It sounds like New York City is about to get a lot less horsey: Mayor Bill de Blasio has decided to nix the horse and carriage fixtures of the city, saying "they're not humane; they're not appropriate to the year 2014; it's over." Badda-boom. But it turns out horses aren’t the first livestock to get the boot from post-industrial NYC. Previous beloved inhabitants of Central Park: sheep.
When 19th century dynamic landscaping duo Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux won a competition to create a central lawn in the increasingly urban NYC, they decided to juxtapose the bustling city with a green space evoking Romantic English gardens. And what’s more idyllic than peacefully grazing sheep? They had to have them.
But before the lawn could be populated with sheep, it had to be depopulated of poor people (they are a total killjoy for polite society strolling). So African-American, Irish, and German immigrants were summarily evicted from their makeshift homes (ah, to live the American dream!), and in 1864 the city unfurled 200 angelic, high-pedigree sheep upon the newly repurposed (cough) terrain. They even came complete with a shepherd and his family, who slept in a newly-erected building above the sheep’s barn at night (and no doubt slept ever so soundly). Most people reportedly considered the sheep a welcome contrast to the increasing build-out of the city. And though Manhattan paid for the sheep’s maintenance, their grazing provided well-maintained grass (not to mention the fertilizing qualities of their well-bred droppings), and the municipality also profited from selling the sheep’s wool.
And so the sheep remained, being pleasantly pastoral, for nearly 70 years. Until 1934, when a concrete-jungle-loving parks commissioner decided to utilize the space for a restaurant, and the sheep were moved to Prospect Park in Brooklyn. The arrangement didn’t last long: officials worried that the desperate poor (ugh, them again!) of the Great Depression might find the sheep too tasty-looking to pass up. So away the sheep went to upstate New York. Now the only vestige of sheep at Central Park is in its zoo—perhaps the modern-day version of the English Garden getaway from the city.
(Image: commons.wikimedia.org)
