The Park and the People

Maria Konnikova

1 Central Park almost didn't exist. When it was first proposed, no comparable urban green space could be found in the whole of the United States—and it seemed unlikely that one would arise on land that could be put to other, more profitable use—especially with New York real estate values on a steady rise. But on May 5, 1851, Mayor Ambrose Kingsland proposed that a large public park might be just the thing for the growing city.

2 Easier proposed than done. What followed Kingsland's initial suggestion was three years of intense debate over the theoretical park's location, size, cost, and control. Where would it be built and how? And whose interests would be represented in the process?

3 After several years of proposals and counterproposals, the legislature finally settled on a single site: between 5th and 8th Avenue, beginning at 58th Street and extending up to 106th. By January 1854, the location was finalized. But even then, success was far from assured. Not only was the land swampy and rocky—not the best of locations for extensive development—but it held a sizable population of immigrants and locals—and even if they could be moved successfully, there was no consensus on what the park would look like or what it would entail.

4 It would take two years to clear the 1,600-odd residents out of the space. Irish pig farmers, German gardeners, and an entire community of black locals, complete with schools and church became a thing of memory.

5 In 1857, the city announced a contest: what would be the best landscape for the new park? Thirty-three proposals were submitted. The winner: a blueprint called the Greensward Plan and aimed to incorporate English pastoral designs with an overall aesthetic unity. It would have recreations for the wealthy—carriage drives, horse-riding paths, structured walks—as well as space for more democratic activities—the lawns and the ponds, the rambles and the meadows. One of the key components of the plan was that the park should remain uninterrupted by the encroachments of urban life: all of its transverse roads were to be sunk eight feet below the surface.

6 The vision was grand. To get there would take 20,000 men and 166 tons of dynamite, six million bricks and 35,000 barrels of cement, 65,000 cubic yards of gravel and 19,000 cubic yards of sand. Over 270,000 trees would be planted and three million cubic yards of soil moved. Four waterbodies would be constructed from scratch. At the end, it would take even more gun powder to blast through the rocky ridges, and the total cost would skyrocket to $10 million, three times the city's budget for 1850.

7 Central Park first opened to the public in the winter of 1859, though it would be a full twenty years from the Greensward Plan's approval for it to be completed in full. Today, it's hailed as a masterpiece of prescient urban planning, a synonym for New York's vitality and beauty. But it's also something more. Central Park may well be one of the reasons that New York City now boasts the single fastest increase in life expectancy of any city in the U.S. to the point where its citizens' average lifespan—82—now equals that of Japan.

8 A new study in Psychological Science reveals that the benefits of urban green space—and the more of it, the better—extend far beyond the purely ornamental. Increases in green space correspond to increases in happiness, decreases in depression, and a general elevation to well-being and life satisfaction. While we may not be happier if we live in California, it seems like we certainly are if we live with access to extensive greenery.

9 The British Household Panel Survey is a national survey of UK households that was conducted annually from 1991 to 2008. For the present study, researchers took data from over 5,000 households (and 10,000 individuals), focusing on the roughly 84% of respondents that were categorized as "urban" dwellers. They looked at three main data points: responses to the General Health Questionnaire (a series of 12 questions that asks you to do things like compare your happiness or depression levels in the last six weeks to your "usual" state), a single question of life satisfaction ("How dissatisfied or satisfied are you with your life overall?" on a scale of 1 to 7), and amount of local-area green space. What they wanted to know was simple: all things being equal, would the same person be happier when he lived in urban areas with more greenery than in areas with less?

10 What they found was a clear relationship between the amount of local green space, mental distress, and life satisfaction. Specifically, the more green space, the higher the overall life satisfaction and the lower the mental distress. (And yes, they did control for all the things you'd expect: the income, employment, education, and local crime rates of each area, as well as the age, marital status, health, income, education, employment status, residence type and household space, and commute length of the individual participants.)

11 The size of the effect becomes clear if you compare it to two of the largest known predictors of long-term happiness, marital status and employment. People who live one standard deviation above the green space mean, as compared to one standard deviation below, experience a decrease in mental distress that is about one-third as large as the difference between being single and being married—and one-tenth as large as that between being unemployed and employed. For increases in life satisfaction, the comparisons are 28% and 21%, respectively.

12 That's fairly impressive. And it can also account in part for why, despite the stress and the seemingly rapid pace of life, New York is outpacing others in terms of life expectancy gains. Happiness is closely related to longevity. Happier people tend to be healthier overall—and even controlling for basic health, simple feelings of life satisfaction (and the closely-related absence of negative emotion) have been linked to better health outcomes and longer lives. Green design, it seems, isn't just environmentally beneficial. It benefits us in far more immediate—and selfishly visible—ways.

(Adapted from https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/literally-psyched/want-to-be-happier-and-live-longer-protect-green-spaces/)