#jackie kennedy onasiss reservior

[notesonnewyork]

New York by Numbers (2)

If you forced the street grid upon Central Park’s 843 acres, you’d have chopped it into some 34,000 tax lots. But, no need to try it at home, the State of New York already did. Back in 1853, after the Legislature used eminent domain to acquire the land that would become Central Park, its Commission of Estimate and Assessment (CEA) sent out surveyors to perform the feat. Two years later, they not only beveled the ground into all those tax lots, they also determined that 561 proprietors held the expanse. Needless to say, according to historians Mike Wallace and Edwin G. Burrows, “the 1,600 or so Irish, German, and [free] blacks who lived on the land...were evicted by 1857,” but how did the CEA deal with all those property owners?

It paid them a total of $5,127,637.30, or $150.81 per lot. As tallied to the penny in the state comptroller’s report for the period from July 1857 to July 1858, the New York Times also discovered that the CEA spent $275,000.00 to obtain the Arsenal and its lot at 5th Avenue and 64th Street. All told, that brought the initial expenditure on Central Park to $5,402,637.30; or, if you prefer, $161,642,432.51 in today’s terms. So how did the CEA pay for it?

Well, for one, as Richard E. Foglesong attested in his book Planning the Capitalist City [1986], the CEA assessed a total of $1,657,590 on the new park’s adjacent landowners for the “benefit” of its proximity. The rest, well, that was left for the City’s Common Council to collect from its other citizens. At this point in New York history, the State Legislature managed almost all of the city’s finances, surely placing the Council in an unenviable position. As if to remind its readers where not to direct their percolating anger, the Times wrote “The Common Council and the Departments are sometimes held responsible for seemingly excessive increases in taxes, over which they can exercise no control.” 

Additionally, since the CEA borrowed money to purchase Central Park, the interest on that debt was also passed along to city taxpayers. In 1858 alone, the state comptroller doled out a $255,760 levy. But that wasn’t all. Before Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux’s Greensward Plan for the park was initiated, buildings, rubble, animals, and other unmentionable debris had to be cleared from the land. To make that happen, the Common Council appointed a Board of Commissioners to manage the operation. As of 1858, it had borrowed $600,000 to pay laborers and procure the necessary equipment. Now neither the comptroller’s report nor the Times is clear on the interest involved, so suffice it to say that preparing the future Central Park to be landscaped required an expenditure of at least $6,533,397.30--aka $187,938,007.11 by today’s accounting. And what unfathomable sum was needed to complete the whole of Olmsted and Vaux’s vision? Well, that’s an investigation for another post. 

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(Photo by Riff Chorusriff. Gazing south from the top of the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir in Central Park. Midtown and the monstrosity at 432 Park Avenue are 36 blocks away. July 2, 2017.)