Nyc Parks history

The Commissioners' Plan of 1811, which mapped out the streets of Manhattan, designated several spots as open space, including Union Square, Tompkins Square Park, Madison Square Park and Marcus Garvey Parks; in general, early plans allotted more space for these sites than what was finally built.

The Village of Brooklyn was incorporated as a city in 1834, which gave it increased powers to lay out squares and parks.

Elsewhere in Manhattan, Coenties Slip (Vietnam Veterans Plaza) first served as boat slip, and then open space after it was filled in 1835.

In 1836, Peter Gerard Stuyvesant and his wife Helen Rutherford reserved four acres of the family farm and sold it for five dollars to the City of New York as a public park.

By 1839, a board of commissioners had presented a city plan with 11 planned parks and squares including Washington (Fort Greene) and Tompkins (Von King) Parks.

Although not a city park, the Green–Wood Cemetery, which opened in 1840, provided the public 478 landscaped acres and 20 miles of pedestrian paths.

Bryant Park was once a reservoir until it opened officially in 1847.

Stuyvesant Square, which opened as a public park in 1850, has a direct link to New York's early history.

After three years of debate over the park site and cost, in 1853 the state legislature authorized the City of New York to use the power of eminent domain to acquire more than 700 acres of land in the center of Manhattan.

The earliest parks date to the Dutch and Colonial era, and parks before 1856 were maintained by the Mayor's office and street commissioner.

Thanks in part to Elliot's support, Olmsted was appointed superintendent in 1857.

New York’s Central Park is a world-famous public park, created beginning in 1858 to address the recreational needs of the rapidly growing City.

The park first opened for public use in the winter of 1859 when thousands of New Yorkers skated on lakes constructed on the site of former swamps.

By 1865, the park received more than seven million visitors a year.

The Department of Parks & Recreation has a long history of serving the public with clean and safe spaces to relax and recreate, but parks and open spaces existed in New York long before the first "Department of Public Parks" was established in 1870.

The Zoo, first given permanent quarters in 1871, quickly became the park’s most popular feature.

After a debate over the administration of Central Park, he tendered his resignation in 1873, but was forced to reconsider after the depressed economic environment of 1873.

In 1878, he lost his job as in–house landscape architect at the Parks Department but was retained on a per–project basis as a consulting landscape architect, a demotion.

Architect Jacob Wrey Mould was hired to rework Olmsted and Vaux's plans in 1880.

In 1881, John Mullaly (honored by Mullaly Park in the Bronx), formed the city's first open–space advocacy organization, the New York Park Association, to advocate for the acquisition of nearly 4,000 acres above the Harlem River.

The Association helped secure State legislation in 1883 to establish six large parks and three broad parkways.

On December 12, 1888, Bronx, Claremont, Crotona, St Mary's, Van Cortlandt and Pelham Bay Parks, as well as Crotona, Mosholu and Bronx-Pelham Parkways, were vested to the City of New York, quintupling the City's green space overnight.

The New York Society for Parks and Playgrounds was incorporated in 1891, described as a “moral movement not a charity.” The New York Society was founded by Charles A. Stover, former Mayor Abram S. Hewitt, and Columbia University President Seth Low.

In 1895, in poor health and suffering from dementia, Olmsted was committed to McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts, the grounds of which he actually helped design.

The movement to build more playgrounds got the City's official recognition in 1897, when Mayor William L. Strong appointed the Small Parks Advisory Committee with crusading journalist Jacob A. Riis as its secretary.

The playground movement gathered momentum, and in 1898 settlement house workers Charles B. Stover and Lillian D. Wald formed the Outdoor Recreation League (ORL). Over the next four years ORL opened nine privately sponsored playgrounds on parkland acquired by the City.

In 1902 newly–elected Mayor Seth Low agreed to have the City Parks Department operate and improve the ORL playgrounds.

Manhattan: Seward Park, October 17, 1903

In 1908 the Playground Association of America noted 11 playgrounds in Manhattan and five in Brooklyn.

The post of Supervisor of Recreation (under the Park board) was also created in 1910 to focus resources in the area of children's recreation.

Stover was so successful at redirecting resources to playgrounds that in 1911 he had to rebut allegations that he was “merely a playground commissioner” by noting that he worked to keep an athletic field out of Battery Park and strived to keep Central Park pristine.

“If our boys . . . are going to acquire the habit of subordinating selfish to group interests, they must learn these things through experience and not from books or the bleachers . . . ” –Luther Halsely Gulick, Popular Recreation and Public Morality, 1912

The Bronx: St Mary's Park, June 22, 1914 – in 1914 eight playgrounds were opened in the Bronx; two in Crotona Park, and one each in St Mary's, Macomb's Dam, Claremont, Pelham Bay, Fulton and Echo Parks (the one in St Mary's Park was first by about a week)

These included “Indoor Playgrounds,” playgrounds for mothers and children, “Open Air” playgrounds (16 citywide41;, “Evening Playgrounds,” and “Kindergarten Centers.” By 1915 there were 70 equipped playgrounds throughout the city with features such as swings, slides, basketball frames, and seesaws.

“Play is not merely a good thing for the child; it is an essential part of the process of his growth . . . it is for the sake of play that infancy exists.” –Joseph Lee, President Playground Association, 1916

Even though there were dozens of playgrounds across the city, it was not until 1926 that the first equipped play area opened in Central Park.

In 1927, August Heckscher donated the first equipped playground, located on the southeastern meadow.

One of the first large public–private initiatives of the Moses administration was the “Learn to Swim” programs at pools across the city in the summer of 1934, which served several thousand adults and children.

The WPA pool facilities at Crotona Park in the Bronx; Betsy Head Pool, Red Hook Park, and Sunset Park in Brooklyn; and at Highbridge, Jackie Robinson, and Thomas Jefferson Parks in Manhattan all include recreational facilities that date to 1936.

Beginning in 1938, the Board of Education agreed to provide land next to schools where the Parks Department could build and maintain Jointly Operated Playground (JOPs). The Parks Department also built scores of recreation facilities as part of public housing projects.

At the beginning of 1946, Parks officials noted that children played checkers, handball, horseshoe pitching, jacks, paddle tennis, and shuffleboard, and participated in table tennis contests and outdoor track meets.

The Opening Day Brochure, March 30, 1951 explained, “Experience has taught the Park Department that, although the park system has been greatly expanded, its present program is decidedly weak in one respect.

The facility was originally known as the Brownsville Boys' Club, and had been opened in 1953 after years of planning by a group of public–minded Brooklynites under the guidance of Abe Stark, President of the City Council of New York.

A proposal in 1955 to build an old-age center near the Ramble in Central Park was rejected, and a contribution by the Florina Lasker Foundation withdrawn, when bird enthusiasts protested the plan.

A recreation center was built at St John's Park in 1956, and a center was eventually built on the planned site in Crotona Park, but other centers fell by the wayside.

Frederick Law Olmsted's New York, Elizabeth Barlow and William Alex, Praeger, 1972.

FLO: A Biography of Frederick Law Olmsted, Laura Wood Roper, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973.

In 1979, Olmsted's Brookline house (and Olmsted Brothers headquarters) was designated a National Historic Site.

In 1984, the first fully accessible playground in the country opened in Flushing Meadows Corona Park in Queens.

By 1990, the private organization of the Central Park Conservancy contributed more than half the public park’s budget and exercised substantial influence on decisions about its future.

They are also the authors of The Park and the People: A History of Central Park, which was published in 1992 and is available in paperback from Cornell University Press.

The previous entry on “Central Park” is excerpted from The Encyclopedia of New York City, edited by Kenneth T. Jackson and published by Yale University Press (1995). It is reprinted with the permission of the authors, Elizabeth Blackmar and Roy Rosenzweig.

Orchard Beach provided not only an elegant bathhouse (landmarked in 2007) but also many playgrounds, acres of athletic fields for baseball, football, and soccer, and several tennis courts.