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Central Park - New York City
Central Park - New York City by Elizabeth Blackmar and Roy Rosenzweig
Central
Park was the first landscaped public park in the United States. Advocates of creating the park--primarily wealthy merchants
and landowners--admired the public grounds of London and Paris and urged that New York needed a comparable facility to establish
its international reputation. A public park, they argued, would offer their own families an attractive setting for carriage
rides and provide working-class New Yorkers with a healthy alternative to the saloon. 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.
Creating the park, however, required displacing
roughly 1,600 poor residents, including Irish pig farmers and German gardeners, who lived in shanties on the site.
At Eighth Avenue and 82nd Street, Seneca Village had been one of the city's most stable African-American settlements,
with three churches and a school. The extension of the boundaries to 110th Streetin 1863 brought the park to its current 843
acres.
Hyde Park & Kensington Park - London
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