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

pcannavo@hamilton.edu

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

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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.

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