Before Central Park

Description

With more than eight hundred sprawling green acres in the middle of one of the world’s densest cities, Central Park is an urban masterpiece. Designed in the middle of the nineteenth century by the landscape architects Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, it is a model for city parks worldwide. But before it became Central Park, the land was the site of farms, businesses, churches, wars, and burial grounds―and home to many different kinds of New Yorkers. This book is the authoritative account of the place that would become Central Park. From the first Dutch family to settle on the land through the political crusade to create America’s first major urban park, Sara Cedar Miller chronicles two and a half centuries of history. She tells the stories of Indigenous hunters, enslaved people and enslavers, American patriots and British loyalists, the Black landowners of Seneca Village, Irish pig farmers, tavern owners, Catholic sisters, Jewish protesters, and more. Miller unveils a British fortification and camp during the Revolutionary War, a suburban retreat from the yellow fever epidemics at the turn of the nineteenth century, and the properties that a group of free Black Americans used to secure their right to vote. Tales of political chicanery, real estate speculation, cons, and scams stand alongside democratic idealism, the striving of immigrants, and powerfully human lives. Before Central Park shows how much of the history of early America is still etched upon the landscapes of Central Park today. Table of Contents Preface Introduction Part I: Topography 1. The First Settlers, 1625–1664 2. Along the Kingsbridge Road, 1683–1845 3. The Other Bensons, 1754–1846 4. The War at McGowan’s Pass, 1776–1784 5. Valentine Nutter, 1760–1814 6. The War of 1812 Part II: Real Estate 7. Dividing Bloomingdale, 1667–1790s 8. Dividing Bloomingdale, 1790–1824 9. Dividing Bloomingdale, Seneca Village: The Residents, 1825–1857 10. Dividing Bloomingdale, Seneca Village: The Black Leaders, 1825–1857 11. Dividing Harlem, 1825–1843 12. Dividing Yorkville, 1785–1835 13. The Receiving Reservoir, 1835–1842 14. A Changing Land, 1845–1853 Part III: The Idea of a Park 15. The Battle of the Parks, 1844–1852 16. Becoming Central Park, 1853–1856 17. The First Commission, 1855–1857 18. Designing Central Park, 1857–1858 19. Extending the Park, 1859–1863 Epilogue Afterword by Elizabeth W. Smith, President and CEO of the Central Park Conservancy Acknowledgments Notes Selected Bibliography Index