Definition
Central Park is the 843-acre landscape park at the geographic center of Manhattan, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux in the 1850s. By the time Robert Moses inherited it as parks commissioner in 1934, it was decrepit; he scrubbed, replanted, and reorganized it, but also blanketed it with playgrounds, ballfields, and asphalt that Olmsted's original plan had deliberately omitted.
The park is therefore a Moses case study with two faces: the rescuer who restored a ruined civic asset, and the modernizer who imposed an active-recreation grid on a contemplative landscape.
Why it matters
How it works
A great urban park has multiple constituencies — joggers, picnickers, parents, naturalists, dog-walkers, lovers of quiet — whose needs partly conflict. A commissioner who answers only to one constituency (here, families seeking active recreation) can produce visible improvements that simultaneously erase quieter uses, and the loss only becomes visible when the affected users mobilize.
Moses's Central Park playbook was to deliver many small, photographable improvements quickly, financing each from federal or city funds and surfing the public approval that followed. The model broke the day mothers of the Upper West Side blocked a parking-lot bulldozer in defense of a playground he had ordered removed, demonstrating that even his political invulnerability had a limit.