New York City Hall Park
by Vadim Levin
Title
New York City Hall Park
Artist
Vadim Levin
Medium
Photograph - Photograph
Description
This photograph was taken at one of the February evening at the New York City Hall Park.
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City Hall Park, located in downtown Manhattan, has played a key role in New York civic life for centuries, from its Colonial beginnings as a rebel outpost to its current function as the seat of City government. The land has been used, among other things, as a pasture, a prison, a parade ground, a public execution site, an almshouse, an art museum, and a post office.
From 1653 to 1699 this area was known as the Commons and served as a communal pasture ground for livestock. The parks western boundary was a Native American trail that later became Broadway. An almshouse for the Citys poor stood on this site from 1736 to 1797, at which point a second almshouse was built; archaeological evidence of the first structure was unearthed in 1989.
In 1757 construction began on a debtors prison and a soldiers barracks on the north end of the Commons where the Tweed Courthouse now stands. In 1765 New Yorkers protested the Stamp Act at the site, and a year later the first Liberty Pole, a commemorative mast topped by a vane featuring the word liberty, was built by pro-independence New Yorkers; a replica dating to 1921 now stands between City Hall and Broadway, near its original location. During the American Revolution (1776-1783) the British controlled New York and used the debtors prison to hold Revolutionary prisoners of war, executing 250 of them on gallows located behind the Soldiers Barracks.
Source: http://www.nycgovparks.org/parks/cityhallpark/history
Uploaded
December 6th, 2013
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