I’m talking about a massive park in the absolute heart of the city. Located such that is naturally surrounded by city high rises. *People are giving examples of parks that are way off in the boonies. I’m trying to say located centrally, heart of the city, you know where the high rises are. Yes I understand nyc has more, the point is centrally located.
Copied by younger cities in North Americ. You know, the cities younger than NYC that could have seen the value of setting aside a large area for parkland before it was developed.
Because other cities didn’t have a large black neighborhood to knock down.
This is yet another absolutely shameful example of government led evil, but Seneca Village was also a small portion of what makes up Central Park. We need not imply that demolishing a thriving black community was the sole goal of Central Park to acknowledge how fundamentally fucked up this place is.
I wouldn’t be so sure. Wouldn’t surprise me if they saw the black neighborhood and came up with reasons to justify getting rid of it, and the park that was created somehow justified the original intentions.
I’m certainly not sure. There’s no bounds to the depth of government endorsed racism in this country.
I only know that Seneca Village, in particular, was geographically a small portion of what makes up Central Park. A quick perusal of Wikipedia isn’t an all encompassing or definitive history but it appears that approximately 1600 residents in a number of different villages were evicted through eminent domain, while Seneca Village seems to have had ~250 residents at its peak.
As is often the case it seems like residents with the least power and wealth were steamrolled by government agencies for a “civic good,” but many sites were considered before this shameful act, so it hardly seems that the park was an invented purpose after the fact. Rather, these government agencies should be shamed for continuing to force the least powerful and wealthy of its citizens to pay for shared public goods.
Well, that’s simply not true. While that may be how they found the land for Central Park, that’s not the reason why other cities haven’t made large parks like in NYC.
Portland, OR has (I think) the second biggest inner-city park in the country, and I’m fairly sure no minority neighborhoods were destroyed to create it. Way to be edgy though.
As for answering OP’s question… I’m guessing the property is just too valuable as commercial and residential land for the city governments to want to redesignate as parks. Especially now with the housing crisis and all.
It was! San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park (4.1 km²) is in fact larger than NYC’s Central Park (3.4km²).
They didn’t set it aside, they displaced people to make a park.
Central Park is cool and all, but most cities could do with a large quantity of much smaller parks that people can walk to instead of one really big park in the middle of downtown.
We are here for decentralization after all.
Well, most of them had no thriving black community in the middle of the town that they could raze to create a park.
