by Marie Antonia Parsons

Created on: November 14, 2009

Central Park today is known as a mecca of green beautya haven from the traffic smells and sounds, a place to forget for a little while the screech of metal and the stresses of life. In the summers automobile traffic is restricted, and bikers, runners, roller-skaters, jugglers, dancers, volleyball players, and people just taking walks, enjoying quiet picnics or rowing canoes can come out on weekends. It was the first urban park in America and an example of 19th century romantic landscape architecture.

It would be difficult to believe that such a place was not an easy construct, yet it was. In the mid-1850s, Manhattan was suffering from an overabundance of bad beef, bad milk, bad sewage, too many orphaned children, and cholera. A scathingly thorough report on sanitary conditions had been submitted in 1842. More sewers were built but inefficiently and inadequately placed. Tenements were remodeled but financial conditions could not meet the actual demand. Then in 1848 an idealistic landscape architect named Andrew Jackson Downing had proposed creating a five-hundred acre People's Park in Manhattan. This park it was thought would encourage social interactions amongst all social classes. Two years later a merchant who had returned from a European grand tour was highly impressed with the many grand and green spaces he had seen there. He joined with a group of like-minded businessmen, who agreed Manhattan deserved a similar open public space. Many also believed that such a park would prevent further movement north of factories and lower-class (i.e. Irish, German and African Americans along with their pigs and other matters). Such a space would provide a pastoral and healthy retreat from the rest of the city and improve real estate values.

The initial spot chosen was a 150-acre east-side plot bounded by Third Avenue, the East River, 66th and 75th streets. The owners of that plot however refused to sell, so in 1851 a bill was introduced and passed into law to seize the land by eminent domain. A rush of opposition to the entire enterprise then arose, bolstered by demands from landowners on the West-side who were also unhappy about the growth of poor and immigrant communities like the African American Seneca Village. These west-side landowners proposed a more central location, which was too rocky for streets, sewers or building houses.

Finally in 1853 the state again exercised eminent domain to seize 778 acres (which grew to 843 acres ten years later. A commission took

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