The boy in red lobbing snowballs on a desolate tenement street

By 1905, nine playgrounds had been built in Lower Manhattan—products of a social movement started in the late 19th century that called for safe, supervised places for city boys and girls to play.

But nine playgrounds couldn’t possibly serve all the tenement-district kids who dwelled in downtown neighborhoods at the time. For most of them, the streets remained their playgrounds.

And snowbanks surrounding a block of rundown red brick storefronts made the perfect launching spot for a snowball fight.

George Luks painted “Children Throwing Snowballs” in 1905. The thick brushstrokes suggest action, almost chaos. Is it kids vs. kids, with two adults watching from a shop awning…or a group of kids lobbing snowballs at the adults, a shopkeeper in a smock and female customer dressed in black?

The boy in the red coat is in the center of the image, and our eyes are drawn to his warrior stance. At this moment, the boy might be imagining that he isn’t on a gritty snowbank but on top of a parapet. He’s a knight defending his kingdom, or a soldier leading his backup troops to victory—not just another poor city kid making mischief on a winter afternoon.

A painter’s atmospheric view of the Harlem River from the High Bridge

It almost looks like George Luks painted two completely different scenes in “Roundhouse at High Bridge,” his 1910 panorama of Upper Manhattan and the Bronx bisected by the Harlem River.

On the right is a more placid scene: hazy pink and beige skies; a sloping bend in the river. A lone tugboat makes its way toward the long-gone Putnam Bridge or the Macombs Dam Bridge roughly 20 blocks to the south at 155th Street. A reddish streak seems to trail off at the end of the bridge.

The scene on the left is one of turbulence. The roundhouse is belching smoke from the steam engines of the trains that start and stop here. An orange-red engine or trolley sits on the rails just outside the roundhouse, drawing the eye.

Perhaps the different depictions from the same vantage point say something about the destructive effect industry has on natural beauty. The roundhouse—which did exist in this general area—is imposing and fiery, almost apocalyptic beside a serene river. It fits with the tender yet unromantic approach this Ashcan artist typically took to his cityscapes of early 20th century Gotham.

A few years after Luks completed this painting, he set up a studio and residence in an Upper Manhattan neighborhood five minutes from the High Bridge, according to the 1994 book American Impressionism and Realism.

“Although his new neighborhood was blessed with a park-like atmosphere…it did not appeal to him as a subject, and he pursued instead broader views of the city on the outskirts of his comfortable community,” the book states.