Reappropriating the "Green:" Islamist Environmentalism (1997)
Reconciling City and Citizen: The 19th Century Urban Environmentalism and Republicanism of Frederick...
Transcript of Reconciling City and Citizen: The 19th Century Urban Environmentalism and Republicanism of Frederick...
Reconciling City and Citizen: The 19th Century UrbanEnvironmentalism and Republicanism of Frederick Law Olmsted1
Prepared for delivery at the annual meeting of the WesternPolitical Science Association
San Antonio, TexasApril 2011
Peter F. CannavòDepartment of Government
Hamilton College 198 College Hill RoadClinton, NY 13323(315) 859-4829
The overall aim of this paper is to situate America’s
preeminent landscape architect (and indeed one of the
founders of the profession), Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-
1903), with respect to both the civic republican and
environmentalist traditions. First and most fundamentally, I
aim to show how Olmsted departed from the anti-urban bias of
earlier republicanism and tried to bring civic virtue into
the city through his park-building projects. Thomas
Jefferson’s classic republican vision of the virtuous yeoman
1 I want to thank Yvonne Schick and Olivia Waxman, two students from the2010 edition of Interpreting the U.S. Environment, my environmental history course at Hamilton College. Their term papers first made me fully appreciate the complexities of Olmsted’s work and thought.
farmer was premised on a rejection of the city as
irredeemably corrupt. Henry David Thoreau, who bridged
republican values with a proto-environmentalist vision of
nature preservation and ecocentrism (Cannavò 2010), was also
concerned about the moral corruption of town life. Olmsted
was similarly concerned about urban morality, but he saw in
parks a powerful means through which to redeem urban life
and bring virtue to the city. Second, I would like to show
how Olmsted premised his vision of civic reform and virtue
on a notion of long-term stability, what today we would call
sustainability, as well as meticulous top-down planning. In
Olmsted’s view, a successful park had to be faithful to the
designer’s plan over subsequent decades, even centuries.
Third and finally, this notion of sustainability and
elite management points to a tension between democracy and
the formative project (Sandel 1996), pursued by both
republicanism and environmentalism, of creating a virtuous
citizenry and/or fostering human flourishing. This tension
comes through in Olmsted’s park projects and his writings
about them. Olmsted celebrated urban parks as democratic
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spaces open to all. However, alongside these democratic
values sits Olmsted’s vision of the urban park as created by
an elite designer or commission to reform the citizenry.
Success of this top-down project depends on the endurance of
the designer’s vision, which must not be altered by the
park’s users. The tension between democratic values that
take citizens’ preferences as given and a formative project
(Sandel 1996) that attempts to inculcate civic virtue is
endemic to both republicanism and environmentalism in the
United States. While this formative social engineering
project has anti-democratic overtones and stands in the way
of citizens’ attempts to shape their own spatial
environment, it can also be understood more as a necessary
reaction to the morally and ecologically deforming aspects
of urban industrial society. A key challenge is in
reconciling the formative project with democratic values.
Background
Olmsted is perhaps most familiar to us as the designer
of New York City’s Central Park, a project he actually
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pursued in collaboration with Anglo-American architect
Calvert Vaux. Though he was one of the earliest and perhaps
the most famous practitioner of landscape architecture,
Olmsted was also a self-educated polymath who pursued
successful ventures in farming, journalism, and public
health (Rybczynski 1999). Also less well known is the
degree to which Olmsted, sometimes working on his own but
often in collaboration with Vaux, single-handedly shaped the
19th century North American landscape. Olmsted was involved
in designing or consulting on a staggering number of
landscape architecture projects across the continent. His
more famous endeavors include Brooklyn’s Prospect Park;
Boston’s Franklin Park and Emerald Necklace; park systems in
Buffalo, Rochester, Chicago, Milwaukee, and Louisville;
Montreal’s Mount Royal Park; the planned suburb of
Riverside, Illinois; the campuses of Berkeley, Stanford,
Cornell, and the University of Chicago; the World’s
Columbian Exposition in Chicago; the Biltmore Estate in
Asheville, North Carolina; and the grounds of the U.S.
Capitol (Rybczynski 1999).
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Many of Olmsted’s park projects were so cleverly
designed that today most people mistake them for remnants of
undisturbed nature within the urban landscape, when in fact
they were massive public works projects that involved
significant transformation of both vegetation and topography
(Spirn 1995) as well as a strong impulse toward social
engineering. What is also significant is not just the sheer
physical accomplishment of transforming the American
landscape in the 19th century, but also Olmsted’s frequent
theoretical elaborations on parks as instruments of urban
reform. It is here, rather than on the physical design of
the parks themselves, that I mainly focus.
Olmsted’s Influences
Certainly, the idea of parks as a salve for morals did
not originate with Olmsted – during the 19th century, there
was already considerable interest in parks and suburbs as
escapes from overcrowded, unhealthy urban living (Taylor
1999). Olmsted’s mentor, Andrew Jackson Downing – arguably
the founder of the landscape architecture profession – was
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an especially influential figure here, and he was one of the
first to call for a great park in New York City (Roulier
2009, p.315).
Olmsted’s vision of green places as sites for the
renewal of mental and physical health and character were
influenced by a number of perspectives, including
Romanticism and Transcendentalism (Scheper 1989; Taylor
1999). Indeed, though Olmsted is chiefly remembered for his
urban parks, he was also instrumental in advancing the
wilderness preservation with which heirs of Romanticism and
Transcendentalism, especially John Muir, are associated.
Appointed as a Commissioner of what would eventually become
Yosemite National Park, Olmsted authored an 1865 report
urging creation of park (Scheper 1989, p.376).
Olmsted’s urban achievements, however, are no less a
part of the Romantic/Transcendentalist legacy. George
Scheper remarks, “Olmsted, who regarded the beneficial
influence of nature not so much as an article of faith as a
simple empirical truth, would arguably do more than anyone
else in his day and perhaps more than anyone in America
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since, with the possible exception of John Muir, to
implement and realize the romantic/transcendentalist creed
of nature by making charming and salubrious rural scenery
accessible to the men, women, and children of the burgeoning
American cities of the second half of the nineteenth century
and to their heirs – ourselves” (Scheper 1989, pp.374-375).
Scheper (1989, pp.378-379) also sees a proto-feminist
sensibility in what he describes as Olmsted’s vision of the
park as a “gentle and comforting presence.” Offering a
rather limited and reactionary equation of feminism with
maternal values, Scheper says, “Olmsted … sought to
celebrate the timeless forms and bio-rhythms of nature
rather than to memorialize the deeds of military, political,
or commercial achievement and to serve ordinary citizens,
the poor and working classes, and especially women,
children, and the elderly as park users.” Olmsted, he
maintains, was influenced by a broader nineteenth century
liberal Protestant reform movement that offered “a feminist
vision, democratic and inclusive in spirit, marked by a
‘maternal’ concern and ‘preferential option’ for the
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powerless and a goal of attunement with nature.”
From a feminist standpoint, one could also cite
Olmsted’s discussion of the liberatory promise of urban or
town life for women. In his 1870 lecture, “Public Parks and
the Enlargement of Towns,” Olmsted suggested that women,
facing “dull lives … in the country,” were hungering for the
culture and excitement of the city or town:
We all recognize that the tastes and dispositions of women are more and more potent in shaping the course of civilized progress, and again we must acknowledge that women are even more susceptible to this townward drift than men. Ofttimes the husband and father gives up his country occupations, taking others less attractive to him in town, out of consideration for his wife and daughters … Is it astonishing? Compare advantages in respect simply to schools, libraries, music and the finearts. People of the greatest wealth can hardly command as much of these in the country as the poorest work-girlis offered here in Boston at the mere cost of a walk fora short distance over a good, firm, clean pathway, lighted at night and made interesting to her by shop fronts and the variety of people passing. (Olmsted 1870,pp.208-209).
Women, Olmsted noted, were also burdened by the household
tasks of rural life. The city, with its huge, diverse labor
force, could more readily supply domestic needs and obviate
household drudgery. Town life promised “the emancipation of
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both men and women from petty, confining, and narrowing
cares” (Olmsted 1870, p.214).
Civic Republicanism
However, following Scott Roulier (2009), I want to focus
more on the civic republican dimensions of Olmsted’s vision
of parks, particularly Olmsted’s conception of parks as
sites for the cultivation of democratic values and civic
virtue, as well as Olmsted’s environmentalist affinities.
Civic republicanism was prominent in the United States
during the Revolutionary and Founding eras (1763–1824),
though it eventually lost influence to liberalism (Wood
1969; Pocock 1975 and 1989; McCoy 1980; Bailyn 1992).
Republicanism was perhaps most fervently espoused by Thomas
Jefferson and his followers. In later years, traces of
republicanism persisted in the labor, civil rights and
community organizing movements (Sandel 1996). Moreover,
republican values in the U.S. have also found expression in
the environmental movement (Cannavò 2010).
Republicanism emphasizes active, participatory
citizenship and civic virtue as key components of either
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human flourishing in general or, at the very least, of a
well-functioning political society. Republicanism elevates
the common good and self-sacrifice over negative liberty and
private interest.
Republicans also tend to favor material simplicity over
luxury and consumption. In the republican view, the pursuit
of material wealth or possessions tends to distract citizens
from civic duties, promote individual greed at the expense
of communitarian values, and foster dependence on powerful
economic interests that provide goods or credit. In fact,
civic republicans see economic dependence, arising from
luxury and consumption or from extreme inequalities in
wealth, as destructive to civic virtue. Dependent citizens
pursue the interests of the creditors, manufacturers,
employers, or landlords on whom they rely rather than
articulating and pursuing the common good of society.
Luxury, consumption, and inequality are the hallmarks of a
corrupt society marked by self-interest rather than virtue.
Republicanism is thus critical of the commercial and
inegalitarian values associated with capitalism.
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‘Small-r’ republicanism has ‘small-d’ democratic
implications. A healthy republic depends on citizens coming
together and collectively deliberating on the common good.
If citizens are virtuous, then democratic self-government is
a guarantor of the common good against special interests.
Republicanism thus aims, through a formative project of
social and political practices, to instill in individuals
the virtues conducive to civic engagement and pursuit of the
common good.
Republican and Environmentalist Anti-Urbanism in the 19th
Century
In line with this formative project, the Jeffersonian
republicans favored an agrarian republic. Jefferson, in his
Notes on the State of Virginia (1787), famously regarded the frugal,
hardworking, independent yeoman farmer, with his simplicity
of material wants and dependence on no one but nature, and
with the leisure available for political activity, as
leading a life conducive to the cultivation of civic virtue.
The stability and virtue of a republic of self-governing
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citizens depended on a kind of sustainability: America
needed to indefinitely remain a society of small,
independent, agrarian landowners rather than succumb to
capitalism, industrialization, and urbanization (Cannavò
2010).
In contrast to the yeoman ideal, corruption was marked
by dependence. As Jefferson (1787, p.217) remarks in Query
XIX of Notes, corruption
is the mark set on those, who not looking up to heaven,to their own soil and industry, as does the husbandman,for their subsistence, depend for it on the casualties and caprice of customers. Dependance [sic] begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition ... [G]enerally speaking, the proportion whichthe aggregate of other classes of citizens bears in anystate to that of its husbandmen, is the proportion of its unsound to its healthy parts, and is a good-enough barometer whereby to measure its degree of corruption.
In opposing dependence and corruption, Jefferson argued
against an economy oriented around manufacturing, wage
labor, and commerce:
While we have land to labour then, let us never wish tosee our citizens occupied at a work-bench, or twirling a distaff. Carpenters, masons, smiths, are wanting in husbandry: but, for the general operations of manufacture, let our workshops remain in Europe.
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The urbanization associated with industry was also to be
eschewed: “The mobs of great cities add just so much to the
support of pure government, as sores do to the strength of
the human body.” Urban life involved economic dependence on
employers or customers, laziness, inequality, the pursuit of
luxury, and attachment to commerce rather than country;
moreover, life in crowded cities was physically unhealthy
(McCoy 1980, p.110; Miller 1988, p.210).
Though agrarian republicanism was anti-urban, it did not
valorize wild nature. The Jeffersonians reflected what Leo
Marx (1964) famously identified as the pastoral ideal.
America could be “a site for a new golden age,” an
uncorrupted garden (Marx 1964, pp. 36–37, 43). The garden
was not a wilderness, but a cultivated “middle landscape”
(Marx 1964, p. 71) between ‘the extremes of wilderness
savagery and metropolitan corruption’ (Pocock 1975, pp. 539–
540) and created through conquest of wild nature (and
genocide against Native Americans).
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The agrarian republican vision became untenable over
the course of the nineteenth century, as the nation
industrialized and urbanized, and farming became a
commercial rather than subsistence enterprise. Olmsted
himself noted these developments:
Formerly it was a matter of pride with the better sort of our country people that they could raise on their own land, and manufacture in their own household, almost everything needed for domestic consumption. Now their tables are furnished with all kinds of city delicacies. (Olmsted 1870, p.203).
However, another perspective, exemplified perhaps by
Thoreau, kept alive republican concerns about simplicity,
virtue, and the common good (Cannavò 2010). For Thoreau and
others – including many writers, painters, and
preservationists – the site of virtue was no longer the
small farm, which had become an appendage of an increasingly
commercializing, accumulative, greedy, corrupt, and mind-
numbingly overworked society. Rather, the sites of virtue
cultivation were wild and undeveloped places. The garden
had in effect become the wilderness (Cronon 1995) and other
relatively unpopulated places – like Thoreau’s beloved
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Walden Pond – that offered solitude and isolation away from
the oppressive social life of towns. Thoreau saw in wild
places a chance to escape society’s strictures, false
conventions, greed, and empty commercial and material
pursuits. By temporarily repairing to the countryside – for
a couple of years or just for an afternoon’s walk (Thoreau
1854 and 1862) – one could recover virtue in a corrupt
society. Wild nature offered freedom, solitude, and life
reduced to its essentials, and it was also a source of
individual and collective vigor, inspiration, and strength
with which society must maintain contact in order to remain
vital (Thoreau 1854; Nash 1982, p.88). By exiting the
spatial confines of society, one could regard one’s own life
and society from a healthful distance, re-evaluate
conventions and prejudices taken for truths, break off old,
encrusted, false norms, and restore the moral integrity
necessary to be a good self-governing citizen (Cannavò,
forthcoming). In short, it was wild nature that could make
us more moral, more critical, more independent citizens.
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The republican dream had been transformed into an
environmentalist one.
As I have noted elsewhere, the U.S. environmental
movement goes beyond wilderness preservation and pollution
control and advances a notion of the good life and politics
that perpetuates much of the republican ideological
perspective (Cannavò 2010). Commonalities between U.S.
republicanism and environmentalism include a strong sense of
civic responsibility and communitarian values, an emphasis
on democratic self-government and active citizenship as
necessary to defend the common good against powerful
economic and political interests, an embrace of material
simplicity or moderation, and a concern about the
disruptive, alienating, and corrupting effects of
capitalism. Moreover, just as the Jeffersonians sought the
long-term sustainability of a virtuous republic by
maintaining an agrarian society, environmentalists have been
concerned with long-term sustainability of nature and
society through a program of pollution control, open space
preservation, green jobs, alternative energy, etc. Finally,
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until the rise of the environmental justice movement in the
1980s, environmentalists, like the Jeffersonian republicans,
tended toward an anti-urban bias, often viewing cities as
polluted, blighted places that symbolize human corruption
and our fall from nature (Cronon 1995; Light 2001).
Thoreau reflected this anti-urbanism. He saw towns and
cities as oppressive sites of prejudice, illusion, and moral
corruption; it was in wild nature that one could discover
the authentic self and recover one’s virtue. In Walden,
Thoreau urged:
Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, throughChurch and State, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality (Thoreau 1854, p.66).
It should be acknowledged that veneration of the
wilderness in contrast to cities was a minority perspective
in the 19th century (Scheper 1989, p.375); more common were
strains of anti-urbanism that hearkened back to Jeffersonian
republicanism and privileged the small farm (Marx 1964).
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This bias was certainly sharpened by industrialization,
which seemed to be making cities especially unhealthy and
overcrowded. Whether the ideal alternative to the city was
the wilderness or the small farm, when Frederick Law Olmsted
took up landscape architecture and sought to improve city
life, he was already operating in a cultural context with
strong anti-urban strains. Olmsted was himself critical of
urban life but sought to reform rather than reject the city.
Olmsted on Positive Aspects of Urban Life
Before venturing into Olmsted’s concerns about cities,
it is well worth noting Olmsted’s more positive observations
about urban life. Robert Twombly (2010, p.33) notes a
common view “that Olmsted was anti-city … because he
inserted the countryside – or interpretations of it – into
its very heart, de-urbanizing, so to speak.” However, as
Twombly points out, “this interpretation overlooks the
positive aspects of city life that saturate his writings.”
Indeed, we already saw how Olmsted saw towns and cities as
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offering liberation, especially for women, from the cultural
limitations and daily drudgery of rural life.
In his lecture, “Public Parks and the Enlargement of
Towns,” Olmsted recognized that cities were the home of the
future: “Of the fact of the general townward movement of the
civilized world, and its comprehensiveness, there can be no
doubt” (Olmsted 1870, p.206). Cities were here to stay; one
had to live with, and in, them. In the same lecture, he
noted how farms were becoming fewer and more consolidated;
railroad hubs and stations were creating population centers.
Meanwhile, the city was becoming a symbol of technological
advancement; Olmsted recognized that emerging population
centers were more efficient than rural areas in their use of
resources, such as heating, and in their ability to
facilitate communications.
Despite the problems of cities (see below), urban life
was also improving, as Olmsted wrote in an 1868 report on
urban planning in Brooklyn. Though
towns have gone on increasing, … in the largest the amount of disease is not more than half as great as it formerly was; the chance of living to old age is much
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more than twice as great; epidemics are less frequent, less malignant and more controllable; sweeping fires are less common, less devastating and are much sooner [controlled]; ruffians are better held in check; mobs are less frequently formed and less dangerous, and, when they arise, are suppressed more quickly and with less bloodshed; there is a smaller proportion of the population given over to vice and crime; and a larger proportion of well-educated, industrious, and well-to-do citizens. (Olmsted 1868, p.34).
To what might these improvements be attributed?
Olmsted emphasized a move toward lower density in the laying
out of buildings. Lower density made for “larger spaces
open to the sunlight and fresh air” (Olmsted 1868, p.36).
In the same discussion (1868, pp.38-39), Olmsted also
praised early moves toward separation of commercial and
residential districts and approvingly noted the rise of
suburbs. In the 1870 lecture, he presented suburbs as
combining the amenities of the city and the healthfulness of
the country (1870, p.213) and, in 1868, he planned out the
new suburb of Riverside, Illinois. However, as population
centers grew larger in size, there was more need for parks,
as people become more distant from large areas of green
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space (Olmsted 1868, pp.40-41). There were also even more
serious problems that generated a need for parks.
Olmsted’s Criticisms of Urban Life
The growth of cities was not without serious problems,
Olmsted readily acknowledged. Despite improvements, life
spans were shorter than in the country; disease, misery, and
vice remained common; continued overcrowding in many areas
meant stress, antisocial and atomistic tendencies, and lack
of access to fresh, unpolluted air (Olmsted 1870, p.215).
Such costs, Olmsted noted, were as yet poorly understood and
often described in vague terms as “vital exhaustion,”
“nervous irritation,” “constitutional depression,”
“excessive materialism,” “loss of faith,” and “lowness of
spirit” (Olmstead 1881a, pp.307-308). For Olmsted, urban
parks were a key means to reform the mental, physical, and
moral health of city residents. In fact, Olmsted saw the
rise of parks as a predictable response to urbanization:
“Considering that it has occurred simultaneously with a
great enlargement of towns and development of urban habits,
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is it not reasonable to regard it as a self-preserving
instinct of civilization?” (Olmsted 1881a, p.307).
Olmsted’s concerns about the negative influence of
urban life on character were in line with earlier
commentators like Jefferson and Thoreau. Though he has
often been seen as a middle-class moral scold who criticized
the working class and advocated their social control (Taylor
1999), Olmsted, we will shortly see, was also concerned
about the values of the wealthy, commercial class.
As regards the urban working class, Olmsted was clearly
uncomfortable with both their living conditions and their
character and not especially enamored of how they spent
their leisure time. On summer evenings, residents would
escape their cramped quarters and sit out on the front steps
while their children risked injury playing in the streets:
Oftentimes you will see half a dozen [residents] sitting together on the door-steps, or, all in a row, on the curb-stones, with their feet in the gutter, driven out of doors by the closeness within; mothers among them anxiously regarding their children who are dodging about at their play, among the noisy wheels on the pavement. (Olmsted 1870, p.228)
Meanwhile, young men would lounge about in a rude and
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threatening manner or seek debauchery in basement taverns:
Again, consider how often you see young men in knots ofperhaps half a dozen in lounging attitudes rudely obstructing the sidewalks, chiefly led in their little conversation by the suggestions given to their minds bywhat or whom they may see passing in the street, men, women, or children, whom they do not know, and for whomthey have no respect or sympathy. There is nothing among them or about them which is adapted to bring intoplay a spark of admiration, of delicacy, manliness, or tenderness. You see them presently descend in search ofphysical comfort to a brilliantly lighted basement, where they find others of their sort, see, hear, smell,drink, and eat all manner of vile things. (Olmsted 1870, p.228)
Yet, he noted sympathetically, congregation in surly gangs
or the pursuit of vice are manifestations of a legitimate
desire for sociability for which the city fails to provide a
healthy outlet:
Whether on the curb-stones or in the dram-shops, these young men are all under the influence of the same impulse which some satisfy about the tea-table with neighbors and wives and mothers and children, and all things clean and wholesome, softening and refining. (Olmsted 1870, p.228)
Moreover, as noted above, Olmsted’s criticisms of
cities were not reserved for the working class. He observed
that crowded urban life in general bred an antisocial,
calculating harshness: “whenever we walk through the denser
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part of a town, to merely avoid collision with those we meet
and pass upon the sidewalks, we have constantly to watch, to
foresee, and to guard against their movements. This involves
a consideration of their intentions, a calculation of their
strength and weakness, which is not so much for their
benefit as our own. Our minds are thus brought into close
dealings with other minds without any friendly flowing
toward them, but rather a drawing from them” (Olmsted 1870,
pp.215-216). The city fostered atomism rather than
community: “men who have been brought up, as the saying is,
in the streets, who have been the most directly and
completely affected by town influences, so generally show,
along with a remarkable quickness of apprehension, a
peculiarly hard sort of selfishness. Every day of their
lives they have seen thousands of their fellow-men, have met
them face to face, have brushed against them, and yet have
had no experience of anything in common with them” (Olmsted
1870, p.216).
The kind of work done in cities was also stressful. In
an 1866 park proposal for the city of San Francisco, Olmsted
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said that the local commercial class was “wearing itself out
with constant labor, study, and business anxieties” and
required “intervals of harmless and healthy recreation”
(Olmsted 1866, p.107). On another occasion, he noted that
“the more intense intellectual activity, which prevails
equally in the library, the work shop, and the counting-
room, makes tranquilizing recreation more essential to
continued health and strength than until lately it has
generally been” (Olmsted 1868, p.40).
While these remarks showed a sympathy for the travails
of all those working in cities, Olmsted, as we saw, was not
above moral condemnation. Interestingly, though, some of
his most trenchant criticisms of urban dwellers,
particularly as regards their lack of sociability and
communitarian spirit, were aimed not at the working class,
but at those engaged in commerce. As we saw, Olmsted
acknowledged that proletarian city dwellers engaged in
spontaneous social gatherings. As for the commercial
classes, Olmsted saw much less sociability there. In true
republican fashion Olmsted often characterized them as anti-
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social, selfish. and lacking in civic spirit: “Much of the
intercourse between men when engaged in the pursuits of
commerce has … a tendency to regard others in a hard if not
always hardening way” (Olmsted 1870, p.216).
The wealthy also helped to perpetuate the city’s
substandard conditions. Olmsted bemoaned the absence of
good urban planning in America: “Strange to say, however,
here in the New World, where great towns by the hundred are
springing into existence, no care at all is taken to avoid
bad plans” (p.218). He laid at least part of the blame on
commercial interests and property owners, who in their
eagerness to make a quick buck paid little heed to creating
a healthy city:
… commerce requires that in some parts of a town there shall be an arrangement of buildings, and a character of streets and of traffic in them which will establish conditions of corruption and of irritation, physical and mental. (Olmsted 1870, p.220)
If the great city to arise here is to be laid out little by little, and chiefly to suit the views of land-owners, acting only individually, and thinking only of how what they do is to affect the value in the next week or the next year of the few lots that each may hold at the time, the opportunities of so obeying this inclination as at the same time to give the lungs
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a bath of pure sunny air, to give the mind a suggestionof rest from the devouring eagerness and intellectual strife of town life, will always be few to any, to manywill amount to nothing. (Olmsted 1870, p.229).
Echoing Jefferson’s concerns about urban life, Olmsted also
believed that nouveaux riches, focused on their wealth and
lacking in social responsibility, fostered vast inequalities
and class divisions and antagonisms, undermining American
cohesion and democracy (Lewis 1977, p.395). In a similar
vein, Olmsted was also critical of Americans’ excessive
mobility and rootlessness (Lewis 1977, p.395) and its impact
on civic life. He accordingly expressed concern about San
Francisco’s Gold Rush-fueled “transient speculative class,”
whose lack of civic virtue imposed a “dead weight of
indifference to all municipal improvements” (Olmsted 1866,
p.115).
Yet this greed and lack of civic spirit were not
particular to just the city. Olmsted was more broadly
critical of what he saw as America’s crude, hyper-
individualist frontier mentality (Scheper 1989, p.383;
Rybczynski 1999, pp.252-254; Lewis 1977, p.387). The main
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purveyors of this mentality were, to put it mildly, a rather
surprising assemblage: pioneers, immigrants, pioneers,
Native Americans, rural Southern slave-owners, and the
nouveaux riches. According to Olmsted, all were in some way
removed from the influences of a close-knit community and
threatened America with a socially fragmentary, anarchic,
intemperate, selfish individualism (Lewis 1977, pp.388-389,
392; Roulier 2009, p.323).
In contrast to this individualism, the nation needed
collective institutions: “The aggregation of men in great
cities practically necessitates the common or public
ownership, or control, of streets, sewers, water pipes, and
pleasure-grounds” (Olmsted 1895, p.312). There was also a
significant role for cultural institutions to create a
civilized democratic society rather than perpetuate the
frontier ethic (Scheper 1989, p.383; Lewis 1977, p.387).
Parks were key pleasure-grounds and cultural institutions
for Olmsted, and he felt that the United States was a
shameful laggard compared to Europe in providing such places
to its people. In his 1851 essay, “The People’s Park at
28
Birkenhead,” focused on Liverpool’s Birkenhead Park, Olmsted
noted, “five minutes of admiration, and a few more spent
studying the manner in which art had been employed to obtain
from nature so much beauty, and I was ready to admit that in
democratic America there was nothing to be thought of as
comparable with this People’s Garden” (Olmsted 1851, p.42).
Why Parks?
Rather than reject urban life due to all its faults,
Olmsted, who saw the advantages of modern towns, sought to
reclaim the city. But why parks as a solution to the city’s
ills? Here, Olmsted brought together the love of nature
that had been articulated by such proto-environmentalists
like Thoreau with republicanism’s formative project,
communitarian values, and democratic tendencies. And yet he
veered away from the anti-urbanism of these predecessor
views.
With regard to Olmsted’s affinities with early
environmentalists, it hardly needs repeating that Olmsted
saw contact with natural settings as profoundly restorative
29
of not only physical but also psychological and moral
health. Scheper remarks:
Olmsted’s great urban, pastoral-style public parks … stand as living monuments to and embodiments of the idealist proposition that there is a pre-established harmony between the forms of nature and the human heartand mind and that proper character formation as well asindividual and collective human happiness are dependentupon that synergism. (Scheper 1989, p.372)
Olmsted shared with contemporaries like Thoreau and
Muir a love of wild places. In his report recommending the
turning of Yosemite into a public park, he spoke of how the
enjoyment of scenery provides “refreshing rest and
reinvigoration” (quoted in Rybczynski 1999, p.258). In
constructing his parks, Olmsted was partly interested in
recreating the experience of wild places, which were distant
and unavailable to urban residents with limited means.
Olmsted said in an 1858 memorandum to Central Park’s Board
of Commissioners, “It is one great purpose of the Park to
supply to the hundreds of thousands of tired workers, who
have no opportunity to spend their summers in the country, a
specimen of God’s handiwork that shall be to them,
30
inexpensively, what a month or two in the White Mountains or
the Adirondacks is, at great cost, to those in easier
circumstances” (quoted in Scheper 1989, p.372).
Yet in his parks Olmsted really aimed for the restful
and restorative rather than the exciting. He did not
attempt to replicate sublime wilderness but, more in
reflection of the pastoral rather than the wilderness ideal,
constructed gentle, peaceful, rural landscapes, to be
experienced through contemplation and relaxed social
interaction – such as strolls or picnics – rather than awe,
active play, sports, or adventure (Taylor 1999; Scheper
1989; Waxman 2010). Thus, a park’s openness, a replication
of the countryside in the city, was a key characteristic.
Olmsted defined the park as “a space of ground used for
public or private recreation, differing from garden in its
spaciousness and the broad, simple and natural character of
its scenery, and from a ‘wood’ in the more scattered
arrangement of its trees and greater expanse of its glades
and consequently of its landscapes” (Olmstead 1875, p.254).
The park should convey “the beauty of the fields, the
31
meadow, the prairie, of the green pastures, and the still
waters. What we want to gain is tranquility and rest to the
mind. Mountains suggest effort” (Olmsted 1870, p.232).
Parks offered simple pleasures, not grandeur: “each element
in their scenery is simple, natural to the soil and climate,
and unobtrusive.” The park was “soothing and refreshing”
(Olmsted 1875, p.256).
Olmsted thus saw parks as a scene for relaxed,
convivial recreation that was either gregarious – involving
large groups of strangers – or neighborly – involving more
intimate groups (Olmsted 1870, pp.223-225). Recreation in
parks ought to be receptive rather than exertive: “Under one
will be included all of which the predominating influence is
to stimulate exertion of any part or parts needing it; under
the other, all which cause us to receive pleasure or benefit
without conscious exertion. Games chiefly of mental skill,
as chess, or athletic sports, as base-ball, are examples of
means of recreation of the first division, which may be
termed that of exertive recreation; music and the fine arts
generally, of the second or receptive division” (Olmsted 1870,
32
p.223). Enjoyment of a park’s gentle scenery through
strolling, small family picnics, skating, and other playful
but relaxed activities would also be receptive.
The gentle beauty of the landscape would re-constitute
human beings worn down by the city (Roulier 2009, p.326).
It would create peaceful, temperate characters, as Olmsted
said in regard to Central Park: “No one who has closely
observed the conduct of the people who visit the Park, can
doubt that it exercises a distinctly harmonizing and
refining influence upon the most unfortunate and most
lawless classes of the city, – an influence favorable to
courtesy, self-control, and temperance” (Olmsted 1870,
p.246). Parks also served an educative function, cultivating
the proper “habits and tastes” in children (Olmsted 1866,
p.115).
Moreover, a park enhanced physical health. Olmsted
declared the salubrious benefits of foliage: “Air is
disinfected by sunlight and foliage. Foliage also acts
mechanically to purify the air by screening it” (Olmsted
1870, p. 220). He also sought to address people’s health
33
needs more directly. Central Park had a working dairy that
sold fresh milk and a fountain that provided clean water
(Scheper 1989, p.396).
Olmsted’s Parks as Republican Spaces
Significantly, Olmsted also saw the park as a place to
build community, i.e. as a space for republican values. As
noted earlier, social interactions in the park would take
two forms: an intimate, neighborly interaction among friends
and family, and a more casual, even tacit interaction or
coexistence among fellow city-dwellers, many of whom were
strangers. However, in the peaceful, open setting of a
park, with room enough for a diversity of urban residents to
share the same space without jostling one another, at least
some hint of shared civic identity could emerge even among
the strangers. As Roulier (2009, pp.313-314) notes,
Olmsted’s program was very much in the republican mold: he
sought to create civic spaces that could help foster a sense
of fraternity or democratic solidarity.2 22 The freedom of movement and escape from the confining aspects of the city afforded by parks suggested a more liberal element of personal
34
As Roulier notes, Olmsted staunchly defended working
class access to the parks even as his contemporaries feared
the mixing of classes (Roulier 2009, p.336). In a famous
passage, Olmsted described Central and Prospect parks in
language that is redolent of republican values. Olmsted
evokes a democratic space that facilitates – for population
hitherto unused to it – the mixing of all citizens, in spite
of class, religion, ethnicity, and gender. Olmsted’s famous
description of Central and Prospect parks incorporates
diversity, democratic egalitarianism, and community:
Consider that the New York Park and the Brooklyn Park are the only places in those associated cities where, in this eighteen hundred and seventieth year after Christ, you will find a body of Christians coming together, and with an evident glee in the prospect of coming together, all classes largely represented, with a common purpose, not at all intellectual, competitive with none, disposing to jealousy and spiritual or intellectual pride toward none, each individual adding by his mere presence to the pleasure of all others, allhelping to the greater happiness of each. You may thus often see vast numbers of persons brought closely together, poor and rich, young and old, Jew and Gentile. I have seen a hundred thousand thus congregated, and I assure you that though there have
freedom and mobility in Olmsted’s projects, says Roulier (2009, pp.331-334).
35
been not a few that seemed a little dazed, as if they did not quite understand it, and were, perhaps, a little ashamed of it, I have looked studiously but vainly among them for a single face completely unsympathetic with the prevailing expression of good nature and light-heartedness. (Olmsted 1870, pp.225-226)3
Years earlier, observing Britain’s Birkenhead Park, he
similarly remarked, “I was glad to observe that the
privileges of the garden were enjoyed about equally by all
classes … And all this magnificent pleasure-ground is
entirely, unreservedly, and forever the People’s own. The
poorest British peasant is as free to enjoy it in all its
parts, as the British Queen” (Olmsted 1851, pp.43-44).
Olmsted, Robert Lewis argues, had a vision of community
that was orderly, harmonious, and nostalgic for the New
England town and the yeoman farmer. Yet unlike the more
exclusionary character of the small, homogeneous New England
town or the white Jeffersonian yeomanry, Olmsted’s vision of
community rejected racial and ethnic marginalization.
Olmsted’s overall view was simultaneously paternalist and
inclusive: that all groups could be properly educated, 3 The word “Christians” is used here as a generic term for “citizens” (Scheper 1989, p.387).
36
uplifted, and assimilated into a diverse, cosmopolitan
national community guided by middle-class values (Lewis
1977, pp.398-399) and marked by collective solidarity.
Perhaps unwittingly recalling Rousseau’s Social Contract
(1762), Olmsted saw as a defining characteristic of
civilization that “every individual on the whole during his
life is of service to and is served by every other therein”
(quoted in Roulier 2009, p.321).
Roulier (2009, p.320) rightly casts doubt on whether
coexistence among diverse citizens in a park could actually
generate a strong enough sense of community to “motivate
citizens to act in concert to achieve, common political
goals.” Still, he notes, the atmosphere of an Olmsted park
seemed sufficient to at least bring out neighborly and
gregarious instincts, which in itself can be a boon to
democracy. The park could be a space for the beginnings of
a self-governing, communitarian, republican ethos among
urban-dwellers.
The Role of the Designer I: A Long Time Horizon
37
Olmsted envisioned the landscape architect as a place-
founder and, indeed, an artist (Scheper 1989, p.371). A
park was a fusion of nature and art, as Olmsted told the
citizens of Montreal in his proposal for Mount Royal Park:
“When an artist puts a stick in the ground, and nature in
time makes it a tree, art and nature are not to be seen
apart in the result” (Olmsted 1881b, p.204). This was to be
a cooperative process with nature at the local level. The
designer as artist worked with local natural qualities to
bring out their “latent loveliness” (Olmsted 1881b, p.220).
The result was something that looked natural but was “far
more charming than the best that nature, unencouraged, would
much more slowly give you.” Thus, on Mount Royal, one could
“prevail upon nature to dress it with characteristic
mountain forms of foliage and bloom, more interesting than
nature would, in a century, otherwise provide.” Indeed, he
said, scenery could be thought of like a crop (Olmsted
1881b, pp.207-208; emphasis in original). And not only was
this crop in some measure superior to nature, it was also
superior to what we usually take to be high culture: a well-
38
designed urban park would yield more riches to a city than
“museums and galleries” (Olmsted 1881b, p.220).
Parks had to be laid out carefully to achieve Olmsted’s
desired qualities, and the plans would take decades to be
realized, as the saplings and other plantings grew. The
designer’s plan could therefore not be altered. Olmsted
accordingly described “the problem of a park” as something
that must be considered “clear of unfortunate, temporary
political necessities” and involving “the reconciliation of
adequate beauty of nature in scenery with adequate means in
artificial constructions of protecting the conditions of
such beauty and holding it available to the use, in a convenient and orderly
way, of those needing it” (Olmsted 1881a, p.308; emphasis
added). A well-managed park would be “steadily gainful of
that quality of beauty which comes only with age” (Olmsted
1881a, p.308). Olmsted thus emphasized, “A landscape park
requires, more than most works of men, continuity of
management. Its perfecting is a slow process” (Olmsted
1895, p.314).
A park was also a gift to future generations. “It must
39
be remembered,” Olmsted emphasized regarding Central Park,
“that the Park is not planned for such use as is now made of
it, but with regard to the future use, when it will be in
the centre of a population of two millions hemmed in by
water at a short distance on all sides; and that much of the
work done upon it is, for this reason, as yet quite barren
of results” (Olmsted 1870, p.243). Indeed, Olmsted saw park
planners looking ahead a thousand years into the future
(Olmsted 1870, p.228).
Like his Jeffersonian forebears who sought a stable
agrarian society in order to protect republican virtue
against the possible ascendance of commercial values, and
like the nineteenth century proto-environmentalist
wilderness advocates who saw preservation of wild places as
an important lifeline for virtue in a commercializing
society, Olmsted pursued a conception of sustainability.
His park-building projects not only required decades to
reach maturity, but they were a bequest to future
generations, who must receive them unimpaired. Yet this
emphasis on sustainability not only showed an affinity with
40
the environmentalist tradition; it also constrained the
political process. Not only were the short-term interests
of elected officials stymied; also stymied was the ability
of citizens to exercise democratic control over parks and to
re-found them as necessary.
The Role of the Designer II: Olmsted’s Paternalism
The role Olmsted envisioned for the planners and
architects of parks sits in considerable tension with the
more democratic aspects of his vision. In fact, Olmsted’s
version of the formative project emphasizes not so much
actual republican self-government as it does a more
conservative, paternalist republican vision.
Charged with developing and executing a complex, long-
term design, park planners had to be insulated from short-
term political pressures and other outside interference. In
Blodgett’s words:
Conflicting inferences about the park were compounded by contrasting time-spans in men’s thoughts about it. The politician habitually construed the park as vacant space to be filled with jobs and structures on a
41
schedule set by the next election, the next audit or appropriation, the next batch of obligations coming due… [T]he city official saw the park in relatively short-range terms as a current item on an endless agenda. Olmsted in contrast set his goals for the park well in the future … The appearance of a ‘finished’ Olmsted landscape required decades to mature. The results he wanted [for Central Park] lay, in their earliest fulfillment, forty years ahead. (Blodgett 1976, p.880)
Park planning could therefore not be entrusted to the
normal political process or to democratic decision-making,
for that matter. As Olmsted thus noted, the creation of a
park
is a work in which private and local and special interests will be found so antagonistic one to another,in which heated prejudices are so liable to be unconsciously established, and in which those who wouldbe disappointed in their personal greeds by whatever good scheme may be studied out, are so likely to combine and concentrate force to kill it (manufacture public opinion, as the phrase is), that the ordinary organizations for municipal business are unsuitable agencies for the purpose. It would, perhaps, be a bold thing to say that the public in its own interest, and in the interest of all of whom the present public are the trustees, should see to it that the problem is as soon as possible put clean out of its own hands, in order that it may be taken up efficiently by a small body of select men. But I will venture to say that until this in effect is done, the danger that public opinion may be led, by the application of industry, ingenuity, and business ability on the part of men whose real objects are perhaps unconsciously very close
42
to their own pockets, to overrule the results of more comprehensive and impartial study, is much greater thanin most questions of public interest. (Olmsted 1870, p.236)
Politicians would interfere with a project and ruin it with
patronage, while the rich would shout it down because they
did not want their taxes to go up or did not want the poor
to use the parks and cause disorder (Olmsted 1870, pp.237-
238). The general public also lacked good judgment: “it is
hardly to be supposed that the popular demand represented in
parks has yet take the fully mature, self-conscious form of
thoroughly-reasoned purposes and principles, and has
insisted on an accurate embodiment of them in the works
ordered. It is more reasonable to assume that it has not.”
(Olmsted 1881a, p.294).
Olmsted thus praised the Commissioners of Central Park
for conducting their business away from the public: “As to
their method of work, it was as like as possible to that of
a board of directors of a commercial corporation. They quite
set at defiance the ordinary ideas of propriety applied to
public servants, by holding their sessions with closed
43
doors, their clerk being directed merely to supply the
newspapers with reports of their acts.” (Olmsted 1870,
p.241). In a much later essay, he similarly noted, “If
scenic parks … are to be well placed, well bounded, well
arranged, and, above all, well preserved, the directors of
the work need to be more than ordinary men. Real-estate
dealers must necessarily be excluded from the management.
Politicians also, if the work is to run smoothly” (Olmsted
1895, p.314).
Park design and management would have to be an elite
and virtually selfless enterprise by those possessed of
uncorrupted public spirit and a long time horizon:
The direction of park works may probably best rest witha small body of cultivated men, public-spirited enough to serve without pay, who should regard themselves and be regarded as a board of trustees, and who, as such, should make it their first duty to hand down unharmed from one generation to the next the treasure of scenerywhich the city has placed in their care. Public libraries and public art museums are created and managed by boards of trustees. For similar reasons public parks should be similarly governed (Olmsted 1895, p.314).
Yet one might note that libraries and museums, while
important civic institutions, are limited to particular
44
buildings, while parks occupy a significant chunk of the
urban landscape and so arguably have a much greater impact
on the overall city.
Lewis (1977) thus sees Olmsted as advancing a top-down,
paternalistic “ordered republicanism” that emphasized
“harmony, balance, and disciplined, ordered progress.”
Olmsted, he says, “believed that a bureaucratic system and a
cultured, professional elite would impose tranquility upon a
restless, democratic and egalitarian people” (pp.386-387;
Blodgett 1976, p.872). Having had numerous fights with
politicians and political machines over the planning and
management of parks and fed up with political patronage,
Olmsted was distrustful of the tumultuous political process
and sought a more closed, even authoritarian planning
system. Blodgett (1976, p.877) also notes that “Olmsted was
constantly embittered by the public’s failure to understand
the purpose of his parks or accept his trained expertise.”
Olmsted sought to tightly control not only the physical
character of the park, but the activity pursued therein.
His remarks about urban street life showed a discomfort with
45
spontaneous interactions, however much these interactions
bespoke of a legitimate social impulse. Good urban parks
would promote contemplation, enjoyment of the scenery, and
peaceful neighborly activities like picnics while excluding
the pursuit of not only vice, or but also noisy
entertainments or even competitive sports (Lewis 1977,
p.403; Taylor 1999). Consequently, as both Blodgett (1976)
and Dorceta Taylor (1999) note, Olmsted’s vision of his
parks clashed with the public, who often favored more
dynamic entertainments and more active recreation.
“Olmsted,” Blodgett notes, “never satisfactorily reconciled
his tranquil, unitary vision of Central Park with the
desires of its users. He had special trouble coping with
the demands of the active young working-class male” (1976,
p.881). Eventually, and reluctantly, he embraced more
active forms of recreation – such as tennis courts, baseball
diamonds, and playgrounds – in his park designs (Blodgett
1976; Taylor 1999).
Tamed Parks and Citizens
46
Olmsted also saw a need for tight policing of parks to
prevent antisocial behavior (Olmsted 1870, p.232). Taylor
lists a number of prohibitions Olmsted established for
Central Park visitors, including walking on the grass
(except on the Commons), picking flowers, leaves, twigs,
fruits or nuts, use of provocational or indecent language,
and annoying the birds (Taylor 1999, p.443).
Consequently, whereas republican thought often
emphasized turbulent, dynamic self-government, from
Machiavelli’s tumultuous vision of the Roman Republic to
Jefferson’s regular revolutions to Thoreau’s disobedient
citizen, Olmsted sought to tame the populace. Olmsted
seemed more like Rousseau’s Great Legislator, fashioning an
unalterable general will for the people (Rousseau 1762).
Olmsted’s park was democratic in terms of inclusion and
diversity but his descriptions of idyllic recreation seemed
sanitized of a truly dynamic public life. The park was to be
an almost therapeutic haven from the tumult of the city
rather than a truly vibrant public square. In his plans for
Boston’s Franklin Park, Olmsted’s tranquil vision thus ruled
47
out not only athletic teams but also political activity
(Blodgett 1976, p.886). Here, one might recall Olmsted’s
approving observation, quoted above, that in the modern
city, mobs are “suppressed more quickly.”
This notion of a tamed haven was manifested in how
Olmsted’s parks related to the surrounding city. Olmsted’s
urban planning projects were often comprehensive in covering
both parks and other aspects of city planning, including the
layout of neighborhoods and infrastructure, and Olmsted was
attentive to creating the right experiential transitions as
someone passed from the surrounding city to a park.
However, despite these holistic aspects of his planning, he
also designed his parks so that the city disappeared when
one was within them:
We want a ground to which people may easily go after their day's work is done, and where they may stroll foran hour, seeing, hearing, and feeling nothing of the bustle and jar of the streets, where they shall, in effect, find the city put far away from them. We want the greatest possible contrast with the streets and theshops and the rooms of the town which will be consistent with convenience and the preservation of good order and neatness. We want, especially, the greatest possible contrast with the restraining and confining conditions of the town, those conditions
48
which compel us to walk circumspectly, watchfully, jealously, which compel us to look closely upon others without sympathy. Practically, what we most want is a simply, broad, open space of clean greensward, with sufficient play of surface and a sufficient number of trees about it to supply a variety of light and shade. This we want as a central feature. We want depth of wood enough about it not only for comfort in hot weather, but to completely shut out the city from our landscapes. These are the distinguishing elements of what is properly called a park. (Olmsted 1870, pp.230-231)
One experienced spatial openness within the park but closure
with respect to the outside:
The most essential element of park scenery is turf in broad, unbroken fields, because in this the antithesis of the confined spaces of the town is most marked. (Olmsted 1875, p.259)
… it is desirable that views of considerable extent should be controllable within its borders, and that in order to command them it should not necessary that views beyond its borders be opened, the elements of which cannot be controlled, and are liable, even in thedistant future, to be made inharmonious with those of the park; especially so, where such elements will have urban rather than rural associations. (Olmsted 1875, p.258)
This notion of turning one’s back on the city has of course
helped to fuel criticisms of Olmsted as anti-urban.
49
It also bears mentioning that Olmsted’s plans, while
certainly improving urban life, did not directly address the
dysfunctional aspects of the industrial city – poverty,
dangerous or oppressive working conditions, poor sanitation
and public health, monopolistic business practices – that
made him prescribe his parks. Moreover, the creation of the
parks themselves was sometimes attended with injustice.
Carving out an area for Central Park, for example, “required
displacing roughly 1,600 poor residents, including Irish pig
farmers and German gardeners, who lived in shanties on the
site. At Eighth Avenue and 82nd Street, Seneca Village had
been one of the city's most stable African-American
settlements, with three churches and a school” (Blackmar and
Rosenzweig, n.d.). This was, however, done through an act
of eminent domain that took place before Olmsted became
involved in developing Central Park.
The Parks Evolve After Olmsted
Fortunately, Olmsted’s somewhat oppressive guidelines
were not always honored. As Elizabeth Blackmar and Roy
50
Rosenzweig (n.d.) note with regard to Central Park, “New
Yorkers repeatedly contested [the Park’s] rules, however,
and in the last third of the [nineteenth] century the park
opened up to more democratic use.” A number of changes took
place in Central Park:
In the 1880s, working-class New Yorkers successfully campaigned for concerts on Sunday, their only day of rest. Park commissioners gradually permitted other attractions, from the Carousel and goat rides to tennison the lawns and bicycling on the drives. The Zoo, first given permanent quarters in 1871, quickly became the park's most popular feature. (Blackmar and Rosenzweig, n.d.)
Change continued in the twentieth century:
In 1934, Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia placed Robert Moses in charge of a new centralized citywide park system … Moses built 20 playgrounds on the park's periphery, renovated the Zoo, realigned the drives to accommodate automobiles, added athletic fields to the North Meadow,and expanded recreational programming. In the early 1950s and early 1960s, private benefactors contributed the Wollman Skating Rink, the Lasker Rink and Pool, newboathouses, and the Chess and Checkers house. Moses also introduced permanent ball fields to the Great Lawnfor corporate softball and neighborhood little league teams.
In the 1960s, Mayor John Lindsay's two park commissioners, Thomas Hoving and August Heckscher, welcomed "happenings," rock concerts, and be-ins to thepark, making it a symbol of both urban revival and the counterculture. (Blackmar and Rosenzweig, n.d.)
51
Moreover, a visitor to Central Park today does not lose
sight of the surrounding city, but enjoys a beautiful vista
of skyscrapers rising above fields, ponds, and trees.
Olmsted’s parks and other creations were thus in many cases
more fully claimed by their users, who themselves acted as
place-founders, in effect re-founding the parks to fit their
own needs (Cannavò 2007), even as vast pastoral spaces
remained to fulfill Olmsted’s main objectives.
Unfortunately, Olmsted’s parks, including Central Park,
in many cases also fell into disrepair as American cities
declined during the mid-twentieth century. Recent decades,
however, have seen a revival of interest in Olmsted’s work
and efforts to restore his creations.
Assessing Olmsted: The Formative Project, Sustainability,
and Democracy
Despite these criticisms, there is much to admire in
Olmsted’s overall landscaping project. As many
environmental activists and park preservationists have
52
argued, it is hard to deny to appeal and benefits of green
space, including quiet, restful places, in crowded urban
settings. Moreover, trees, as Olmsted noted, do have a
number of health and environmental benefits. And Olmsted
also deserves praise for his sympathy for the urban working
class and his inclusive, egalitarian vision of the park,
often pursued in the face of resistance from more
reactionary elites. Additionally, though he saw parks as in
some ways havens from the city, he also did not fully
embrace the anti-urbanism of other republicans and proto-
environmentalists.
I would also argue that Olmsted’s long-term, meticulous
plans for his parks were understandable from a landscaping
point of view and from the viewpoint of social reform. A
city park is a kind of urban ecosystem, with an intricate
interweaving of constructed and biotic, growing elements.
It cannot be created overnight and cannot be altered at
will. The re-founding of a park over time must be
accompanied by some attention to long-term sustainability
and preservationist restraint or the place itself will be
53
ruined or changed beyond recognition (Cannavò 2007). A
founder’s proper control over the future of a place is
really a matter of degree. Olmsted arguably went too far in
prescribing the character and activities appropriate to this
parks and in shutting out the public from decision-making.
In so doing, he unfortunately anticipated authoritarian
planners, like Robert Moses, who devastated American cities
through twentieth-century Urban Renewal projects. However,
a more democratic, open-ended process should not entirely
exclude long-term guidelines, if only for the reason that
some landscaping plans require decades to mature.
Olmsted’s approach to urban reform, while elitist,
anti-democratic, and quasi-authoritarian, was not entirely
without justification. If one is to accept that social and
economic conditions shape human character for better or
worse, then any effort to reform those conditions also
involves not taking citizens’ behaviors as given but trying
to bring improvement. This improvement has much in common
with republicanism’s formative project, which sought to
foster the conditions favorable to active, public-spirited,
54
self-governing citizenship. This improvement also has much
in common with environmental values like sustainability and
quality of life, which aim at not just bettering ecological
conditions but also improving human lives and practices and
fostering ecological citizenship.
The republican formative project and environmental
values like sustainability are thus non-democratic in that
they do not necessarily accept the public’s interests or
desires as they are but seek to create citizens who will
have better interests or desires in accord with some vision
of human flourishing. Thus, Olmsted’s parks, while
themselves not democratic in their founding or management,
were to some degree schools of certain democratic values:
inclusion, diversity, tolerance, peaceful coexistence, and
even community. There is an implicit hope for more capable,
virtuous democratic citizenry further down the road. Such a
tension between promoting a republican or green conception
of the good and attending to citizens’ current democratic
wishes is made even more challenging by the fact that both
republicanism and environmentalism have at various points
55
emphasized democratic self-government as a key to pursuing
the common good.
In grappling with urban reform and democracy and tying
together republican and environmentalist themes, Olmsted
anticipated the challenges and perspectives faced by urban
environmentalists today. The environmental justice, New
Urbanist, civic agriculture, parks preservation, and anti-
sprawl movements all in some way attempt to foster green
values, active citizenship, and improvements in public
health and/or quality of life. These movements do not take
cities or citizens as given and instead try to create
enduring social and environmental reforms. They thus face
the challenge of balancing democratic values with the
pursuit of some kind of formative project.
The key is to open up opportunities, practices, and
spaces for the development and exercise of civic and
environmental values without prescribing too much ahead of
time. Olmsted perhaps prescribed too much, but he was
trying to address a set of problems with which today’s heirs
of the republican and green traditions still grapple.
56
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