lucky, maybe a third of these babies are still with us and now into their 80's and 90's. We come into the world with no teeth, hair and in diapers, and some of us go out that way too! Anyway what a precious bunch of moms and babies! Happy Mothers Day!

It looks like an audition for the 1932 edition of 'The Little Rascals'! Wonder where they all wound up? Doctors, Lawyers, Indian Chiefs?