Union Square today displays an extraordinary mania for subdivision. Its ten acres have been hardscaped by fencing and concrete into a multitude of distinct levels and impermeable zones. On the surface, these choices appear self-defeating; the most pedestrian of basic needs—walking a relatively straight path, or maintaining sightlines over even modest distances—are unmet. But, of course, it is all by design. These inconveniences are precisely the goal. Traditionally the site of many of New York’s most contentious public demonstrations, its current layout makes mass protest next to impossible. Union Square is deliberately arranged to stymie the crowd.
Joanna Merwood-Salisbury’s new architectural history, Design for the Crowd: Patriotism and Protest in Union Square, shows that public protest and urban planning have been in conflict in Union Square since formal designs for the plaza emerged in the early nineteenth century. Though the park was unremarkable in form, dimension, and arrangement, its significance to the history of social movements cemented its place in the American landscape. Like London’s Hyde Park, or Cairo’s Tahrir Square, its name has become a metonym for political activism. Union Square, writes Merwood-Salisbury, “expresses, perhaps more than any other urban landscape in the country, how political ideals are realized, imperfectly, in reality.”
Union Square’s importance to labor and radical politics can readily be catalogued. It hosted the first Labor Day parade in 1882, when local trade unionists were cheered by a quarter of a million spectators. Beginning in 1890, annual May Day gatherings invariably culminated with speeches at the plaza. By the turn of the twentieth century, it was the nexus of socialist and anarchist organizing. In 1927, it became home to the headquarters of the American Communist Party. During the 1960s, Students for a Democratic Society located its regional offices there.