The Changing Purpose of Parks in 19th-Century New York City
In a lively, illustrated lecture, Dr. Catherine McNeur, award-winning author of Taming Manhattan: Environmental Battles in the Antebellum City (Harvard University Press, 2014), will discuss the changing ways that New Yorkers envisioned and used parks throughout the nineteenth century. These green oases transformed from spaces for military exercises and promenading, to engines for public health and social change.
Dr. McNeur will talk about early parks in the city, as well as Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux’s hopes for Central Park. In addition, she will speak about issues of gentrification and environmental justice in the nineteenth-century city, as people and practices were displaced for a new kind of urban nature.
Time: 18:00 GMT
