Central park is also now (unlike twenty years ago) one of the safest urban parks in the world.
The park has a fascinating history. For long periods since it's opening 130 years ago, it fell badly into disrepair and mismanagement. It's pretty amazing really that it is now kept as well as it is. The cost is big.
Consider the number or people who would pay fortunes for bits of it to develop for commercial purposes. And then consider the hell-hole New York City would become in a few decades if the park were to disappear.
I can't think of any European equivalents to these huge American city parks. I remeber being in awe at the size of Central Park, nothing in London or Paris comes close.
ReplyDeleteMost large cities in Britain have swallowed large estates, and they have become a mingling of residential, commercial and park areas, examples around Manchester include Longford Park, Platt Fields on Oxford Rd and Parrs Wood in Didsbury, similar examples like Sefton park in Liverpool too. These parks are tiny compared with the big city parks in the US.
Golden Gate Park in San Francisco is so large it contains many large museums, sports venues, concert venues, botanical gardens etc.
Central park, apart from pagodas, band stands and the like seems to be just parks and woods (okay it has two museums outside and one inside). Strange, it felt almost larger than Golden Gate Park, but the stat's say it's smaller.
Central Park is the product a profoundly evil act. It was the product of one of the forgotten bits of ethnic cleansing that permeate U.S. history: the confiscation of almost all property in Manhattan owned by free blacks.
ReplyDeleteButler Shaeffer wrote a great article on the subject: Uppity in Central Park
For two years, the Villagers resisted the city's orders to leave, as well as the efforts of the police who had been directed to remove them. In the words of one New York newspaper, "[t]he policemen find it difficult to persuade them out of the idea which has possessed their simple minds, that the sole object of the authorities in making the Park is to procure their expulsion from the homes which they occupy." Seneca Village was thus destroyed and, in the words of another newspaper "the supremacy of the law was upheld by the policemen's bludgeons." Some 1,600 persons - who had the audacity to believe that they were entitled to live as free men and women in a city that had earlier enslaved them - were forcibly evicted from their homes. The lands were then cleared to become a part of Central Park.
To me Central Park is not such a nice place; I cannot divorce the beauty of the place from the people whose hopes and dreams were brutally shattered with policemen's clubs to build it.
I've been to Manhatten once and strolled by Central Park, never went in though I wanted too.
ReplyDeleteIt's a landmark no doubt, but my footsteps will never scuff that concrete again.
Nothing agaisn't this beautiful park (it's just personal)
I'd recommend seeing it along with the rest of Manhatten. The other burroughs aren't quite as impressive.
"Central Park is the product a profoundly evil act. It was the product of one of the forgotten bits of ethnic cleansing that permeate U.S. history."
ReplyDeleteI thought U.S. in its entirety came to be this way.
Why stop there? It's the history of the entire planet.
ReplyDeleteWow! What a beautiful city park. However, the Malaysian parks re more beautified than this one. I think the authority should spend more on the beautification of this park.
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