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Winner - 2023 John Brinkerhoff Jackson Book Prize, UVA Center for Cultural Landscapes
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.
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
