Journal of Planning History

The role that parks played in Manhattan changed dramatically during the antebellum period. Originally dismissed as unnecessary on an island embraced by rivers, parks became a tool for real estate development and gentrification in the 1830s. By the 1850s, politicians, journalists, and landscape architects believed Central Park could be a social salve for a city with rising crime rates, increasingly visible poverty, and deepening class divisions. While many factors (public health, the psychological need for parks, and property values) would remain the same, the changing social conversation showed how ideas of public space were transforming, in rhetoric if not reality.

In the 1910s, the bungalow colony Harding Park developed on marshy Clason Point. Through the 1930s–1950s, Robert Moses sought to modernize this East Bronx waterfront through the Parks Department and the Committee on Slum Clearance. While localism and special legislative treatment enabled Harding Park’s preservation as a co-op in 1981, the abandonment of master planning left neighboring Soundview Park unfinished. The entwined histories of recreation and residency on Clason Point reveal the beneficial and detrimental effects of both urban renewal and community development, while also demonstrating the complicated relationship between localism and large-scale planning in postwar New York City.

In the mid-1960s, the Staten Island Citizens Planning Committee (SICPC) thwarted plans for the Richmond Parkway, seeking instead to weave dense, affordable housing options within a network of linear preserves they donned “the Greenbelt.” By the mid-1970s, however, the SICPC decoupled their environmental concerns from dense housing schemes, turning instead toward ecological zoning strategies. The SICPC’s changing vision reveals the policies and park spaces that emerged when environmentalists ran square into the realities of the mid-1970s fiscal crisis. If such policies proved effective for preserving biodiversity, they also helped cement the segregated landscape taking shape across the metropolis.

While the privatization of parks has been controversial since the 1980s, the origins of public–private parks in New York City were complex. During the 1970s fiscal crisis, the Parks and Recreation Department suffered severe budget cuts and was forced to reduce services drastically. Faced with parks that were falling apart, thousands of volunteers in block associations and community groups began to maintain parks on their own. They pioneered radical forms of “do-it-yourself” urbanism with guerrilla horticulture, community gardens, children-fashioned adventure playgrounds, tree-planting drives, makeshift ambulances, and volunteer patrols. By the early 1980s, these “self-help” efforts coalesced into new public–private parks. The history of public–private parks is thus one of privatizations in the plural and points to an array of antistatist impulses that emerged on both the left and right in the 1970s.