===================================================================== RNA House History Club Session Seventeen March 4, 2018 ===================================================================== Some History of Central Park The story of Central Park is complex and stretches from 1850 to the present, over 160 years. Leading up to the decision to create a grand public park in the 1850s was the growth and expansion of NYC. In the first half the 19th Century, New York City's population grew from ninety thousand to half a million. Most of the over 500,000 New Yorkers lived south of 30th Street. Lower Manhattan was lively and noisy with some densely packed poor districts. There were a few public spaces like City Hall Park and Battery Park and some gated parks for the wealthy, but there was not much green space within the central city. While most New Yorkers lived in lower Manhattan, by 1850, over 20,000 New Yorkers some wealthy, some poorer, had moved to the outer districts, what are now the UWS, Central Park, the UES and Harlem. These districts were comprised of scattered mansions and estates and small, distinct villages, existing independently of each other and some farms. Even though a State commission had laid out a street grid plan for NYC in 1811, due to irregular landholdings and natural obstructions the grid plan did not have much effect in the outer districts until later in the 19th Century. NYC owned some of the land. Large plots were owned by wealthy families and some small plots were individually own. The extension of trade lines, the expansion of craft production into sweatshop manufacturing, and the organization of banks and insurance and railroad companies had transformed the port of New York into a national shipping, industrial, and financial center. More and more, wealthy NYC merchants and landowners travelled to Europe for business or pleasure. Some were impressed with public grounds like the Bois de Boulogne in Paris and Hyde Park in London. In these parks, people were able to escape the city environment without leaving the city. Wealthy merchants and travelers returning to NYC began advocating in their own circles and in their newspapers for the city government to create a new grand park. A public park some argued would offer their own families an attractive setting for carriage rides in an almost county like setting and provide working-class New Yorkers with a healthy alternative to the saloon. Other classes of people joined the clamor for more public open spaces for fresh air, for a rural like feeling, for more prestige for NYC. Not everyone wanted to have only the wealthy served with a grand park. The newspapers that served working and middle class people advocated for NYC to create instead many small public parks in the more working class districts for ordinary people to have some of the advantages of a park. The first pressure on NYC to create a new grand park came in the early 1850s from merchant/landowners who advocated for a site overlooking the East River, the Jones Woods from present-day 66th Street to 75th Street East of what is now Third Ave. But it became clear that those most strongly advocating for that site were the very landowners who would most benefit from the great increase of value of land they owned in that area. An anonymous reader charged in a letter to the Journal of Commerce that "Mr. Beekman our Senator is too deeply interested in the neighborhood of the contemplated Park to be an impartial judge of its feasibility. He and his family have a large extent of land there which will be greatly augmented in value by this operation." Other landowners further west also argued against the Jones Woods site, that a new public park should not be on one side of Manhattan or the other. It should be a central park. The authors of The Park and the People write: "The decision to build the grand park, although clothed in democratic rhetoric, was fundamentally rooted in the interests of New York's wealthiest citizens — its gentlemen and ladies. Leading merchants and bankers and their families advocated creating a grand public park in order to promote their city's (and their own) 1 cosmopolitan stature. They were joined by uptown landowners, who wanted a park to enhance real estate values. But not all New Yorkers agreed that the city needed such an expensive public symbol of its grandeur. Yet, despite the opposition, the park's gentlemen advocates claimed to represent the entire "public". Only after a three-year debate over the necessity, location, and financing of a public park was the site selected. In choosing a site and taking the land for a democratic public park, the gentlemen swept aside the concerns of poor New Yorkers." After three years of debate over the park site and cost, in 1853 the state legislature authorized the City of New York to use the power of eminent domain to acquire more than 700 acres of land in the center of Manhattan for the park. The land chosen to become Central Park, 59th St to 106th St between Fifth and Eighth Ave (now CPW) was occupied by a few wealthy estates and by over 1,600 free Blacks and Irish and German immigrant owners, renters and some squatters The most developed section of the site that was to become Central Park was known as Seneca Village. It stretched approximately from West 82nd to West 88th streets just east of what is today Central Park West. Seneca Village started when Black New Yorkers purchased land there and began to build houses in the mid 1820s. It grew to be the largest community of free African-American property owners in New York, paying taxes and some eligible to vote. But also Seneca Village was integrated. Of the 264 people known to be living in Seneca Village in 1855, 30% were Irish and a few Germans and mixed. Of the three churches in Seneca Village two were African American and one, All Angels' Church, was built there by St Michael's Church on Amsterdam Ave and 99th St for the Blacks and Irish and Germans living in and around Seneca Village. The African Union Church housed the Colored School No. 3 set up in the 1840s. The churches were along the main street of the village, known as Old Lane. For the most part, the people of Seneca Village would have been considered middle class in today's terms. They were the city's most stable African-American settlement. Besides Seneca Village, there was, in the NE corner of what was to be Central Park, the Roman Catholic Sisters of Charity convent and school with 70 sisters, several substantial buildings and 200 boarding students. Also, throughout the site, modest wooden houses some substantial were built. Of the people living in the park, some owned their land, others rented from absentee land lords or from their neighbors and some built on land whose owners were unknown. There were grocery, bakery and butcher shops and gardens to raise food. Some people kept goats and pigs for the same purpose or to be sold. Also, there were some small businesses like leather dressers and bone boilers. Before the construction of the park could start, the area was cleared of its inhabitants and their dwellings. The residents were evicted under the rule of eminent domain during 1856-57. The City of New York paid about $5,000,000 in total to the upper income people who owned most of the land (21 land holders owned about half the park land.) and to others who owned small plots. Some small amounts were paid to renters who had long term leases and who lost their places to live. The amount offered to each landowner was determined by a special commission which allowed for appeals of its judgments. Most appeals failed. Many of those forced to abandon their homes and businesses and churches, simply moved west into the area we now call the Upper West Side, rebuilding their houses on unoccupied lots. There is no evidence that the Seneca Village community stayed together. The money to pay compensation for the land and for the construction came from general NYC taxpayer funds and from an assessment on owners of land that would be fronting on the park or within one mile who would benefit the most from increased land value. Including the construction, the total cost was over $10,000,000. Central Park as it became known was the first landscaped public park in the United States. The start of construction of Central Park sparked a 2 speculative land boom over the land surrounding the future park. It was not the first time in NYC and not the last that poorer people had to make way for the purposes of those with more wealth. The extension of the northern boundary to 110th Street in 1863 brought the park to its current 843 acres. By eminent domain, NYC had taken 6% of Manhattan's land property out of the private real estate market likely in perpetuity for the public purpose of a park. Like urban renewal a century later, some New Yorkers benefitted but other New Yorkers lost their homes. In this process, the city altered its relationship to both public and private land. The park represented a new concept of public property held in trust for the community's cultural rather than its economic benefit. Whereas in the eighteenth century city government principally concerned itself with facilitating commerce, now citizens looked to government to provide and administer resources for a common good that included the benefits of recreation.