Born in Brooklyn in 1918, Arthur Leipzig traveled the world with his camera to document people and tell their stories, from Yiddish theater actors in Communist Romania to Sudanese fishermen battered by a storm.

“Chalk Games,” 1950

Children playing on a city street, drawing with chalk on the pavement near parked vintage cars.

But it was his sensitive, evocative images of children at play on New York City streets that first won him acclaim.

And the idea of capturing these ordinary kids engrossed in stickball, hopscotch, and other popular Gotham street games in the middle decades of the 20th century came not from a teacher or a trend but from a painting by a Flemish Renaissance master.

A busy village scene depicting people engaged in various activities such as playing games, working, and socializing in a festival-like atmosphere.

That painting is “Children’s Games,” by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (above). Dating back to 1560, it’s a richly detailed, bird’s-eye depiction of more than 230 children playing 83 different games in a town square, from hoops to blind man’s bluff to leapfrog.

Leipzig spoke out about the effect Bruegel’s painting had on him shortly after he began documenting New York’s children’s games in the 1940s. At the time, he was a member of the Photo League, a cooperative of socially conscious photographers who chronicled the rougher edges of the Depression-era city.

“Marching boys,” 1943

Four young boys walking together, smiling and holding wooden sticks. They are dressed casually, with varying styles of shorts and shirts, in a dusty outdoor setting by a brick wall.

“When photographer Arthur Leipzig recently saw a picture of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s famous painting ‘Children’s Games,’ he was struck by the resemblance of games of nearly 400 years ago to those one sees today,” according to the New York Times.

The many similarities he noticed by watching children jump, run, swim, and hop from his own window proved “that boys and girls play in New York in 1950 about the same way they did in Flanders in 1560,” continued the Times.

“Divers, East River,” 1948

Three young men diving into a river from a wooden dock, with a bridge visible in the background.

From the 1940s to the 1960s, Leipzig documented the children’s games he observed, as well as the dirt lots and asphalt surfaces that inventive city kids turned into playgrounds, ball fields, and game boards.

Like the cheeky youngsters in Bruegel’s painting, these New York children didn’t have specially made toys. Games could be played with chalk, sticks, hoops, or a box fashioned into a cart—most of which could be found discarded on the streets.

“King of the Hill,” 1943

Two young boys playing in a sandy area, with one boy facing the other and smiling, while the other boy looks back at him. The background features a brick wall.

Some of Leipzig’s photos share a similar vantage point with Bruegel. The first image in this post, “Chalk Games,” features a bird’s-eye view likely from the first or second-floor balcony, window, or fire escape of a building on Prospect Place in Brooklyn.

Yet Leipzig didn’t set out to copy Bruegel’s painting but take inspiration from it. He channeled its imagination and spirit from a dirt town square in Flanders to the black and white of New York’s midcentury cityscape.

“Johnny on the Pony,” 1943

A group of children playfully climbing on each other near a street and a wrought-iron fence, capturing a moment of childhood fun in black and white.

Leipzig (below right photo) didn’t limit his work to children. His photos told the stories of a window washer on a skyscraper, lone pedestrians making their way under traffic lights in a storm, the romance and thrills found at Coney Island, and the joy of VE Day in Times Square.

A man sitting on the ground with legs stretched out, wearing a black hat and a plaid shirt, with a large chain hanging above him.

He died in 2014 at age 96, and his children’s photos might be his best-known legacy, displaying a sensitivity to the rhythm and energy of New York’s humanity.

“The city was my home,” Leipzig said, per a quote from the Peter Fetterman Gallery. “As I look back at the work I did during that period, I realize that I was a witness to a time that no longer exists, a more innocent time.”

“While I know that the city has changed, that the streets are dirtier and meaner, the energy that I love is still there,” he said.

“Red Rover,” 1943

Four children playing together on a city street, two girls holding hands while a boy jumps in the center, with vintage cars and buildings in the background.

“No matter where I go, I keep coming back to photography New York. Of course the ‘good old days’ were not all sweetness and light. There was poverty, racism, corruption, and violence in those days too, but somehow we believed in the possible. We believed in hope.”

[Top image: Jackson Fine Art; second image: Kunst Historisches Museum; third image: Jackson Fine Art; fourth image: George Adams Gallery; fifth image: Howard Greenberg Gallery; sixth and eighth images: Brooklyn Museum; seventh image: New York Times]

Tags: Arthur Leipzig Children’s Games, Arthur Leipzig New York City, Arthur Leipzig Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Arthur Leipzig street photographer NYC, Kids in NYC playing in streets photos, New York Photo League 1940s, Photos of 1940s New York City

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