18 ======Some History of Central Park
===================================================================== 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.
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