1y ago

Why wasn't NYC's Central Park concept copied by other cities?

I'm talking about a massive park in the absolute heart of the city. Located such that is naturally surrounded by city high rises. *People are giving examples of parks that are way off in the boonies. I'm trying to say located centrally, heart of the city, you know where the high rises are. Yes I understand nyc has more, the point is centrally located.

Copied by younger cities in North Americ. You know, the cities younger than NYC that could have seen the value of setting aside a large area for parkland before it was developed.

150 comments

Because other cities didn’t have a large black neighborhood to knock down.
- TIL
  RIP Seneca Village
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seneca_Village
  
  To be somewhat fair, that represents a very small part of Central Park.
- They used all those up for the Interstate system.
  
  Yup, About 100 years later. What’s old is new again.
  
  Yeah, Akron is particularly guilty here... The interbelt didn't even even up being a useful interstate.
- This is yet another absolutely shameful example of government led evil, but Seneca Village was also a small portion of what makes up Central Park. We need not imply that demolishing a thriving black community was the sole goal of Central Park to acknowledge how fundamentally fucked up this place is.
  
  I wouldn’t be so sure. Wouldn’t surprise me if they saw the black neighborhood and came up with reasons to justify getting rid of it, and the park that was created somehow justified the original intentions.
- The large black neighborhoods were replaced by highways before cities could replace them with Central Park-esque projects
- In fairness, they did try to obtain property that also had two wealthy families on twice (with injunctions that failed) before looking at the Central Park area that Seneca Village was also in.
  Of course that doesn’t sound as much as a hot take that you gave.
- Well, that's simply not true. While that may be how they found the land for Central Park, that's not the reason why other cities haven't made large parks like in NYC.
  Portland, OR has (I think) the second biggest inner-city park in the country, and I'm fairly sure no minority neighborhoods were destroyed to create it. Way to be edgy though.
  As for answering OP's question... I'm guessing the property is just too valuable as commercial and residential land for the city governments to want to redesignate as parks. Especially now with the housing crisis and all.
  
  It's called a generalization. Way to be edgy though.

It was! San Francisco's Golden Gate Park (4.1 km²) is in fact larger than NYC's Central Park (3.4km²).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Gate_Park
- St. Louis's Forest Park is bigger still at 5.3 km^2
  
  My favorite urban park by far!
- So is Prospect Park in Brooklyn
- That one's pretty neat.
- Sorry, I don’t think GGP meets OP’s requirements of huge fuggin sky scrapers next to it.
  We’ll have to change to Richmond and Sunset zoning requirements and try again.

They didn't set it aside, they displaced people to make a park.
- I'm honestly surprised that they haven't followed up by just allowing the city to gradually eat the park.

Central Park is cool and all, but most cities could do with a large quantity of much smaller parks that people can walk to instead of one really big park in the middle of downtown.
We are here for decentralization after all.
- I want both.
- A single larger park is better for wildlife in many ways. Birds don't care as much, but others do.

Well, most of them had no thriving black community in the middle of the town that they could raze to create a park.
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seneca_Village
  
  Thanka for sharing this. As a non American I honestly assumed the park was there from the beginning, not created (stolen?) so recently.
  
  Exactly that.
- Don't they use prison labour to maintain it? And mislead volunteers to get free labour to keep upping the rent in the neighborhoods.

"naturally surounded by high rises" nothing natural about that. Its callled urban planning and in this case complete control was given to one guy, the one that made prospect park too, i saw a docu on it. Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn't but the bearucracy and corruption with funding usually takes its place. A lot of cities simply weren't planned for that, central park is designed pre-automobile. Many new cities are post-auto, so they dont care about walking spaces like they used to, a lot of cities have decided that the public is dangerous and hard to control, they dont want them to gather or loiter in any space and why should they give something for free when a business can profit from their need? NYC came from a place where they the populace was accustomed to dealing with the public in person on a daily basis.
- People are giving examples of parks that are way off in the boonies. I'm trying to say located centrally, heart of the city, you know where the high rises are.
  
  None of the cities I know have high rises in the centre tho

Most cities in Germany have parks in or near the city centre. In fact it's considered unusual if there's isn't any.
- Englischer Garten in Munich is Lovely!

London has Hyde and Regent's Parks. Paris has the Bois de Boulogne, Berlni has the great Tiergarten. Big parks are a common feature of cities.
- London has far far far more parks than those two! They’re not even the biggest in London, Richmond park is at 2500 acres (that’s more than 3x the size of Central Park) It’s where that viral video of the dog chasing deer was taken - JESUS CHRIST, FENTON!! Personally I’ve always preferred St James Park over Hyde or regents if you’re in central London, but it’s a small 50ish acres. Hampstead Heath (800 acres) and bushy park (1099 acres) are similar in size to Central Park too if you’d prefer not to be in central London.
  To answer OPs question, I’d much rather live in a city with more parks than I can count than just one massive one somewhere. There’s 5 parks within a 15 minute walk of my house and I live in a city!
  EDIT: from Wikipedia: London is made of 40% public green space, including 3,000 parks and totaling 35,000 acres.
  
  And not to mention the green belt to prevent sprawl. Excellent foresight.
- And here I thought the Central Park was bigger in surface area...

Central Park was once a whole community thriving community. They forced them out (eminent domain) and turned it into the Central Park we know now. Other cities have huge parks and areas, but New York markets their state like no other (maybe California).

naturally surrounded by city high rises.
Something seems odd with the idea that high rises were 'natural' :-)
For me, the "concept" is terribly wrong.
A park itself is fine, but you can't use one park as an excuse for not having other parks, green areas etc. anymore in a big city.
New York has 5 times more people than Munich. But Munich's biggest park is about the same size as New York's Central Park (a little bigger even). And if you count all the green areas, parks etc. in Munich together, they are 6 times larger (counting only the ones that are publicly accessible and listed in wikipedia) than that Central Park.
So, give your New Yorker's 30 central parks and lots of other green spots, and you got a concept.
- Central Park is not New York's largest park. It's the 5th.
- Something seems odd with the idea that high rises were ‘natural’ :-)
  They are better than spreading single family homes and ground floor commercial spaces over a huge swath of land that would inevitable need clearcutting and plowing under to be suitable for development.
- Located such that.
  Who said I want to use it an excuse for no other parks?
  What's with all the bad faith discussion.
  
  Nobody said you wanted to use it that way. OP’s probably referring to the lack of parks in Manhattan.
  
  What's with all the bad faith discussion.
  Good question. Do you need a mirror to figure it out?

NYC’s Central Park has 843 acres
Cleveland’s Emerald Necklace has 7 parks with over 1,500 acres. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleveland_Metroparks
And that doesn’t even count a 32,000 acre national park just south of greater Cleveland.
New York is just a more famous large city. Plenty of other cities have vast parks.
- Not to mention Summit Metro Park's 14,000 acres (which largely but up against the two park systems you mentioned)
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summit_Metro_Parks
  Cleveland and Akron did well on preserving access to nature
- Chicago has an emerald necklace as well. Also millennium Park might for ops request.

Yeah, how come no other cities have parks?
- Obviously the question is about the size, scale, and location of Central Park. The designer wanted even larger.
  
  Other cities have done the same. Central Park isn’t even the oldest one.
  The oldest one in the Americas is in Mexico City: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alameda_Central

because no one values green spaces.
Which is why government typically rubberstamps every developer request to clearcut new forests and turn under new grassland, to build a new poorly built development of McMansions that will probably have to be extensively rebuilt within 5-10 years due to the apalling build quality.
Same reason no one builds affordable homes. Why develop homes for the poors, for 100k, when they can make McMansions on the same land, and sell them for 1mil+ a pop.
If Central Park was proposed today, it would be decried as a waste of valuable property (and probably liberal wokeism)
- a lot of central park was for rich people actually or designed with rich citizens to use it in mind
- Boston spent billions of dollars to replace their downtown freeways with green space.
  
  They spent billions to fix traffic issues and failing infrastructure.
  The greenspace was a byproduct. That was only allowed to happen because buildings along the former elevated roadway would see a massive increase in land value with the roadway gone that was more valuable than shoving more buildings into the strip of land.

Happy Munich noises. Bigger than central park too 😉
- TIL I have more reasons to visit Munich than to visit NYC
- Came here to write that. Central Park didn't need to be copied because a lot of European cities had that decades to centuries before.
  Tiergarten Berlin, Schlossgarten Stuttgart, Praterinsel Vienna, Planten un Blomen Hamburg, Maschsee/Eilenriede in Hannover, Züriberg Zürich, just to name a few in the Germanophone world.
  It's possibly harder to find a large city who hasn't some equivalent than find one with it - and most without one lost it after WW2 and American city planning.
- Yeah, I think OP is asking strictly from a US perspective (although being USdefaultist by not specifying it), because I can't really think of any large European city which doesn't have realitve large parks in the city center or next to it.

People are giving examples of parks that are way off in the boonies.
First, things are not so binary that it’s either high rises and boonies.
Second, NYC has a huge central business district. My own city does not have enough high rises to surround a large park. Such a park would destroy most midsize cities, not enhance them.
- Yes I understand nyc has more, the point is centrally located
  
  Less than 12,000 people live in downtown Cleveland to NYC’s 1.6 million in Manhattan alone. My whole county has 1.26 million, NYC has 8.8 million. I bet person for person, Cleveland has more space than Manhattan
  Consider Public Square and the Group Plan malls. Cleveland is also working in a lakefront development.
  https://www.groupplan.org/

Vancouver has Stanley park which is bigger than Central Park, right next to downtown and on the water. (So we have a nice seawall around it you can run/bike along.)
The answer to the question though is these giant parks are incredibly expensive. Think how many billions of dollars in apartmentsyou could replace that park with. I don't think it'd be a good trade but for cities which are chronically strapped for cash, that's a hard bargain.

@someguy3 Portland, Oregon has the largest urban park in the country, Forest Park, but it is forested an not a garden park. Also it is on the edge of the city instead of Central.

I think most U.S. cities that were established before cars have large, centrally located urban parks. New Orleans, Boston, San Francisco, Detroit, etc. The cities that don’t are probably ones that grew only after cars were ubiquitous so the park could be wherever.
Like a western city in a mountain valley that had a population boom after cars would probably prefer their main urban park to be on the periphery for hiking trails and access to the mountain. The green-space didn’t have to be on a trolley line near downtown to be accessible.

Jacksonville Florida doesn't have a large central park, but with 86 acres of park per 1000 residents and one of the largest geographical areas of any single city in the US, that's a lot of parks. I suppose I'm trying to say there are other ways a city can embrace park culture without a central park style hub park.
- Agreed, but there is something interesting about a huge park that can really get immersed in.
  
  That is true! Not that I would wish Jacksonville on anyone but if you ever do happen to be punished with it, the river walk and arboretum are two redeeming features, as well as the coastal marsh/beach parks on the north Bank of the river. For something almost sort of similar to central park, but not, there are several multi-block parks strung together through the riverside/Avondale neighborhood that make the area very walkable.

As a New Yorker, let me just assure you that it wasn’t really designed with crosstown traffic in mind. If you’re going from West 69th and say, 10th Ave, to East 69th and 2nd, you’re in for a shitshow no matter what you do. This includes walking (try not to be ran over by an Uber walking through Central Park late at night). Taking the subway(what subway line goes from upper east to upper west?? Hahahah you’re fucked!) Or taking a crosstown bus (Takes almost an hour to go from 10th avenue to 2nd avenue cause you’re gonna have to go all the way up/down to the cross park street).
Multiple smaller parks would probably be much better, or just, y’know, having space for trees outside of the designated tree infrastructure.
- I think having both large and small (and tree lined streets) are good ideas. But there's something appealing about a large park that you can really immerse yourself in.
  
  I don’t disagree with you, but due to the geography of New York, midtown smack above the meeting point of the busiest bottlenecks in the nation becomes literally the worst location for it. They could have buried FDR drive near south street seaport like in Boston and just turned the whole southern tip of the island under Houston into a huge park. Or maybe the whole northern tip up near inwood.
- I don't quite understand how you Americans number streets or why you talk so much about intersections, but I think this is right:
  https://maps.app.goo.gl/PgFcT1f5MCg1cJyd7 30-22 min with the metro or 30 min walking, or 30-17 by bus.

Baltimore, Maryland has a gigantic green space (second biggest woodland park in the United States according to Wikipedia) right in the center of the city called Leakin Park. It's gorgeous during the day time, but unfortunately during the evening most people avoid it because it's become a dumping ground for bodies.
It's become known in the region as one of the most dangerous parks in the United States, which super sucks.
- Also has Patterson Park which is huge, minus the body dumping.

I live in Chicago and we do have a big centrally located park, along with other smaller parks scattered around. It's down by the lake, and they keep that big stupid bean there.
Pro tip for tourists, if you absolutely have to go see the bean don't touch it; everybody touches the damn thing and you will get sick. Go look at the Picasso instead. It's on all of the tourist attraction maps and way more interesting than a big shiny bean.
- Why would I ever choose to go to Chicago? From an outside perspective it sounds like a total shit hole.
  
  Was just out there a month ago. Place was clean, good weather too. A lot of things to do. Nothing what they've shown in the news. I stayed near the loop, didn't travel south, as I had no reason to.
  Leaving Chicago, the taxi driver said he wanted people to continue thinking Chicago was a shit town, because it keeps rent down. Funny.
  
  Nah, Chicagos a great town with excellent food, culture, museums and events. Lots of festivals in the summer, it runs along a beatuiful lake with nice beaches, it has great people, all in all I love Chicago. Full disclosure, there are neighborhoods with high crime, it is unfortunately super segregated, and cold as hell in the winter.
  
  Just so you know, you're probably not being downvoted by any Chicagoans.
  Even the most devout Chicagoan evangelist will just typically grunt and nod in response to someone calling Chicago a shithole.
  We understand that Chicago is not everyone's cup of tea.

San Diego has a bigger one. Go check it out.

There are central parks in Boston and San Francisco…
- I got interested in the thought and looked it up. Boston Common predates Central Park by about 200 years!
- Chicago, too, plus the Emerald Necklace of parks and greenways ringing the city.
- Boston Common? Neat, but not exactly the size I was talking about. SF's is nice.

They do, they're just not as large as central park, not as iconic, and they're more misshapen.
- Obviously I'm talking about large parks on the scale of central park.
  
  Well, youre not going to find something “on the scale” of central park in other cities because no us city is “on the scale” of nyc..
  -Size wise, nyc’s population is nearly double the next largest city.. -Density wise, nyc’s population density is nearly double that of the next densest city -skyscraper wise, nyc has nearly double the quantity of skyscrapers as the next most skyscraper heavy city..
  See the trend??
  If you look at it proportionally though, many US cities have something similar, many of them have been brought up itt…
  Personally, id say pittsburgh and chicago have roughly what youre looking for..
  -chicago has a few large urban parks that are surrounded by skyscrapers.. the only difference is that they are next to the lake.. pretty much all the amenities in nyc’s central park can be found in lincoln & grant parks..
  -pittsburgh also has a large urban park in the heart of downtown (hell, they bulldozed 1/3 of downtown to build it).. while it only has skyscrapers on one side, it is literally 1/10th the size of nyc, so give it some slack lol.

City Park here in NOLA is 1300 acres (50% larger than Central Park) and was established in 1854, making it three years older as well. Stay losing NYC! 😜

Check out Forest Park in St. Louis. It's nice.
- I spent a day there last time I was in St. Louis. It was really nice. There were a few museums and the zoo you could all go to for free.

Kings park, Perth.
Bigger than central park and high up on the only hill for miles
- One of the great design tricks of Central Park is that at almost every entrance you go downhill. You are instantly cut off from the city noise.

I don't know about other cities, but the ones I've lived near were simply too irregularly shaped. NYC was able to be built like a grid, but a city like, say, Buffalo (go Bills!) is both too wibbly wobbly as well as too cold to envision a park being used as a centerpiece.
- I may remember incorrectly, but NY was only 'able' to build in a grid by displacing a lot of residents and tearing it all down to start from scratch
  
  Some democracy their city is if they actively sought out the world's most frustrating city design at such civilian expense (and with it not being free).

Chicago has a huge lakefront park as well as large parks throughout neighborhoods connected by grassy and tree-lined avenues. Not quite Central Park but a lot of great park space throughout for residents.
- Came here to say this. The large parks connected by tree lined boulevards is called the Emerald Necklace.

Didn't Los Angeles have central green space (not on the scale of central park in NYC, but large) that was gradually eaten away and paved over with time?

Pittsburgh has three major parks in the city limits - Point State Park downtown, which is a small area that hosts events, Schenley Park which has plenty of hiking, biking, and fishing, and Frick Park which is massive and allows you to get lost in the forest in the middle of the city. It's a great way to get out of crowded areas without traveling.

Some cities did, like Vancouver. But others thought it too expensive to the taxpayers and are now kicking themselves decades later. Or the taxpayers didn't want to support it back then.

Detroit has Belle Isle which was designed by the same guy who did Central Park.
- Looking at it, that is kinda out of the way and hard to access (probably why it's a park). I'm talking large parks in the middle of the urban area.
  
  Detroit is laid out differently from NYC, more like the spokes of a wheel or a spiderweb, instead of a grid like Manhattan. Downtown Detroit (the most "urban" area of the city) and Belle Isle are both at the center of the wheel.
  Not sure you'd get a sense of that by "looking at it" on a map, but Belle Isle at least as close to downtown Detroit as Central park is to lower Manhattan.
  You do have to take a bridge to get there though, since it's an island, so you may have a point about accessibility in that regard.
  Nevertheless, Belle Isle is a large park in the middle of an urban area. Especially if you bring Windsor into the mix.

Louisville has Cherokee park that was designed by Olmsted, same dude as Central Park.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Law_Olmsted
When I lived there I loved to go dirt trail running in the middle of the city.

Hyde Park in Sydney

Because its really hard to do it retroactively. Not too many people cared about its aesthetic/health or public value when compared to the commercial real estate value
- The whole point was to do it proactively.
  
  That ship sailed 120+ years ago

Forest Park, St Louis MO

Paris in France has a few parks and gardens. It’s weird to thing that the US invented the concept: https://www.evous.fr/Guide-des-plus-beaux-parcs-et-jardins-de-Paris,1176706.html
- I'm obviously talking about cities in North America that grew after NYC's central park. Which could have seen the value of setting aside a massive amount of land cheaply before they grew.

The English Garden in Munich comes close: A long park reaching almost into the very center of the city.

New Orleans has City Park. Go check it out!
- Neat, looks like it's mostly a golf course though.
  
  And alligator ponds!

@someguy3 Portland, Oregon has the largest urban park in the country, Forest Park, but it is forested an not a garden park. Also it is on the edge of the city instead of Central.

Vancouver - Stanley Park (downtown), Queen Elizabeth Park (geographic center), Central Park (Metrotown)... The lack of parks in US cities is a matter of poor planning.

What about cities that dont have a lot of high rises?

Possible answers include: Because this concept is not suitable for every city. Because there are other ways to introduce greenery into the city center, like many bigger or smaller parks.

Toronto - High Park and Downsview Park, depending how central you're looking for. Both massive and in busy parts of the city.

Of the top of my head (because I lived there) - Berlin has Tiergarten and London has Hyde Park. The latter is so so in size but the former is quite large.
Thinking further, I remembered that Paris has the Champ de Mars (surrounding the Eiffel Tower), which is about Hyde Park size.
Also plenty of cities have large forested areas that merge with the city proper and are not too far from the center, such as for example Grouse Mountain on the north side of Vancouver and Monsanto on the west side of Lisbon.
Notice how even the cities in Europe were space has been at a premium for a lot longer than in the Americas do at times have a big centrally located park.
- Vancouver has Stanley Park right in the city too
  
  Well, I've only visited for a few days and I like hiking so naturally I only had eyes for Grouse Mountain ... ;)

We have lots of large parks in my city. Not central park sized, but we are not an NYC sized city. It's basically a small city incorporated into the forest. Sometimes they try to capitalize some of it, but the voters reliably shut them down, we love our green spaces.

Jesus I had no idea

Park Slonski - Silesian Park in Upper Silesia in South Poland is much better than Central Park in NY. You should see it if you come to Poland.

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