Why wasn't NYC's Central Park concept copied by other cities?

BarqsHasBite@lemmy.ca to Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world – 237 points –

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.

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Because other cities didn’t have a large black neighborhood to knock down.

They used all those up for the Interstate system.

Yup, About 100 years later. What’s old is new again.

Yeah, Akron is particularly guilty here... The interbelt didn't even even up being a useful interstate.

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.

FYI tdot is slang for Toronto (sounds like you're american).

I’m aware. It’s actually a small reference to Kendrick Lamar’s early rap name which was k.dot . Can’t have punctuation in your name on lemmy, tho.

The large black neighborhoods were replaced by highways before cities could replace them with Central Park-esque projects

In fairness, they did try to obtain property that also had two wealthy families on twice (with injunctions that failed) before looking at the Central Park area that Seneca Village was also in.

Of course that doesn’t sound as much as a hot take that you gave.

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.

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It was! San Francisco's Golden Gate Park (4.1 km²) is in fact larger than NYC's Central Park (3.4km²).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Gate_Park

Sorry, I don’t think GGP meets OP’s requirements of huge fuggin sky scrapers next to it.

We’ll have to change to Richmond and Sunset zoning requirements and try again.

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They didn't set it aside, they displaced people to make a park.

I'm honestly surprised that they haven't followed up by just allowing the city to gradually eat the 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.

Don't they use prison labour to maintain it? And mislead volunteers to get free labour to keep upping the rent in the neighborhoods.

"naturally surounded by high rises" nothing natural about that. Its callled urban planning and in this case complete control was given to one guy, the one that made prospect park too, i saw a docu on it. Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn't but the bearucracy and corruption with funding usually takes its place. A lot of cities simply weren't planned for that, central park is designed pre-automobile. Many new cities are post-auto, so they dont care about walking spaces like they used to, a lot of cities have decided that the public is dangerous and hard to control, they dont want them to gather or loiter in any space and why should they give something for free when a business can profit from their need? NYC came from a place where they the populace was accustomed to dealing with the public in person on a daily basis.

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.

None of the cities I know have high rises in the centre tho

Most cities in Germany have parks in or near the city centre. In fact it's considered unusual if there's isn't any.

London has Hyde and Regent's Parks. Paris has the Bois de Boulogne, Berlni has the great Tiergarten. Big parks are a common feature of cities.

London has far far far more parks than those two! They’re not even the biggest in London, Richmond park is at 2500 acres (that’s more than 3x the size of Central Park) It’s where that viral video of the dog chasing deer was taken - JESUS CHRIST, FENTON!! Personally I’ve always preferred St James Park over Hyde or regents if you’re in central London, but it’s a small 50ish acres. Hampstead Heath (800 acres) and bushy park (1099 acres) are similar in size to Central Park too if you’d prefer not to be in central London.

To answer OPs question, I’d much rather live in a city with more parks than I can count than just one massive one somewhere. There’s 5 parks within a 15 minute walk of my house and I live in a city!

EDIT: from Wikipedia: London is made of 40% public green space, including 3,000 parks and totaling 35,000 acres.

And not to mention the green belt to prevent sprawl. Excellent foresight.

And here I thought the Central Park was bigger in surface area...

Central Park was once a whole community thriving community. They forced them out (eminent domain) and turned it into the Central Park we know now. Other cities have huge parks and areas, but New York markets their state like no other (maybe California).

naturally surrounded by city high rises.

Something seems odd with the idea that high rises were 'natural' :-)

For me, the "concept" is terribly wrong.

A park itself is fine, but you can't use one park as an excuse for not having other parks, green areas etc. anymore in a big city.

New York has 5 times more people than Munich. But Munich's biggest park is about the same size as New York's Central Park (a little bigger even). And if you count all the green areas, parks etc. in Munich together, they are 6 times larger (counting only the ones that are publicly accessible and listed in wikipedia) than that Central Park.

So, give your New Yorker's 30 central parks and lots of other green spots, and you got a concept.

Something seems odd with the idea that high rises were ‘natural’ :-)

They are better than spreading single family homes and ground floor commercial spaces over a huge swath of land that would inevitable need clearcutting and plowing under to be suitable for development.

Central Park is not New York's largest park. It's the 5th.

Located such that.

Who said I want to use it an excuse for no other parks?

What's with all the bad faith discussion.

Nobody said you wanted to use it that way. OP’s probably referring to the lack of parks in Manhattan.

What's with all the bad faith discussion.

Good question. Do you need a mirror to figure it out?

NYC’s Central Park has 843 acres

Cleveland’s Emerald Necklace has 7 parks with over 1,500 acres. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleveland_Metroparks

And that doesn’t even count a 32,000 acre national park just south of greater Cleveland.

New York is just a more famous large city. Plenty of other cities have vast parks.

Chicago has an emerald necklace as well. Also millennium Park might for ops request.

Yeah, how come no other cities have parks?

Obviously the question is about the size, scale, and location of Central Park. The designer wanted even larger.

Other cities have done the same. Central Park isn’t even the oldest one.

The oldest one in the Americas is in Mexico City: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alameda_Central

Alameda_Central

... That is tiny. I'm not talking a park. I'm taking a massive park.

Central Park is not even big enough to be listed on Wikipedia’s list of urban parks by size:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_urban_parks_by_size

... Technically inside funky city lines is not the same as being in the heart of a city. Gatineau Park even says North of Ottawa. Not North side, North of. "It is not classified as an urban park by its managing authority.[1]"

I really didn't think I'd have to emphasize Central Park is a massive park in the heart of a city such that is surrounded by high rises. At this point I think you're at least talkng in bad faith. So cheers.

I never said every urban park is the same as Central Park.

You did ask why other cities haven’t copied the concept of Central Park. I’ve pretty clearly demonstrated that the concept of an urban park in a metropolitan area is both not original to Central Park and not unique to Central Park.

because no one values green spaces.

Which is why government typically rubberstamps every developer request to clearcut new forests and turn under new grassland, to build a new poorly built development of McMansions that will probably have to be extensively rebuilt within 5-10 years due to the apalling build quality.

Same reason no one builds affordable homes. Why develop homes for the poors, for 100k, when they can make McMansions on the same land, and sell them for 1mil+ a pop.

If Central Park was proposed today, it would be decried as a waste of valuable property (and probably liberal wokeism)

a lot of central park was for rich people actually or designed with rich citizens to use it in mind

Boston spent billions of dollars to replace their downtown freeways with green space.

They spent billions to fix traffic issues and failing infrastructure.

The greenspace was a byproduct. That was only allowed to happen because buildings along the former elevated roadway would see a massive increase in land value with the roadway gone that was more valuable than shoving more buildings into the strip of land.

Oh so the replacement of a surface road with green space increased property values? Gee I wonder if that has anything to do with valuing green space?

Yes, who would have thought having a giant fucking highway outside your 4th story window would have negatively impacted property value.

Happy Munich noises. Bigger than central park too 😉

Came here to write that. Central Park didn't need to be copied because a lot of European cities had that decades to centuries before.

Tiergarten Berlin, Schlossgarten Stuttgart, Praterinsel Vienna, Planten un Blomen Hamburg, Maschsee/Eilenriede in Hannover, Züriberg Zürich, just to name a few in the Germanophone world.

It's possibly harder to find a large city who hasn't some equivalent than find one with it - and most without one lost it after WW2 and American city planning.

Yeah, I think OP is asking strictly from a US perspective (although being USdefaultist by not specifying it), because I can't really think of any large European city which doesn't have realitve large parks in the city center or next to it.

People are giving examples of parks that are way off in the boonies.

First, things are not so binary that it’s either high rises and boonies.

Second, NYC has a huge central business district. My own city does not have enough high rises to surround a large park. Such a park would destroy most midsize cities, not enhance them.

Yes I understand nyc has more, the point is centrally located

Less than 12,000 people live in downtown Cleveland to NYC’s 1.6 million in Manhattan alone. My whole county has 1.26 million, NYC has 8.8 million. I bet person for person, Cleveland has more space than Manhattan

Consider Public Square and the Group Plan malls. Cleveland is also working in a lakefront development.

https://www.groupplan.org/

@someguy3 Portland, Oregon has the largest urban park in the country, Forest Park, but it is forested an not a garden park. Also it is on the edge of the city instead of Central.

Vancouver has Stanley park which is bigger than Central Park, right next to downtown and on the water. (So we have a nice seawall around it you can run/bike along.)

The answer to the question though is these giant parks are incredibly expensive. Think how many billions of dollars in apartmentsyou could replace that park with. I don't think it'd be a good trade but for cities which are chronically strapped for cash, that's a hard bargain.

I think most U.S. cities that were established before cars have large, centrally located urban parks. New Orleans, Boston, San Francisco, Detroit, etc. The cities that don’t are probably ones that grew only after cars were ubiquitous so the park could be wherever.

Like a western city in a mountain valley that had a population boom after cars would probably prefer their main urban park to be on the periphery for hiking trails and access to the mountain. The green-space didn’t have to be on a trolley line near downtown to be accessible.

Jacksonville Florida doesn't have a large central park, but with 86 acres of park per 1000 residents and one of the largest geographical areas of any single city in the US, that's a lot of parks. I suppose I'm trying to say there are other ways a city can embrace park culture without a central park style hub park.

Agreed, but there is something interesting about a huge park that can really get immersed in.

That is true! Not that I would wish Jacksonville on anyone but if you ever do happen to be punished with it, the river walk and arboretum are two redeeming features, as well as the coastal marsh/beach parks on the north Bank of the river. For something almost sort of similar to central park, but not, there are several multi-block parks strung together through the riverside/Avondale neighborhood that make the area very walkable.

Baltimore, Maryland has a gigantic green space (second biggest woodland park in the United States according to Wikipedia) right in the center of the city called Leakin Park. It's gorgeous during the day time, but unfortunately during the evening most people avoid it because it's become a dumping ground for bodies.

It's become known in the region as one of the most dangerous parks in the United States, which super sucks.

Also has Patterson Park which is huge, minus the body dumping.

I live in Chicago and we do have a big centrally located park, along with other smaller parks scattered around. It's down by the lake, and they keep that big stupid bean there.

Pro tip for tourists, if you absolutely have to go see the bean don't touch it; everybody touches the damn thing and you will get sick. Go look at the Picasso instead. It's on all of the tourist attraction maps and way more interesting than a big shiny bean.

Why would I ever choose to go to Chicago? From an outside perspective it sounds like a total shit hole.

Was just out there a month ago. Place was clean, good weather too. A lot of things to do. Nothing what they've shown in the news. I stayed near the loop, didn't travel south, as I had no reason to.

Leaving Chicago, the taxi driver said he wanted people to continue thinking Chicago was a shit town, because it keeps rent down. Funny.

Nah, Chicagos a great town with excellent food, culture, museums and events. Lots of festivals in the summer, it runs along a beatuiful lake with nice beaches, it has great people, all in all I love Chicago. Full disclosure, there are neighborhoods with high crime, it is unfortunately super segregated, and cold as hell in the winter.

I'm personally fond of the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry. They had the Bodies exhibit the time I visited and it was incredible.

Just so you know, you're probably not being downvoted by any Chicagoans.

Even the most devout Chicagoan evangelist will just typically grunt and nod in response to someone calling Chicago a shithole.

We understand that Chicago is not everyone's cup of tea.

There are central parks in Boston and San Francisco…

I got interested in the thought and looked it up. Boston Common predates Central Park by about 200 years!

Boston Common? Neat, but not exactly the size I was talking about. SF's is nice.

They do, they're just not as large as central park, not as iconic, and they're more misshapen.

Obviously I'm talking about large parks on the scale of central park.

Well, youre not going to find something “on the scale” of central park in other cities because no us city is “on the scale” of nyc..

-Size wise, nyc’s population is nearly double the next largest city.. -Density wise, nyc’s population density is nearly double that of the next densest city -skyscraper wise, nyc has nearly double the quantity of skyscrapers as the next most skyscraper heavy city..

See the trend??

If you look at it proportionally though, many US cities have something similar, many of them have been brought up itt…

Personally, id say pittsburgh and chicago have roughly what youre looking for..

-chicago has a few large urban parks that are surrounded by skyscrapers.. the only difference is that they are next to the lake.. pretty much all the amenities in nyc’s central park can be found in lincoln & grant parks..

-pittsburgh also has a large urban park in the heart of downtown (hell, they bulldozed 1/3 of downtown to build it).. while it only has skyscrapers on one side, it is literally 1/10th the size of nyc, so give it some slack lol.

Central Park was established in 1860 when NYC was 1 million people. Other cities could have seen this good idea and set aside land when they were even smaller.

And the same still applied in 1860… nyc was double the size of the next largest city back then.

And to answer your question, they did do the same... chicago for example also built lincoln park in 1860 even though they were 1/10th the population at the time. The only difference between central & lincoln park is that lincoln park is larger than central park & not as square.. its entirety (that isnt water) is surrounded by skyscrapers & is very much central to the city…

To add more, central park is 4 miles away from the citys financial district.. lincoln park is 2 miles away… it is MORE “central” than central park lol

Check out Forest Park in St. Louis. It's nice.

I spent a day there last time I was in St. Louis. It was really nice. There were a few museums and the zoo you could all go to for free.

City Park here in NOLA is 1300 acres (50% larger than Central Park) and was established in 1854, making it three years older as well. Stay losing NYC! 😜

Kings park, Perth.

Bigger than central park and high up on the only hill for miles

One of the great design tricks of Central Park is that at almost every entrance you go downhill. You are instantly cut off from the city noise.

Didn't Los Angeles have central green space (not on the scale of central park in NYC, but large) that was gradually eaten away and paved over with time?

Pittsburgh has three major parks in the city limits - Point State Park downtown, which is a small area that hosts events, Schenley Park which has plenty of hiking, biking, and fishing, and Frick Park which is massive and allows you to get lost in the forest in the middle of the city. It's a great way to get out of crowded areas without traveling.

Chicago has a huge lakefront park as well as large parks throughout neighborhoods connected by grassy and tree-lined avenues. Not quite Central Park but a lot of great park space throughout for residents.

Came here to say this. The large parks connected by tree lined boulevards is called the Emerald Necklace.

I don't know about other cities, but the ones I've lived near were simply too irregularly shaped. NYC was able to be built like a grid, but a city like, say, Buffalo (go Bills!) is both too wibbly wobbly as well as too cold to envision a park being used as a centerpiece.

I may remember incorrectly, but NY was only 'able' to build in a grid by displacing a lot of residents and tearing it all down to start from scratch

Some democracy their city is if they actively sought out the world's most frustrating city design at such civilian expense (and with it not being free).

I'm honestly not that stupid but it kinda seems like that would be the least frustrating layout.

All the streets in NYC are numbered, none are known by any name. After a while that begins to feel tedious.

Numbered streets are great.

I'm glad someone likes them I guess.

Hi. I grew up in a city with named streets. One street can have four names depending on where you're at on it. You've never had to deal with directing someone down a city full of that, apparently.

On the other hand, we have an area with lettered streets. L comes before M, N, O, P, etc. If you're on F and need to get to C Street, you know you need to go up 3 blocks. Meanwhile, if you're on Johnson and need to get to North York, you have to know that it's the same street and changes names in 7 blocks.

Detroit has Belle Isle which was designed by the same guy who did Central Park.

Looking at it, that is kinda out of the way and hard to access (probably why it's a park). I'm talking large parks in the middle of the urban area.

Detroit is laid out differently from NYC, more like the spokes of a wheel or a spiderweb, instead of a grid like Manhattan. Downtown Detroit (the most "urban" area of the city) and Belle Isle are both at the center of the wheel.

Not sure you'd get a sense of that by "looking at it" on a map, but Belle Isle at least as close to downtown Detroit as Central park is to lower Manhattan.

You do have to take a bridge to get there though, since it's an island, so you may have a point about accessibility in that regard.

Nevertheless, Belle Isle is a large park in the middle of an urban area. Especially if you bring Windsor into the mix.

Central Park is immediately surrounded on all 4 sides by residential areas. That is the exact middle of the urban area. Belle Island is island off to the side of the city, only accessible by 1 bridge. I wouldn't count Windsor when border crossing and passports come into it.

Again, I acknowledge your point about accessibility.

When you say something like "I wouldn't count Windsor," however, it suggests to me that you've never been to Detroit and that you still don't understand what I'm talking about.

--

EDIT to add:

I don't think you've been to Detroit, but I'm not sure that you've been to New York City, either?

It seems as if you are thinking of Manhattan as all of NYC, or at least as the center of NYC. Geographically, it is not.

I'd agree Manhattan is "central" to NYC, in terms of culture and politics and money. But it could not be -- it would not even exist as it does today -- were it not for the other four boroughs. It takes all five boroughs to make New York City. The shape of the whole city is as irregular as any other city built on the water, and the center of it is nowhere near Central Park or Manhattan.

In fact, the only way that Central Park is close to being geographically "central" to the whole city is if you include Newark NJ as part of the city. But New Jersey is a totally different state from the State of New York. (I mean sure, you don't need a passport to go across bridges or through tunnels, but still: You see where I'm going with this, don't you?)

? You tried to bring Windsor, Canada in for some reason. For Canadians to go to Belle Island they need to cross a border and have a passport. This is obviously not the kind of city park I'm talking about.

Some cities did, like Vancouver. But others thought it too expensive to the taxpayers and are now kicking themselves decades later. Or the taxpayers didn't want to support it back then.

Because its really hard to do it retroactively. Not too many people cared about its aesthetic/health or public value when compared to the commercial real estate value

Vancouver - Stanley Park (downtown), Queen Elizabeth Park (geographic center), Central Park (Metrotown)... The lack of parks in US cities is a matter of poor planning.

@someguy3 Portland, Oregon has the largest urban park in the country, Forest Park, but it is forested an not a garden park. Also it is on the edge of the city instead of Central.

We have lots of large parks in my city. Not central park sized, but we are not an NYC sized city. It's basically a small city incorporated into the forest. Sometimes they try to capitalize some of it, but the voters reliably shut them down, we love our green spaces.

Toronto - High Park and Downsview Park, depending how central you're looking for. Both massive and in busy parts of the city.

Possible answers include: Because this concept is not suitable for every city. Because there are other ways to introduce greenery into the city center, like many bigger or smaller parks.

Of the top of my head (because I lived there) - Berlin has Tiergarten and London has Hyde Park. The latter is so so in size but the former is quite large.

Thinking further, I remembered that Paris has the Champ de Mars (surrounding the Eiffel Tower), which is about Hyde Park size.

Also plenty of cities have large forested areas that merge with the city proper and are not too far from the center, such as for example Grouse Mountain on the north side of Vancouver and Monsanto on the west side of Lisbon.

Notice how even the cities in Europe were space has been at a premium for a lot longer than in the Americas do at times have a big centrally located park.

Vancouver has Stanley Park right in the city too

Well, I've only visited for a few days and I like hiking so naturally I only had eyes for Grouse Mountain ... ;)

Park Slonski - Silesian Park in Upper Silesia in South Poland is much better than Central Park in NY. You should see it if you come to Poland.