“The Lungs of the City”: Frederick Law Olmsted, Public Health, and the Creation of Central Park
By Lucie Levine
As the nation’s first great urban park, Central Park was conceived as “The Lungs of the City,” and built in 1858 as an oasis for “the sanitary advantage of breathing.”[1] A half-century later, a letter to the editor of the New York Times glowed that “thousands visit the park daily just to breathe.”[2] But today, “I can’t breathe” is the defining cry of the moment, as the city and the nation confronts both a global respiratory pandemic and the ongoing scourge of police brutality against black people. Both these crises — of public health and racism — have placed a spotlight on the park, and helped redefine New Yorkers’ relationship to the beloved green space. Early in the pandemic, New Yorkers sought the park as a socially distant relief from quarantine[3]; as cases began to climb, a controversial field hospital was erected in the park[4]; by mid-May, an effort to curb infections moved city government to limit the number of people allowed on the Sheep Meadow[5]; on Memorial Day, Amy Cooper made a false report against Christian Cooper in the Ramble[6]; during protests that followed the murder of George Floyd on the same day, New Yorkers both used the park as a site of protest, and fled into the greenery to escape altercations with the police.[7] Given that the park has emerged as both a salve and a locus for our national reckoning, it is interesting to consider how 19th century ideas about public health and social democracy shaped the original purpose of the Lungs of the City.
Central Park Looking South, 1859. Museum of the City of New York.
In the 19th century, parkland and public health were so intimately intertwined that Frederick Law Olmsted left his post as Superintendent of Central Park to become General Secretary of the United States Sanitary Commission, a national medical relief effort organized during the Civil War for securing aid and supplies for wounded soldiers.[8] The organization was the precursor to the American Red Cross, and in a war where more soldiers died of disease than battle wounds, it would become the nation’s largest national public health effort. In his role as General Secretary, Olmsted reorganized the Army Medical Corps, oversaw the creation of field hospitals, supervised staff, distributed supplies, and coordinated contributions and volunteers from local aid societies.[9]
Olmsted’s role as public face, and driving force, of this enormous national public health effort echoed his work in Central Park, where he strove to create spaces that had “a soothing and refreshing sanitary influence” on those who enjoyed them.[10] He believed that parks and natural scenery offered “relief from ordinary cares” as well as a “change of air, and change of habits,” which were “favorable to the health and vigor of men … the health and vigor of their intellect” which “not only gives pleasure for the time being but increases the subsequent capacity for happiness and the means of securing happiness.”[11] His reference to “change of air and change of habits” helps illustrate that public health and sanitation had different connotations at that time than they do today. In the mid-19th century, “public health” referred not only to the physical wellness of the populace, but also to its moral conduct and social configuration. Considering Central Park as a public health initiative also helps us understand its place in the city’s 19th century social structure.
John Boart and Otto Sibeth, "Map of the Central Park," 1873. New York Public Library.
Central Park sits in the center of Manhattan’s street grid, 843 acres of municipal land in the middle of one of the most densely populated islands in the world. But when the city’s grid was designed in 1811, it left no park space amidst the rigid geometry.[12] It wasn’t until the late 1840s, when the city was being transformed by industrialization and immigration, that leaders including William Cullent Bryant, editor of the New York Evening Post, and Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune, began to call for a public park “worthy of our great metropolis,” that would give New York a green space to rival those that blanketed London.[13]
From the outset, public opinion defined that worthiness in terms of public health imperatives, and a growing consensus saw open space as the key to improving public health in the city. Olmsted, who personally considered “the highest value of a park” to lie in the “subtle and spiritual” qualities of its natural scenery,[14] nonetheless wrote that in the 1840s “The political economy of the day valued [parks] almost exclusively because of their cleaner air, and few travelers’ stories or other general accounts … failed to refer to them as ‘airing grounds,’ [or] ‘breathing places.’”[15]
The politics of fresh air in New York at the time were manifold. Then as now, fear of infection, disease and “dispensation,” induced the city’s wealthiest citizens to leave New York.[16] As Olmsted put it, “foul” air was “often provocative in time of epidemics, of a panicky disposition to flee the town.” But, the park offered a reason for the city’s upper class residents, who were the majority of the park’s earliest visitors, to stay put: Olmsted explained, “where there were parks, they gave the highest assurance of safety, as well as a grateful sense of peculiarly fresh and pure air.”[17]
Pure air would not only keep the wealthy safe, reasoned mid-19th century New Yorkers, it would also “uplift” the poor, who were disproportionately affected by the city’s growing health crises. By 1850, New York had one of the highest mortality rates of any city in North America or Western Europe,[18] a decade later nearly twice as many New Yorkers were dying each year as were being born, but the death rate in New York’s tenement districts was triple that of the city overall.[19]
Accordingly, New York’s progressive physician-reformers championed the Sanitary Movement, begun in London in the 1830s, which attributed disease to “bad air,” and promoted “the removal of filth” from urban areas.[20] The Sanitary Movement was as much a social movement as it was a medical one. Physicians like John Griscom, the first American to teach chemistry, and Elisha Harris, the first secretary of the American Public Health Association, lectured widely on “the relation of the atmosphere to life and health,”[21] and founded Progressive organizations like The Association for Improving the Conditions of the Poor.[22] Under their direction, The Sanitary Movement led to tenement reforms, citywide sanitary surveys, the establishment of the Metropolitan Board of Health, and the creation of Central Park.[23]
The park was an emerald jewel in the crown of urban reform. As Roy Rosenzweig and Elizabeth Blackmar point out in their 1992 history of the park, The Park and the People, early proponents of the park saw it as “a primary source” and “a symbol” of the city’s wellbeing.[24] As a “source,” the clean air and abundant foliage of Central Park stood as an antithesis to the smoke, dust and detritus of the ever-industrializing and expanding city. As a “symbol,” the park would stand for “good morals and good order” by providing a space for “manly exercise” — as opposed to opportunities for licentiousness and gambling.[25]
These ideas not only reflected the reformers’ genuine effort to provide the city’s poor with living conditions marked by light, air, and dignity, but also showed the way 19th century reformers understood disease to be a mark of the supposed moral failures of the working classes. For example, Olmsted wrote that Central Park was “for the accommodation and gratification of immense numbers of … the great, industrious, moderately‐thriving, decent, self‐respecting class, the children of which mainly fill the common schools;” he was also certain that the park would have “a manifestly civilizing effect” on that same class.[26]
But the Sanitary Movement also expressly used the idea of “civilizing influence,” and calls for “removal of filth,” as weapons against the poor and disenfranchised, and particularly against the city’s Black residents. Sanitarians throughout Europe and the United States justified major urban projects by interpreting “removal of filth” as “urban cleansing,” which could neutralize the perceived “threat” of “dangerous classes,”[27] and empower park builders in the appropriation of land and displacement of residents.
However “safe” from disease wealthy white New Yorkers felt in Central Park, their comfort had come at the expense of Black New Yorkers. In 1853, New York City acquired 775 acres of land stretching between what is now 59th and 106th Streets, and 5th and 8th Avenues, through eminent domain.[28] While much of the land that would become the park was rocky and swampy, it was by no means uninhabited. The Central Park Conservancy estimates that 1,600 people were displaced throughout the area. Seneca Village, the first and largest free Black community in antebellum New York, which flourished between 82nd and 89th Streets and 7th and 8th Avenues, was destroyed.[29]
Central Park’s commissioners referred to residents of Seneca Village as “squatters,”[30] but Black New Yorkers had begun buying land in Seneca Village in 1825, seeking refuge from the crowding and discrimination they faced downtown. Landownership was also inextricable from citizenship for African Americans at the time; in 1821, New York added an amendment to the State constitution which raised the property qualification for voting from $100 to $250 for Black men, while removing it entirely for white men. That amendment also required that Black men wishing to vote hold residency in New York for at least three years, while giving white men the vote on the basis of living in New York for one year (or 6 months if they served in the military or paid taxes.)[31] Of the one hundred Black New Yorkers who were eligible to vote in 1845, 10 lived in Seneca Village.[32] By 1855, the area was an integrated enclave home to 225 people, two-thirds of whom were Black. The community supported 50 homes, three churches, and a school, as well as planting fields and orchards until 1857, when all residents were dispersed in order to make room for the park.[33]
Olmsted joined the Central Park board that same year. Interestingly, he had spent much of the 1850s traveling through the South, reporting for the New York Times on conditions below the Mason-Dixon Line. His dispatches appeared in the Times between 1852 and 1854, and were edited into a series of books between 1856 and 1860.[34] While Olmsted never considered himself an abolitionist, he saw the South as a “stronghold of evil,” and believed that Black Americans were “entitled to the inalienable rights of man.” He ended his series in the Times calling for “all those who do not think Slavery is right, or who do not desire to assist in perpetuating it, whether right or wrong, [to] demand first of their own minds, and then of their neighbors, fair play for the Negro.”[35]
Despite the dispossession of Black landowners in Seneca Village, Olmsted saw landscape architecture as a driver of social democracy. Influenced by American landscape architect Andrew Jackson Downing, Olmsted and his partner Calvert Vaux wrote in their Second Annual Report to the Commissioners of Central Park that “the primary purpose of the park is to provide the best practical means of healthful recreation for the inhabitants of the city of all classes. It should present an aspect of spaciousness and tranquility with variety and intimacy of arrangement, thereby affording the most agreeable contrast to the confinement, bustle and monotonous street division of the city.”[36]
But Olmsted did not believe that “all classes” could be trusted to properly enjoy Central Park. “A large part of the people of New York are ignorant of a park,” he wrote. “They will need to be trained to the proper use of it, to be restrained in the abuse of it.”[37] That training and restraint were reserved almost exclusively for the working classes. For example, Olmsted and the Park Board worked to actively and severely limit sports and active recreation in the park, in favor of passive recreation like taking in the scenery.[38] This distinction between contemplation and recreation was class-based; wealthy park-goers, in carriages, who made up about three quarters of the Park’s visitors in the 1860s,[39] were said to “know how to behave themselves,”[40] while men playing ball in the park were considered “rude fellows.”[41]
By 1860, the Central Park Board codified their distaste for play or boisterous use of the park by adding rules that prohibited swimming or fishing in the ponds, setting off fireworks, playing musical instruments, displaying any flags, posting any bills or parading in any processions.[42] To enforce these rules, the Board paid a state-appointed police brigade to act as “Park Keepers.” Olmsted insisted that his 24 Park Keepers give military salutes, organized them along paramilitary lines, and tasked them with preventing “disorderly and unseemly practices.”[43] Then as now, applications of police enforcement were selectively applied. For example, in 1887, The Park Keepers pursued a group of men who were picking dandelions in the park, but made no attempt to limit the dandelion gathering of Ethel Dana, daughter of an episcopal clergyman.[44]
In the face of this unequal treatment, it was working-class and immigrant New Yorkers who advocated for a more inclusive park which better reflected the city it served. For example, they were at the vanguard of the fight to allow music, boating and beer sales in the Park on Sundays. That fight raged throughout the 1860s as a group of Sabbatarians fought to impose strictures on Sunday park usage, usually the only day that working people had available to visit the park.[45]
Today in Central Park, the genius of Olmsted’s design vision is everywhere in evidence, but how we interact with it — playing, sitting on the lawns, making music, and protesting — has evolved significantly from what he envisioned, thanks to the persistence of generations of New Yorkers who asserted their right to breathe fully and equally in the Lungs of the City. More than 150 years on, the park’s restorative effects still rejuvenate us, but the long process of making the Park a public space that fully and equitably fulfills the needs of all New Yorkers remains ongoing.
Lucie Levine is a historian, tour guide and writer. She founded Archive on Parade, and is the Public Events Coordinator for Friends of the Upper East Side Historic Districts.
[1] Frederick Law Olmsted, “Trees in Streets and in Parks” in Frederick Law Olmsted Writings on Landscape, Culture and Society (New York: Library of America, 2015), 590.
[2] “The Lungs of the City,” The New York Times, April 9, 1909. https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1909/04/09/101876603.pdf
[3] Roger Clark, “Central Park Remains an Oasis During Coronavirus Outbreak,” NY1, March 18, 2020 https://www.ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/coronavirus/2020/03/18/central-park-coronavirus
[4] Melissa Ruso, “Controversial Central Park Field Hospital to Close; Samaritan's Purse Staffers Will Stay at Mount Sinai,” NBCNewYork, May 2, 2020 https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/controversial-central-park-field-hospital-to-close-samaritans-purse-staffers-will-stay-at-mount-sinai/2399596/
[5] Devin Gannon, “NYC will limit access to Central Park’s Sheep Meadow this Weekend,” 6sqft, May 15, 2020 https://www.6sqft.com/nyc-will-limit-access-to-central-parks-sheep-meadow-this-weekend/
[6] Sarah Maslin Nir, “How two lives collided in Central Park, rattling the nation,” New York Times, June 14, 2020 https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/14/nyregion/central-park-amy-cooper-christian-racism.html
[7] Ashley Gilbertson, “The Curfew is Over. New York City’s fight is not,” New York Times, June 8, 2020 https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/08/opinion/new-york-city-protests.html
[8] Louis P Masur, “Olmsted’s Southern Landscapes,” New York Times, July 9th, 2011. https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/09/olmsteds-southern-landscapes/
[9] National Park Service, “Olmsted and the United States Sanitary Commission,” Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site. https://www.nps.gov/frla/learn/historyculture/upload/USSC-Site-Bulletin.pdf
[10] Olmsted, “Trees in Streets and in Parks,” 594.
[11] Frederick Law Olmsted, “Yosemite and the Mariposa Grove: A Preliminary Report,” 1865, in The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted, Volume Five: The California Years, 1863-1865, ed. Victoria Post Ranney, (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 502.
[12] Tricia Kang, “160 Years of Central Park: A Brief History” Central Park Conservancy, July 1st, 2017, https://www.centralparknyc.org/blog/central-park-history
[13] Roy Rosenzweig and Elizabeth Blackmar, The Park and the People: A History of Central Park (New York: Cornell University Press, 1992), 22-23.
[14] Olmsted, “Trees,” 593
[15] Ibid, 589.
[16] Rosenzweig, 26.
[17] Olmsted, “Trees,” 589.
[18] Richard A Pizzi, “Apostles of Cleanliness,” Modern Drug Discovery 5(5) (May 2002): 51.
[19] Protecting Public Health in New York City: 200 Years of Leadership (New York: New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, 2005), 10.
[20] Pizzi, 51.
[21] “The Importance of Ventilation--Lecture by Dr. John H. Griscom, M. D,” New York Times, February 6th, 1870.
[22] “Protecting Public Health in New York City,” 10.
[23] Pizzi, 51.
[24] Rosenzweig, 24.
[25] Ibid, 26.
[26] Ada Louise Huxtable,”It isn’t Green Cheese,” The New York Times, May 21, 1972. https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1972/05/21/82224007.html
[27] “Epidemics in Western Society Since 1600: The Sanitary Movement and the Filth Theory of Disease” Yale University Open Courses. Accessed June 2020. https://oyc.yale.edu/history/hist-234/lecture-11#
[28] Kang, “160 Years of Central Park”
[29] Central Park Conservancy, “The Story of Seneca Village,” January 18, 2018, https://www.centralparknyc.org/blog/seneca-village
[30] Ibid.
[31] Bennet Leibman, “The Quest for Black Voting Rights in New York State,” Albany Law School Government Law Center (August 2018): 394-399.
[32] Central Park Conservancy, “The Story of Seneca Village.”
[33] Ibid.
[34] Masur, “Olmsted’s Southern Landscapes.”
[35] Witold Rybczynski, A Clearing in the Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the 19th Century (New York: Scribner, 1999), 121.
[36] Dorcea E. Taylor, The Environment and the People in American Cities, 1600s-1900s (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009): 228.
[37] “Training the ‘ignorant’ how to use a park.” Central Park History, https://www.centralparkhistory.com/timeline/timeline_1860_ignorant.html
[38] “Restricting Play in the Park.” Central Park History https://www.centralparkhistory.com/timeline/timeline_1860_play.html
[39] Rosenzweig, 215-216
[40] Ibid, 320.
[41] Ibid, 319.
[42] “Training the ignorant.”
[43] Ibid.
[44] Rosenzweig, 324-326.
[45] “The Fight Over Sunday in the Park” Central Park History, https://www.centralparkhistory.com/timeline/timeline_1860_fight.html