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.
Because other cities didn’t have a large black neighborhood to knock down.
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.
I’m certainly not sure. There’s no bounds to the depth of government endorsed racism in this country.
I only know that Seneca Village, in particular, was geographically a small portion of what makes up Central Park. A quick perusal of Wikipedia isn’t an all encompassing or definitive history but it appears that approximately 1600 residents in a number of different villages were evicted through eminent domain, while Seneca Village seems to have had ~250 residents at its peak.
As is often the case it seems like residents with the least power and wealth were steamrolled by government agencies for a “civic good,” but many sites were considered before this shameful act, so it hardly seems that the park was an invented purpose after the fact. Rather, these government agencies should be shamed for continuing to force the least powerful and wealthy of its citizens to pay for shared public goods.
Interesting. I might look for a documentary on this. I’m sure something is out there.
FYI tdot is slang for Toronto (sounds like you’re american).
I’m aware. It’s actually a small reference to Kendrick Lamar’s early rap name which was k.dot . Can’t have punctuation in your name on lemmy, tho.
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).
St. Louis’s Forest Park is bigger still at 5.3 km^2
My favorite urban park by far!
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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.
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?
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
Alameda_Central
… That is tiny. I’m not talking a park. I’m taking a massive park.
Central Park is not even big enough to be listed on Wikipedia’s list of urban parks by size:
… Technically inside funky city lines is not the same as being in the heart of a city. Gatineau Park even says North of Ottawa. Not North side, North of. “It is not classified as an urban park by its managing authority.[1]”
I really didn’t think I’d have to emphasize Central Park is a massive park in the heart of a city such that is surrounded by high rises. At this point I think you’re at least talkng in bad faith. So cheers.
I never said every urban park is the same as Central Park.
You did ask why other cities haven’t copied the concept of Central Park. I’ve pretty clearly demonstrated that the concept of an urban park in a metropolitan area is both not original to Central Park and not unique to Central Park.
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.
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.
Oh so the replacement of a surface road with green space increased property values? Gee I wonder if that has anything to do with valuing green space?
Yes, who would have thought having a giant fucking highway outside your 4th story window would have negatively impacted property value.
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.
@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.
