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| Now 200 years old, Duane Park is the second oldest public park in New York City. Since 1797, when it was purchased by the city, the park has been redesigned several times. Until 1940, these designs all provided ample greenery. Then the planting area was greatly reduced.
At the time of the park's purchase, in 1797, the area now known as Tribeca was primarily residential, and so it was fitting that in 1804 this small space was planted much like a formal garden, with triangular and circular shrub beds. It was ornamented with trees and enclosed with a fence. In 1825, more "forest trees" were added. The trees flourished, as can be seen in an 1858 print of an American Express wagon parading past the park.
The Parsons-Vaux design remained in place for more than half a century, from 1871 to 1940, the period during which most of the buildings around the park went up. We have a plan from 1934 that shows how the planting was arranged. It also shows that there was a horse trough at the Western tip of the park. No schematic view of the Parsons-Vaux park exists, but a view of the Canal Street Park at the western end of Canal Street (unfortunately since removed) shows what the designers had in mind.
In 1940, Duane Park was totally remade following a formalistic design. Much of the planted area was replaced with concrete. The ornate wrought-iron fence was replaced with a simpler steel one. In the center of the Hudson Street side the designers added a tall flagpole whose outsized base was carved with an inscription in honor of Annetje Jans Bogardus. Heavy brick-faced pillars were erected at the Hudson Street entrance. The trees were cut down and replaced with ten new ones evenly spaced at the outer edges of the park. At various times, strips of land have been cut away from the park. In the last major resizing of the park, in 1954, the western tip of the park and the southern sidewalk were added to the adjacent roadway. On the south, a new sidewalk was made by replacing the planted area on that side with cobblestones. A concrete barrier was placed between street and sidewalk to prevent trucks backing into the food warehouses on the other side of the narrow street from encroaching on the park.
In making plans for the renewal of Duane Park, Friends of Duane Park have endeavored to restore the spirit of the Parsons and Vaux design of 1887. This design was intended to provide a maximum of greenery yet allowed ample seating and plenty of space for children to play. Perhaps a major reason the Parsons and Vaux design was replaced was because of the problem of maintaining a green space in a busy commercial area. But times have changed, and the community around Duane Park has shown that it is ready to maintain a verdant park at its center.
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Duane Park was once part of a 62-acre farm outside the limits of the New Amsterdam Settlement. The property was granted to Roeloff and Annetje Jans by Governor Wouter Van Twiller in 1636 and Roeloff Jans was contracted by the West India Company to farm the plot. After Roeloff's death in 1637, Annetje (shown at left) married Everardus Bogardus, the second minister of the Dutch Church of New Amsterdam. The farm was renamed Dominie's Bouwerie. In 1664 the English took over New Amsterdam, and in 1670 Governor Francis Lovelace acquired the farm. Although the Dutch retook New Amsterdam three years later, Jan's heirs did not lay claim to the farm. However, when the English returned in 1674, the Duke of York (who later became King James II) confiscated Lovelace's farm. In 1705, the royal family granted the farm to Trinity Church and it became known as the Trinity's Lower Farm. When Duane Street was laid out in 1794 (it was named after James Duane, a former mayor and the nation's first federal judge) it isolated a triangle of land too small to build on. Three years later the city purchased this remnant of Trinity's Lower Farm to make a park. 
By 1870, Duane Park had become unkempt. Although the neighborhood had by this time been taken over by manufacturing and commercial enterprises, the park was given a complete facelift. An 1871 report states that "The Duane Street Park possessed a half-destroyed fence, and was in a state of dilapidation. Its renovation was undertaken, and it has been made an elegant little triangular spot, filled with deciduous trees, evergreens, and shrubs." An illustration from the report shows a design that was standard for the time, with trees and shrubs grouped informally in a totally fenced-in space, the whole surrounded by a sidewalk bordered by a formal line of trees. 
A decade and a half later, the city had in Abram Hewitt (1886-88) a mayor who believed the city's parks should be more accessible to the public - they should not be totally fenced in. The Superintendent of Parks, Samuel Parsons. Jr., chose the landscape architect Calvert Vaux -already famous for his design with Frederick Law Olmsted of Central Park - to collaborate on the redesign of many of New York's smaller parks, including Duane Park. As Parsons explained in an 1892 magazine article, the notion was that the smaller parks should create a feeling of quiet and restfulness by having pathways that meander through the landscaped areas, providing "a grateful sense of seclusion and quasi ownership." At Duane Street, he wrote, "a diagonal walk has been introduced, swelling out to a considerable width at one point between the three entrances. Beyond this, there are only three small bits of green grass on either side, a few shrubs along the fence, and a small flower bed, but even this is a boon to the crowded neighborhood."