WHITE OPEN SPACES
Confronting our parks’ racist history
I USED TO TUNE OUT when my father would go on about eminent domain: how his immigrant grandparents had built up a modest homestead with two houses, three grown children, and a flock of chickens on the banks of the Bronx River. And then, around 1913, how the government had seized the property to make way for the Bronx River Parkway. That the episode still rankled after almost a century just seemed like a manifestation of my father’s cranky late-life conservatism.
That was before I found out about Madison Grant.
It’s a name you should be hearing a lot this year because
