Street ball in NYC courtesy of The New Yorker (of all magazines)

In The New Yorker, Thomas Beller writes about the street game in The Big Apple. The crux:

"...Street ball in New York is in decline. I have observed, in the past decade, one playground after another—where, once, you could have shown up in the mid to late afternoon and found a group of fairly skilled players of different ages battling—become depopulated. I am not talking about a mass extinction. There are still lots of playgrounds with lots of good players—but fewer playgrounds, and fewer players, and the ones who show up seem older..."