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A CENTRAL PARK FOR THE WORLD
n Tuesday, August 9, 1864, The New York Times published an unassuming
editorial titled “Adirondack.”
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Despite consuming nearly a full column
down the right side of the page, to a causal reader that day the topic might have seemed
trivial, or at the very least indistinguishable from the news that surrounded it. Included
was a report of the city’s expenses for the coming year, intelligence of Admiral
Farragut’s campaign against the port of Mobile, and a letter praising the good people of
New York for providing blackberry wine “for our noble and suffering soldiers”
entrenched in their third year of civil war.
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Inspired perhaps by the oppressive summer
heat, the unnamed author—likely a man named Charles Loring Brace—felt compelled
to extol the advantages of the vast North Woods, where “[w]ithin an easy day’s ride of
our great City,” there exists, he said, “a tract of country fitted to make a Central Park for
the world.”
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By 1864 the city of New York had swelled to more than 800,000 inhabitants,
easily surpassing Philadelphia as the most populous city in America. Over a span of
less than twenty years, New York had doubled in size into a metropolis that rivaled the
great commercial and manufacturing centers of the world.
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But its working-class was
O
Convention