Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [632]
Merchant and AICP sponsor Robert Bowne Minturn reached a similar conclusion by a somewhat different route. After returning in the winter of 1849-50 from an eighteen-month grand tour, he and his wife, Anna Mary Minturn, were struck, as so many other well-off travelers had been, with the mortifying contrast between what Downing called New York’s “mere grass-plots of verdure” and Europe’s grand green spaces. Minturn became the nucleus of a group of largely Whig gentlemen, many of whom had made their fortunes in international trade, that came to agree that Manhattan needed a public space worthy (as William Cullen Bryant put it) “of the greatness of our metropolis.”
A proper park, these gentlemen said, would advance New York’s commercial interests, counter the attractions (like Brooklyn’s Green-Wood) offered by rival cities, and offer a pastoral and healthy retreat from the disorderly city. It would also provide the respectable classes a place to promenade that was far from crowded Broadway, where cultivated ladies like Anna Minturn were finding themselves “stared out of countenance by troupes of whiskered and mustachioed chatterers” (a Post correspondent noted). Even better, a spacious park would allow the gentility to roll about in their fabulous new carriages, rectifying what Nathaniel Parker Willis had long ago singled out as New York’s great deficiency “as a metropolis of wealth and fashion”: the “lack of a driving park.”
Placing a park at the spot favored initially—the iso-acre plot bounded by 66th, 75th, Third Avenue, and the East River known as Jones’ Wood—would, moreover, reap additional advantages. Uptown property owners had been expressing considerable dismay at finding Irish, German, and African Americans forced northward along with hogs, bone-boiling establishments, and dung heaps. The Harlem Rail Road, too, was fostering a rapid growth of up-island brickworks, ropewalks, and paint manufactories. By removing a substantial chunk of uptown territory from the marketplace, landowners believed, a park would protect their terrain from further encroachment. Establishing the “character” of the surrounding neighborhood would also “materially improve Real estate” and make possible the profitable construction of terraced villas like those facing Regent’s Park in London.
Unfortunately, the Joneses and Schermerhorns who owned the Wood were unwilling to sell, scenting bigger profits in more commercial and river-oriented uses. So in 1851 James Beekman, a wealthy Whig state senator, who himself owned property near Jones’ Wood and was generally regarded as uptown’s representative in the legislature, introduced a bill to seize the land by eminent domain. Backed by Minturn and other prominent merchants and bankers, Beekman’s proposal passed quickly into law.
Despite this fast start, the Jones’ Wood plan now triggered vigorous opposition from other downtown merchants who castigated it (said one irate Tribune contributor) as “a scheme to enhance the value of up-town land.” Fiscally conservative gentlemen like U.S. Senator Hamilton Fish also objected to the way Beekman’s plan shifted the method of paying for the park: away from the traditional practice of assessing the neighboring landowners who would be the chief beneficiaries, and toward putting the burden on all taxpayers. There were additional reservations about the unnervingly massive and worrisomely precedent-setting expansion of state intervention in the land market.
Unionists, land reformers, and environmental reformers had their own objections. The Industrial Congress was on record as saying that if the city