Where did you play with your friends? Where did you hang out? How did your day look like? I grew up in a small town in a small country and that’s something that I always found mysterious and fascinating.
When I grew up we played soccer, hide and seek, hanging out next to a river. I was always wondering how a childhood in places like Manhattan looks like
I spent my childhood in Brooklyn (just a bridge away from Manhattan) just before the internet was a thing, and it seems pretty normal relative to what friends from other places describe. In fact, better in some ways. It was always easy to get a group of kids together to do whatever. We had pickup baseball (usually stickball), basketball, hide-and-seek and other games. There were 2 nice parks and several pocket parks in easy walking distance. Most of us had and rode bikes everywhere. A lot of my friends went to different schools (because of the density you might walk 3 blocks to the elementary school north of you, or 4 to the one south), so there were always new pools of people to interact with.
Though I moved away my sister still lives there and has kids of her own, and it seems pretty much the same now as it was then. Since the density of the place hasn’t changed too much it actually seems more the same than where I live now, which has significantly changed in terms of population and traffic (and is heavily car-dependent) in just the last 15 years.
Man, I rode my bike everywhere as a kid. I could get through 5-6 elementary schools. I could get to the rich kids neighborhood and the ghetto. I could get to 2 different movie theaters. I could get to 6 different great record shops.