Why is the Bixler Playlot in Hyde Park so popular when there are so many nicer playgrounds nearby?
“Location,” all parents of babies and toddlers in its three-mile radius will answer immediately.
That’s certainly true, but there is more to it than that.
Bixler is on East 57th Street, between Kenwood and Kimbark, across from Medici on 57th, the popular eatery where you can drag your screaming toddler to use the potty without having to buy anything.
Down the block is 57th Street Books, to hide in if it starts to rain, though they give you a look if your kid isn’t wearing a mask. Bixler Park is next to Ray Elementary and down the street from the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, with their luxurious, largely ignored playground.
After school, until the first snow, and then again when it seems like spring may be on the way, little kids descend on Bixler from the institutional daycare centers, Little Inspirations and Bright Horizons, and the home versions, Luz and Sahannah and Claudia. They come from Lab and Ray and the Parent Co-op, from the Chicago Free School and Akiba Schechter Jewish Day School and Ancona School.
They come with moms and dads and aunts and uncles and babysitters and nannies and brothers and sisters and cousins. They come from East Hyde Park, Woodlawn, Kenwood, Bronzeville, even Beverly.
Some come mysteriously, but leave their mark.
It seems in addition to being a playground, with typical playground amenities — slides, swings, a sandbox — Bixler is a junkyard.
Here, people leave their unloved toys. This must happen in the dead of night, because, in all the hours I’ve spent at Bixler since my daughter was born, I have never witnessed someone depositing a large, broken, dirty rideable toy — yet Bixler is so full of them that it’s difficult to get from one side of the playground to the other.
There is a pink tricycle with a weather-beaten Minnie Mouse molded onto its handlebars, a metal fire engine with pedals attached by sharp metal poles, several of the classic Little Tikes Cozy Coupes — you know the one, even if you don’t think you do. It is vaguely McDonald’s-esque, shaped like Grimace, with a Heinz red molded plastic bottom, French’s yellow upper arches, and googly eyes on the front bumper. There are generally at least three in Bixler, always missing their steering wheels.
They’re very popular, for a while anyway.
It’s all comfortably familiar, until it’s not.
Last fall, as the sky got dark earlier each day, forcing us home before we were ready, Bixler seemed different. There were the same discarded toys, the same swing sets, angled toward each other at the east and west sides of the park, the same series of progressively dizzying slides.
It was the kids who were different.
They were younger. A new mini-generation of toddlers, blooming up in Bixler right before our eyes. I watched my daughter regard them with mild interest mixed with disdain.
She had just turned 3; in the world of Bixler, she had become one of the older kids.
It seems to have happened in a single afternoon.
We could only spend the winter dreaming of the coming spring. ‘New’ old toys would appear. Some annoyed dad, as I’ve seen happen from time to time, would likely toss a couple of particularly dangerous toys into the garbage outside the gate. Maybe someone from the Park District would fix the sprinkler, or maybe not.
Bixler would again fill with little kids, coming from blocks and miles and neighborhoods away to run and yell and be together. They would have been born under the shadow of the pandemic, but not under its thumb, like my daughter and her cohorts were. They’ll be the same as us, but different, newer.
And me and my daughter? We’ll be at the “big” kids’ playground closer to Ray, finding out what’s going on over there.
Lucy Biederman is the author of The Walmart Book of the Dead. She publishes a monthly-ish newsletter about teaching, writing, and reading at https://lucydiamondb.substack.com/.
