Bushnell Park and the First People's Vote for a Public Park

The roughly forty acres of green in the middle of Hartford represent a first in American civic history. Bushnell Park was the first public park in the United States to be conceived, built, and paid for by its citizens through a popular vote. When Hartford voters approved spending public money to acquire the land in eighteen fifty-four, it had never been done that way before.

The idea came from the Reverend Horace Bushnell, the pastor of North Church. Bushnell was alarmed by what industrial expansion was doing to Hartford's working poor, people who lived in crowded tenements without access to clean air or open ground. In eighteen fifty-three, he convinced the Hartford City Council to hear his proposal for a public park.

They voted unanimously to proceed. The following year, Hartford residents approved the expenditure through a public ballot. Bushnell turned to his friend Frederick Law Olmsted to design the layout.

Olmsted, a Hartford native who would later design Central Park, recommended his colleague Jacob Weidenmann, a Swiss-born landscape architect. Weidenmann shaped the land into graceful paths and clustered plantings that shielded visitors from the noise of the surrounding city. Today the park holds the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Arch, a Victorian carousel, and sculptures accumulated across nearly two centuries of civic life.

The Park River, which once flowed visibly through it, was buried underground in the nineteen forties, though its path still shapes the landscape. Horace Bushnell died in eighteen seventy-six. The park was renamed in his honor.

A statue of him stands inside it, a minister who argued, successfully, that public green space was not a luxury but a right.