======RNA House History Club Session Seventeen March 4, 2018 ======Some History of

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, 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 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 , 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 . 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 , the Jones Woods from present-day 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 . 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 , 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 . 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 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. The city was not just reserving land from private exchange, it was also altering the shape of the market itself. Preventing more than eight hundred acres from being sold and fixing that land's use would have a profound effect on uptown land values; it was thus an experiment in city planning that might offset the unpredictability brought on by unrestrained private competition. The park gave substance and stability to the avenues and neighborhoods closest to it. The question of who should exercise political control of this new kind of public institution was a point of contention throughout the nineteenth century. The new park was to be managed by a government agency, the Central Park Commission. From its very beginning, politics played a role in Central Park. In appointing the first Commission (1857-1870), the Republican-dominated state legislature abandoned the principle of "home rule" in order to keep the park out of the hands of locally-elected (and primarily Democratic) office holders. Under the leadership of Andrew Green, the Commission became the City's first planning agency and oversaw the laying out of uptown Manhattan as well as the management of the park. After a new City Charter was adopted, in 1870 the Park was restored to local control, the Mayor appointing the Park Commissioners from then on. In 1857, the Central Park Commission held the country's first landscape design contest and selected the "Greensward Plan," submitted by , the park's superintendent at the time, and , an English-born architect. The planners used a natural aesthetic to provide an antidote to the city’s competitive pressures and dreary buildings. They sought to create a pastoral landscape in the English romantic tradition. The plan called for open rolling meadows contrasted with the picturesque effects of the Ramble and the more formal dress grounds of the Mall (Promenade) and Bethesda Terrace. In order to maintain a feeling of uninterrupted expanse, Olmsted and Vaux sank four transverse roads eight feet below the park's surface to carry cross-town horse and wagon traffic. Responding to pressure from local critics, the designers also revised their plan's circulation system to separate carriage drives, pedestrian walks, and equestrian paths. Vaux, assisted by , designed more than forty bridges to eliminate grade crossings between the different routes. But areas for sports were not part of the original plan. The building of Central Park was one of nineteenth-century New York's most massive public works projects, providing jobs for some 20,000 workers--Yankee engineers, Irish laborers, German gardeners, and native-born stonecutters--to reshaped the site's topography to create the pastoral landscape. It took a massive human effort to transform the rocky and swampy site into a landscaped park. By the time Central Park was completed 16 years later, workers had gone over every foot of ground, raising or lowering the surface. They transformed natural drainage courses into artificial subterranean waterways and created the illusions of picturesque abundance and distant prospects. In the first five years, laborers excavated, moved, or brought into the park nearly 2.5 million cubic yards of stone and earth—enough to raise the level of a football field eighty stories. With pickaxes, hammers, shovels (all hand tools) and 166 tons of gunpowder 3 (more than the amount fired at the Battle of Gettysburg), they cut through more than 300,000 cubic yards of rock. Stone breakers crushed 35,000 cubic yards of this rock into paving stones. Contractors supplied 6 million bricks, 35,000 barrels of cement, 65,000 cubic yards of gravel, and 19,000 cubic yards of sand. Gardeners fertilized the ground with more than 40,000 cubic yards of manure and compost and planted 270,000 trees and shrubs where there had been practically no trees before. Out of this immense expenditure of labor and materials, 20,000 men and $5 million by 1866—emerged the park's drives, paths, bridges, hills, lakes, lawns, and scenic vistas. For a “natural” park, all its features were man made. The city also built the curvilinear reservoir immediately north of an existing rectangular receiving reservoir. The park first opened for public use in the winter of 1859 when thousands of New Yorkers skated on frozen lakes constructed on the site of former swamps. By 1865, the park received more than seven million visitors a year. The city's wealthiest citizens turned out daily for elaborate late-afternoon carriage parades. Indeed, in the park's first decade more than half of its visitors arrived in carriages, costly vehicles that fewer than five percent of the city's residents could afford to own. Middle-class New Yorkers also eventually flocked to the park for winter skating and summer concerts on Saturday afternoons. Stringent rules governing park use--for example, a ban on group picnics--discouraged many ordinary New Yorkers from visiting the park in its first decade. Small tradesmen were not allowed to use their commercial wagons for family drives in the park, and the Commissioners restricted the playgrounds to schoolboys who could produce a certificate of good attendance and character from a teacher, And even these exemplary lads found the fields open to them only three days of the week. Working-class youths were largely excluded, since relatively few of them went beyond elementary school in this period. New Yorkers repeatedly contested these rules, however, and in the last third of the century the park opened up to more democratic use. In the 1880s, working-class New Yorkers successfully campaigned for concerts on Sunday, their only day of rest. Park commissioners gradually permitted other attractions, from the Carousel and goat rides to tennis on the lawns and bicycling on the drives. The Zoo, first given permanent quarters in 1871, quickly became the park's most popular feature. In the early twentieth century, with the emergence of immigrant neighborhoods at the park's borders, attendance reached its all time high. Progressive reformers joined many working- class New Yorkers in advocating the introduction of facilities for active recreation like softball. In 1927, August Heckscher donated the first equipped playground, located on the southeastern meadow. When plans were announced to drain the old rectangular reservoir at the park's center, reformers urged that it be replaced by a sports arena, swimming pool, and playing fields. Other New Yorkers, influenced by the City Beautiful movement, proposed introducing a formal civic plaza and promenade that would connect the two museums at the park's east and west borders. Landscape architects and preservationists campaigned against these design innovations, however, and the site of the reservoir was naturalistically landscaped into the Great Lawn. Such debates over modifications of the Greensward Plan and proper uses of a public park have persisted into the present. In 1934, Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia placed in charge of a new centralized citywide park system. During his twenty-six year regime, Moses introduced many of the facilities advocated by the progressive reformers. With the assistance of federal money during the Depression, Moses oversaw the building of 20 playgrounds on the park's periphery, the renovation of the Zoo, and the realignment of the the drives to accommodate automobiles. Athletic fields were added to the North Meadow, and recreational programming was expanded. In the early 1950s and early 1960s, private benefactors contributed the Wollman Skating Rink, the and Pool, new boathouses, and the Chess and Checkers house. Moses also

4 introduced permanent ball fields to the Great Lawn for corporate softball and neighborhood little league teams. But the beginning of the end of Moses’ power and dominance began when he planned an 80-car parking lot to enhance the . The spot he chose for the parking lot was one of the favorite playgrounds for UWS families especially CPW mothers and their children. On Tuesday the 17th of April 1956, a human barricade of mothers, babes in arms, forced the bulldozers to back off. And suddenly the epic Battle of Central Park was all over the headlines. MOMS VS. MOSES, the Daily News whooped. For a week the mothers picketed from dawn till nightfall, physically blocking the destruction of the glen, daily winning more and more support from civic groups, churches and the newspapers Their protest and the sympathy it won in the NYC press emboldened Mayor Wagner for the first time to cancel one of Moses’ planned projects. The mothers' victory in preserving their use of a small part of Central Park was the prelude to other victories against Robert Moses. In the 1960s, Mayor 's two park commissioners, Thomas Hoving and August Heckscher, welcomed "happenings," rock concerts, and be-ins to the park, making it a symbol of both urban revival and the counterculture. In the 1970s, however, severe budget cuts during a fiscal crisis precipitated a long-term decline in maintenance. The park’s lawns became dust holes in dry weather and mud holes in wet. Its walks were broken and pothole. Benches lay on their backs, their legs jabbing at the sky. The concrete had been stripped of drinking fountains so completely that only their rusting iron pipes remained. The crisis for the park and the city was severe. The crisis revived the preservation movement prompting a new approach to managing the park. In 1980, the , a private, nonprofit, fundraising organization, was formed by a group of concerned citizens determined to tackle the decline. The Conservancy took as its mission to restore, manage, and enhance Central Park in partnership with the public. From 1980 to 1996, the Central Park Conservancy was led by , who was also appointed the Central Park Administrator; in 1996, Karen Putnam assumed the dual private and public posts. Today the private organization of the Central Park Conservancy contributes more than 75% of the public park's budget and exercises substantial influence on decisions about its future. Central Park, however, continues to be shaped by the public that uses it, from the joggers, disco roller skaters, and softball leagues to bird watchers and nature lovers. The history of Central Park continues. The New York Historical Society in 1997 had a major exhibit documenting the substantial life and community in Seneca Village and asking for help in finding descendants of the people who lived there. In 2011, there was an archeological dig which uncovered artifacts from Seneca Village. The NYC Urban Park Rangers give historical and geological tours as does the Conservancy. And people find in the park all sorts of wonders and pleasures and escapes. People living near the park in crowded NYC apartment buildings claim the park as their backyard. For me a question is raised, was it worth NYC's taking 6% of its land out of the private real estate market and preserving it as a public park?

References: The Park and the People: A History of Central Park, Roy Rosenzweig and Elizabeth Blackmar, 1992 "Central Park History Overview", https://www.centralpark.com/visitor-info/park- history/overview/

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