What’s 843 acres, gets over 30 million visitors a year, and is green all over?
It’s also home to 26,000 trees, 9,000 benches, a carousel, a world famous museum, a zoo, aaaaand….the Global Citizen Festival!
Alright so maybe I gave it away (well, maybe the title gave it away). Yes, it’s New York’s Central Park.
The Global Citizen team just got back from a walk through of all the amazing behind the scenes work going on in anticipation of Saturday (T-2 days people!), and it got us thinking…. Central Park is pretty spectacular. And it has hosted A LOT of important, revolutionary events.
The creation of a park this big and this diverse in a city as populated as New York is revolutionary in and of itself. Central Park could have been apartment buildings, but instead it’s a public space, a green space, a cultural space. It’s where kids learn how to ride a bike, where skaters can skate and power walkers walk, where visitors explore. It’s where Holden Caulfield found peace and New Yorkers found solace in the days after 9/11. It’s the closest thing Manhattan has to a “beach.”
It’s a place where people can come together, just as tens of thousands will on Saturday, in an effort to change the world.
So, as Central Park gears up for one ridiculous weekend (one day before the Global Citizen Festival, Pope Francis is leading a procession through the park and greeting 80,000 people) I thought it would be an apt time to pay homage. Here within, a collective Global Citizen tribute to Central Park.
It starts way back in 1853….
...when New York decided to set aside one large plot of land to create the US’s first major public park. There was a competition to decide who would design the park, and Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux won. At the time, New York City’s population was already booming, and people needed a place to get away from all the crowds and chaos. Olmsted and Vaux designed the park with public health and the creation of a civic society in mind. The park would be the first of its kind in the US, and ushered in the urban park movement, considered a great symbol of American democracy.
From the get-go Central Park has been a space for the people, and a space of equality. Olmsted and Vaux intentionally did away with a lot of the more elaborate designs typical of European parks, like ornate entranceways, to signal that everyone was welcome regardless of their social class.
The park and social movements
Since the 19th century the park has seen a lot of ups and downs. There were rat infestations and crumbling buildings, followed by moments of investment, restoration and improvement. But through it all Central Park has remained a fundamental social and public space.
A few highlights of its history:
Hooverville: During the Great Depression, what is now the Great Lawn was transformed into a shanty-town, one of the many “Hoovervilles” (as they were dubbed, after US President Herbert Hoover) that cropped up as a result of economic hardships. Over 20 homeless families camped out in the park, and eventually the public came to sympathize with them.
All you need is love: Central Park became a major site of the “Love-ins” and “Be-ins” that were held in protest of the Vietnam War, environmental issues and racism throughout the late 1960s and 1970s. In 1967, The Grateful Dead performed a concert as part of an anti-war protest. In 1968, Martin Luther King’s wife addressed a crowd of 90,000 following her husband’s death. In 1970, there was the first Be-in for gay rights.
Walk (or run) for a good cause: As a large, central, and iconic spot, Central Park is the beginning and end point of most charity walks and runs. The AIDS walk, the People's Climate March, the Unity Walk, breast cancer walks, and the New York Marathon all owe their successes, in part, to the beauty of meeting in Central Park.
Shakespeare gets a makeover: Central Park’s Delacorte Theatre (located just southwest of the Great Lawn) became home to the first ever Shakespeare in the Park In the early 1960’s. The idea was to bring Shakespeare’s plays to life in an outdoor theatre that was widely accessible to the general public (and most of the time, totally free of charge).
Boogie down: Thanks to the City Parks Foundation, a non-profit that offers programs in parks throughout NYC, we have Summerstage, aka a lot of free, awesome, performances. There are concerts and film nights and poetry readings, all of it completely open to the public and totally free of charge. It embodies everything the park was intended to be.
So when thousands and thousands of celebrities, diplomats, politicians, activists and (most importantly) GLOBAL CITIZENS, join forces at Central Park’s Great Lawn, we won’t just be shaping the world’s future, but continuing a legacy of the park’s past.