Just took Lil Destor to the playground at Union Square Park.  It's a great facility and an example for me about how the city sometimes provides just what you need.  When I was in my 20s, it was an outdoor bar.  Now it's a playground.  Good timing, folks!

You hear people complain about other parents and other parents' children all of the time, but the city is teeming with sweet kids chaperoned by nice adults, particularly over the weekend.  There's a whole other side to the nanny culture, which my wife chronicles at her blog, Nommersland, so I don't mean to make light of things.  But even when things go wrong, I think it's safe to say that we enjoy raising a kid in the city.

But one thing I witnessed as Lil Destor and I left the park just kind of bothers me.  Apparently, some youngish girl passed out and she and her two guys friends were seen "doing drugs."  I'm guessing we're not talking pot here, but whatever.  People, including a lot of parents around my age (late blooming breeders, I'm 36) weren't so much trying to get help for the girl who passed out a they were trying to get the whole crew arrested.

"Don't do drugs in our park," yelled this woman, two tykes in tow.  "Scofflaws!"

I get it.  There are hard core drug users, methadone cases and outright psychotics in Union Square.  It was ever thus.  The park is right next to Beth Israel hospital and several drug treatment centers.  And, sure society should probably frown on people shooting up or blowing rails near the playground on a midmorning Saturday.  But, then again, people routinely smoke pot in Central Park, in the open, in broad daylight and I think people are far less troubled by that.  We all have levels of vice we're willing to tolerate.

What I saw was relatively richer people pushing for an arrest that, had it happened (I don't think it did, I saw EMTs approaching as I left, so I think the officer made a wise, executive decision) would have done more harm than good.  Three non-violent junkies sweating it out in a holding cell does nobody any good.

But I think what's really bothering me about this is the illusion of New York City, which has replaced the illusion of the suburbs.  When I was a kid, the city was the crime infested rat trap and the suburbs the oasis from poverty and crime.  Destroy all of that real estate value and the deprivation migrates outward.  Meanwhile, in a city like New York, property values are somewhat bolstered by corporate, foreign and high net worth buyers competing for limited assets.  So I feel for the mother paying more than $4,000 a month to cram her family into a one bedroom rental just wants the police to haul those junkies away and to keep the playground clean.

I get it.  Except that to remove the grit from the city is to remove all of its potential to help its citizens, particularly its artists and activists, connect with real life.  In the 70s and 80s, a mother reporting to a police officer the presence of junkies in Union Square would have been laughed in the face.  Alphabet City was a place you didn't go.  The Bowery didn't have the most expensive condos in Manhattan.  A production of Snow White near Times Square would definitely be a porno and not a Disney extravaganza.

Not that I'm advocating a return to old times, mind you.  Just the understanding that the city is supposed to accommodate all walks of life and that for that to happen, people need to be less strident.  "Scofflaws?'  Really?