Playgrounds are for children

November 17, 2010, 5:30 PM

Want to Play Chess in the Park? It Could Be a Crime

By DYLAN LOEB MCCLAIN

Playing chess in New York City parks is a well established custom, so much so that the city has installed more than 2,000 tables among its 536 parks. But, if adults want to play on those tables — and those are typically the people who do — and those tables happen to be in a playground, the players may run into trouble. With the police. That is evidently what a group of players found out at the Emerson Playground in Inwood Hill Park in Manhattan.

The problem is that the law says that adults cannot enter playgrounds unless they are with children. The idea, obviously, is to keep people out who have the wrong motives for being around children. But in the case of the players in Inwood, they evidently just wanted to, well, play chess. More coverage of the story and what happened is on the City Room blog.