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The First Park Proposal
For more than five years, scattered editorials in William Cullen Bryant's Post and Horace Greeley's Tribune had extolled the "beautiful woodland" of the picturesque Jones Wood estate, 150 acres between 66th and 75th streets and Third Avenue and the East River. A number of wealthy New York families, including the Alvords, and the Frederick Primes (who attended Minturn's earliest meetings), owned land and country houses nearby. In the fall of 1850 James Beekman, a Whig state senator and wealthy uptown neighbor of the Joneses and Schermerhorns (who owned the land), lobbied with the aldermen for the park. [ Ch112]
Between the fall of 1850 and the summer of 1851, the proposal for a large landscaped park moved quickly from casual conversation in the parlors where the Minturns gathered with their friends to a state law giving the city the power to take the Jones Wood site. Editors and politicians declared that "all classes" backed the project. Merchant families maintained that the park would establish the city's metropolitan stature, bring order to the lower classes, and certify their own credentials as a metropolitan gentry. Uptown landowners believed the park would ensure the respectable and profitable development of uptown Manhattan. The alliance of these groups seemed to promise that New Yorkers would soon be enjoying seaside breezes at Jones Wood park.
But just as the project seemed close to realization, dissenters from such disparate corners of the city as the Journal of Commerce and the Staats-Zeitung began to raise troubling questions. Why was the park to be located on the East Side? Why was it to be financed through general tax revenues instead of through benefit assessments on adjacent landowners? Did "all classes" really want the Jones Wood park, and would all benefit from it?
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