Central Park Band Concert

“The mass of the people could not or would not go on Wednesday or Saturday afternoons to Central Park to hear the band. Hence it occurred to the Commissioners to make the band go to the people, and so, once a week, public music has been dispensed, distributed, diffused in down-town squares for the benefit of what men call ‘the million.’ As if there were many more, and surely there are not many less than a million of us, all told and all together, rich and poor, old and young, on the whole island, from Harlem river to the bay.

Tompkins Square is something frightful both in boundaries and barrenness. It is an effort of an aggregate of acres to get the better of the city. Covering the areas bounded by Avenues A and B and Seventh and Tenth streets, it is more than twice as large as Washington Square—indeed there is room enough in it to parade a division of military, with every evolution; and without a blade of grass in it, and scarcely a tree, and no seats for loungers or lovers to loll upon, the whole campus is as bare as the Champ de Mars in Paris. Considering the enormous assemblage of mothers with infants in arms, last evening, Smith pronounced it a field of ma’s indeed.

But for the music. Here, as in Madison and other public squares, the Commissioners have erected a music stand, which, in this square, is close by Seventh street, so that the few hundreds assembled about this centre of attraction were but a patch on the broad and bare surface of the field. The population surrounding this great square, we were informed by a policeman, is ‘about half and half’—that is, half German and half Irish; the houses all tenement houses, and on every corner is a ‘mill’ of the gin species. St. Bridget’s, a truly grand and imposing edifice, alone breaks the monotony of brick fronts.

The tenement houses on Seventh street, nearest the stand, made a grand show of women at the windows, and set up, as it were, a sort of aristocracy over the people in the square—it was if the tenement houses were the boxes, and the square the pit. Into this pit the tenement houses on three sides of the square had poured a population of hard-handed laborers, women, and an almost inconceivable crowd of small children. If the protracted heat has induced an unwonted mortality among the young folk, it is not at all observable in the vicinity of Tompkins Square. The whole region swarms with children. They are the chief product of the place. And these children by hundreds walked, crawled, or were carried to the music stand last night, and throughout the entire programme they listened with open eyes and ears and mouths. We have never seen so many fairly enraptured children in one throng; if the Commissioners could have seen them they would give them music at least twice a week.

The entire assemblage was admirably orderly, and there were actually fewer policemen on duty than there are in Madison Square when there is music there. They were not needed—the music was a magistrate, special constable, patrolman, anything and everything, so far as the maintenance of perfect order was concerned, and the baton of the leader was more potent than a hundred policemen’s clubs.

But it was hardly necessary so terrible to tone down the programme to the supposed taste of the locality. The Germans of that region would like a little more of Strauss and Wagner and a little less of Lumly and Bishop. Give them the best, and give it often. These open-air down-town concerts have a beneficial and humanizing effect; to thousands they are compensations for the seldom reached, too seldom seen Central Park; to the children they are the great, perhaps the only, delight of the week.”