“Poor People’s Parks”: An Alternative Early Environmentalism

In the late nineteenth century, conservationists and preservationists began creating national parks in the western United States, framing these landscapes as pristine wildernesses even as they evicted Indigenous peoples whose ancestors had been there for thousands of years. As scholars first celebrated and then critiqued these advocates, national parks have remained the key location of early environmentalism. But at the very same time as wealthy nature lovers were creating these monuments to wilderness, working people and immigrants defended small and scrappy parks in the tenement districts of the nation’s largest city. This paper explores the fights for NYC’s Tompkins Square Park and the Battery between 1870 and 1900. Because these “poor people’s parks” were where urban laborers breathed healthy fresh air, played, socialized, had sex, and protested, this forgotten vein of early environmentalism focused on landscapes that were integrated into human lives. Equity was a crucial part of these struggles, as working-class immigrants recognized that wealthier and whiter New Yorkers had much more local green space When authorities welcomed infrastructure into the small pockets of green that working people crowded into, advocates began to see access to parks as a right they were being denied. Recovering advocacy for “poor people’s parks,” this paper calls for a broadening of the history of early environmentalism. Advocates who created national parks influenced the rise of a mainstream environmental movement focused on wild lands and animals, but there have always been undercurrents of activism led for and by peoples familiar with inequality and dispossession.