block or two each, such as City Hall Park and Washington Square. Andrew Jackson Downing, the first great American landscape architect, dismissed them as “mere grass plots of verdure.” He wanted a vast “People’s Park” that could serve, in his words, as the “lungs of the city,” where the working classes could find respite from the ever-increasingly noisy, crowded, dirty, and unhealthy metropolis.

Many of the city’s merchants and wealthier citizens wanted a large, landscaped park like those that had been springing up in the major European cities beginning in the eighteenth century. This not only would give the rich a place to parade their carriages but would demonstrate to the world that New York was becoming a prosperous and fashionable city of the first rank.

Naturally, this being New York, a political battle soon erupted over just where to site the park. East Side landowners wanted it there; West Side landowners insisted it be on their side of the island. After three years of maneuvering, the state in 1853 sanctioned the use of eminent domain to buy 778 acres in the middle of Manhattan (expanded to 843 a decade later) from its 561 owners for more than five million dollars. One-third of the price was to be raised by assessing adjacent landowners for the increased value of their property, the rest paid by the state.

The state government, firmly in Republican hands, established the Central Park Commission to keep the park and its biggest construction budget out of the hands of the firmly Democratic city government. The members of the commission were mostly wealthy. They invited architects to submit plans, with a top prize of $2000 (a middle-class annual income at the time). Thirty-three plans came in, and the winners were the English-born Vaux and Olmsted, who had already been appointed superintendent of the park.

The construction project was mammoth by the standards of the day. Blasting away unwanted rock outcroppings and turning swamps into lakes consumed more gunpowder than the Battle of Gettysburg. Almost three million cubic yards of soil were removed or redistributed and 270,000 trees and shrubs planted. Miles of paths and roads were built, along with 36 bridges and arches, no two of them alike and many of them masterpieces.

Even before it officially opened, the park was crowded with visitors who used it for myriad purposes that ranged from people watching to bird watching to ice skating to baseball to dog walking. Many just used it to admire the sheer beauty of the place and its art, such as the Angel of the Waters statue that soars over Bethesda Fountain.

With so many citizens using the park (250,000 on a nice weekend, 25 million over the course of a year), it has always needed a lot of maintenance. But when control was transferred to the city’s Department of Parks (which has

its headquarters in the park), politics began to work its insidious way, and Central Park began to get short shrift in allocations from the city budget.

Maintenance does not have much political sex appeal, for the simple reason that keeping the lawns mowed and the benches painted doesn’t get anyone on television or the front page. As the city’s budget woes deepened in the mid-twentieth century, the maintenance was relentlessly cut back, while the “anything goes” attitude of the late 1960s allowed people to behave in ways that would never have been tolerated earlier. One sociologist even argued that vandalism was simply another way of using the park.

The owners of the immensely valuable real estate that surrounds the park became more and more alarmed as what had been their properties’ prime asset began to slide toward being a liability. Several advocacy groups banded together and began to lobby for change in how the park was controlled. In 1980, they founded the Central Park Conservancy and got the administration of Mayor Ed Koch to agree to its taking over control and maintenance of the park, under contract with the city. Meanwhile, the city greatly increased the police presence in the park to rid it of graffiti artists and muggers.

For the most part privately funded by members and contributions from adjoining property owners, the Conservancy was able to greatly increase the park’s budget. Today it provides 85 percent of Central Park’s $23 million budget. It has also raised $300 million for capital projects and an endowment fund of $90 million. In 2004, unpaid volunteers contributed no less than 32,000 man-hours to keeping the park clean and beautiful.

And what a difference 25 years makes. The once-derelict buildings, such as the Dairy (now the visitor center) were restored, as were many of the rustic shelters where people can sit and admire the view. Bethesda Fountain, the very heart of the park, was restored, and the angel once more dips her toe into its falling waters. The Sheep Meadow, 15 acres of greensward, and the Great Lawn are once more healthy, green, and protected from overuse. With three years of effort, the graffiti was scrubbed away and has been kept away ever since.

It is all an object lesson in what can be achieved by thinking creatively about handling public responsibilities. Bureaucrats and politicians are inevitably hedged in both by legal restrictions (they have, for instance, only two funding sources, borrowing and the taxpayer) and by their own divergent self-interests. Placing responsibility for the park with an organization that has no other responsibility and can raise money from people who have a direct self-interest in the park has made Vaux and Olmsted’s masterpiece once more the pride and joy of New Yorkers.