Episode 6 Transcript- Dark History of Central Park Part 1: Laying the Foundation

Hello podcast listeners, I’m Amanda, and this is New York’s Dark Side

[Intro Music]

Today we're heading back downstate to New York City, where we will be covering some of the dark history around the development of the famous Central Park. I used several sources for this episode, which will all be linked in the web page for this episode. One resource that I want to give a shout out to is the book ‘The Park and the People: A History of Central Park’ by Roy Rosenzweig and Elizabeth Blackmar. There is a wealth of information in this book, far more than I could have ever hoped to fit into this episode, so if you are wanting to do a deep dive into the park’s history, check out their book. Before I get started, I just want to give a reminder that if you are enjoying the show, please take a moment to make sure that you're following the show on your platform of choice for updates on when the new episodes launched. And I also ask that you take a moment to give the show a rating, which will help others who may be interested in finding this show actually be able to find us. And I also have a couple quick update. I have launched a new website; I'm still working on it and the web address is www.nydarksidepodcast.com. The blog that I have been using is still live while I get everything all switched over and the other thing I wanted to announce is that we do have some limited merchandise available and you can find the link to our teepublic store in the show notes. 

[Amanda] I'm going to be spending some time giving you some background into some of the key people that were really lobbying for the park as well as the motivations that kind of led to the development of the park. I think it's really relevant to the history of what happened, and I just found it to be pretty interesting and this really just kind of who I am now. So, there is some debate on who truly brought forth the idea for Central Park. I watched a couple of videos on YouTube that listed different people, but according to the book I mentioned earlier, The Parks and The People, many newspaper editorials, letters to the editor, and testimony before legislative committees have a theme of an anonymous gentleman that had traveled to Europe and brought back the idea of building a Grand Park in New York City. This anonymous gentleman is thought to be Robert Bowne Minturn. The Minturn family was prominent in the shipping industry in New England and around New York. Robert Bowne Minturn was born on November 16th, 1805 to William Minturn Junior and Sarah Bowne. His father, William Minturn was a well-respected merchant shipper and had spent several years in the China trade and was also the founder of the Mutual Fire Insurance Company of New York. So there… there was some money in this family already. Sarah Bowne, Robert’s mother, was a descendant of John Bowne who had a historical significance for his fight for religious liberty in the 1660s and 70s. John Bowne’s fight for freedom to practice Quakerism was an example to the English colonies which ultimately ended up, you know, leading the founding fathers to push for religious freedom in the American Constitution, which I thought was pretty cool. So just a side note, this is a piece that I'm really, really, like I said loving about doing this podcast. I'm learning so much about different pieces of history and I'm finding it to be so much fun and very interesting. I hope that all of you as the listeners are enjoying it too. And a quick shout out to my listeners in the Queens area. John Bowne High School, PS20 John Bowne Elementary School and Bowne Street in Flushing, Queens are all named in honor of John Bowne. Bowne Park is named after his son, who ended up being a New York City mayor named Walter Bowne anyway. Back to Robert Bowne Minturn. At the age of 14, Robert Bowne Minturn’s father passed away and Robert was forced to leave school to start working. He ended up taking a job in a counting house and he worked his way up and eventually received a partnership there. But in 1830. Robert Minturn left that company, and he took a job at Fish, Grinnell, and Co. Now again, I'm going to go down another little rabbit hole with some more background on the company because I just happened to find it interesting. One of the senior partners at Fish, Grinnell, and Co., the Fish part of the title came from a man who was named Preserved Fish. His name is spelt like preserved fish, but it's pronounced preserved. I guess this was a maybe fairly common Quaker name back in the time, but his name was thought to be shortened from either preserved in grace or preserved in sin. But again, it's spelled, it's spelled like preserved, and it just made me giggle a little bit when I found it and made me very thankful that I have a normal name. Thank you, Mom and Dad. So, because I found Preserved fish, I wanted to just look into him a little bit so we're gonna do a little background on our new pal Preserved. Preserved started out in the shipping industry. He boarded a whaler when he was in his 20s and he became captain of the whaling ship at age 21. He soon realized, though, that he could make a lot more money selling whale oil than actually being the one to harvest it. So, he went into working as a merchant. He worked for a merchant in a while in Massachusetts. And then he ended up moving to New York after some political issues that he ran into in Massachusetts. And when he came to New York, he partnered with his cousin Joseph Grinnell to form Fish, Grinnell, and Co. He would become the director of Bank of America which is not the same Bank of America as we have today. And that was in 1812, and he was a broker for a while at the New York Stock Exchange. Now, when I was doing my digging and this is kind of another thing that I just found kind of funny and cute, I found a song that was written by a songwriter, Ken Ficara. I did reach out to him. I haven't gotten a response. I wanted to hear the song that he wrote, but unfortunately the way that it's posted on his website, it requires Adobe Flash Player, which is no longer available so I couldn't get it to play. I did reach out to him to see if he had a copy that I had not found online that was posted that I might be able to play for you guys, but he hasn't responded yet, so I do have the lyrics. The lyrics are available on his website. I will link that in my website so that if you wanted to check it out you can find it. I am gonna read off the first verse and the chorus. I don't own the rights to this. It's just kind of funny. So the first verse is “he was a merchant and a banker. His ships rode at anchor in the harbor. He had fortune and fame. He lunched on Wall Street with the Gentry in the early 19th century. But he had the most unfortunate name”, and the first chorus is. “Preserved fish. Did you ever wish more than your name had gone down in history? Oh, preserved. What'd you do to deserve it? To have a name that caused you such misery?” And there's another chorus portion I'm gonna read off because this one really made me giggle again. The whole song is online and you can find that it's linked in my website, but the second chorus goes “preserved fish. Did you ever wish that your name didn't bring to mind sardines? Oh, preserved? What did you do to deserve it? How could your Quaker parents be so mean?” And we'll never know. Did preserved get bullied? If he lived in this time, there would probably be no hope for him. You know, people are mean. Kids are really mean. I don't know what it was like in the late 1700s, early 1800s where he lived, but anyway, I just found it to be pretty creative and while Preserved himself, didn't have anything to do with Central Park, one of his family members, Hamilton Fish, does come to play in the story at some point. Hamilton Fish was a prominent politician. He seemed to do a lot from just a brief background and like he had his hands in all kinds of things and I want to eventually look more into him. But one thing I will mention just because I am who I am, Hamilton was named after Alexander Hamilton because his parents were super close friends with Alexander and I just had to throw that plug in for Hamilton, anyway. 

[Amanda] Alright, so I'm done with my sidebar. I'm going to go back to where I was, like I said earlier, Preserved Fish found the company Fish, Grinnell, and Co with his cousin Joseph Grinnell. Fish would end up leaving the company. Joseph Grinnell- he would end up retiring and he Grinnell would leave the company to be run by his two younger brothers, Henry and Moses Grinnell. Henry Grinnell was married to Robert Bowne Minturn’s sister Sarah, and when Minturn joined the company they changed the name to Grinnell, Minturn, and Co. The company was a conglomerate of merchant sailing magnates, and this would make them incredibly wealthy. In 1845, before the height of the emigrant trade related to the Irish potato famine from which the firm profited greatly… which is kind of sad, but I mean, that's how businesses go. Minturn was reported to be worth $200,000, today's equivalent of more than $2.251 billion. He was doing the damn thing. He was making a buck and had a great, great life. So, in 1848 Minturn was working himself very hard and he decided to take his family on an 18-month tour of Europe to give himself a break. Which just sounds amazing. Like, I wish I could just pack up and go on an 18-month vacation. I would… I would take an 18-month staycation. But I'm not a billionaire, and I have to work for a living, so here I am. But anyway, Minturn, his wife, his sister-in-law, a combination of their children leading up to six children and several servants, because they're rich. So, bring your servants along, packed up and they sailed on one of the merchant ships, one of the packing ships, I can't remember the name of it, and went to sail to Europe and they toured England, they toured France, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Jerusalem and Egypt. Like I'm incredibly jealous. While touring Europe, Minturn was struck by some of the differences between the various cities that they visited. He saw London, Paris, Vienna and its said that as soon as he got home, he started pushing for New York City to have its own great park. And there is some speculation though that it was actually his wife, Anna Mary Wendell Minturn, that was making the push for the park and that her husband was actually the face of the project because, you know, 1800s. Regardless, the Minturn’s were chatting about this idea to some of their wealthy friends, and Robert Minturn decided to call a meeting of gentlemen, basically just a meeting of rich privileged people to make plans on the park ,where it should be, putting together the legislative pieces to make it happen. And on May 5th, 1851, the idea for a Grand Park was proposed to the Common Council of New York by Mayor Ambrose Kingsland. Kingsland's proposal for the park was for public money to be used to establish the park, which at the time was completely unprecedented and I'll get more into the why of that a little bit later in the episode. Robert Minturn still very involved and would further help push the park forward by working his connections of wealthy citizens, elite merchants, and bankers, and garnering their signatures on a petition for the park. And at this time there was no public site identified, but they had an idea for a site. And so, when Mayor Ambrose went forward and established the criteria for what he was looking for, he said “a place that was easily accessible and possessing all the advantages of wood, lawn and water. Which might, at a comparatively small expense, be converted to a park”. Now the background piece of this. For about five years before this, there have been multiple editorials published discussing a private country estate called Jones Wood and this was being published by Horace Greeley in the Tribune and a poet, William Cullen Bryant in the New York Evening Post, and this likely contributed in some regard to the original area being proposed for the park being Jones Wood, which was 150 acre farm what today is on the Upper East Side- a portion of the neighborhood of Lenox Hill. A Tavern keeper, John Jones had bought the property from the family of a smuggler named David ‘Ready Money’ Provost. Some of the land came from the marriage of John Jones, daughter Sarah, to Peter Schimmerhorn, a wealthy family with investments in ship merchandising and real estate. And the Joneses and the Schimmerhorns were not willing to sell their land for the park when a committee of Alderman met with them. So, we'll get more kind of into that a little bit later. So, what was the fascination with Jones Woods and was this the most ideal place for a park? 

[Amanda] At the time the city was debating the park, there were citizens in the city calling for a great number of things. The rich merchants were calling for better transportation, including cleaner streets. They wanted a stronger police force and more honest leadership and politics. Labor leaders were calling for steadier employment, higher wages, shorter hours, and more affordable housing. You know, like all the things that we are still asking for almost 200 years later. Reformers, among them some doctors, manufacturers, merchants, and philanthropic women. They were campaigning for temperance and sanitary, housing and the protection of new immigrants. Nativists were advocating for immigrant restriction because there was a lot of immigrants coming over. You know, this is the time of the potato famine. There's a lot of people coming over from Ireland. Christian evangelists were urging a citywide moral revival. Abolitionists were demanding an end to slavery in the South. According to the Book of the Park and the People, the park was a project of relatively few gentlemen and lots of their wealthy friends, and they justified a large public park on three grounds- utilitarian claims that it would promote the city's commercial and physical health, social and moral arguments that it would improve the disorderly classes and foster order among them, and cultural contentions that it would display the cultivation of the leading citizens. New York City's population was rising very quickly and in a 50-year period it had grown from 90,000 people to almost 500,000. Almost half of the population was foreign born because again, there's a lot of immigrants coming over. However, not all the population, just like today, was benefiting from the expansion of trade lines manufacturing and improvements in transportation. In fact, 4% of the city's population controlled more than 80% of the city's wealth. With the large number of people and New York City becoming a large industrial city, this also led to increases in the cities mortality rate due to things like contagion, accidents, malnutrition, exposure, contaminated water, conditions of childbirth, as well as lung diseases associated with the polluted air and the people promoting the park felt that the site would be for a good place for healthy and manly exercise and that the park would also improve the health and morale of the communities by giving them a good place to, you know, do appropriate exercise and would also allow for family outings and that women and children of course would especially benefit from the park where they can enjoy walking pure air and exercise in the nice weather. 

[Amanda] Now let's talk about this a little bit more. So, Robert Minturn, we've talked about him quite a bit. He was one of the biggest advocates for the park and he was also well known for his philanthropy. In the 1830s, he would provide relief to people in the neighborhood just from his house to the point where the poor in the neighborhood were packing his doorway looking for handouts. Deciding that this was not the best way to help people, he helped found the New York Association for Improving the Conditions of the Poor, an organization that believed that the quote, the injudicious dispensation of relief, end quote, was the chief cause of increasing poverty. So, they worked out a way to separate people that they deemed unable to change their ways and improve their status and they packed up these poor people and sent them to poor houses like the one I mentioned in the first episode, like the farm colony. And they also sent them to penitentiaries, so you know, to get them off the street and away from their houses. People they deem deserving of aid were given a little bit of relief, some relief, but they also received lots of advice from them on how to fix themselves, as the organization believed it was character flaws in the people themselves that were the problem contributing to their status as poor, not other things like, you know, not being born into wealthy families, and, you know, getting crappy jobs and because that's what was available and you know, other things that, you know, we still deal with this today. I'm just saying. So anyway. Advocates for the park thought that the development of a public park would help reform the character and morals of the working class by providing them with a place to exercise and spend time at the park, rather than spending their time at, you know, the drinking houses and beer gardens and spending their money in other ways like they felt like they were doing anyway. The issue is the location of the park, which again we'll kind of talk about that in a little bit where they were planning to put the park was not the most ideal location for people to actually access it, you know, like the working class. Advocates for the park also felt that the city needed grander spaces to walk and ride around in their carriages, because only the rich people had carriages, the working class, they had to walk everywhere. And the wealthy folks, the advocates for the park, they felt like they couldn't do this on the streets anymore, that they used to, like Broadway because the streets were now dirty and crowded with the working class people and immigrants, and that their boisterous activities like going to the beer gardens, being out drinking, having cock fights and things like that prevented the wealthy genteel persons from enjoying the spaces that they had previously. So, the Minturn’s and their circle of wealthy New Yorkers associated parks with cultural accomplishments due to the landscape aesthetics, they felt that parks were very similar to like fine art, music and literature. So, having a nice park was a sign of the wealthy class and it was important to them. And a little bit more background on this thing, this feeling when the Minturn’s returned from Europe, they ended up purchasing a summer house in Hastings, NY. And some of the other wealthy homeowners and Robert Minturn, they ended up forming a New York Horticultural Society, you know, so they could show off their very nice landscaped homes that, you know, they had that the working class didn't have and the Horticultural Society also formed cultural organizations to help lobby for the new park as well. 

[Amanda] And... there were also a lot of wealthy people that would benefit from the location of the park being at the Jones Wood location. One of those people was Senator James Beckman. The senator would end up proposing a bill that would go before Legislative Council and propose taking the John Jones Wood location by eminent domain. And there were a lot of questions about his motives for this as he had property that formed the southern border of Jones Woods. So, he had a lot to gain by Central Park being at the Jones Wood location because it's gonna increase his property values and one of the other things that I mentioned earlier was when they proposed the park to the City Council, they wanted the park to be paid for through general taxation. But in the 1830s and 40s and into the 50s, when this whole thing is going on, the way things were done when the city was looking to make improvements in the area, such as adding to or maintaining the streets, or adding things like sewer systems or things like parks, what they did was they would do a special assessment in the area where that work was going to take place and the property owners in that area ended up being burdened with the cost of the project. They didn't do things like we do now through general taxation, where you know, everybody is paying a little bit for the projects. So, Senator Beekman, even though he wanted this property, and he wanted the park there, he didn't want to help. Like he would help pay the bill a little bit. But he would have ended up having to pay quite a chunk of money if they did it through special assessment rather than the way that they were proposing it be done through general taxation. So again, he had a lot to kind of gain from this. Same with Mayor King… or Mayor Ambrose Kingsland he also would have some foot in this because he also had property there. So, Senator Beekman, he was a big supporter of changing the system from the assessment system to a system that funded projects like these through general taxes, so that the cost of the projects will be spread out to everyone rather than just the people that benefited from these improvements. He was lobbying for the park. Again, he would benefit a great deal from this because this would protect his properties from ending up, you know, later on down the road as being next to like some factories or anything because now the parks going to be there. So, they're starting to be some questions about his motivations. So, then they started talking about having an alternate site in a more centralized location, so as I mentioned- James Beekman. Senator James Beekman would go before Legislative Council. He proposed a bill that allowed the city to take Jones Wood through eminent domain. It would pass the house unanimously the next day. That was in June of 1850 or June or July of 1851. I saw some conflicting dates on that. A couple of weeks before the legislature would pass the authorization of the purchase of Jones Wood, a publication would be released in the Journal of Commerce, and this was between two Uptown Alderman Henry Shaw and Nicholas Dean. Nicholas Dean was the president of the Croton Aqueduct board, and they were recommending that the park be a more Central Park, which would better meet the needs of all New Yorkers rather than the Jones Woods location on the East River. This would end up leading to a three-year battle over where the park should be located and at whose expense it would be. A third proposal for the park would come forward, and that was for the enlargement of the battery at Manhattan Southern tip, the 10-acre battery had once been a popular and fashionable promenade, or the wealthy people to take their carriages and walk about, but it was starting to get more crowded by the working class, and the day after the city Alderman had endorsed the Jones Wood location, they also passed a bill to enlarge the battery. Merchants were concerned that expanding the battery would impact the harbor and safe dockage of goods, and they lobbied to Mayor Ambrose Kingsland to veto the enlargement of the battery site, which he ended up doing. He vetoed it. The supporters of the battery enlargement then retaliated by forming a coalition. Against the Jones website, which ended up taking the Jones Wood bill hostage and on September 10th, 1851, the veto on the expansion of the battery site was declared unconstitutional by the Common Council. The owners of Jones Wood would also go to court in the in the fall of 1850 to try to save their land from being taken by eminent domain. And on December 1st, 1851, a district Supreme Court Justice declared that the Jones Would law was also unconstitutional. So, they won. They got their land back. So now that the Jones Wood site was blocked by the courts. 

[Amanda] The Special Committee on Parks had been formed in in January of 1852. They proposed a Central Park at a similar site that had been previously proposed by the president of the Croton Aqueduct Board, Nicholas Dean. Daniel Dodge, a Democrat from downtown and Joseph Britton, a Whig from the city's wealthiest residential ward, authored a report emphasizing the economic advantages of having the park in a more central site. They proposed that the park fee between 5th and 8th Ave and extend from 59th to 106th street, citing that this site in particular had irregular topography, and this would reduce the price per acre when they went to purchase it, they said that this area was really unsuitable for building. Anyway, because of the uneven in rocky services like, it was the perfect place for a park. This report also kind of officially named the park Central Park, and it answered a lot of concerns that had been voiced by the citizens. The city already owned over 100 acres of this area for a reservoir and it would also provide the city with more fronting property to be assessed, which would help with the cost of the project. They also boasted in the report that Central Park would probably be one of the largest parks in the world, and it would offer winding, long paths with various scenery for the rich to wind their carriages through. You know exactly what they wanted. Senator Beekman, though, however, was really not ready to let the Jones Wood location go even as other support started to wane and, you know, become more in favor of the Central Park. So, on June 21st, 1853, this was the same day that the Central Park location bill was being brought to the Senate, James Beekman brought an amended version of the Jones Woods bill. And the amended version of the Jones Wood bill changed the funding of the project from assessment model to being funded through the general taxes, exactly like how he wanted it to be. The Central Park bill was an assessment funding model, but the amounts and the methods of assessment were left up to the commissioners who would value and take the land. Now the Central Park Bill passed with overwhelming approval. The Jones Woods bill failed to win the majority of votes in the Senate, but he still wasn't done. Now apparently in the Central Park bill there was a flaw in the way that it was drafted. I don't know the exact details of that, so it had to be redrafted and repassed and they were going to do it the same day. So this is still June 21st. The Senate went to dinner. They worked on the things that they needed to work on and got that done. Since the Central Park bill needed to go through the process again, Beekman decided that he was gonna do it again. So, he again went and he proposed the Jones Wood bill on the same day. Another senator, Senator Cooley, denounced his bill as an outrage and called out Beekman, stating that the Jones Wood bill was coming forward by people with interested motives and Beekman… was… pissed and he pushed for a pro Jones Woods vote as vindication for his honor as a gentleman because he felt he had been slighted and… it passed, unfortunately. But little did they know that he had changed the bill again, and this time he required the city to apply for appointment of commissioners to the Jones Wood plan for a park. So, the way it had originally been drafted, it was kind of more optional. This changed it to a requirement for the city to do something with this. Now the Schimmerhorns again had to go to court to try to save their property. So, they did, and the Supreme Court Judge James I. Roosevelt suspended action on the park until any unconstitutional portions of the bill could be removed. The Jones Woods legislation, Roosevelt wrote in his decision on January 9th, 1854, “is a private act. Its effect is to transfer, by local taxation the property of one portion of the limited community to another” so using an initial that most people involved in the park battle with readily recognize as referring to Beekman, Roosevelt declared that the bill “provides a garden for B’s lot in the 19th Ward, quadrupling its value, and takes A's garden in the 5th Ward to pay for it”. And with these words he confirmed that the Central Park alone would become New York's Gardens, Jones Woods Bill again was dead. The issue though with the new Central Park location was that much of the land that they were looking to take was actually already occupied and already built upon. The land was occupied by the poor Irish and German families as well as free persons of color who raised vegetables and tended hogs in this area. Landowners along the left side were concerned that this area was gonna continue to grow with people that they didn't want there. And there's much more discussion about the site, and slowly, people had been pushing for the Jones Wood location switch sides. They favored the Central Park location.

[Amanda] I know we're just really kind of getting into the nitty gritty of Central Park. We've just established a site, but I think that this is the perfect time to end this episode. We've laid the foundation and in the second episode we're really going to go into the location of Central Park as it is today and what happened when they took that land over the people of Seneca Village. Yeah, it's just so sad. Like, I don't even know what to say. I know this has been a lot of information. I know that we're turning it into a two parter, but it's just been such a crazy piece of history to look into. Like I said, there's a ton of information and I just, I'm really excited to bring it to you. So, I will be back in two weeks with another episode. As a reminder, the source material that I've used so far is going to be up on the website. Don't forget to follow the show for updates, like I said, for when new episodes drop. If you have a moment, give me a rating so that other people can also try to find the show. You can always follow my social media pages on Facebook, the New York’s Dark Side podcast page. We're on Twitter and Instagram  @NYDarkSidePod. And you can send me an e-mail at nydarksidepodcast@gmail.com. We now have a YouTube channel, so we have video podcasts. Maybe that's how you're watching us today. I hope you keep listening, and I hope you stay curious.