Central Park

Predictions/Inquiries:

How has the Park evolved over time?

In the Park:

Central Park was built between 1857 and 1860.  Motivation for the park followed the spirit of reform present in the middle of the 19^th century and well-to-do Americans who had seen and experienced Europe’s romanticized green spaces and desired their own at home. Further, Revolution had hit Europe in 1848 and fears struck the American aristocracy as distance grew between them and the poor.  These differences were clear in New York with slums such as the Five Points District and the mansions on Fifth Avenue for example.  In the absence of class comingling in the City, the hope was that a park would bring the classes together.  Underlying that was the idea that a park would elevate the lower orders of immigrants and laborers. Nevertheless, support from NY’s finest was essential to the construction of the park.  A desire to promenade and drive their carriages in a natural landscape, to increase tourism in the City, and for those with property that adjoined the Park, a desire to increase their real estate values all led to upper-class support. 

The momentum generated around the possibility of a grand park in New York led to  an interesting debate regarding where it should go and who it should serve. The City utilized eminent domain to take the 843 acres that would comprise the ultimate park.  One well-to-do resident commented that “the Park should never be made at all if it is to become the resort of rapscalians.”  A voice of the lower sorts called on the park commissioner not to “allocate to aristocratic pride and exclusiveness,” but instead to create “a spot for all classes of our fellow citizens.”  Hartford born Frederick Law Olmstead and English immigrant Calvert Vaux, with their “Greensward” plan, won the Board of Commissioners of the Central Park’s design competition.  Their design was an attempt “to school both patrician and plebian cultures by transmitting, almost subliminally, civilized values and a harmonizing and refining influence.”  Olmstead and Vaux further desired “a retreat from the city’s competiveness and congestion” and the “habit of mind, cultivated in commercial life” (Burrows & Wallace, 794).  When the Park opened however, the working class turned out to be the losers as it was too far from their districts and too expensive to get there.  Further, Olmstead, as Park Superintendent, created a set of rules and regulations to train in “the proper use of” the Park.  Such regulations included the “forbidding of German singing society picnics” and “Irish church suppers,” thus forcing plebian consumption on patrician terms. It wasn’t until the 1870s that the working class began to frequent the Park. 

Today, Central Park seems to have met its founders’ intentions in a more democratic fashion. My stroll through the Park saw people of all different ages, races, ethnicities, and classes using the park in a variety of ways.  The park has evolved to meet those more democratic desires as well, seen in the inclusion of baseball fields, boat rentals, playscapes, and dog parks.  Despite the fact that you might see a biker, a rollerblader, and a pedestrian jockey for position on the promenade, or sense the city via looming buildings and inevitable sounds, the greatest achievement of the park is that it nevertheless delivers a sense of refuge apart from the “city’s competitiveness and congestion.” But as I found in one other NY park, how public space is utilized continues to be defined in undemocratic ways.