Like all good things—life on earth, for starters—it began as a swamp. A brackish pond, with shells and detritus piled up in small iridescent mountains, as the flayed skin of cows softened in the murky water. This marshy expanse was filled in and paved over in 1808, becoming Pearl Street, but the surrounding land was still damp and miasmic. Buildings sunk into the earth as if being swallowed. The crowded tenements tilted, and alleyways grew like ivy over the cramped trellis of the city’s official maps. The area was known as “Mulberry Bend,” curving like a fight-ready elbow, but other names were immortalized by Jacob Riis in photographs titled Bandit’s Roost and Rag-Picker’s Row.
In 1897, the cluster of slums was demolished and replaced with a park, designed by an aging Calvert Vaux. The park, over the past century and change, has gone by many names: Mulberry Bend Park, Five Points Park, Paradise Park, and now, Columbus Park. These days it sits beside a copse of looming courthouses on one side, attracting a chirping flock of television cameras and the occasional murmuration of protesters. On the other side is the bustling nexus of Chinatown. But the real action is by the pavilion in the northern plaza, where the games are played. Every concrete table has a gravitational force, the spread of cards or pieces, with concentric rings of players, then commentating onlookers—a solar system made of only Saturns. Sometimes, a geodesic dome of umbrellas for shade, tiny cumulus clouds of cigarette smoke, a thick brick of cash in an old lady’s pocket.
In his book Man, Play, Games (1961), Roger Caillois describes four types of game: agon (competition, like chess or basketball), alea (pure chance, like lottery or roulette), mimicry (simulation, playing pretend or dress-up), and ilinx (vertigo, “a rapid whirling or falling movement,” spinning around very fast, pushing a sled downhill, riding a roller coaster). These categories can be combined in hybrid forms, like card games that shuffle the cards, alea, but rely on strategy to win, agon. Sometimes I think New York City itself is one big agon-alea-mimicry-ilinx experience. Walking through Columbus Park always reminds me how any space can be claimed for the “free unreality” of shared play—wasteful, voluntary, intricate, joyous. In our family, in a little game of our own, the bend has a fifth name: Caillois Park.