[ 142 ] IAN R. STEWART only add to their taxes, and thus were led to form the habit of crying down any hopeful anticipations!'80 Those who were concerned about a rise in taxes were joined in opposing a park by those few who feared that such spots would become centers of crime or at least coarse behavior. Although there was no proof that the other city parks had been reduced to this state, a lead article in one of the local papers painted this menacing picture of the democratic city: It is folly to expect in this country to have parks like those in old aristocratic countries. When we open a public park Sam will air himself in it. He will take his friends whether from Church Street, or elsewhere. He will knock down any better dressed man who remonstrates with him. He will talk and sing, and fill his share of the bench, and flirt with the nursery maids in his own coarse way. Now, we ask what chance have William B. Astor and Edward Everett against this fellow citizen of theirs? Can they and he enjoy the same place? Is it not obvious that he will turn them out, and that the great Central Park will be nothing but a great beer garden for the lowest denizens of the city, of which we shall yet pray litanies to be delivered?81 In the same article it was argued that a park so described would actually depress the value of property in the neighborhood since much of the bordering property would quickly be taken up "by Irish and German liquor dealers as sites for dram-shops and lager beer gardens!' Perhaps a more serious but unexpected source of opposition to a park came from the respected New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor. Its first public report, issued at the beginning of 1853, concluded that appropriating a large space for a public park would be counterproductive to its efforts to improve the condition of the poor: It is self-evident that the using of so much of the island as is now designed for this purpose, will so diminish the space otherwise available for dwelling, as directly and indirecdy to increase the intolerable grievances of high rents and crowded tenements which multitudes now suffer without affording any compensatory advantages that will benefit the great mass of the population. Its general effects... will be decidedly unfavorable.82 80 Frederick Law Olmsted, "Public Parks and the Enlargement of Towns" reprinted in S. B. Sutton, ed., Civilizing American Cities (Cambridge, 1971), 87. si Ibid., 88. 82 New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, First Report of a