>I do believe that Central Park is one of the most beautiful parks
>I've ever seen....but could you say more about this success?
Actually CP was a real-estate scheme to take land off the market and raise prices. The working class was opposed.
But I'm thinking of the elimination of industry from Manhattan and then the outer edges of Brooklyn & Queens, expand the central business district, push midtown development westward (Fitch says to valorize Rockefeller Center, which opened into the Great Depression), use Lincoln Center to get the Puerto Ricans out and develop further up the west side, etc. Of more recent vintage is the gentrification of Harlem, conceived around 1980 I think, which took a sharp blow in the late 1980s crash, but has really come to some fruition in the latest upcycle. Next, gentrify hipster Brooklyn. The hipsters, as an artist quoted in the Village Voice in the early 1980s said, are the Duartes of the gentrification movement.
Doug