AA-2026-C3E433
On the image
A woman has settled her family onto a blanket on the park lawn for the afternoon, the children orbiting her in the loose way children do when they are nominally supervised. In the 1950s this was the whole plan: get outside, find grass, stay until dinner. The municipal playground behind her is stocked with the era's standard equipment — steel slides angled at gradients that would alarm a modern safety inspector — and children use it without any adult standing at the bottom to catch them. The man at the picnic table to the left is wearing a hat to sit outdoors, which was still, in this decade, simply what a man did. Everyone here is enacting a form of leisure that required no destination, no reservation, and no explanation, which is perhaps why nobody thought to remember where they were going or write it down.
Visually related — by likeness
Sunday Afternoon, City Park, 1950s. 1953–1959. Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library, AA-2026-C3E433. https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/sunday-afternoon-city-park-1950s.
@misc{aaAA2026C3E433,
title = {Sunday Afternoon, City Park, 1950s},
year = {1953–1959},
howpublished = {Archive \& Atlas, Historical Image Library},
note = {Accession AA-2026-C3E433},
url = {https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/sunday-afternoon-city-park-1950s}
}TY - ART TI - Sunday Afternoon, City Park, 1950s PY - 1953–1959 PB - Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library AN - AA-2026-C3E433 UR - https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/sunday-afternoon-city-park-1950s ER -
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