Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [633]
Finally, upper westside landowners made clear that they too were unhappy about the growth of immigrant and poor communities in their domain—places like Seneca Village—and demanded a park in their neck of the woods lest it soon “be covered with a class of population similar to that of Five Points” (as uptown assistant alderman Daniel Tiemann put it). They proposed an alternative, more “central” mid-island location, whose rocky topography made it unsuitable for building houses, grading streets, or digging sewers. The land would be much cheaper, and the municipal corporation already owned 135 acres in the area. It would therefore be possible to build a much bigger park, indeed one of the largest in the world, that would have “ample room for riding and driving therein with Horses and Carriages.”
After two years of debate and maneuver, the coalition backing the central park location won out. In 1853 the state agreed to use eminent domain to take 778 acres (expanded to 843 a decade later) from the 561 proprietors who controlled the site, 20 percent of which was owned by three families. Over the next two years a commission of estimate surveyed and assessed the thirty-four thousand lots, finally authorizing payment of five million dollars for the parcels (three times what advocates had claimed the entire park would cost). Compromising on the funding mechanism, it decreed that one-third of the expense would have to be covered by assessing adjacent landowners, generating screams and (ultimately unsuccessful) lawsuits from men like Archibald Watt, who nevertheless cleared a 1500 percent profit on land he’d bought only twenty years earlier. The sixteen hundred or so Irish, Germans, and blacks who lived on the land—dismissed and disparaged as “vagabonds and scoundrels”—were evicted by 1857, though the Sisters of Charity were allowed to remain in their Mount St. Vincent retreat until 1859.
Also in 1857 the state legislature established a Board of Commissioners of the Central Park, which sponsored a competition for choosing the park’s layout, touching off a new controversy over design. The commissioners were drawn to Downing’s old vision of a park that could foster interclass harmony, but many in the city either doubted that such coexistence was possible or feared that comingling would end with the lower orders imposing their vicious habits on their betters. The Times detested the notion of providing Boweryites with free access: “As long as we are governed by the Five Points, our best attempts at elegance and grace will bear some resemblance to jewels in the snouts of swine. Rather the Park should never be made at all if it is to become the resort of rapscalians.” Far better, some said frankly, to design a space that catered to distinctly upper-class needs—a new trotting course for sporting types, a carriage drive for the fashionable, a pastoral space cleansed of commercial excess and social disorder for the genteel—which would also anchor northern Fifth Avenue as a residential preserve for the wealthy.
Tribunes of popular culture like Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper countered by calling on the commissioners not to “allocate to aristocratic pride and exclusiveness, a place which they may strut and parade in a solitary state, but [to create] a spot