The Way We Were: 33 Vintage Photographs of Children Playing in the Past That We Could Have Lost Today

   

What is your favorite toy? What games do you like to play? Do you think that children in the past had the same toys and played the same games as you? Check out how children played in the past through these 33 funny pictures.

 
Hanging around in Swansea, April 1939
 
Keep cool in summer, New York City, 1937

 

 
Little girl playing with kitty, ca. 1910s

 

 
 
London in the 1920s

 

 
Messing around the phone booth, New York, 1975

 

 
New York City in the 1970s-80s

 

 
 
On a play street in New York, ca. 1900s

 

Playing time at school, 1956

 

 
Ring around the rosie, ca. 1940

 

 
These young Neapolitans hanging onto the backs of street cars, Naples, 1948

 

 
Two children have great fun hanging upside down off a low rail in stockport, 1966

 

Two girls play with their tricycles, ca. 1920s

 

 
Two girls swing on a lampost, Manchester, 1965

 

Two little kids dancing on the streets of New York City, ca. 1940

 

 
Young boys hitch a ride, London, 1941

 

Brooklyn, New York, April 1949

 

 
Children balance on rail in South Dakota, 1959

 

 
Children draw on pavement with chalk, ca. 1960s

 

 
Children drawing on the pavement, 1941

 

Children hanging on a full train after the liberation, 1945

 

 
Children playing at The Bronx, New York City, ca. 1940s

 

Children playing on a street, ca. 1890

 

 
Children playing, Misawa, Japan, 1960

 

Edwardian children on stilts

 

 
Girls doing handstands, Southam Street, London, 1956

 

Girls jump rope in Zennor Road, ca.1957-65

 

 
Hanging around in Swansea, April 1939

 

Children on seesaw in a park, ca. 1910s

 

 
Children playing in the snow at residential school, 1946

 

Group of Gleichen boys playing in rubber tires, Alberta, ca. 1920

 

Little cowboys riding wild horses, ca. 1910s

 

 
 
Sarcee children on Sarcee Reserve, Alberta, playing with bows and arrows, 1911