I’m talking about a massive park in the absolute heart of the city. Located such that is naturally surrounded by city high rises. *People are giving examples of parks that are way off in the boonies. I’m trying to say located centrally, heart of the city, you know where the high rises are. Yes I understand nyc has more, the point is centrally located.
Copied by younger cities in North Americ. You know, the cities younger than NYC that could have seen the value of setting aside a large area for parkland before it was developed.
Because other cities didn’t have a large black neighborhood to knock down.
TIL
RIP Seneca Village
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seneca_Village
To be somewhat fair, that represents a very small part of Central Park.
They used all those up for the Interstate system.
Yup, About 100 years later. What’s old is new again.
Yeah, Akron is particularly guilty here… The interbelt didn’t even even up being a useful interstate.
This is yet another absolutely shameful example of government led evil, but Seneca Village was also a small portion of what makes up Central Park. We need not imply that demolishing a thriving black community was the sole goal of Central Park to acknowledge how fundamentally fucked up this place is.
The large black neighborhoods were replaced by highways before cities could replace them with Central Park-esque projects
Well, that’s simply not true. While that may be how they found the land for Central Park, that’s not the reason why other cities haven’t made large parks like in NYC.
Portland, OR has (I think) the second biggest inner-city park in the country, and I’m fairly sure no minority neighborhoods were destroyed to create it. Way to be edgy though.
As for answering OP’s question… I’m guessing the property is just too valuable as commercial and residential land for the city governments to want to redesignate as parks. Especially now with the housing crisis and all.
It’s called a generalization. Way to be edgy though.
In fairness, they did try to obtain property that also had two wealthy families on twice (with injunctions that failed) before looking at the Central Park area that Seneca Village was also in.
Of course that doesn’t sound as much as a hot take that you gave.