The Playgrounds and Parks of the city children who cannot get away in summer new opportunities for play are being pro vided each year. In 1900 there were public playgrounds in nine cities, in 1906 the number had increased to 35, in 1917 to 653, and now practi cally every city has some kind of playground, and thousands of people are engaged in directing the play. The following table shows how some of the big cities rank in respect to public parks, which are the larger playgrounds of the cities.
The Indoor Types of recreations are as important as outdoor recreations if measured by the amount of money spent on them or by the number of people who enjoy them. Measured by the extent to which they promote health, happiness, and good conduct, their value is less. Nevertheless, they are a necessary and essential part of modern life. While indoor athletic contests, theaters, dances, concerts, lectures, and many other types of amuse ment and recreation belong to the indoor group, the movies are the most important from the business point of view. In the United States they are probably the most universal of all recreations, for they are not limited by climate or season, and can be enjoyed anywhere at all sea sons. Their distribution is almost the same as that of the population except that where the people are prosperous there also the moving picture theaters prosper.
In the production of moving pictures the investment in 1920 was estimated at from $250,000,000 to $500,000,000, while the expenditures were $200,000,000 per year. Of this sum about $50,000,000 was paid in salaries to sonic 20,000 people, so that the average salary reached the high figure of $2500. Of course the bulk of this went to the " stars " some of whom have refused offers of a million dollars a year, preferring to run their own companies and make their own profits. An average
movie feature of five to seven reels costs from $100,000 to $250,000, but sometimes the cost runs up to half a million or even a million. The production of films, unlike their exhibition, depends very closely on geographical surroundings. It is essential that the pictures be pro duced in places where good weather for photography can be counted on much of the time. It is also essential that there be as great a variety of scenery as possible, including cities, farms, plains, mountains, ocean, rivers, waterfalls, and forests. Los Angeles answers these requisites better than almost any other place in the world, and hence has become the greatest center of production.
After the films have been produced they are exhibited in theaters which number about 10 for each theater of the old type where actors actually play their parts. In 1921, it is estimated that there were 18,000 movie theaters, that they were attended each day by about 20,000,000 people, who paid about $4,000,000 per day in admission fees. These figures may be exaggerated, but it seems fairly certain that moving picture theaters take in well over a billion dollars a year and perhaps nearly a billion and a half. This is more than the entire interest-bearing debt of the United States in 1900 ($1,023,000,000) or about as much as the first Liberty Loan, $1,466,000,000, the raising of which was considered a noteworthy feat early in the Great War. If to these vast sums there be added the amounts spent for other forms of indoor recreation, for athletics, and for vacations, it is evident that the business of recreation is one of the largest in the United States.