Bennett Park (New York City) Bennett Park (New York City) Bennett Park, also known as James Gordon Bennett Park, is a public park in New York City, named for James Gordon Bennett, Sr., the newspaper publisher who launched the "New York Herald" in 1835. It is located between Pinehurst and Fort Washington Avenues and West 183rd and 185th Streets in the Hudson Heights neighborhood of Washington Heights in northern Manhattan, on land purchased by Bennett in 1871, the year before his death. It sits opposite the northern Fort Washington Avenue entrance to the 181st Street subway station on the IND Eighth Avenue Line, serviced by
New York City dominated by Tammany Hall, a political machine supported by Irish and German immigrants. Several prominent American literary figures lived in New York during the 1830s and 1840s, including William Cullen Bryant, Washington Irving, Herman Melville, Rufus Wilmot Griswold, John Keese, Nathaniel Parker Willis, and Edgar Allan Poe. Public-minded members of the contemporaneous business elite lobbied for the establishment of Central Park, which in 1857 became the first landscaped park in an American city. The Great Irish Famine brought a large influx of Irish immigrants, of whom over 200,000 were living in New York by 1860, upwards of a quarter of