Episode 9 Transcript- Dark History of Central Park: Hoaxes, Crime, and Evolving the Park for All the People

[Amanda] Hey Podcast Listeners, I’m Amanda. Welcome to New York’s Dark Side.

[Intro Music]

[Amanda] I’m going to admit, I had to finish up the Central Park saga before moving on. I said it in the last episode, it just really felt unfinished. So here we are. Welcome to part four of the history of Central Park. The last episode went over the design and opening of the park, as well as some of the early regulations, and we’re going to pick up from there and take this park into the 21st century. The park, even though it was under the guise of being the park for all the people, open to the public for everyone to use, was really the wealthy elite people’s park. We talked about some of the ways the elite and park managers had tried to restrict access for the working-class people- including bans on vehicles allowed into the park, restrictions on what could and couldn’t be done in the park, the press coverage expressing the dangers to the park to unaccompanied women… 

[Amanda] We’re going to start out by talking about some of the private ventures that the wealthy elite wanted to open in the park for themselves. In 1859, a man named August Belmont persuaded the park commissioners to look into zoological and botanical gardens that were being operated in England and other European countries. August Belmont was a prominent banker, who had moved to New York City from Germany. He started his own banking house when he arrived with basically no capital and ended up building one of the largest banking houses in the country. He also would introduce thoroughbred horse racing to America and would be the long-time president of the American Jockey Club. Belmont was on the park board, and after he brought this to the board, they would end up putting in the annual report for that year that a zoo was going to be placed in the park and run by private group that would pay rent and charge admission fees. Belmont, along with several of the city’s wealthiest gentlemen, including Frederick Law Olmstead one of the designers of the park organized the American Zoological and Botanical Society and began to plan the zoo. A few months later, the state legislature would authorize the park’s board to set aside 60 acres in Central Park for a zoological and botanical garden to be run by the new society. No other American cities has a zoo in them. The society wanted the park to be open every day except for Sunday, which would… you guessed it, keep the poor and working class out of their zoo. The plans for the zoo, would stall however with the start of the civil war, and then would stall for several years as the park officials began to argue about the location, the organization, and the management of the zoo. 

[Amanda] While all of this was going on, the public had actually been donating live animals to the park for quite some time. These animals included several deer, a goose, an alligator, a peacock, a porcupine, a pelican, a prairie wolf, a silver-gray fox, and a boa constrictor. Quite a menagerie of animals there. In 1863, 250 more animal donations would come. General William T. Sherman would donate 3 African Cape Buffalos that he just so happened to pick up in Georgia. There weren’t really any specific enclosures or anything for the animals being donated to the park, so the board had to set up some wire enclosed spaces for the animals. The cape buffalo they just tied to a willow tree when it was warm out. The park commissioners would end up putting some more permanent enclosures at the Arsenal. The menagerie of animals continued to grow in popularity and peaked in 1880 when a chimpanzee was brought to the Monkey house. This was the first chimpanzee in the United States. Even then President Ulysses S. Grant came to see the chimp with dozens of photographers and artists. The chimpanzee was given the very controversial name of Mike Crowley, this was controversial because there was speculation this name was given to him as an insult to the Irish and Irish-American organizations. There were protest delegations coming to the parks department over the name. A lot of the names given to the animals in the menagerie were Irish names which fueled this concern that it being done in a derogatory manner. Mr. Crowley however, was such a popular feature of the park though that when he got sick the park had to publish daily reports on how he was going which would be printed in the newspapers. People were writing letters to the zoo offering sympathy and remedy ideas for him. There were faith healers showing up to pray for him. Prohibitionists were protesting at the zoo because there was concern that ardent spirits were being used as a possible cure. After Mr. Crowley recovered from his illness, an author, Henry Fuller, wrote a biography of Mr. Crowley, detailing his life and times. Fun fact, you can read the biography, I found it on Google, and you can purchase a copy on Amazon for $18. I’ll link to both in my resources. I did a little search and found a fun little rabbit hole to go down. In a December 1, 1884 issue of the Democrat and Chronicle I found an article about an escaped boa constrictor from the Central Park Menagerie. The article states that three boa constrictors had been donated to the park and were “the largest of their kind ever received in this country”. Two were claimed to be 20 feet long and the third 25 feet. They were being kept in padded boxes in the boiler room of the arsenal. The park superintendent had taken a worker of the menagerie down to see the largest of the boas and afterwards had shut the box, but later an engineer who was in charge of the furnaces went down to the boiler room to tend to the furnaces and found the box open and the snake gone. They instantly set up a search and could not find the snake in the room and suspected that it had gotten into a space between some large pipes leading to the offices. They began carefully tearing up the flooring to search for the snake to not injure the snake, but couldn’t find it so they set up workers to lock all of the doors and stand guard all over the building. Many of the guards were armed with clubs…. Which I found very ironic since they were trying not to injure the snake, but I guess if I was being faced with a 25-foot snake in the middle of the night, I would want a club at the very least. I would actually probably want a flame thrower, I’ve never used one so I would probably be more of a danger to myself than the snake but I would feel pretty bad ass holding a flamethrower until I needed to actually use it. Now, Mr. Crowley the famous chimpanzee, was a mess and pacing around his cage which was in Superintendent Conklin’s office.  They set a night watchman in there, Tom Donohue, to guard Mr. Crowley from the monster snake. The city was terrorized for the night concerned that the snake had escaped the arsenal and was potentially roaming the city. The truth of the matter was that there was an escaped boa constrictor at the arsenal, but it was far from 25 feet long. It was a six-foot snake that had been brought over from Africa and was on loan from the owners to the director of the menagerie. The boa was being kept in the boiler room in a potato sack and had a sore in its mouth which Conklin was treating with alum water. Conklin had treated the boa and it’s suspected that either the knot he had used on the bag failed or that the snake’s tail had been left outside the knot contributing to the snake escaping from the bag. The rumor of the snake being much larger than truth is alleged to have been started by Mike Crowley the chimpanzee according to the article, I’m not kidding. The snake was found in the hall about 60 feet from where he was being kept. The reporter interviewed Superintendent Conklin about it and states when he was leaving Mr. Crowley was laughing and rolling around in his cage holding a newspaper. 

[Amanda] This actually wasn’t the first-time widespread panic spread through the city with concern of escaped animals being the center of a hoax. Ten years previously, on November 9, 1874, the New York Herald released an article stating that over 200 animals had escaped from the zoo and brutalized and killed hundreds of people and that the reporter writing the article had witnessed it all. The article alleged that during “another Sunday of horror” … because remember, they’re really hating on the Sundays when the regular folk are at the park, a great calamity occurred when a zookeeper, Chris Anderson, poked his cane through the cage bars of one of his charges, Pete the Rhinoceros. Pete was apparently poked in the eye in this interaction, which led him to break out of his cage and his keeper Chris was trampled beyond recognition. Pete then began to break out other animals in the zoo- lions, tigers, panthers, leopards, wolves, wild swine… who then began to fight each other over the remains of the keeper.  The reporter alleges to have watched this from a window in the Arsenal and then Lincoln, one of the lions who had been watching all the other animals fighting made eye contact with him and burst through the window after him. The lion killed a couple of unlucky bystanders and stopped chasing him, another zookeeper attempted to shoot the lion, but while he did hit him it wasn’t a fatal blow. The reporter ran again, and the lion chased him and then leapt past him into a crowd of “fainting women, screaming children, and terrified men” and no one is able to really stop the chaos. The article goes on in great detail of how various people were brutalized and killed by different animals, sometimes the animals seem to be working together, sometimes they’re fighting each other and they’re slaughtering citizens along the way, Pete the Rhino falls into a sewer… there’s lions in a church…. It’s a complete mess, the article is just bananas… It was front page, covering six columns, it went so far to give a list of known casualties, it listed the animals that were allegedly slaughtered as well, and then gave a list of animals still on the loose. It gave statements of precautions from the national guard and the police that citizens should take. And then at the very end of the article, it admitted it was a hoax, stating “of course the entire story given above is a pure fabrication. Not one word of it is true. Not a single act or incident described has taken place. It is a huge hoax, a wild romance, or whatever other epithet of utter untrustworthiness our readers may choose to apply to it. It is simply a fancy picture which crowded upon the mind of the writer a few days ago while he was gazing through the iron bars of the cages of the wild animals in the menagerie at central park”. The article succeeded in causing widespread panic throughout the city. Men armed themselves prepared to defend their families from attack, the police units mobilized, women and children barricaded themselves within their homes. Even the war correspondent from the Herald, apparently not in on the hoax, showed up at the Central Park menagerie with two large navy revolvers ready to help take on the rampaging animals. An editor, Thomas Connery, from the Herald would end up taking ownership for the idea of the hoax, stating that the idea had come to him when he was at the Central Park menagerie and witnessed the near escape of a leopard as it was being moved. He claimed the owner of the Herald had nothing to do with the story, but most people didn’t believe that to be true. The article itself was authored by Joseph Clarke. The article is linked in the sources for this episode if you want to read it, and you should. 

[Amanda] Now, before I move on, I found one other piece of history related to this story. This hoax article run by the New York Herald is one of two events that lead to the elephant becoming the symbol of the Republican Party. The Herald had been running articles that Ulysses S. Grant may be trying for a third term as president, this concern was taken up by Democratic politicians and helped disaffect Republican voters just before the midterm elections. After the hoax article ran in the Herald, cartoonist Thomas Nast put together a cartoon for Harper’s Weekly connecting the two events. His cartoon depicted a jackass meant to symbolize the Herald, wearing a lion’s skin which was a symbol for Caesarism, scaring away animals in a forest which was meant to symbolize Central Park. One of the animals running away was an elephant, which he labeled as the Republican Vote, running away from it’s usually ties scared by the prospect of Caesarism. The caption on the cartoon read “an ass having put on a lion’s skin roamed about the forest and amused himself by frightening all the foolish animals he met with his wanderings”. Later that month, after the election and the poor outcome for the Republicans, Nast would run another cartoon with the elephant in a trap, symbolizing the Republican vote being decoyed away from its normal allegiance. Other cartoonists would begin to follow suit with the symbolism and the elephant eventually symbolized the Republican party, not just the vote. The donkey would become the symbol of the Democratic party instead of the Herald because it was the democratic party that had frightened the Republicans. So, there you go, now you can think about how a fake news story from New York helped inspire what would become the symbols for the two major political parties in the United States. You’re welcome!

[Amanda] Okay, back to the zoo. The wealthy people on fifth avenue wanted the zoo moved because they were offended by both the smell of the animals and the demeanor of the crowds of people observing the animals. The people on the West Side didn’t want to zoo to move over to their direction for the same reason. Other people were also upset about the menagerie because they thought it took away from the stature and refinement of the city and the park. An article in the Post in 1883 complained that the menagerie “has long disgraced the city and the park” with its “mangy and uncultivated beasts”. The way it was written to me makes it unclear if it was directed at the animals or the people, I’m going to go with both given the timeframe and what we’ve already learned. Andrew Green and the wealthy and elite still wanted for a private zoological park, outside of Central Park, and they would get state approval in 1895 for a new zoo in the Bronx. There was thought that the outdoor animals would move to the Bronx Zoo but there was so much support though from other political party members as well as the people of New York, the bill for the Bronx Zoo needed to be altered to protect the Central Park Menagerie. So, the Central Park Menagerie would remain. 

[Amanda] There were two other institutions that would be developed in Central Park that did end up being privately owned institutions. The American Museum of Natural History and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The museums of course were closed on Sunday, and protests would begin regarding this even before they opened. The museums would open in 1887, closed of course on Sunday. The boards for both museums were filled with Presbyterian leaders. It would take five years, and push from many labor organizations and petitions, for the Metropolitan Museum of Art to open on Sundays, and another year for the Museum of Natural History to do the same. When I first started writing this episode, I didn’t realize I was going to spend so much time on the Zoo, so I’m really not going to go more into the museums. The public having more access and say in the museums would lead to more opportunity to have a say in other aspects of the park. 

[Amanda] By the 1900’s the public and recreational reformers started to focus more on the children and the benefits they were not getting from the park. They had no playgrounds. They were starting to see the benefit of play as part of human development. The playground movement was warning that “the boy without play is the father to the man without a job”. The playground movement really would have an impact on Central Park until the 1920s, at this point only about 9% of the park was devoted to play fields or other programmed events. The Heckscher Playground on 61st and Seventh avenue was added in 1926 as the sole equipped playground with the park, but it was bitterly opposed by many of the real estate and civic groups. Interestingly the League of Women Voters and the Federation of Women’s Clubs were opposed to the building of the playground. Like why, ladies? Why? The playground was named for philanthropist August Heckscher who gifted the playground taking up 4.5 acres and included swings, merry go rounds, spiral slides, jungle gyms, a field house, and a wading pool. The location had designated as a playground in the Greensward plan and had been used for a long time as a play area for the children. When studying the children that were making use of the park’s playground, they found that most of the children making use of the equipment were less affluent neighborhoods than the wealthy homes surrounding the park. 90% of the children were coming from more than a quarter of a mile away, they found that more residents of a single block in working-class Yorkville, which was three-quarters of a mile away were using the playground than the residents on the wealthy eastern perimeter of the park. So, while there was some class segregation at the playground, there was for the time a notable degree of racial integration, which is awesome. The children of San Juan Hill, a largely black and poor district in the west 60s, were making heavy use of the park.  

[Amanda] On November 1, 1941, a tragic crime would take place in Central Park, when 12-year-old Jerome Dore, a person of color from Harlem, fatally stabbed the white 15-year-old James O’Connell on the edge of Central Park at 99th Street and Fifth Ave. The papers would paint a controversial and revealing picture of the incident and the way different groups of New Yorkers would interpret it. The Daily News said that O’Connell was walking home with his brother from confession at St. Cecelia’s Church when they were accosted by “three colored boys” who chased them and then stabbed James to get what few pennies he had on him. The tabloids would assign broad social and racial implications for the event. The newspapers would quickly take up a cry of a crime wave being instigated by Puerto Rican and black New Yorkers at the border at the north end of the park. Some of the stories running stated things like “Police Act to End Terror in Central Park”, there were reports of “roving bands of knife carrying colored youths” and “terrorism of rape, robbery, and murder in the park”. Even the New York Times was running headlines such as “Crime Outbreak in Harlem”, “Youths Running Wild” and “Boy Hoodlums Called the Chief Offenders in Wave of Terror, Especially in Parks”.  Two major African American newspapers raised the concern that the city’s “mighty and influential white press” was using the event to slander and attack Harlem, creating an exaggeration on the crime levels in Harlem and the park. Most of the crimes in the late 19th century into the early 20th century involved violations of park ordinances not violent crime, these were things like picking flowers, public intoxication, and littering. Murder in the park was much more rare than other places in the city and the rate of felony level crimes was also much lower in the park compared to the city, but many people believed otherwise. The reason for this was because people heard about crime in the park far more consistently than they did crime in other areas of the city in the newspapers, on the radio, and on television. There was some reasoning behind this. There were three commercial television networks that had their national headquarters a short walk away from Central Park, which led to the increase in publicity of crimes in Central Park. In the 1960s, Johnny Carson would frequently make jokes about crime in Central Park, his studio was a short distance from Central Park as well. There were also celebrity crime victims, which got a lot of publicity. John F Kennedy Jr., son of the former president John F. Kennedy at age 13 was robbed while riding his bike in Central Park on his way to a tennis lesson, the assailant took his bike and tennis racket. The story made the New York Times. Dick Button, a figure skating champion, was one of several men assaulted in Central Park by a group of men armed with bats and suffered a serious head injury. There were also United Nations delegates from Nepal, Cyprus, France, and the Soviet Union that were victims of crime in Central Park. Victims of crime in Central Park tended to be more newsworthy since they were more likely to be of similar background to the people reporting on the crime—they tended to be white and middle class. This is not anything unique to Central Park, we hear this echoed across the true crime genre. Two of the most publicized case of Central Park crime- the 1986 murder of Jennifer Levin by Robert Chambers, Jr. was labeled the “preppy murder” by the press and the 1989 rape and near fatal beating of the 28-year-old investment banker referred to the “Central Park Jogger” are two examples of class and racial bias in crime coverage. In 1984 two homeless women had been viciously gang raped in Central Park and only got minimal press attention. The racial bias in the newspapers started before World War II, as more people of color began to settle in the northern borders of the park. The Upper West Side East Harlem, and Morningside Heights, also started to transform as migrants in the thousands from the South and Puerto Rico began to settle within. Between 1950 and 1955 the Puerto Rican population doubled. As this happened, just like in previous generations, some of the upper- and middle-class New Yorkers began to panic. The assumption among these groups was that the persons of color and Puerto Ricans that lived among them were poor, however there were many residents of the Upper West Side and Harlem that were doctors, lawyers, ministers. 

[Amanda] It wasn’t just class, racial, and ethnic tension that were rising in the 40’s, 50’s, and 60’s. There were other dangers being publicized after the World War II, those of the gay community. Prior to the war, most gay New Yorkers tended to conceal their presence, but afterwards they were more open in the community. In the late 40s and early 50s, however, there was a panic over sex crimes being committed that changed the stereotype of the gay community from ridicule to fear as they were being portrayed as dangerous psychopaths. The local and national press would label them as perverts and misfits. The truth was that members of the gay community were far more likely to be victims of crime in the park rather than the perpetrator. Many of them were preyed on at night, as thugs knew that they were frequently at the park after dark and were reluctant for the public exposure that may come if they went to the police to report the crime. One television commentator, Barry Gray, would state in 1959 to his viewers” Central Park is a happy hunting ground taken over by the dope-happy hoodlum, the homosexual, the exhibitionist, the potential murderer. They’re there all the time, on the benches, on the grass, lurking behind trees and bushes. The park is one great open-air cesspool”. He made it just sound like a terrible place to go. However, as with most things, as time went on and New Yorkers from all classes and backgrounds learned to live with each other in public spaces, fear of crime in the park would start to assuage, even though in truth the crime rates were going up. Even so, they remained much lower than crime in the city. 

[Amanda] In 1956, the Battle of Central Park would take place, when a crowd of mothers, children, and baby carriages would block a bulldozer on a grassy knoll from razing a play area. There was a small (0.4 acre) play area that the park commissioner Robert Moses wanted to turn into an 80-car parking lot for the Tavern on the Green restaurant. There was a fenced in playground next to right next to the area that Green wanted to turn into a parking lot that was designated for children under 8. Mothers would lounge in the grassy know watching their younger children play on the playground and their older children play in the grass. This was their space. One mother would be quoted as saying “you know, at that time in your life, your life centers around your children. We lived in that little spot in the park. We took our kids twice a day… that little spot in the park was really the center of our neighborhood. You know. In a city like New York, a little spot like that is really precious”. The mothers learned of the plan to raze their space two days prior to the day they planned to raze it by accident. An engineer had left the blue prints for the parking lot on the ground when he went to lunch and one of the mothers had come across it. They were instantly outraged and started a petition to save their space. They rallied in front of the Tavern on the Green. The park commissioner promised to give them a reply to their petition, and his response to it was sending in a bulldozer on Tuesday April 17, 1956. Newspapers would run photos of the mothers, children, and babies standing in front of the bulldozer the following day. The mothers would successfully stave off the bulldozers a few more days, but on April 24th, Moses got crafty, and a crew snuck in at 1:30 AM, surrounded the area with a snow fence, and bulldozed the grassy knoll. This sparked widespread outrage and drew spotlight to the clientele of the restaurant, those wealthy and elite citizens who could afford to eat there.  Moses tried to defend his decision, even going to the New York Historical Society to get insight into what Frederick Law Olmstead and Calvert Vaux had to say about restaurants in the park. A court battle would ensue, and Moses would end up surrendering and returning the grassy knoll. This one decision would end up ruining Robert Moses reputation. He would end up resigning his position in 1960 after a highly publicized defeat regarding free Shakespeare in the park. This had been started in 1957 by Joseph Papp. Moses’ aide, Stuart Constable had a deep dislike for Papp relating to his political associations. Constable and Moses wanted Papp to reimburse the park for maintenance costs, but to do so, Papp would have needed to start charging admission. Negative publicity forced Moses to back down, and free Shakespeare in the park continued. 

The first oppositional political event held in the park would occur in 1966, when ten thousand people gathered on the Central Park lawn to hear Reverend A. J. Muste, a pacifist leader along with other speakers rally in protest of the Vietnam war. The courts a year previously in 1965 had upheld the park commissioners right to deny permits to antiwar protesters, but the parks department reversed that ruling to allow for this protest. The police had actually pushed to help that decision, wanting to avoid massive traffic jams that had occurred when the previous denied rally had been held on 69th street. The antiwar movement was also growing. The new park commissioner, Thomas P. F. Hoving, would end up being a great reformer of the park. He would hold many public events in the park and was its greatest promoter, but this pissed some people off, including Henry Hope Reed who he had appointed Park Curator. Reed thought that he was desecrating the park with his public events, and went public with his concerns leading to Hoving being replaced by August Heckscher. This August Heckscher was the grandson of the man with the same man who donated the first playground to the park. He actually was even more committed to his park commissioner predecessor with the park as a pleasure garden. Shortly after taking office, he would be approached by a group of flower children asking to have an Easter “love in” in Sheep Meadow, which he allowed. This was a huge change from the previous decade when Robert Moses had been park commissioner. Then there had been restrictions on some of the clothing that people could wear to the park- No public bathing suits, halter tops, or shorts shorter than mid-thigh… Things had changed a lot over the previous decade. The Love In was aired on national TV, but ended up being yanked off the air. I did find clips of it on YouTube which I will post on my website.  

[Amanda] By the late 60’s and early 70’s regulations continued to ease up in the park under Heckscher’s commission. Park officials encouraged things that had previously been forbidden- inviting acrobats, jugglers, musicians, bike racers, marionette shows, crafts and art. Heckscher even legit took an axe to the signs at the beaches that had the list of restricted activities and put-up new signs that just said “Enjoy”. I’m not going to lie here people. I am so glad I decided to do this episode even though when I ended the last one, I said I was moving away from Central Park. The last episode had me feeling that the coverage of the park was unfinished. And I know we haven’t brought the park to 2023, but I feel like this is a much better transition point than where I left it last time. 1880’s park was still very restrictive and not at all a park for all the people. Heckscher brought the park out of that age. He would say that Moses thought of parks “as a place to keep off the grass” and Reed thought of parks as “places were history was enacted a hundred years ago”, his own philosophy on parks “were a place for the people”.  And I agree with that. There’s so much more that I could have covered in this episode, so again, if you’re interested in a deep dive on the park, check out the book The Park and The People by Roy Rosenzweig and Elizabeth Blackmar. I need to return the copy I have to the library now so that I stop getting naughty grams from them. Don’t forget to follow the show for updates on when more episodes drop, and that you can connect with me on Facebook at the New York’s Dark Side Facebook page, on Twitter and Instagram @NYDarksidePod. My email is nydarksidepodcast@gmail.com if you want to shoot me an email. I hope you keep listening and most of all, I hope you stay curious!