Design
How 19th Century Immigration Made New York City Rethink Its Parks
Central Park was conceived as “social salve” to ease tensions between existing residents and newcomers, a historian writes. Did it work?
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. In the abstract, she writes: