Illegal pickup

It’s another reason the Dodgers never should have left Brooklyn.

If you had to choose one photograph to capture American childhood in the 1950s, you might pick an Arthur Leipzig shot of children playing stickball in front of the brownstones of Bedford-Stuyvesant.

Leipzig would have never published a photo like that from Los Angeles because he would have been documenting a crime.

In 1945 or so, the Los Angeles City Council passed a law regarding “STREETS – SIDEWALKS – PLAYING BALL OR GAMES OF SPORT.”

Stickball by Arthur Leipzig, 1951. (Courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum)

The law says, “No person shall play ball or any game of sport with a ball or football or throw, cast, shoot or discharge any stone, pellet, bullet, arrow