#MapMondays! Ernerst Flagg’s 1904 proposal to sell off Central Park and built a grand park

#MapMondays! Ernerst Flagg’s 1904 proposal to sell off Central Park and built a grand parkway connecting City Hall with the Harlem River. Flagg explained the need for the project, “[at] four times the width of that of Fifth Avenue, there would still remain for gardens distributed on both sides of it a space about as wide as Madison Square is long. Now imagine this strip of verdure extended for ten miles through the heart of the town, shaded by trees, ornamented with shrubbery, fountains, statuary, arches, and every other suitable embellishment, and where could one find its equal? The finest of avenues of the old world would pale in comparison. The Mall at Washington as it is proposed to rearrange it would not be as wide and only about one-fifth as long…

“What can be said for an improvement which practically closed the two central avenues, and placed the park on the natural axis of traffic? Central Park is still regarded by most New Yorkers with pride… but the time must soon come when the disadvantages of its location will be too apparent to be hid…

Ornamental grounds of this sort should not be so wide as to be inconvenient and serve as a barrier between the adjacent parts of the city as Central Park does…

Since Central Park was laid out conditions have changed; with the completion of the proposed lines of rapid transit, the real suburbs will become as accessible to the mass of the population of the future as the park has been in the past. What is needed now is, not a suburban central park, but agreeable ways to reach the suburban park system for which provision has fortunately been made…

There is a crying need here for long stretches of grass, avenues of trees, and gardens, so placed that they can be conveniently reached by all the people… To obtain the funds, it would only be necessary to sell off land which the city now owns, and apply the proceeds to the purchase of other land of at least equal extent. If those parts of the park lying between Fifth Avenue and the extension of Sixth Avenue on the east side and between Eighth Avenue and the extension of Seventh Avenue on the west side.” (at Central Park)
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