From 1977 until 1980, Martha Cooper worked as a staff photographer for the New York Post. Between daily assignments, Cooper began to document unsupervised children playing amidst the rubble and disintegrating neighborhoods of New York (primarily the Lower East Side). The photographs focus on the activities of children playing and being creative on New York City streets, and largely depict groups of children building toys or playing with found objects in the days before video games and computers. In today’s day and age when unsupervised play in city streets is a rarity, these photographs reflect a time that was not so long ago, but a radically different approach to social norms and child rearing. The Museum of the City of New York recently acquired a selection of twenty photographs from this series for its permanent collection