High Hoops

A construction site’s scaffolding provides the backdrop, and backboard, for youngsters playing streetball at 131st Street near Fifth Avenue in New York on Aug. 8, 1991. Streetball — a showy, hard-nosed version of basketball — has been played on city streets and public courts for decades and is credited with grooming countless collegiate and professional stars. Streetball is “marked by elbows-out play, a casual commitment to the rulebook and makeshift facilities,” reported The Times in 2010. Some public parks have become legendary basketball meccas, including Rucker Park in Harlem and West Fourth Street, known as “The Cage,” in the West Village. Surprisingly, the steel basketball hoops at more than 700 city public parks are not purchased from commercial outlets, but rather individually crafted, forged by a team of parks department blacksmiths who cut, weld and paint each by hand. “The finished product is a remnant of an earlier era of the sport, somewhere on the evolutionary chain betw