Carl Schurz Park

History[edit]

The bluff overlooking a curve in the East River at this point was named by an early owner, Siebert Classen, "Hoorn's Hook", for his native Hoorn on the Zuider Zee.^{[note 1]} The first house on the site was built for Jacob Walton, a few years before the Revolution, when the picturesque location suddenly gained tactical importance in the control of the East River. In February 1776,^[2] the house and grounds were commandeered for an American battery of nine guns on the site.^{[note 2]} This drew British fire on September 15, 1776, in a mopping-up operation to secure all of Manhattan Island following the Battle of Long Island; the bombardment demolished Walton's house and forced an American withdrawal. The British kept an encampment on the site until Evacuation Day, 1783. Archibald Gracie leveled the remains of the star fort and constructed his timber-framed villa Gracie Mansion in 1799.


The section of the park lying south of 86th Street (set aside as "East River Park" in 1876), where John Jacob Astor once had a villa, was used as a picnic ground when the northern section was acquired by the City of New York in 1891.^{[note 3]} The easternmost block of 86th Street was acquired subsequently, and the street de-mapped. A new landscape design by Calvert Vaux and Samuel Parsons was completed in 1902, several years after Vaux's death.


East River Park was renamed Carl Schurz Park in 1911.^[3] The park was reconstructed in 1935 by Robert Moses, due to the creation of the FDR Drive,^[4] with revised landscaping by Maud Sargent. The park's restoration from a neglected state in the early 1970s was due to the energies of a neighborhood group, the not-for-profit Carl Schurz Park Conservancy (incorporated 1974), formed originally to clean up the park's single playground.^[5]


Carl Schurz Park served as the location for the climactic fight scene in Spike Lee's 2002 film 25th Hour, starring Edward Norton and Philip Seymour Hoffman.