Picture Hartford in the 1850s, booming and crowded, when the Reverend Horace Bushnell first proposed this public park. This idea arrived as Hartford was racing through growth: the city doubled in population from 1850 to 1860, its economy booming on publishing, insurance, banking, munitions, manufacturing and river shipping. With that prosperity came crowded tenements, crime, poverty, poor sanitation and polluted air and water — conditions that made Bushnell’s proposal for a public park, financed entirely by public funds, both radical and urgently practical.
Today the vision has become 50 acres, or 20 hectares, of welcome green space visited by over one million people each year. Paths through this park are not just local lanes: they contribute to the East Coast Greenway, linking your footsteps with a much longer trail. Stand here for a moment and imagine Hartford in the 1850s — a city in motion, and a fresh public park taking shape as an answer to urban pressures.
Fifty acres of green, over one million visitors a year, and paths that run on into the East Coast Greenway: Bushnell's radical proposal did its work.