Excerpt from The New Parks Beyond the Harlem, With Thirty Illustrations and Map: Descriptions of Scenery; Nearly 4000 Acres of Free Playground for the People; Abundant Space for a Parade Ground, a Rifle Range, Base Ball, Lacrosse, Polo, Tennis and All Athletic Games; Picnic and Excursion Parties The author of the following pages has presented, in a compact form, a comprehensive history of the movement which, initiated in 1881, resulted in the enactment of a law that has added 3840 acres to the park area of the city. Although the bill creating six new parks and three parkways was passed by the Legislature of 1884, the efforts by which the opponents of the measure sought to defeat its enactment have been carried on with more or less obstinacy ever since. In fact the experience of the men to whom the city is indebted for the existence of Central Park has been repeated in the present instance. Having failed, after a bitter and protracted struggle, marked by most adroit tactics. To defeat the bill during the session of 1884, in which it passed by a vote of twenty-one to two in the Senate and of seventy-four to twenty-one in the Assembly, its enemies renewed the contest before the Governor. At the end of the thirty days allowed for Executive considera tion, however, he resolved to give it his approval, and, affixing his signature thereto, it became a law on the 14th of June, 1884. It might reasonably be supposed that the fierce and prolonged assaults on the New Parks Act would have ceased after the passage of the bill, which was fully discussed before the Cities' Committees of the Senate and Assembly, in both branches of the Legislature and before the Governor; but the attacks were kept up with unabated virulence and pertinacity even after the decisions of the Supreme Court and the Court of Appeals on the constitutionality of the law, and the reversal finally by the last tribunal of the decision of the Special and General Terms of the Court of Common Pleas on the Sinking Fund question. Nay, so far was this spirit of rancor ous opposition carried that one of the most conspicuous in the unrelenting and at times unscrupulous warfare against the parks defiantly said that he would so tie them up in litigation that the city would not be able to obtain possession of them for years to come - if ever. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.