Research Catalog

Title

Before Central Park / Sara Cedar Miller.

Author

Miller, Sara Cedar

Publication

New York : Columbia University Press, [2022]

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

x, 611 pages : illustrations (some color), facsimiles, maps, portraits; 25 cm

Summary

"With more than eight hundred sprawling green acres in the middle of one of the world's densest cities, Central Park is an urban masterpiece. Designed in the middle of the nineteenth century by the landscape architects Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, it is a model for city parks worldwide. But before it became Central Park, the land was the site of farms, businesses, churches, wars, and burial grounds-and home to many different kinds of New Yorkers. This book is the authoritative account of the place that would become Central Park. From the first Dutch family to settle on the land through the political crusade to create America's first major urban park, Sara Cedar Miller chronicles two and a half centuries of history. She tells the stories of Indigenous hunters, enslaved people and enslavers, American patriots and British loyalists, the Black landowners of Seneca Village, Irish pig farmers, tavern owners, Catholic sisters, Jewish protesters, and more. Miller unveils a British fortification and camp during the Revolutionary War, a suburban retreat from the yellow fever epidemics at the turn of the nineteenth century, and the properties that a group of free Black Americans used to secure their right to vote. Tales of political chicanery, real estate speculation, cons, and scams stand alongside democratic idealism, the striving of immigrants, and powerfully human lives. Before Central Park shows how much of the history of early America is still etched upon the landscapes of Central Park today"--

Subject

• 1600-1865
• Central Park (New York, N.Y.) > History
• New York (N.Y.) > History > 1775-1865
• New York (N.Y.) > History > Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775
• New York (State) > New York

Genre/Form

History.

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references and index.

Call Number

JFE 22-4436

ISBN

• 9780231181945
• 0231181949

LCCN

2021027671

OCLC

1251501710

Author

Miller, Sara Cedar, author.

Title

Before Central Park / Sara Cedar Miller.

Publisher

New York : Columbia University Press, [2022]

Type of Content

text

Type of Medium

unmediated

Type of Carrier

volume

Bibliography

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Chronological Term

1600-1865

Other Form:

Online version: Miller, Sara Cedar. Before Central Park New York : Columbia University Press, 2022 9780231543903 (DLC) 2021027672

Research Call Number

JFE 22-4436