My only friends as a kid were from the inner depths of my mind
My parents looked at where the kids in the neighborhood were going and put us in school appropriately. My oldest sister and I went to public schools. The middle two went to the local parish Catholic School. There was a pretty big age gap between me and my siblings. By the time I came around no kids in the neighborhood were going to Catholic school.
Aw.
For me it was both. My best buddy and I met getting into a fight on the school playground, rolling around kid fight, “you fight good” “you fight good” He had recently moved to our neighborhood and turned out to live a few blocks away. Went over to his house after school and still friends today. We had a small circle. All in same school and short bike rides from each other. Funny enough we were always in the same levels of classes but never, not once, in the same class.
If there were kids my age and grade in my neighborhood that didn’t go to my school I never met them.
I went to Catholic school but my closest friend ( who attended the same Catholic church) went to public school. The rest of that group also attended public school. I also had some school friends, but I didn’t see them much over the summer or school vacations.
However, I’m not sure how much of that was specific to where I lived . Not the city (NYC), but my specific circumstances. I did not attend the Catholic school or church that I should have - I lived within the boundaries of Parish A, but attended the school and church in Parish B * so none of my schoolmates lived within a few blocks of me. Any Catholic school students who lived close would have attended the Parish B school.
High school was a different story as almost all of my classmates were zoned for a different public high school than I was - I literally knew no one my first day, as my neighborhood friend ( who was zoned there) went somewhere else. At that point most of my friends were from school ( except my boyfriends and their friends - I never had a boyfriend from my high school)
* When my grandparents moved into the neighborhood, Parish A told them their house was within Parish B apparently because they were Italian and Parish A was mostly German. Since I lived in that same house, that’s where we went even though it was 20 or so years later.
Definitely same school. Same neighborhood? Depends on your definition. My best friend lived within walking distance, but not particularly close, like on the same block or group of blocks. I had other friends more on my block or at most a few blocks away.
School, since there were no kids within a mile or so. By Junior High my friends from church were in the same school.
My friends were from school.
Talked to a cow-orker from Chicago, her experience was the same as mine (and puly’s). She is in her 30s, went to public school, and all of her friends were from public school. Said same is true of her brother’s young kids today, except they go to Catholic school.
It sounds like my Chicago childhood/school experience was quite different than many or yours. In Chicago (at least in the 60s-70s) there were neighborhood public schools that just about every kid could and did walk to. (Today I believe there is open enrollment, with kids taking the bus or being driven to various schools.) But I was in the district for Reinberg. EVERY kid in Reinberg’s district who went to public school went to Reinberg. The kids living across the alley to our west were in a different district. They ALL attended Mary Lyons. Grade school was K-8.
Pretty much the only alternative to public schools was Catholic schools. Our local one was St Ferd’s. (There was one Lutheran school a ways to the east of my grade school, but that was just something weird and different.) I cannot overemphasize how predominant Catholicism was at that time in that area.
I had a couple of friends who attended the Catholic school. They told my sisters and me that they were taught that they were better than the public school kids. My mom made me go to the Catholic church, and attend catechism (we were let out of school and walked over on Wed afternoons.). But I guess that still wasn’t enough! 
The neighborhood was densely populated - identical houses on 30’ wide lots. EVERYONE walked to/from school - AND home for lunch. A different time indeed. My dad lived in the same house since 1927, and folk did not move in/out nearly as frequently as they seem to today. So these kids living down the street whom I NEVER played with lived there my entire childhood.
What I’m having a hard time getting my head around today is how segregated we kids were. (100% white, non-hispanic.) I have memories of groups of us kids playing out front and in our yards and in the alley all the time - playing 500 or bounce or fly, pinners, freeze tag, hide and seek, SPUD, ghost in the graveyard, mother may I, etc. And we rode our bikes everywhere. I don’t remember us EXCLUDING any kids from playing with us. And I don’t remember any groups of Catholic kids playing up or down the block.
I was on the far end of my school’s district, so to play with my friends from school, even as a little kid I often had to cross 1 or 2 busy streets. I had one really good friend right down the block. And I did play w/ the neighbors who went to Ferd’s, but they were a couple of years younger than me. But most of the time, I remember playing with just a gang of kids - including my immediate neighbors, but also my sisters and their friends.
Just seems so weird that, as kids, we either decided to segregate ourselves from kids who lived on our same block, or our/their parents sent us messages telling us to not play with certain kids. Also so weird - as an adult - how HUGE of a gulf a year or 2 was. Now, I consider anyone 10-15 years older or younger than me essentially my same age. But as a kid, someone 1-2 years older or younger was just a different species. Sure, we’d often have a range of ages in our group games, but I wouldn’t individually go out to befreind someone 1-2 years older or younger.
When I was in grade school we lived in a neighborhood that was mostly Jewish. We played with the kids in the neighborhood that we went to school with. One family was avoided because they were weird. Looking back, I think they might have been Mormons. They eschewed halloween, and did not celebrate birthdays. They also dressed weird (the boy wore dress shirts and pants, the girls dresses). They might have gone to a private school. We all hated them and threw crab-apples at them.
I didn’t go to Hebrew school or Shul, yet I was accepted by everyone. The Mormon kids were just too weird, I guess.
Both, plus “other.”
I went to parochial schools, and most of my friends were either other kids with whom I went to those schools, or kids who lived in the neighborhood (but who went to public schools).
In addition, we always lived near some of our extended family, and I became very close with a few of my cousins, who were similar in age to me, to the point that they were my best friends as well as being my cousins.
My suburban neighborhood had a lot of kids, including older girls who would become the organizers, so my first friends were neighborhood kids. I’m still friends with many of them today.
After second grade, when our nextdoor neighbors moved across town, my friends came from school. More specifically, girls I was in Girl Scouts and softball with, who also went to my school.
After that it was kids in band. And kids I was in the “gifted track” with.
I’m still friends with most of the people I was friends with growing up. In fact, my current closest Group Of Women Friends aren’t friends from school but they are friends my school friends met in college and brought home to me 
I had two sets of friends, one in my immediate neighborhood and one in my grandparents’ block (about 1 1/2 blocks away). The first set I played with from the time I got home from school until dark the entire school year, while the second most summer days. They played entirely different games. In particular, the school year friends incessantly played a game they called boxball that no one I ever knew who didn’t in the 700 block of S. Alden St. in West Philly has ever heard of it. Yes there are games called boxball, but none of them was our game. In the 800 block we played more traditional games, especially stoop ball. It is notable that in the 1940s far fewer people owned cars and they were not parked during day time since they were driven to work. So we had the streets for our playgrounds.
In my childhood neighborhood, there’s a huge clearing (moraine, I’m guessing), with an elementary school at each end. Public school at one end, Catholic school at the other. Word was, recess was staggered betweeen them so that the kids wouldn’t mix on break.
Anyway, my friends were primarily from my school, at least during the school year. There were two or three families with kids my age on the (suburban) block and we all played together the rest of the time. By the time I reached high school, pretty much all of my friends were the teens with whom I’d been going to school with for a few years. By my senior year I had maybe one local friend who didn’t go to my high school. Plenty of other aquaintances though, mainly through the punk scene, but we didn’t hang out outside of gigs.
Neighborhood and school. I knew kids from Sunday School but never saw them anywhere but the temple. I think I went to the house of one kid I met at the pool, but that’s it.
However, we didn’t mix with the kids going to Catholic school very much. They were just starting to move in when I went to school, most of them moving into new homes on the same street. Over time there was some interaction between the groups.
Not Mormons. Maybe Jehovah’s Witness? Mormon do Halloween.
Ahhh, cool. We were too busy throwing crab apples at them to learn anything about them. They definitely did not do Halloween 
Most of my early friends were in the neighborhood and went to the same Mormon congregation.
I had friends that were a few blocks away and actually further away than some kids that went to a different congregation. I never talked to them. Nothing wrong with talking to them but we just didn’t spend as much time together.
Church on Sundays and more church during the week. Most kids didn’t go to private schools. There was a private Catholic high school but no one from my neighborhood went there [
Maybe Mennonites or Seventh Day Adventists? We bought our house from Mormons and my daughter hung out with them. Not weird at all until the later years of high school when started withdrawing to make sure they married a good Mormon boy and prepped to go to a BYU somewhere.
Both, really. We all went to West Hollywood ES which was part of LAUSD despite being in then-unincorporated West Hollywood. K-6 at the time, they were still using the system of A and B classes when I started, and the student population was small enough that each half-year group fit into a single room. Most of us in the neighborhood went on to the same middle school, or junior high as it was called then.
Both the elementary school and the middle school now have mandatory uniforms. I hate seeing kids live with so much less freedom than we had. 