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Listen to part of a lecture in an Urban Planning class.

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(female professor) If you ever visited New York City, you’ll know that hidden among all the busy streets and skyscrapers is something that might seem out of place.

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That would be Central Park, a huge expanse of trees, fields and lakes, nearly four square kilometers in size.

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Now, I doubt most people have ever even considered how Central Park came to be.

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But there’s actually a lot of history leading up to its creation.

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You see, public parks, or I should say the modern urban vision for public parks, namely open space preserved in its natural state or pretty close to it, for recreational purposes, well, that first emerged as a concept in the late 1700s in Europe.

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Of course even before that people were aware that plants and trees were very helpful for purifying polluted air.

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And in the industrial cities of the time, where there was a lot of factory smoke that was very important.

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For example, in London, there were royal parks.

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Frankly, I don’t think they were as effectively utilized as parks today, because they were owned by royalty and rarely opened to the public.

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But, these parks did help clean the air so much that they were sometimes known as the lungs of the city.

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Anyway, it’s in the late 1700s that we first see the creation of a modern urban park intended specifically for the public.

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That was in Munich, Germany, and it was called the Englischer Garten.

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The Englischer Garten as it might sound was designed to look like an English landscape park, very natural looking.

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It had manmade lakes and sort of gentle sloping hills with pathways, trees.

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This was basically the ancestor of many modern parks worldwide and it had numerous successors, including a park in London called Regents Park.

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Originally, Regents Park was private hunting grounds but it was remodeled and opened to the public in 1841 for their pleasure and enjoyment.

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During that era, parks became a really hot topic in England.

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You’ve probably all seen in newspaper or magazines articles about gardening or interior design. Those are popular topics these days.

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Well, in the mid-1800s, articles about public parks were the hot topic.

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They were all over the media. Something people really enjoyed reading about.

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Well, as the years went by, public parks continued to be popular in England.

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And the concepts and designs spread to the rest of Europe and North America.

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And it was around this time that a public garden in England was visited by a man named Frederick Law Olmsted.

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Olmsted was a United States citizen who ended up becoming one of the principal designers of Central Park, which was actually quite remarkable considering he had no training in the field of landscape design.

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He was a journalist who happened to visit England in 1850 to, well, to write about their urban parks.

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He was especially interested in one in Liverpool called Birkenhead Park.

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Birkenhead Park was yet another of the open public spaces established by the British government and it really made an impression on Olmsted.

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He ended up writing a piece about it, which was published to stir up interest for a similar kind of park in America.

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And he succeeded admirably. This article was the impetus for public support for the building of a park in New York City.

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Well, city officials there responded to this favorable public opinion and started a contest to design a big park right in the middle of the city.

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I bet you can guess who the winner was: Frederick Law Olmsted.

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Along with an architect friend, Olmsted submitted the design that combined function with natural beauty inspired by parks like Birkenhead. But not everyone liked his design.

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In fact, he had many critics. Some people weren’t fans of all that open green space.

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Others wanted to incorporate more structures and architecture on the grounds.

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And still others thought modification should be made to include ideas that appeared in some of the losing plans.

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There was a great deal of debate, a lot of it political in nature, but, eventually, Olmsted accepted the compromise that actually turned out to work in the park’s favor.

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In response to his critics, Olmsted changed his design to include separate paths for vehicles and pedestrians, paths that went over and under each other and never crossed.

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That allowed people to enjoy the park without being disturbed by the noise and dust of carriages, or nowadays cars.

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It was a revolutionary idea and it wouldn’t have come about if not for that debate.

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