Before Parks: Public Landscapes in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Boston, New York, and Philadelphia

By the late nineteenth century, U.S. cities were busy building public parks for residents’ leisure and social activities. Before the development of parks, city dwellers had a variety of public spaces available to them, but these landscapes rarely receive the credit due to them. Using historical newspapers, journals, and city documents, this article argues that the very practical public landscapes of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Boston, New York, and Philadelphia played an important, though frequently unrecognized, role in the development of the nineteenth-century American public park. The very modest utilitarian village green, common, square, and parade ground are the unsung ancestors of public parks. Although they usually did not begin as places for leisure, residents slowly began to layer on new uses and functions, gradually transforming them into park-like places and creating a shared familiarity with the types of activities that would become core to the public park.