New York Times: Watching a child — no, make that hundreds of thousands of children — grow up in a cityscape without a specific escape hatch, namely a playground to serve as a safe outlet and an oasis, has haunted Rose H. Harvey for decades.

She takes it quite personally. So personally that she is driven by an unusual agenda: by 2010, she intends that as many as 300 underachieving New York City schoolyards will morph, at an average cost of $1 million each, into vibrant outdoor playgrounds to invigorate the all-too-stationary PlayStation generation.