Elm Park: America's First Public Park Purchase

The green space to your west has a claim that every American city should know about. Elm Park, or more precisely the land the park sits on, was purchased by the city of Worcester in eighteen fifty-four, making it one of the very first parcels of land in the United States ever bought with public funds expressly for use as a public park.

The purchase came just months after Hartford, Connecticut bought the land for Bushnell Park, in the same year. Worcester and Hartford essentially ran neck and neck in establishing the idea that a democratic city owes its citizens open green space, not just streets and buildings and factories.

The original twenty-seven acres, called the New Common, were redesigned by the firm of Frederick Law Olmsted, the same landscape architect who designed Central Park in New York. Olmsted's firm returned again in the early nineteen hundreds to refine the design and add playground infrastructure.

From eighteen seventy-four to eighteen eighty-four, the basic park plan took shape: the reflecting pools, the walking paths, the bridges over the linked ponds. In eighteen eighty-eight, Newton Hill was added as a separate rustic section. The whole complex is now about sixty acres.

The scale seems modest compared to Central Park or Fairmount Park. But the principle it established is not modest at all. Worcester declared in eighteen fifty-four that public land held for the pleasure and health of ordinary people was a legitimate use of public money. That idea spread across American cities in the decades that followed. Elm Park is where American municipal parks began to become a right rather than a gift.