Creating New York’s Central Park took more gunpowder than the Battle of Gettysburg. In the 1840s Manhattan had only about 165 acres of public squares, and figures like William Cullen Bryant and Andrew Jackson Downing pushed for a park to rival London and Paris. A plan to buy the 160 acre Jones’s Wood was struck down in court, so the city turned to a 750 acre site around the Croton Aqueduct’s receiving reservoir. The 1853 Central Park Act used eminent domain to clear the land, including Seneca Village, a predominantly Black community of two story homes, three churches, and a school, where property ownership gave Black men the right to vote. In 1858 Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux won a 33 entry contest with the Greensward Plan.

Inspired by cemeteries like Mount Auburn and Green-Wood and by England’s Birkenhead Park, they hid crosstown traffic in sunken transverse roads blasted through bedrock. Over 20,000 laborers moved about five million cubic feet of soil and rock, imported more than 18,500 cubic yards of topsoil from New Jersey and Long Island, and moved mature trees by machine; five workers died. In 1870 Boss Tweed’s Tammany Hall seized control and Olmsted and Vaux resigned, returning after Tweed’s fall to finish the park in 1876. Robert Moses later added playgrounds and Wollman Rink, and after the decay of the 1960s and 1970s the Central Park Conservancy took over in 1980.

• Military engineer Egbert Viele’s 1856 survey and his own park design, which the commission discarded
• Ignaz Anton Pilat’s plantings and George E. Waring Jr.’s drainage system that kept the swamps at bay
• The 1956 Tavern on the Green parking lot fight, when Moses sent bulldozers at night and mothers stopped him in court
• Proposals during the park’s decline for public housing, a private golf course, and a revolving World’s Fair
• A 2009 study crediting the park with over $656 million in annual tax revenue for the city