Politics and the Park [ 155 ] nearly twelve years after William Cullen Bryant had first advocated it in the New York Evening Post. A great deal of credit for the emergence of the park from this protracted political struggle must certainly be given to the vision, tenacious support, and leadership of individuals such as Bryant, Downing, Kingsland, and even Wood.62 It should be recognized, nevertheless, that the successful political struggle for the acquisition of the park resulted from a set of fortuitous circumstances. There is no evidence that the primary actors in the movement for the park acted in a highly coordinated or concerted fashion. Rather a host of individuals and organizations were attracted to the issue of the park by a set of diverse motivations. In the aggregate the arguments of each were mutually reinforcing. The result was the knitting together of a coalition of sufficient strength to sway popular opinion and convince public officials of the validity and necessity of a park. It is equally important to recognize the social context that the struggle for the park had made manifest. Specific arguments and actions of individuals were most often only the reflection of several currents of thought in the larger society. The arguments for the park relating to public health improvements, an emerging urban consciousness and civic pride, and that it would be a device for lessening class antagonisms, drew on progressive ideals aimed at positively reforming the growing city. Conversely, the struggle for the park also benefitted from conservative views. The city's rapid urbanization in the 1840s and 1850s had displaced and forced to distant locations the many private gardens, nearby farms, and extensive woodlands that had just recently been a characteristic part of the urban landscape. Those arguments based on the romantic notion of the curative powers of nature and the park as an urban antidote were a reaction by urbanites to the circumstances that threatened to deprive them of what they had accepted as commonplace. In this light the movement for the park was an effort to restore within the city something that had been lost. It was the ability of the park to simultaneously appeal to both progressive reform ideals and certain conservative impulses that sustained and gave broad-based credence to the park issue as it ran the difficult gantlet of public decision-making. 62 In 1900, the city commemorated Bryant's formative role when it erected a statue of him and named a small open space on the western side of the present New York Public Library in his honor.