Before Central Park
by Sara Cedar Miller
PUBLISHER: Colombia University Press (JUNE 29, 2022)
LANGUAGE: English
HARDCOVER: 624 Pages
ISBN-10 : 0231181949
ISBN-13 : 978-0231181945
Customer Review – 5 Stars
A new book is recommended to NAHC followers: Sara Cedar Miller, in her comprehensive new work, Before Central Park, devotes Chapter 1 to New Amsterdam. She recounts how, in 1637, Isaac de Forest and his brother-in-law Dr. Johannes de la Montagne, with permission from the Dutch West India Company, moved from tiny New Amsterdam to plant tobacco on a 200-acre bouwerie, located at what is today the northern end of Central Park. The first chapter in Sara Cedar Miller’s Before Central Park tells the fascinating story of this family and how, despite inhospitable terrain and climate for the cultivation of tobacco, they succeeded in their dream–and fledged the settlement of Columbia University Press.
Winner – 2023 John Brinkerhoff Jackson Book Prize, UVA Center for Cultural Landscapes
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.
