I know the NYTimes thinks its charming, but this plaque embodies the arrogance and greed of wealthy landowners in NY who have opposed the construction of mass transit for over a hundred years.
In fact, private land can only exist thanks to the threat of violence against those who would use it outside of the "owner's" intent.
I hardly think the United States in unique in that respect - just that it perhaps happened more recently than a lot of other places.
Kinda like what makes your wallet 'yours'.
The key difference, though, is that my wallet is unlikely to be directly useful for the creation of a public good. Some portion of the contents are frequently used to that end though.
- Purchased from a tribe that didn't have credible control over the area
followed by
- 20 years of skirmishes/wars with the tribe that actually controlled the area.
Every year I give financial support to civil liberty organizations such as the Institute for Justice (https://ij.org) and the Pacific Legal Foundation (https://pacificlegal.org). Because, after you demonize certain people as a justification for treating them any way you want, you find some of them aren't really that bad and are just trying to protect what they worked hard to get in the first place.
So, rather than try to fire up the mobs with appeals to emotion, I'd much rather fund those organizations which are fighting for individual rights in the courts and with the law.
> And then a surveyor made a mistake. Somehow, after the distances and angles were calculated and recorded on the tax roll, the Voorhis lot did not disappear completely, as the city expected it to. The tiny triangle survived.
> “Some versions of the story say it was overlooked by the city,” Mr. Berman said. “Others say the Hess estate refused to give up the property from the beginning. From most of the writing I’ve seen about it, it seems that it was a mistake on the city’s part that the city tried to correct” by asking the Hesses simply to donate the triangle.
The plaque embodies a surveyor's mistake. The plot is what remains after the city already took the land for public purposes. It's existence has not affected mass transit at all.