In 1811, when New York City commissioners laid out the city’s grid, they didn’t put in many parks. Unlike Paris and London, Manhattan was an island, and so didn’t require the same kind of open spaces for leisure, commerce, and circulation of clean air, they argued at the time.
But over the next few decades, New York’s view of urban parks underwent a transformation. Catherine McNeur, history professor at Portland State University and author of Taming Manhattan: Environmental Battles in the Antebellum City documents this shift in a new article in the Journal of Planning History. [...]
It was becoming harder to know who was a part of New York society and who wasn’t. There was a lot of fear of confident men, or conmen, in this period because the city was growing more anonymous and you couldn’t tell where people stood in the hierarchy. The 1830s park boom reflected this, as wealthy New Yorkers looked to secure spaces that were exclusive where they could promenade and mix with people they were certain were their equals. [...]
That vision didn’t quite pan out. The concept for the park, as lofty and noble-seeming as it was, was planned, executed, and maintained via a “top down” approach, McNeur writes. And perhaps that’s because even the most progressive elites at the time considered Central Park to be a place where the poor could be regulated, not a place that they could coexist in equal capacity. The creators of the park (including Olmsted) and city officials made sure that the lower classes were heavily policed there so that it remained a space where the elites felt comfortable—and that practice continues till today. If poor people of color in America even have access to open public spaces, they are punished for being in them. The idea that parks are for all, born with the creation of Central Park, is still waiting to be realized in a meaningful way.
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