Below is an excerpt from the new book by local author David Brown Morris, Ten Thousand Central Parks: A Climate Change Parable.
David will be one of hundreds of authors reading and speaking at the 42nd annual Miami Book Fair from November 16-23. David’s reading will be at 11 am on Sunday, November 23 in Room 2106. For more info visit MiamiBookFair.com.
Every park has a history, but few parks have a story. The origin story of Central Park, beginning immediately before, during, and after the Civil War, shares the turbulent history of New York City, including its chicanery, bigotry, and crime. It is not always a pretty story. The infamous four-day Draft Riot of 1863, for example, specifically targets black workers. White rioters set fire to the Colored Orphan Asylum, and Lincoln ultimately diverts wartime regiments to restore order.
Central Park as the first major US public works project offers jobs to the Irish and German immigrants willing to shovel muck and to cart topsoil for a dollar a day. The park also owes its origin, however, to newspaper editors and social elites who lobby for a municipal park befitting the prestige of a city that only in recent years had replaced Philadelphia as the national hub of finance, wealth, and commerce. Central Park both in its origins and in its changes constitutes a story worth telling anytime, perhaps at least once each generation, but it is a story whose successes matter anew today as grounds for hope as we face the unprecedented dilemmas of global climate change.
There is no way to sugarcoat the damages. Black landowners who lost their homes to eminent domain likely did not love Central Park. A few terrible crimes occur, especially during the wilderness years of the 1970swhen drugs and muggings prevail. There is also no way to sugarcoat the far vaster global, damage. Thousand-year floods now seem annual events .Each year one billion birds smash into US skyscrapers, littering the sidewalks. The hottest ocean temperatures in four hundred years pose an “existential threat” to Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. It won’t work to blame Mother Nature. We humans have mass-produced the greenhouse gases that now choke the atmosphere, broil the planet, and wreak havoc on the natural world. Unless you live off the grid, grow your own food, and communicate by smoke signal, we are all complicit, as the sea levels inexorably rise.
The highest grossing film of all time during the first decade of the twenty-first century was the 1997 bonanza Titanic. Disaster seems now all too familiar, as the unsinkable ocean liner goes under. Central Park nonetheless, in its origins, in its shortcomings, and in its changes, offers solid if neglected grounds for hope as we face the dangers of climate change that remain largely of our own making.
Stories traditionally need heroes, even superheroes, and Frederick Law Olmsted has achieved almost heroic stature today as the creator of Central Park and as the father of American landscape design. The accolades are well deserved, but not at the start. Olmsted’s later career is impressive, including his design for the grounds of the US Capitol and for Boston’s famous1,100-acre chain of linked parkland known as the Emerald Necklace. In 2015, joining contemporaries such as Emerson, Whitman, and Thoreau, he achieved his own volume in a prominent series featuring classic American writers. His nine-volume papers reappear in 2022 in an online edition, and a dedicated website (Olmsted .org) even helps celebrate his two hundredth birthday. When he first begins work at Central Park, however, he is a failed surveyor, failed clerk, lapsed farmer, out-of-work editor, and an impoverished journalist in his mid-thirties. Indeed, Olmsted is a mostly directionless young man with no experience in landscape design, until he lands a modest job working for the park’s chief engineer.
Central Park too offers an oblique criticism of our need for heroes or for the addictive great-man theories of history. His lesser-known partner at Central Park, Calvert Vaux, twice comes to Olmsted’s rescue.
A deemphasis on heroes opens up space to focus on more human-scale, collective, and collaborative actions. The creation of Central Park takes more than a village. It takes almost a decade of heated discussion in elite parlors and in gritty newspaper editorials. Receiving initial state funding in 1853, Central Park marks its official completion in 1876, after more than twenty years, financial crises, social conflict, and open civil war. London-born Vaux, as a recently naturalized US citizen, is especially sensitive to the democratic ideals of equality that he sees embodied in Central Park. Our nineteenth-century ancestors left us, in effect, a vast, artificial, living monument to democratic values built from trees, water, soil, rocks, meadows, and woodlands. It offers evidence of what the imagination can achieve in transforming urban landscapes, improving everyday lives, and making vital, measurable contributions to urban environments. Climate change can’t be altered overnight, but reflecting on the origins of Central Park may well empower people to address the crisis in their own towns and cities—perhaps one big park at a time.
Why does the story of Central Park matter now? What makes it so urgent? Over half of the world population—56 percent—lives in cities, a figure predicted to rise soon to nearly 70 percent. Asia in 2025 has some thirty megacities with populations over ten million. In Africa, the Nigerian city of Lagos has grown from a population of three hundred thousand in 1950 to an estimated twenty-one million today. People massed in a vast modern metropolis directly impact local and even global environments, and cities are where environmental costs quickly accrue as key contributors to climate change: costs levied in fossil fuels, greenhouse gas emissions, and the byproducts of mass consumption. People are also, however, an invaluable resource in deploying creative low-tech initiatives that directly improve everyday lives. Central Park is literally built by immigrants. Irish and German workers dug the dirt, loaded the horse-drawn carts, blasted the rock, drained the swamps, and planted almost half a million bushes and trees. Today, with refugee tent cities stretching to the horizon and with displaced people yearning for employment, it is far more than an antiquarian inquiry to revisit the mid-nineteenth-century origins of New York City’s world-famous, irreplaceable Central Park.
