Before Central Park

Reviewed by Kara Murphy Schlichting

Before Central Park is Sara Cedar Miller’s fourth publication about New York City’s famous greensward. Miller is historian emerita and, since 1984, a photographer for the Central Park Conservancy. Before Central Park is distinctive in its combination of Miller’s photography, her expert understanding of the park’s geography and archeology, and her meticulous real estate history of parkland from the 17th through the 19th centuries.

Before Central Park
By Sara Cedar Miller
Columbia University Press, 2022
624 pages

This complexly organized history has nineteen core chapters across three chronological and thematically organized sections: Part I: Topography, Part II: Real Estate, and Part III: The Idea of a Park. Readers will likely be on familiar ground in this final section, which retells Central Park’s creation story and the launching of Frederick Law Olmsted’s landscape architecture career. In partnership with architect Calvert Vaux, Olmsted established what a major American urban park could be, but Miller only devotes the last two chapters to this history. As the book’s title suggests, the majority of Before Central Park charts prepark landscape, communities, and real estate markets across two and a half centuries to the 1850s, when city and civic leaders began discussing a large park for Manhattan Island. The book is a valuable resource for researchers studying Manhattan real estate and an often fascinating window into the archival materials that bring this history alive more than 200 years later.

Miller tells the stories of how people divided, used, and fought over the land that became Central Park: from Indigenous hunters to Dutch farmers, enslaved people to patriot soldiers, British loyalists to the Black landowners of Seneca Village, and tavern owners to Catholic nuns. She does so by tracing the impact of their businesses, churches, burial grounds, farms, and military fortifications and battle lines (from both Kieft’s War against the Lenape and from the Revolutionary War) on prepark land.

Real estate, of course, figures centrally in this history. Both Parts I and II focus on real estate transactions. At times Miller’s narrative arc falls away and her meticulous archival work can read as a reference catalogue of property exchange. Fortunately, some of these transaction histories are augmented with examples of engaging (if also complicated for the lay reader) stories of real estate speculation and scams. But Miller is most engaging when she situates real estate transactions in larger social, economic, and political narratives, such as the power struggles between British and patriot forces during the American Revolution, or how residents of Seneca Village used real estate to secure their right to vote and build community as free Black New Yorkers.

Part I surveys mid-to northern-Manhattan’s landscape history, focusing on the varied rocky and rolling topography of the island’s center, which the Dutch and English managed as common land. Although titled “Topography” and opening with an ecological overview of the grassy plain, woodland, and water courses of what became Central Park and the Lenape’s use of them, Part I focuses more on Dutch elites, their intermarriage and inheritances, and their real estate maneuvers. The names and family trees can be disorientating — more maps to visualize the various property lines and transactions of this section would have been welcome.

Individual chapters range from the first era of Dutch settlement to the 1790s transactions over a four-acre tract of land. Chapter three “The Enslaved Bensons, 1754-1846,” exemplifies the strength of Miller’s research, and the way rooting real estate history in key historical narratives — in this case the role of property in manumission in 19th century New York State — can enliven otherwise bureaucratic tales. She traces the real estate transactions between the Benson family of Harlem, Lanaw Benson, a Black woman likely once enslaved by the Bensons, and David Waldron, who most likely set her free and sold land to her. Miller situates this episode in the history of 18th century laws that limited Black real estate ownership, New York State manumission laws, Lanaw Benson’s family, and her path from enslaved to free, property-owning, New Yorker. In so doing, Miller deepens the reader’s understanding of why prepark real estate transactions are worth exploring.

Part II claims that it shifts from Part I’s focus on topography to real estate transactions, but real estate plays a central role in both. The real distinction arises from a set of profound transformations that reshaped the city’s real estate market in the early 19th century, which provide Miller with something of a departure point for Part II. First, the city began selling off common land to pay down post-Revolution debts; second, the combination of the 1811 street grid and the 1825 completion of the Erie Canal rocketed New York City into a new era of development. “After 1825,” Miller says, “real estate began to trump topography as the definitive shaper of the land’s future. Nineteenth-century urbanization encroached on the prepark area’s scattered settlements and farmland.

Comprising eight chapters, Part II: Real Estate is the book’s longest section. The first two chapters focus on the Bloomingdale neighborhood from 1667-1790s (Chapter seven) and then from 1790-1824 (Chapter eight). Miller dedicates each of these chapters’ subsections to individual property owners and specific stretches of land. Chapter seven catalogues the real estate moves of five individuals and families; Chapter eight catalogues seven more.

Shifting gears, Chapter nine tells the story of Seneca Village residents from 1827-1857. This village of around 250 residents, roughly two-thirds of whom were Black, was the largest community of African-American landowners on Manhattan Island. The city acquired the village with eminent domain and razed it in the construction of Central Park. The first third of the chapter is organized thematically, dedicated to topics including suffrage and the draft riots of 1863; the next third focuses on four Seneca Village residents “and the hardships they endured”; the last third returns to a combination of thematic subsections and passages dedicated to individual community members and religious and educational communities. The structural complexity of these chapters requires careful attention from the reader, but also brings to life a diversity of individuals who lived in, valued, and profited off of prepark lands.

Part III: The Idea of a Park is a well-done, detailed accounting of the creation of Central Park, from the mid-century debates over locating the park centrally or at Jones Woods, on the Upper East Side; the estimate and assessment process; the first attempts to design the park and the subsequent design competition that led to Vaux and Olmsted’s Greensward plan; and the speculation that attended the park’s extension north from 106th to 110th Street between 1859 and 1863. Miller moves efficiently and engagingly through the history of potential alternative sites, the economic and political strategies required to secure a park site, the controversies over financing, and why Olmsted and Vaux won the (re)design competition. This history is well known, but Miller synthesizes it well.

A strength of Before Central Park is Miller’s integration of landscape studies and contemporary archeology into her analysis. Her explanation of the 2013 archeological discovery of the Wickquasgeck Trail (renamed Kingsbridge Road after the British took over New Amsterdam) is a prime example: a fascinating, brief, “behind the scenes” look at how parkland restoration and research meet.

The illustrations are also a strength of the work. Miller includes, and enlighteningly explains, a varied collection of her own photographs and historical materials including maps, portraits, and landscape paintings. For example, in the caption for Figure 4.5 Miller explains a 1915 painting by John Ward Dunsmore based on contemporary archeological findings of the British Winter Cantonment on Inwood Hill. This northern Manhattan encampment, Miller suggests, would have been similar to the encampment on Great Hill, the relics of which came to light during park construction. The Great Hill installation no longer stands, but Miller successfully uses Dunsmore’s painting to help the reader imagine this lost landscape.

Figure 8.2 is Miller’s photograph of an iron bolt embedded in rock. It dates to the early 1800s. Surveyor John Randel marked, as Miller explains in the figure’s caption, the intersection of every street and avenue on Manhattan Island in the early 1800s. Such small, one-inch bolts went into rock; on soil three-foot-tall marble high monuments noting the intersecting street and avenues went up, and “an original one can be seen in the Luce Center at the New-York History Society.” This materiality is a welcome break from the Before Central Park’s sometimes dry real estate transaction history.

Professional historians will also appreciate how Miller consistently draws attention to the repositories that hold the archives making her research possible. Her work is a great advertisement for the New York County Court’s division of Old Records, which holds petitions from landowners dissatisfied with the valuation of their property when the commissioners bought land for the park, and for the annotated archival copies of the anonymous entries submitted in the 1850s contest to design Central Park. Miller’s book is an invaluable resource for anyone researching real estate history in northern Manhattan or the landscape history of the prepark.