Ten years before the Civil War, New York city had 515,000 people, the population having risen by more than 200,000 in the forties. The northward march of buildings had passed Twenty-third Street, and the extreme northern boundary could now be placed at Thirty-fourth, though there were many empty districts south of that line. Madison Square had just been laid out. The nineteenth and twentieth wards were added within a twelvemonth. Broadway was now more than four miles long from the Battery to the open country, and along its course as far as Bleecker Street old residences were being ripped apart in clouds of dust to make way for stores. The year 1850 was that in which the time-worn City Hotel disappeared, and in which the Astor Place Opera House was remodeled for business uses. Canal Street was extended, and Dey Street widened. Almost before men realized it the old transportation facilities had become inadequate, and in 1852–3 the Third Avenue and Sixth Avenue horse railways began to carry passengers. With the whole lower part of town engrossed by trade, with more well-to-do New Yorkers fleeing northward year by year for light and air, the city in 1852 undertook the grading of Fifth Avenue from Thirty-fourth Street to Forty-fifth. The New York which thrilled to Jenny Lind’s singing and turned out a quarter of a million people to watch the military procession marking President Taylor’s funeral, was a New York that had suddenly bloomed into a metropolis. In this thriving city, larger than Buffalo to-day, there was not a single open-air recreation ground worthy of the name. Dickens had remarked in 1842 that New York’s summer climate was such that it would throw a man into a fever merely to think what the streets would be but for the daily breezes from the bay. It was a smoky city--Bryant had written in the _Evening Post_ of 1832 a striking description of its unwonted brightness when the cholera stopped nearly all industry--and it was ill-cleaned. The city directories, indeed, listed nineteen parks. But a number, as Five Points Park, Duane Park, and Abingdon Square, were merely places where the street intersections were a little wider than usual. Others, like Hudson Square and Gramercy Park, were private property, and still others, like the Bowling Green, were padlocked. The whole park area was only about one hundred and seventy acres, and the grounds open to the public did not exceed one hundred acres; while the largest single park, the Battery, contained only twenty-one.