Description
TitleEscaping Gotham
Date Created2021
Other Date2021-05 (degree)
Extent1 online resource (x, 446 pages)
Description“Escaping Gotham” recovers a forgotten vein of environmental activism that grew from green spaces where working people of nineteenth-century New York City spent their scraps of leisure time. Yearning for relief from draining conditions in the dense, impoverished, repressive, and filthy neighborhoods of lower Manhattan, downtowners crowded into a few parks that municipal authorities neglected while investing in green spaces in the wealthier uptown district. Downtowners also patronized cheap commercial gardens that reaped profits on the edges of a city without enough public green space. I explore the landscapes of these “communal greens,” where experiencing nature merged with health seeking, diversion, building community, making a living, engaging in resistance, and pursuing pleasure. To the city’s working people, greenery and fresh air inspired a sense of levity and liberty. As downtowners played, partied, and protested in communal greens, wealthier and better-remembered urbanites made somber, sober, and solo sojourns to wild places and advocated to preserve this scenery as state and national parks. To those who sacralized wilderness, communal greens seemed unnatural and the people who spent time there loved vice, not nature. Yet these landscapes generated powerful environmental ideas and activism. Experiences in communal greens taught downtowners to value small pockets of nature that were integrated into urban communities. Over the second half of the nineteenth century, downtowners fought for local parks that municipal authorities framed as wasted space ripe for development. These advocates critiqued what we now call environmental inequity and advanced a powerful and enduring view of access to parks as not a privilege, but a right for all. Desire for the particular kind of escape found at communal greens, I argue, fueled the rise of this “downtown environmentalism.”
NotePh.D.
NoteIncludes bibliographical references
Genretheses, ETD doctoral
LanguageEnglish
CollectionSchool of Graduate Studies Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Organization NameRutgers, The State University of New Jersey
RightsThe author owns the copyright to this work.
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