I grew up in a small town in Illinois, but we could ride our bikes down to the Illinois River, we could explore wooded areas near the river or in ravines, there was lots of farmland that had creeks and ponds.
Got all the bug bites, poison ivy, scratches and cuts that go along with “exploring” the woods, but it was fun to camp out overnight with friends, or build secret forts, or fish, or hike, or sled in the winter.
Back then, it was no big deal to just go roaming around the wooded areas as long as I was home before dinner. Not sure how that works with kids today in these kinds of areas - simpler times back then, I guess.
Just wondering what your neighborhood was like when you were growing up - how far did you have to ride you bike or skateboard or whatever to get out into “nature”, or where did you hang out with your friends on a summer day/evening - woods, local playground or city park or behind some school?
I lived right across from Cincinnati in Covington, KY. I was only about 2 blocks from Devou Park which was large and nice. Covington was starting to go downhill and our area was becoming a ‘hillbilly slum’. People from Appalachia would come up north looking for jobs. Fortunately Covington turned the corner and is a nice place now.
So when I was 11 we moved to the suburbs. We weren’t too far from farm country and would take long hikes and bicycle rides.
Now about 50 years later, I live in a medium sized city in Illinois and often ride my bicycle near the Mississippi, Illinois, and Missouri Rivers.
In elementary school I lived in a paradise, out in the country in rural DeLand, Florida. We had about a 5 acre lake that was the far boundary of the back yard, otherwise full of pines, oaks and tropical fruit trees. Orange, tangerine, loquat, persimmon were in the yard and the sparsly populated neighborhood itself was surrounded by orange and tangerine groves. Dad and I used to walk through the yard in the morning picking our breakfast and I had permission to eat as many of the orchard oranges as I could hold. We rode our bikes everywhere, pulled the slide to the edge of the lake, threw salt on the tails of birds and had not a care in the world.
We moved a lot so the next few houses were suburban, more sprawl and less woods. If there was a good thing it’s that there were tons more friends to play with. Nothing ever really compared to DeLand again except maybe summer camp in the Texas Hill Country where we didn’t quit explorin’ and goin’ ninety to nuthin’ for a full month at a time.
When I was a kid in the 80s we lived in a fairly newly constructed suburb of Wichita. There were a lot of kids around and no internet, and not much in the way of cable or video games. Kids would wander the neighborhood in groups and play in one backyard for a while, then another. Or, if the parents were agreeable, in the basements. All the houses there had finished basements as a tornado precaution, and they were invariably used as play rooms.
There wasn’t any nearby wilderness, just a manmade neighborhood “lake”. Sometimes we found turtles beside it.
I’m a 50s kid, much like the OP but in small town (2000) northern PA. Could range the whole town on bikes, always walked to school - bus was for farm kids. Woods a block away and went on for miles, creeks to wade in and when old enough, I could grab a shotgun, call my beagle and bring home rabbits for dinner.
Norman Rockwell scenes reminded me of older family.
My experience was very similar to yours only it was in Ohio and no river, but a local creek that we thought was the bomb to hang out and play around. It was just like Mayberry. Only two cops, one stop light, a barber shop, filling station with mechanics, and we all hung out at diner/bar by the railroad tracks. Everyone knew each other, old people sat on the porches and watched the world go by and kids were unsupervised after they got home from school until it got dark. When we got older we would throw a case of beer in the back seat and drive out to a deserted country road and have a party next to a cornfield.
I can’t imagine such a place anymore and it most likely is because it was shaped by a child’s imagination and understanding of the world at the time.
There were woods behind my parents house, flanked on the west by the freeway and on the east by houses (now I know that those homeowners actually owned the woods!)
It felt like those woods were never-ending but truthfully it’s only about a mile or two at most. But I walked there even when I got older. I’d take my dog back there and pray she didn’t make her way into the oily water runoff pond thingy (she did, a few times. Gross!)
My parents lived on the outside corner of a square, and that was our neighborhood. Just a little square. Plenty of kids to play with all the time!
I bought a house at the other end of the square and that’s where I live now. I love seeing all the new kids in the neighborhood! There’s also 5 of us who grew up here that bought houses here. Great place to live
There is a creek running through the neighborhood, too. We had more access to it when we were younger, before someone moved next door to the main access point and shut it down. But kids are starting to spend more time in there again. I spent a ton of time there, when not in the woods or generally playing closer to home.
We moved a lot when I was a kid, but the two places we lived the longest were:
Flint, MI in the early to mid-70’s. When we first moved in, it was a nice, middle-class neighborhood with families and old people. By the time we moved out in the late 70’s, at least half the houses were boarded up, people were getting shot on a regular basis, and we couldn’t really play outside that much. Now I think that neighborhood is a horrible run-down slum, as is much of Flint.
From the early to late 80’s, we lived in the Thumb area of Michigan. Very, very rural, small towns, not even an interstate within an hour’s drive. This was like growing up in the 50’s, basically. Everybody knew everybody else and three towns went to my high school, where there were 103 kids in my graduating class. My parents left the keys in the car ignition and we didn’t even own a house key.
As my SDMB name indicates, I grew up in Archie Bunker’s neighborhood, Astoria (Queens), New York.
In my youth, it was a blue collar neighborhood- largely Irish-Italian in the Sixties, largely Greek-Italian in the Seventies. My family and most of our neighbors lived in small one or two-family houses. Most of didn’t have driveways, let alone garages. We walked or took the subways almost everywhere. My house, my school and my church were all on the same block, so 90% of my life was spent on that block for many years.
We didn’t have many big chain stores then (we do now!!), so we did almost all our shopping in small independently owned stores within a few blocks.
I moved away 27 years ago. In the meantime, the neighborhood has gotten heavily Yuppified. It’s hard to imagine that my old house would fetch a million bucks, but it would- easily. I never would have dreamed that rich people would want to live in my neighborhood, but they do, and the retailers I see there now prove it.
Nature was a foreign concept- the only wildlife we saw was squirrels, pigeons, sparrows and stray cats.
I grew up on Amuskai Rd in Parkville, MD. If you look at it on Google Maps, it’s pretty much unchanged since the late 50s/early 60s. We played in the alley or in neighbors’ yards - dodge ball, biking, skating, building tents, putting on shows - and we were also allowed to go to the nearby elementary school to play on their playground. It was concrete suburbia for the most part - not a lot of fun exploring. As we got a little older, we could go to the movies - about a mile away - or several different shopping centers. At one point, the houses that bordered our alley (fronting on Amuskai and Redwood) had a total of 102 kids under 18. Lots of families had 4, 5, or 6 kids. Mostly Catholics - go figure.
I grew up in San Diego in the mid-60s. Our 'hood was on the edge of where the housing tracts ended and the canyons and mesas began. There were tons of families with kids and we spent a lot of time exploring and going “lizard hunting”.
I grew up in a small town in west Georgia. There was a big open field behind our house. Best playground in the world! There were lots and lots of kids and we played in the field, in back yards, rode bikes all over the area, walked or biked to school and best of all, about a mile away we had a library, pool, recreation hall for kids and teens that had a gym and a big room with a juke box, and a drug store with a soda fountain that made the best burgers and grilled pimento cheese sandwiches! I remember several little creeks we played in and the big playground area for little league baseball and peewee football. As I said, it was a small town, so if we did anything bad, the 'rents knew about before we got back home.
Chicago suburbs, but still a little rural with some farmland. We might walk to town (a dime store and a bakery, the library and a post office), ride our bikes around, wander around the field down the street, play wiffle ball in the back yard, or just flop in the front yard and watch the clouds. Once it was late afternoon or early evening, we would stand in the street and play Mother May I, or Red Light Green Light, or we would go to someone’s yard to play Statues, Red Rover, Spud, Hide and Seek, or Tag.
We were expected to be out of the house and occupying ourselves sensibly.
The neighborhood shown in To Kill a Mockingbird reminds me of my childhood. Very few fences, lots of space to roam and play, cracked sidewalks (or no sidewalks), houses needing paint, open porches, and alleys. I miss alleys.
A Christmas Story nails the schoolrooms of the 40’s and 50’s, and again, more alleys. And snowsuits.
Until I was 10, I lived in the far western suburbs of Chicago…this was in the early 1970s. It was a very quiet, fairly new subdivision, with vacant lots (fewer as the years went on, and the subdivision filled up), and wooded areas on the fringes of our subdivision and the neighboring one. Big lots (1/2 acre or more), no sidewalks, no curbs or storm sewers (due to being far enough away from an incorporated town).
I wasn’t big on the outdoors as a kid, but there was a lot of exploring that we did in the woods (which often featured little creeks). We could ride our bikes into town, which was only about 2 miles away, usually to go to the 7-Eleven to buy Slurpees or candy bars. At one point, when I was 8 or 9, a number of us (with our fathers’ help) built “go-karts” (really, just glorified coaster wagons) out of disassembled Radio Flyer wagons and assorted parts…we had a great time racing them down the gently hilly roads in the subdivision, because there was so little car traffic.
As long as we didn’t try to cross the busy highway at the far end of our subdivision (a mental boundary which was drummed into all of our heads by our parents), we were free to go wherever we wanted.
I grew up in West Philadelphia, a neighborhood full of 2 storey row houses. There was a small park about 3 blocks away and a large linear park (Cobb’s Creek Park) that was actually the city boundary 6 blocks away. But we mostly played all the time on the street. Traffic was light and there were few cars parked during the day so that we had the streets to ourselves. I came home from school, threw my school bag in the corner of the living room and then went out to play our street games until it got dark or we got called for dinner.
It never occurred to our parents to worry that we were out unsupervised. And while we kept score in our games, winning or losing wasn’t the real point; playing was. There were no organized sports; we just played.
All this ended around 1950 when the number of cars exploded (and I went off to HS).
Grew up in the 50s in Anchorage. While there was a long green area simply called “the park strip” (still is) that stretched for many blocks through that part of the city, there wasn’t much there to entertain a kid. We mainly hung out in the area called Bootleggers’ Cove, which was part of Cook Inlet, and a short bike ride away. This was a very long stretch of shoreline that was bordered by the railroad tracks, and there were endless things of interest for 12 year old boys, not the least of which was the railway trestle. The movie Stand By Me was somewhat reminiscent of my own childhood.
Up until I was 8, we lived in the country in Michigan. Two sets of cousins in nearby houses. More cousins in town, a ways away when you’re 8. Fields and creeks and ponds. Forts and fishing and fooling with horses we weren’t allowed to ride.
When I was 8 I moved to a new town in Michigan. Our house and yard took up half of the city block. Within bicycling distance there were both fields and ponies and parks and libraries. We’d get ice cream at (I’m not joking) the Malt Shoppe. No cousins nearby, which was a first for me.
Both idyllic situations. I guess your location probably doesn’t matter so much when you have a happy childhood.
I grew up in the ‘70s in a woody development in northern New Jersey. The lots were maybe ¼ acre or more and rings of houses surrounded patches of woods. The woods were more or less common – there were no property markers and people would cut through other people’s property with only the rare fuss. There was kind of a network of paths connecting houses. A bunch of families moved in to my immediate area within a few years of each other so we all played and grew up (and apart) together.
We were one of the first families in the development so my ‘wilderness’ kept getting pushed further and further away as it grew, but not so far that it couldn’t be reached by bike or a long walk. The development ended at a forest park, so there was always that buffer. We were always being chased off of construction equipment and out of houses that were in some phase of construction.
The neighborhood was on one side of a lake, so I went sailing (sunfish), canoeing, fishing, swimming, ice skating, hanging out at the beach. It was pretty nice. On the other side of the lake was a road/neighborhood along the shore and above that was a hill topped by powerlines and woods that stretched over to the High School a couple miles away. So during my teenybopper spiritual quest phase I would occasionally walk the few miles home from school through the woods and down the powerlines.
By the time I graduated HS, though, I was bored with it and had a pretty serious wanderlust going, so I pretty much bugged out. There were other kids who seemed to better appreciate it and did what they could to stay in the area.
I lived in an urban neighborhood in Springfield, Illinois, that was on its way to becoming a ghetto. Nowadays, it’s full-on ghetto. At the time, the residents were mostly old people; there were a few neighborhood kids and we had somewhat of a group that would ride bikes together, watch MTV in someone’s basement, and when we got older, make out from time to time.
