New York’s Tompkins Square Park, a 10.5 acre public space on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, has a long history of civil disorder, elaborated through public memory more than through actual fact. The park’s conversion into a military drill ground for New York’s wealthy and powerful Seventh Regiment in the years after the Civil War was driven by elite anxieties about protest and urban disorder that were amplified by growing class and ethnic hostilities and a changing social order. Despite the fact that park commissioners found other, more suitable locations for a drill ground site, state legislators with ties to Tammany Hall pushed through legislation that led to the park’s destruction. But within 15 years, popular neighborhood protest would see the park restored to its original use as an urban gathering place and social center, a change that foretold an evolution in elite understanding of the uses of public space and the beginning of the city’s Small Parks Movement.

“Open to the People for Their Free Assembly”: Tompkins Square Park, 1850-1880 Co-Winner of the 2010 JSH Student Essay Competition

have long been seen as quintessentially American urban forms, symbolic of the nation that emerged in the nineteenth century. The powerful rectilinear grid— an informing idea made physical—was dedicated to making settlement and development convenient without regard to class or social status. Breathtaking in its scope, the grid predicted a giant future metropolis that would service a global marketplace. Central Park was equally ambitious, a universal open space designed for the use of all citizens, preserving some contact with the agrarian pastoral ideal on which the nation was founded. While these symbolic urban forms were not as different from European models as the rhetoric surrounding them often claimed, they were unique in their relentlessness expression of a particular political ideal: the American democracy.1 Although overshadowed by these enormous urban emblems of America’s ideals, Union Square, located at Fourteenth Street in New York City, has played a different but equally central role in symbolizing democracy, serving as a place for democratic action from the time of the Civil War until today. Although it is an anomaly in the grid and although the intentions and forms behind its original design were quite different from those of Central Park, throughout its history the square has held an unplanned but prominent place in the political life of the city and the nation. The Republican Urban Landscape

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Deborah S. Gardner

Papers

Tompkins Square: Past and Present