Western parks were originally designed as scenic drives for the wealthy

Evidence

Once, in the days—a decade or even two decades before—in which the young Robert Moses had been planning parks and roads, the answer to that question had been quite clear. Driving in automobiles had then still been thought of primarily as pleasure, a pursuit for comfortable middle-class or wealthy fathers (the only fathers who could afford automobiles) taking their families for an outing, just as driving horse-drawn carriages had been a pursuit for pleasure. And it had therefore been important to insure that these families had the most pleasant surroundings possible to drive through, and within the city’s limits the most pleasant surroundings were those provided by parks. The provision of pleasant scenery for drivers to enjoy was, in fact, a primary function of parks; that was why every great city in Europe had its great driving park, Paris its Bois de Boulogne, Rome its Pincian Hill, Florence its Cascine and London its Hyde Park. Roads had belonged in parks in the nineteenth century—so much so that, if necessary, other values of a park had to be sacrificed to provide the roads with the best of the park’s scenery. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 2072

Categorization

• XREF: Directly contextualizes the earlier claim that Moses invented parks as sites of active recreation — parks began as scenery for carriage-era driving. — connects to: Moses built no parks for the neighborhoods that needed them most — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 2110; Wealthy civic elites set aside specialized public spaces long before the modern era — Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order and Action in…, 276
• ADDENDUM: Useful context for article 1 on trees/infrastructure — parks originally built around a mobility mode (carriages), like modern infrastructure.

Broader Connections

• Wealthy civic elites set aside specialized public spaces long before the modern era #expands (0.75) — Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order and Action in…, 276