Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [735]
Such men cast envious eyes at contemporary Paris. “Despotic governments are generally bad governments,” the Guide averred, “but when one hears of the marvels Napoleon has accomplished in Paris. . ., it makes us wish that he, or some one like him, could be made Emperor of New York for about ten years.” Would-be developers at the Guide were particularly enamored of the French capital’s stunning public improvements and stated baldly that “we want a Haus[s]mann who will do for New York what that great reconstructor did for Paris.”
Uptown boosters attracted to this vision founded the West Side Association (WSA) in 1866 to promote extensive improvements in the area north and west of Central Park—the Badlands of Manhattan. Craggy slopes, running streams, and malarial pools marked the bleak and rocky land. It was barely accessible to downtown civilization: a single horsecar trudged along Eighth Avenue up to 84th Street, where it gave up, turned around, and trudged back. Intrepid travelers heading farther north could take a stagecoach up the Bloomingdale Road (now Broadway), but there wasn’t much to see in these parts. The hamlets of Harsenville, Manhattanville, and Carmansville. Some miniature farms. Some squatter shacks occupied by poor immigrants, refugees from Central Park, and assorted outlaws. Some asylums, hospitals, institutional homes, country churches.
In the collective mind’s eye of the WSA, however, the inhospitable terrain looked very different. The elevated plateau afforded magnificent views of the Hudson to the west and the splendid new Central Park to the east, and river breezes provided a salubrious climate. If the rugged topography were tamed—drained, roads and sewers put through, gas and water lines installed, scenic parks and tree-lined promenades created, centers of culture and learning sprinkled here and there—it might one day replace lower Fifth Avenue as New York’s luxury quartier.
West Ninety-fourth Street, looking west across West End Avenue toward Riverside Drive, c. 1889. Although real estate promoters began to target the Upper West Side soon after the Civil War, development was slow. (© Museum of the City of New York)
To hasten such a glorious future into existence, WSA boosters, ably led by lawyerdeveloper William Martin, petitioned the state legislature to give Andrew Haswell Green and the Central Park Commission (CPC) authority to transform the upper western wilds into a residential gentry preserve. Albany Republicans had already shown their willingness to expand the CPC’s powers: In 1864 it had been asked to extend the park’s pleasure drives above its northern boundary by turning Seventh Avenue into a shaded carriage way; in 1865 legislators charged it with fixing up upper Sixth Avenue and making over the old Bloomingdale Road into a tree-lined, Parisian-style “Boulevard.”
In 1866, with Martin and the WSA applying the pressure, Albany gave the goahead for the CPC to develop a street and property plan for all territory above 155th Street (ungridded in the 1811 blueprint). In succeeding months and years, the legislature steadily expanded the CPC’s mandate to include platting streets, designing ne works of parkways and promenades (including a grand Riverside Boulevard along the top of the bluff, and a racing lane for elite horseowners), arranging for parks (Morningside and Riverside), laying out suburban districts, improving up-island riverfronts, dredging a shipping canal at Spuyten Duyvil, and arranging for bridge and road connections across the Harlem River. Not only did the CPC now dominate the citybuilding process for all of Manhattan Island north of 59th Street and west of Central Park, but Green also took charge of forming a general street plan for the adjacent regions of the Bronx—still part of Westchester County.
Green now