poet Edgar Allan Poe wrote, unsurprisingly gloomy, from his rented farmhouse uptown. “In some thirty years, every noble cliff will be a pier and the whole island will be densely desecrated by buildings of brick, with portentous facades of brownstone.” Much of Manhattan was still farmland. (During the Revolutionary War, George Washington rode through cornfields on his way to rally his troops against the British at the corner of 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue.) Yet the commissioners’ plan included hardly any green space at all, explaining that “those large arms of the sea which embrace Manhattan
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