If any of our brethren of the public press should see fit to support this project, we are ready to resign in their favor any claim to the credit of originally suggesting it.
Bryant referred to the beauty and utility of Regent’s Park in London, the Alameda in Madrid, the Champs Elysées in Paris, and the Prater in Vienna. By the official plan for New York, drawn up in 1807, an area of two hundred and forty acres had been reserved between Twenty-third and Thirty-fourth Streets, and Third and Seventh Avenues, to be called the Parade; this, however, had been reduced by degrees to the six or seven acres of Madison Square. At the beginning of the century any one had been able to walk in a half hour from his home to the open fields, but it now seemed that all Manhattan would soon be covered with brick and mortar.
The editor’s proposal was not for the area now included in Central Park, and was for a comparatively small tract, though Bryant had understated its size--it contained about one hundred and sixty acres, against eight hundred and forty-three in Central Park to-day. But it would be a magnificent park compared with any then existing, and the suggestion was sufficient to open a discussion. Jones’s Wood, as the tract was called, was the last remnant of the primeval forest on the East River, as wild as when the Dutch had settled on the island. It was the subject of many a tale and tradition connected with the infant days of the colony, and was reputed to have been the favorite resort of pirates who descended through Hell Gate and landed there to bury their treasure and hold their revels. The first John Jones purchased it when it was called the “Louvre Farm,” in 1803, and a son by the same name succeeded him. In time it became a favorite nutting and fishing ground. Anglers would sit in the shade of its rocky bluffs and overhanging elms and cast their lines into the deep waters of the East River, while in autumn boys would wander through its recesses clubbing the branches above. “What a place of delight Jones’s Wood used to be in the olden days!” exclaimed “Felix Oldboy” in the eighties.
Nor was it long until Bryant himself suggested the alternative scheme for a central park. From time to time he recurred editorially to the subject, now expatiating upon the ever-increasing need for a city breathing place, now pointing to what European cities had done. In 1845 he was in England. From London he wrote (June 24) a glowing description of the fresh and verdurous expanse of Hyde Park, St. James’ Park, Kensington Gardens, and Regent’s Park, and in this letter he spoke of a “central” reservation in New York: