“Open to the People for Their Free Assembly”: Tompkins Square Park, 1850–1880

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.