Down the street also.
"Fighting Traffic" by Peter D. Norton talks about this at length.
The suburbs didn't exist when automobiles hit the market. Most people lived in cities because that's where the jobs were and transportation (outside of whatever public transportation options the cities provided) was limited. Kids and adults used the streets freely (which were for horses, though they were widened as automobiles started growing in popularity).
This changed as cars killed kids (and adults) who didn't know that cars were much faster than cars and didn't react in time. Traffic deaths were so numerous, cities invested lots of money in "safety parades" that were kind of gruesome, actually (like showing tombstones of the future deceased). [^0] Jaywalking was a crime that was invented to deal with exactly this phenomenon.
People fought HARD to keep the streets free (where else are kids going to play). People lost that battle, as we know.
[^0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2022-06-10/how-citie...