United States, 1876 to 1900

Urban Getaways and Outdoor Recreation

The late Gilded Age saw the beginning of outdoor recreation in extravagant wilderness retreats for the well-to-do. The Adirondacks were home to Sagamore, the place of the Alfred Vanderbilts. The Gilded Age leisure class in the 1880s suffered from hay fever (autumnal catarrh, June Cold, hay asthma, etc.) and every August thousands headed for New Hampshire's White Mountains, New York's Adirondacks, the Great Lakes, or Colorado to escape the runny nose, watery eyes, asthma, and sneezing that to many seemed the penalties of city wealth and education. In the resorts, they found relief and at the same time changed the relationship of Americans to nature, which became a commodity to be consumed for health and pleasure.

For the less well off, those who could not flee the city for recreation, there were public parks. In 1866, Frederick Law Olmsted suggested that San Francisco needed a public park to improve San Franciscan health and morality. The park would also promote the prosperity of the city. At the beginning of the Gilded Age, the concept of a large urban park was something of a novelty, with Central Park and Brooklyn's Prospect Park, and Philadelphia's Fairmont Park the only pertinent American examples. The idea of a public park for all classes was democratic and new. Completed in 1872, Golden Gate Park welcomed pedestrians, equestrians, bicyclists, and ladies and gentlemen in carriages.

Activities included band concerts, floral displays, carriage racing on the speed road, picnicking, and family games such as tennis and croquet. The park added a music stand, a conservatory, and a children's playground by 1888. Terms describing the park include “hygienic” and “sublime,” and reformers regarded the park as a medium of moral uplift and social reform. The park was also the site of the California Midwinter International Exposition of 1894, which included parades and military salutes and drew more than two million visitors in six months. Exposition displays became permanent fixtures of the park—Japanese and Egyptian—but much of the park reverted to forestland or open space.

Play, Games, and Entertainment at Home

There was also a rural-urban split in type and amount of play. In 1870, over half of American children grew up on farms, and in 1920 more children grew up on farms than in other environments. An average farm child in the north in 1890 worked over 1,700 hours, attended school 516 hours, and spent most of the rest of the time sleeping. In their spare time they enjoyed pets, dolls, and bicycles. In the typical rural school, recess was a time for Marbles, Tag, and jump rope. Children's toys were homemade—a ball of yarn for catch, a whistle or whirligig made from a thick twig. Animal bladders made effective footballs and balloons. Older girls who were not allowed to play active children's games played string games such as Cat's Cradle or games using buttons and beans. Practical jokes were common, and they ranged from blocking the chimney and forcing the smoke into the room to putting bugs and such in another child's school box. Spitballs were also likely to fly.

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