Review by Choice Review
The Park and the People is an attempt to explore the social history of Central Park. Rosenzweig and Blackmar focus on the various groups, both formal and informal, involved in decisions about park placement, design, and use. The study is organized into six sections. The first two parts examine the creation of Central Park and the web of aesthetic, political, economic, and social concerns that influenced park design and construction during the mid-19th century. Sections three and four address the varied and changing definitions of the park as a public space. Accommodating the 19th-century park to the dawn of a new century dominates part five, and the final segment brings the park's story up to 1980. Although this study enhances overall knowledge of the park's historical experience, the work possesses two major shortcomings. First, the authors' emphasis is on the period stretching from the mid-19th century to 1920. The material on the years after 1920 is clearly secondary and not as well developed. Second, the rich detail of the people's story often overwhelms the authors' thesis, i.e., the changing definitions of public and private space and the accommodations to and implications of these changes. Advanced undergraduate; graduate; faculty; professional. P. Melvin; Loyola University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In this prodigiously researched, eloquent work, history professors Rosenzweig (George Mason University) and Blackmar (Columbia) have written an outstanding study of the evolution of Manhattan's Central Park, from its early days as a carriage promenade for the rich to its development as a haven from urban stress for all classes of people. Construction of the park, which was conceived by the wealthy both as a boon to the public and as a means to enhance real estate values, began in 1856. The project displaced 1600 park site residents, including Seneca, an African American community; exploited the laborers who cleared the land; and was rife with disputes between Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, the architects who won the design competition. Although the emphasis is on the first 50 years of the park's development, Robert Moses's reign as park commissioner from 1934 to 1960 is adequately covered, as is the current controversial dependence on the private sector to finance this beautiful, democratic public space. Illustrated. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
What took 166 tons of dynamite, six million bricks, 19,000 cubic yards of sand, 20,000 men, and $5 million to build? If you answered New York's Central Park, give yourself a perfect grade. The same is awarded this magnificent public works history, a masterpiece combining the story of the park, the history of New York, city and state politics, and the people of the city. Central Park was conceived in the 1840s, built in the depression era of 1857, and renovated during the Great Depression. The authors have exhausted primary and secondary sources to produce this definitive work, which surpasses an earlier photographic history, Circle of Seasons . From the work of park designers Frederic Law Olmsted and Calbert Vaux to New Deal park commissioner Robert Moses to the administration of Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, the volume is a rare combination of scholarship and readable text. The emphasis is on the 19th century and the park's formative decades, including design, property acquisition, and the men whose labor created the world's best-known park. Ignoring neither the vested interests of the propertied class who stood to benefit from the park nor the fear of crime in Central Park, Rosenzweig and Blackmar produce a model history--not just of the park but of the city and people who turn to it for amusement, recreation, relaxation, and more.--Boyd Childress, Auburn Univ. Lib., Ala. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Now embraced as a cultural treasure and called the most democratic space in New York, Central Park has a contentious and elitist history--expertly chronicled here by Rosenzweig (History/George Mason Univ.) and Blackmar (History/Columbia Univ.). Conceived by a small group of the wealthy in the 1850s as an answer to Europe's society gathering spaces, the park sparked debates from the beginning: Why did New Yorkers need an uptown park when Hoboken's Elysian Fields were half the distance away? Where should the park be located? What kind of park should it be? A civic monument? A programmed pleasure garden? A commons for public assembly? Or a landscaped preserve of artificial nature, as essentially proposed and executed by chosen designers Frederick Law Olmstead and Calvert Vaux? And just what public should the park attract? There was not much debate, though, about displacing the site's ``squatters,'' whom Rosenzweig and Blackmar find were members of stable communities: Some owned their property, most probably paid rent, and many were black. And there was no protest when the park became a venue for the rich to see and be seen in their fashionable carriages. While the masses took their pleasure at commercial gardens elsewhere, Olmstead--a tyrant who drove and underpaid park workers, enforced strict decorum among visitors, and elbowed the more sympathetic Vaux out of his share of credit- -maintained the park as a landscape to be viewed. Though the park's creation and early decades are extensively detailed here, the authors complete the political, class-conscious story through years of real-estate speculation, Tammany patronage, and reformers' penury; and then, in the 20th century, through a growing diversity of use and users, and--with homeless residents and millionaire neighbors--an evolving debate over the question of ``whose park is this, anyway?'' Neither dry chronology nor anecdotal diversion, but exemplary social history. (Numerous b&w illustrations.)
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
