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Awards
OverviewFull Product DetailsAuthor: Roy Rosenzweig , Elizabeth BlackmarPublisher: Cornell University Press Imprint: Cornell University Press Edition: New edition Dimensions: Width: 16.80cm , Height: 2.80cm , Length: 23.80cm Weight: 1.361kg ISBN: 9780801497513ISBN 10: 0801497515 Pages: 640 Publication Date: 01 January 2019 Audience: General/trade , Professional and scholarly , General , Professional & Vocational Format: Paperback Publisher's Status: Active Availability: In Print  This item will be ordered in for you from one of our suppliers. Upon receipt, we will promptly dispatch it out to you. For in store availability, please contact us. Table of ContentsReviews"""Original and provocative... A deeply felt celebration of the role of public space.""-Robert Fishman, New York Times Book Review ""Ambitious and adventurous... A surprising and deeply social account of the park's contentious past. A powerful historical resource for thinking about the shape American public spaces have taken.""-Susan G. Davis, The Nation ""Prodigiously researched, eloquent. An outstanding study of the evolution of Manhattan's Central Park.""-Publishers Weekly (starred 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 realestate 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. (Kirkus Reviews) 'Original and provocative. A deeply felt celebration of the role of public space.' Robert Fishman, The New York Times Book Review 'Ambitious and adventurous. A surprising and deeply social account of the park's contentious past. A powerful historical resource for thinking about the shape American public spaces have taken.' Susan G. Davis, The Nation 'Prodigiously researched, eloquent. An outstanding study of the evolution of Manhattan's Central Park.' Publishers Weekly (starred review) Author InformationThe late Roy Rosenzweig, Professor of History at George Mason University was the author of Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870-1920. Elizabeth Blackmar, Professor of History at Columbia University, is the author of Manhattan for Rent, 1785-1850, also from Cornell. Tab Content 6Author Website:Countries AvailableAll regions |
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