Sanctuary: Central Park as Separate Space An excerpt from the honors thesis Spaces of Accommodation: A Study of Central Park for the 21st Century

A writing sample submitted to the Modern Culture and Media Ph.D. Admissions Committee Brown University by Casey Riffel December 13, 2005

“Sanctuary: The Park as Separate Space”

Twenty years hence, the town will have enclosed the Central Park. Let us consider, therefore, what will at that time be satisfactory, for it is then that the design will have to be really judged. No longer an open suburb, our ground will have around it a continuous high wall of brick, stone, and marble. The adjoining shores will be lined with commercial docks and warehouses; steamboat and ferry landings, railroad stations, hotels, theatres, factories, will be on all sides of it and above it: all [of] which our park must be made to fit. —Frederick Law Olmsted [5, p. 120]

Preface This essay was written as the first of three chapters for my honors thesis, Spaces of Accommodation: A Study of Central Park for the 21st . Century The thesis was motivated by an attempt to articulate the terms on which Central Park succeded in becoming a vibrant, beautiful, complex, and semimythological piece of the New York landscape. My argument is that Central Park has succeeded because it is a space of accommodation: it allows contradictory readings, permits a diversity of activity, and does not impose certain experiences on its users. My paper focuses on the historical roots of Central Park, arguing on the basis of the original design and its ideological, aesthetic, and functional implications. The first chapter addresses the ways Central Park becomes cast as an oasis within the city. The second chapter takes the opposite stance by arguing for the ways Central Park and the city influence and interpenetrate each other. The final chapter takes these two viewpoints and synthesizes them through an interpretation of Christo’s installation art piece The Gates. I want to directly oppose the sentiment that Central Park has been perverted over the years and in the process attempt to redefine what it means to be “true” to Olmsted’s original vision.

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Introduction Intricate, contradictory, and subtle, Central Park is a testament to the prescience of its designers and to the tumultuous history of the its maternal city. There was no single impetus for the park’s creation; a mixture of economic, social, and aesthetic motivations swirled around the years leading up to the final decision to build one single park in the middle of Manhattan. [8, p. 18] It was certainly not a grassroots movement, despite the rhetoric of democracy and public access it would come to retrospectively embody. The conflict between New York’s cultural elite and the lower classes would define the first fifty years of the park’s life. Manhattan’s gentlemen wanted the park to have a civilizing effect on the poor while at the same time provide the gentry with relief from the crowded conditions produced by the swell of immigrants. As we explore Central Park, we will find similar contradictions and incongruities built into the park’s very fabric. The park is a place separate from the city at the same time intimately integrated with and dependent on it; the park is a unified work of art while maintaining an inescapable heterogeneity of form; the park remains stubbornly itself while being open to modification and adaptation; the park is a public space where the individual is given power to improvise and interpret on his own terms. Central Park was to be just that: central. A certain amount of the awe directed at the park in the 21st century derives from that very centrality: in the heart of one of the most densely urbanized islands in the world, a park. It is easy to imagine that Central Park’s expansive greenery in some ways permits the absurd density of the rest of Manhattan. How could individuals tolerate the suffocating verticality without being able to retreat, to escape, to breathe once in a while? For all the tribulations of its past, Central Park has solidified its place as a successful, vibrant, and (above all) enjoyable space that has indeed proved, as 1851 Mayor Ambrose Kingsland hoped, “a lasting monument to the wisdom, sagacity, and forethought of its founders.” [8, p. 18] Antebellum New York was a place and a time pivotal in the city’s history. In the first half the 18th century, the population of the city had more than quadrupled, to nearly half a million. [8] The city had just begun to emerge as the most prosperous port in the new nation, a locus of shipping, (sweatshop) manufacturing, and finance. But an enormous imbalance of wealth prevailed, as reflected in the group of gentlemen lobbying for the creation of a public park: “four percent of the city’s residents controlled more than 80 percent of the city’s wealth.” [8, p. 22] The call to build a park reflected the concern by this elite four percent that New York, despite its accelerating prosperity,

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did not possess the cultural refinement that they saw in European capitals. This anxiety, what we might playfully call an anxiety of historical influence, around America’s European heritage permeates both the park’s inspiration and the early thought of its principal designer, Frederick Law Olmsted (1822– 1903). Central Park was both a reaction against what the city was becoming as well as a vision of what it could become. In this chapter, we will focus on how the park was conceived as a foil to the city. From this perspective, it becomes immediately apparent that the terms “nature,” “garden,” and “park” become integral to the separation of park and city. We can see Central Park as a sanctuary, a space with immunity to certain aspects of the city. The religious origins of the term “sanctuary” are not entirely inappropriate. As Olmsted lamented, America had no parks to equal those of Europe; cemeteries were the only spaces, before Central Park, that allowed (mostly wealthy) citizens to “stroll and admire edifying monuments and pastoral scenery.” [8, p. 28] The use of nature as recreation reflected the fact that New York, and America in general, embodied the tension between the social hope of a new land and the problem of constructing a new civilization. Examining the terms “garden” (park as sanctuary) and “machine” will give us a useful framework for exploring Olmsted’s plan for Central Park as well as the ways the park resists and reacts to the pressures of the city.

The Machine invades the Garden The train whistle is not the first sound of civilization to reach Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ears. Sometime in the morning of July 27, 1844, Hawthorne walked into the Massachusetts woods to record his thoughts and document the various aspects of the summertime forest. In his journal he devotes numerous pages to his impressions, which conform to the ideals of serenity and tranquility we expect from a Romantic novelist. Over the birds, leaves, and grass come the sounds of rural life: “he hears the village clock strike, a cowbell tinkle, and mowers wetting their scythes.” [4, p. 13] But although these are the sounds of civilization, they do not detract from the scene’s allencompassing harmony: Hawthorne is content as an individual, and there is no conflict between man and the environment. Edenic in its celebration of the pastoral life, Hawthorne’s account becomes complicated with the sudden entry of a locomotive into the scene: But, hark! there is a whistle of the locomotive—the long shriek, harsh, above all other harshness, for the space of a mile cannot mollify it into harmony. It tells a story of busy men, citizens, from

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the hot streets, who have come to spend a day in a country village, men of business; in short of all unquietness; and no wonder that it gives such a startling shriek, since it brings the noisy world into the midst of our slumberous peace. [4, pp. 13-4] We are reminded that Boston and New York are not that far away. Hawthorne knew that locomotives existed. But his pastoral reverie was an active, if “slumberous,” forgetting of its existence—an intentional amnesia. The train, by unmistakably announcing its existence, has interrupted and disrupted Hawthorne’s world. This incident, as analyzed by Leo Marx, epitomizes the tension between American ideas of nature and technology. Easily construed as opposite and antagonistic, nature and technology get encapsulated as the “garden” and the “machine.” The turbulent history of the “garden” provides a crucial context for an understanding of Central Park’s roots. Ignoring for the moment the tension of garden and machine, we see that there is an inherent incongruity just within the term “garden.” As Marx understands it, the garden, as it operates in American history, comprises two opposing metaphors: “a wild, primitive, or pre-lapsarian Eden, and a cultivated garden embracing values not unlike those represented by the classic Virgilian pasture.” [4, p. 87] Virginia planter Robert Beverley’s 1705 text History and Present State of Virginia described an ambivalence towards the new idyllic landscape. On the one hand, he saw the pastoral embodied in the Virginia landscape and the utopian simplicity of the Indians. The potential for America to realize the vision of a new garden of the world seemed within reach; Beverley had lived in Virginia and seen it with his own eyes. But, on the other hand, Beverley shamefully recounts the sloth and rudeness of his countrymen: the paradisiacal landscape has not given them the tranquility attributed to the noble savage. To his dismay, Beverley finds no gardens in a land where gardens should be most easily built. Marx concludes that “the existence of the garden-as-metaphor has hindered the appearance of gardens-in-fact.” [4, p. 84] Beverley is reaching towards a unification of art and nature, but he is uncomfortable with a civilization existing in a gardenworld without constructing “actual” gardens to represent their continuing refinement. The key is that the garden was used for somewhat contradictory purposes. The pastoral ideal represented the hope of a pure and innocent America, but the pastoral design exploited the terms of the pastoral ideal in a man-made context to symbolize European civilization and refinement. To speak of the American garden is to immediately access the tension between the wild and the civilized, the rural and the urban. The natural beauty and repose of

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the American frontier comes to clash with an increasing emphasis on work. It becomes clear that industrialization threatened the pastoral ideal as it reached back to Renaissance aesthetics of poetry and art. As Marx points out: “If we take the vital element in the pastoral to be the design, the ordering of meaning and value around the contrast between two styles of life, one identified with a rural and the other with an urban setting, then the pastoral was by no means dead.” [4, p. 94] The garden, regardless of its style, was a place that civilized urban patrons could enjoy for leisure and recreation. But the garden required a civilization from which to escape, a necessary context in which to be embedded. As for the machine, represented by the locomotive, Marx and Schivelbusch emphasize that, for most of the eighteenth century, new transportation technologies did not actually threaten nature. Instead, it opened up the frontier and allowed civilization a more intimate contact with the natural world. This is precisely because it was encroaching on (as opposed to destroying) places like Sleepy Hollow. In Europe, the advent of the locomotive grew out of a fully-fledged industrial system. The capitalist infrastructure was already in place, so the locomotive merely exacerbated the evils of Dickensian factories. But the American railroads offered an expansion into the garden, into the vastness of the continent, creating a transportation network in the process. [10, p.88 ff.] The railroad proved key in allowing Americans to “actually [see] themselves creating a society in the image of a garden.” [4, p. 143] In expanding and colonizing the frontier, Americans would imaginatively represent the ideal garden they gradually effaced. A examination of Central Park picks up on this symbolic activity: the park was created to recreate, for the benefit of an encroaching civilization, an ideal world that it needed to destroy in the process. This sets the stage for the creation of an urban park imbued with such incongruities; Central Park requires each user to commune with something akin to Keats’ “negative capability”: the ability to be “in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” The relationship between the garden and the machine has only grown more ambiguous since the creation of Central Park. From a 21st-century perspective, the machine has certainly become the dominant force. It can no longer be said that technology is in the process of overcoming the natural or rural aspects of civilization; the new globalized world finds itself enveloped by an increasingly hybridized complex: military-industrial-capitalistconsumerist-etc. To be sure, civilization is endangering the natural world in a very real way: deforestation, species extinction, ozone depletion, pollution,

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etc. 1 But the balance of power has certainly shifted, and this is reflected by a reversal of Marx’s terms: we are now dealing with the garden in the context of the machine. But more than this, we can substitute “and” for “in”: the garden and the machine. Although New York surrounds Central Park, it is too easy to use “in” to imply that the park is wholly a subset of the city. Joining the two ideas with “and” tells us that we must be aware of bidirectional influence between garden and machine. A dialectical process underscores Hawthorne’s anxiety: the imposition of the machine only heightens the need to retreat from it. But in the modern world, where the machine is ubiquitous, a true sanctuary seems impossible, especially for those who live directly in the mechanical heart. Central Park offers users the possibility of this very sanctuary: an escape from the city. Someone passing through the Scholar’s Gate needs to feel that, although the park’s entrance gates do not close (and, being public, can not really close), they nonetheless restrict something from passing through. Manhattan stops where Central Park begins. The hustle and bustle, everything stereotypical about Manhattan, its congestion, its density, and its delirium, seems to be filtered out by the four-foot stone wall circling the rectangular park. The issue of sanctuary comes to the fore as a key dividing point between city and park.

The Greensward Plan The idea of Central Park as a sanctuary goes back to its conception and, namely, to the choice of its location. As New York slowly began to recover from the Panic of 1837, economic upturns continued to inflate population density. The squalor and contamination of the poorer parts of the city produced serious public health concerns. Dubbing a great park as “the lungs of the city” has always had a visceral root: Central Park was a place where residents could easily breathe clean air. So the idea of a park grew in part from matter of physical health. But the health benefits of a park extended into the moral realm: “A public park would provide a site for ‘healthy’ and ‘manly’ exercise” to combat the urban pastimes of gambling, drinking, and prostitution. [8, p. 24] Although he eventually came to change the face of American landscape design, Olmsted came to Central Park, and to landscape architecture, entirely by accident. Staying at an inn on New Haven Bay, not far from New York, Olmsted found an unlikely dinner partner: Charles Wyllys Elliott. Elliott was intimately involved with the movement to create a large public 1

When it comes to modern and postmodern civilization, there is always an et cetera.

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park in New York. It turned out their politics and viewpoints aligned; Elliot advised Olmsted to apply for superintendent. The next day, Olmsted traveled to Manhattan, applied, and was eventually given the job. [9, pp. 149ff.] Initially, Olmsted flourished because he was an experienced farm administrator as well as a traveler and writer. But Olmsted was not formally trained, nor was he a scholar. At first, his job was purely administrative. But when Andrew Jackson Downing, having introduced Olmsted to Calvert Vaux, died in a steamboat fire, Olmsted and Vaux entered the design competition in his honor. Their plan, dubbed “Greensward,” was chosen as the winning design. It was unique in its treatment of a combination of pastoral and picturesque, the professional quality of its design (owing mainly to Vaux’s drafting skills and formal training), the ingenious sunken transverse roads, and the degree to which it offered a coherent and unified vision. The question of Olmsted and Vaux’s partnership is up for debate; the two men sometimes quarreled over who got credit for which aspects of Central Park and subsequent collaborations. But historians have generally, and not without justification, focused their attentions on Olmsted, endowing him with nearly sole credit for the aesthetic genius of Central Park. [8, p. 121] Olmsted and Vaux wanted Central Park to counteract the impending claustrophobia induced by the staggering density of 19th-century New York. Because the park was in part a reaction against the garbage and detritus of the industrializing city, the picturesque ideology of the park expressed itself as a rhetoric of leisure. In 1859, with a number of years working on the park to cement his ideas, Olmsted penned this dense summary of his design: The primary purpose of the Park is to provide the best practicable means of healthful recreation for the inhabitants of the city, of all classes. It should present an aspect of spaciousness and tranquility with variety and intricacy of arrangement, thereby affording the most agreeable contrast to the confinement, bustle, and monotonous street-division of the city. The Park should...resemble a charming bit of rural landscape, such as, unless produced by art, is never found within the limits of a large town. No kind of sport can be permitted which would be inconsistent with the general method of amusement, and species of exercise which must be enjoyed only by a single class in the community to the diminution of the enjoyment of the others. The Park is intended to furnish healthful recreation for the poor and the rich, the young and the old, the vicious and the virtuous, so far as each can partake therein without infringing upon the rights of others, and no

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fruther. [5, p. 213] Central Park was in this way a landscape rather than an amusement park.2 A few important points arise from Olmsted’s description: the importance of artful design, progressive social ideals, and natural beauty, all in service of contrasting against the city. Later in the chapter, we will explore in depth how the park contrasts again the “street-division” (i.e. The Grid). But for now, we will focus on the natural aspects of the Greensward Plan. Over the course of this and succeeding chapters, we will explore different aspects of the plan, including its accommodation of the city, its heterogeneity, and the roots of its durability. We can see a bit of the beginnings of the wilderness preservation movement in the Greensward Plan.3 It is a sort of proactive nostalgia: Olmsted anticipated the regret future New Yorkers would feel once the natural contours of Manhattan were swallowed up by the viral, encroaching urbanism. Despite the undeniable prescience of Olmsted’s ideals, there are two complications that need to be explored. First is that Central Park was much more an engineering than a conservation project: most of the landscape that would become Central Park was altered or re-made. The second is that his visionary plans employ a fundamentally nostalgic vision of nature and the pastoral. America as unspoiled, as a return to a pre-civilized innocence: this is the regressive aesthetic Olmsted drew on in imagining the contours of the great park. It is ironic and slightly problematic that such a forward-thinking project as Greensward would attempt to code such nostalgic conceptions of nature into a city that would come to embody industrial modernism. But this may have been exactly the point: if New York was on its way to becoming hyperbolically and excessively industrial—with all the vices and virtues there implied—then perhaps Olmsted’s only choice was a reactionary and regressive approach. While the extreme contrast between park and city was expected and even desired, there is the potential for this explicit boundary— which would be drawn in both material a metaphorical terms—to become too rigid, too inflexible. But, as we will see in this and later chapters, Central Park sidesteps this potential inflexibility through its subtlety, adaptability, and heterogeneity. Its ability to do so stems in part from its own qualities and from the influence of New York itself. 2

Though, as we will see later, the fear of the park devolving into Coney Island plays into the park’s character. 3 Olmsted would come to be extremely influential in the creation of Yosemite National Park, where he applied many of his principles about the healthy and vigorous effects of nature. [6, p. 106]

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The Greensward Plan is remarkable for its adaptation and modification of picturesque, gardenesque, and pastoral. Olmsted was influenced heavily by Andrew Jackson Downing and Humphrey Repton. Especially in the case of Repton, one of the legacies of these two men is innovation on the picturesque style prevalent in England in the eighteenth century. The term picturesque developed in the late eighteenth century, primarily in the writings of William Gilpin, Uvedale Price, Richard Payne Knight, and Thomas Whately. In contrast to the formal gardens that became popular in the Early Modern period, the picturesque aesthetic elevated natural landscapes to the level of painting. At its zenith around the end of the eighteenth century, picturesque gardens were generally irregular, showcased the natural attributes of the setting (site-specificity), allow the eye to roam over its sprawling scenery, and have a distinct effect on the individual: it was meant to recall an Arcadian or bucolic past. [2] Often, classically-styled buildings were added to inspire favorable associations. Such landscapes should appear “natural” insofar as they should hide their artifice; their craftsmanship would be so skilled as to seem natural. As Olmsted wrote in the Greensward proposal, “The idea of the park itself should always be uppermost in the mind of the beholder.” [5, p. 126] By this he means that the goal of the park—for Central Park, providing universal recreation—should always be supported but never eclipsed by the artifice. The Ramble is Olmsted’s principle picturesque landscape within Central Park (in addition to The Ravine in the upper park). As such, he exempted it from the integrated circulation system: only foot traffic would be allowed. Steep slopes, rocky formations, and dense foliage obscure the city as nowhere else in the park. It is easy to forget that the Ramble was once a construction site where its “natural” features were carefully constructed by Olmsted and his army of workers. Today, signs at the entrance to the Ramble proclaim its status as one of the most important bird-watching areas in the country. Presumably, the Ramble competes with habitats not constructed by the hand of man. But in areas like Sheep Meadow, Olmsted clearly aimed for a pastoral aesthetic. The wide meadow evokes much more strongly the ideal life lived in harmony with nature. The Greensward Plan called for the boundary between the meadow and the surrounding woods to be gradual, with the density of planted trees slowly increasing so as not to jar the user. The genius of the plan is that the picturesque Ramble, the pastoral Sheep Meadow, and the beautiful Mall are adjacent. Olmsted takes the fluidity of the picturesque aesthetic—in particular, its concern for site-specific design—and uses it to create various effects. [12, p. 23] Although he was generally

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Figure 1: A perspective drawing hides the deisng of the landscape, while individuals are shown at leisure to emphasize the personal benefits of the garden. [2, p. 51] disgruntled with the irregularity of the Central Park site, and extensively reworked it to achieve his ends, Olmsted beautifully proved how gardens and parks could exemplify a tripartite nature: “Central Park and Prospect Park in Brooklyn include within the overall designed landscape the same scale of ‘natures,’...regular, pastoral, wild.” [1, p. 51] But all of these are designed to relieve the harshness and dirt of the city. Aside from the specific aesthetics of the Greensward, though, is a focus on the users of parks and gardens. Unlike their formal counterparts on the Continent, English picturesque landscapes generally incorporated a concern for the well-being and enjoyment of the individuals seeing and walking through them. We can admire and benefit from the concern of the picturesque garden for its visitors, for its ways of involving them interactively on its sites, giving wide scope for mental and imaginative stimulation, in short for knowing how to put visitors into the picture rather than holding them at arm’s length. [2, p. 194]

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This is the reason that English depictions of picturesque landscapes were mainly perspective drawings rather than maps or ground plans, and why individuals were often included in the drawings: walking, fishing, talking. The landscapes were not supposed to draw attention to their layout; the Greensward Plan similarly celebrated the capricious and seemingly random scattering of rocky outcroppings that characterize lower Central Park. In the next chapter, we will see how this concern for the users works to integrate city and park. But for now, we focus on how the attempt to bring users into the park means taking them out of the city. This concern for the incorporation of the user leads to a concealment of artifice: formal gardens focused too much attention on themselves as controlled landscapes. For the Greensward Plan, this meant hiding the city at all costs. The tension between the garden and machine, combined with the picturesque aesthetic and the celebration of a pastoral life combined to produce the epitome of a sanctuary, distinct from the city even as it was inextricably bound to it. But an escape from the city had immediate implications for Olmsted’s politics.

Social Implications So as much as Central Park’s identity revolves around its natural elements, there is also an expressly political bent to its conception. Frederick Law Olmsted passionately believed in the progressive ideals of America that, in his eyes, Central Park embodied. Olmsted clearly believed in the pastoral and picturesque. In 1860, Olmsted proposed the erection of a memorial to Downing inscribed with a passage from one of Downing’s later essays: “The higher social and artistic elements of every man’s nature lie dormant within him, and every laborer is a possible gentleman, not by the possession of money or fine clothes, but through the refining influence of intellectual and moral culture.” [5, p. 251] The basic assumption behind Olmsted’s thinking is that there is a naturally symbiotic relationship between an individual and landscape. The types of landscapes (parks, in particular) that exist in a particular region reflected the level of refinement of its people. And by being brought into contact with nature, individuals could become more civilized. According to John Dixon Hunt, this is one of the key advancements of the picturesque movement in Europe: “[Gardenesque] proponents and enthusiasts knew that a person’s identity is formed by a response to his or her surroundings, and so many individuals in the 18th century saw their political, social, and personal selves created or elicited by landscapes.” [2, p. 195] Passed down through Wordsworth to Uvedale Price, Capability Brown, and

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Humphrey Repton, this theory of landscape arrived at Olmsted by way of Downing. From Downing, editor and publisher of The Horticulturist, as well as the writings of John Ruskin, Olmsted imbibed as doctrine the idea that landscape could exert a strong civilizing force. [5] “Vaux and Olmsted’s artistic conception...rested on a shared belief in the moral superiority of a natural aesthetic.” [8, p. 131] Moreover, Central Park became a patriotic space in which to exhibit the wonders of the American landscape and climate: “It is proposed to limit this particular collection to American trees...because it affords an opportunity to show the great advantage that America possesses in this respect. No other extra-tropical country could furnish one-quarter the material for such a collection.” [5, p. 133] In other places, Olmsted focused on the planting of foreign plants, to this end: integrated design could reflect the social superiority of the park. But, as always, there is a catch. Just as civilized taste produced civilized gardens, “the power of scenery to affect men is, in a large way, proportionate to the degree

Figure 2: On Sundays, the park could become just another crowded urban space. [8, p. 333]

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of their civilization and the degree in which their taste has been cultivated.”4 This subcutaneous current of elitism would become reflected in the use of the park during its first half century. Because of its centrality—not to the 1850’s city, but to Manhattan island itself—Central Park was only easily accessible to those New Yorkers with horse carriages. This meant that the social classes most wanting of the refining influences of the park were the least able to access it. Despite the rhetoric of democracy, the use of Central Park initially reproduced the social stratification of the city: “Since perhaps 3 to 5 percent of New Yorkers accounted for 55 percent of the users of Central Park in the 1860s, park use was apparently only slightly less skewed than wealth distribution.” [8, p. 214] The elites began parading in the park even before it was finished. The irony of this situation is that the park, by becoming the so-called “elite park,” was proving highly successful at being a sanctuary. For the wealthy and refined—after all, those who were most able to appreciate the park—to leave the city meant fleeing the immigrant hordes. Moreover, if the poorer classes visited Central Park, they were not allowed to engage in any of their favorite past-times. The conflict between the regulated use of Central Park and the idea that it was public has proved crucial in the park’s history. It has been a space of negotiation, where both city government and the populace had to slowly learn what it meant to have a public park.5 A century of struggle has now lead to the creation, in the 1980s, of the Central Park Conservancy, a cooperation between private and government bodies. But, initially, the idea of a “public park” was at loggerheads with the park as sanctuary because the public itself embodied the evils of the city. Having grown up in New England communities with strong colonial roots, Olmsted envisioned an American civilization firmly established in its own unique mythology and tradition. When, in his twenties, he began traveling, Olmsted saw a massive discrepancy between the European landscape and the deplorable condition of other parts of the United States: In Virginia itself, an essentially frontier condition of society prevails to this day. Beasts and birds or prey, forests and marshes are increasing; bridges, schools, churches and shops are diminishing in number, where slavery has existed longest. The habits of people correspond. [5, p. 5] A trip to Texas in 1954—three years before he was appointed Central Park 4

Quoted by Nash. [6, p. 106] The Park and the People provides a lucid and thorough account of this struggle, as well as the question of park administration. [8] 5

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Figure 3: The elite park: horse carriages were the domain of the rich. superintendent—cemented this fact. Olmsted’s reaction to expanding America reflects exactly Beverley’s ambivalence 150 years earlier. Olmsted wanted America to embody the progressive ideals he saw atrophying in Europe. [5, p. 7] Olmsted’s Republican politics were important in his election as superintendent and influenced the Greensward Plan. [8] All of the natural aesthetics described above were to be employed to make Central Park symbolic of the struggle between Republicanism and old monarchy. But for Olmsted, the ever-expanding urban centers of the United States lagged as far behind as the frontier: We have nowhere on the western frontier a population newer to its locality and so little socially rooted or in which it is possible for a man to live so isolatedly from humanizing influences and with such constant practice of heart-hardening and taste smothering habits as that to be found in our great Eastern cities. [5, p. 6]

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So the problem of New York becomes equated with the problem of the frontier: How to use nature to simultaneously promote and counteract the developing civilization?

The Middle Ground: Both and Neither An important part of Olmsted’s solution was mediation, or the creation of an intermediate space. The question of Central Park rested squarely at the intersection of all these concerns. It existed at the frontier of an expanding city that Olmsted believed reflected the westward growth the of country as a whole. It was, by exhibiting the virtues and ameliorative effects of nature, to display the virtues of Olmsted’s social values. It was not the wilderness, but Central Park needed to evoke in turn the sublime, beautiful, and picturesque that could alternately and simultaneously be seen in the wilderness. In conceiving Central Park as such a middle ground, Olmsted rendered the park necessarily separate from the city. The classical ideas of harmony or synthesis long predate the industrialization of America, but the theory flourished during the eighteenth century, when it became necessary to reconcile the heated debate between the proponents of a so-called primitive lifestyle and the champions of the perfect civility of man. The pastoral leveraged a moral superiority over the urban because it was more harmonious, more balanced. The middle state is a moral position perfectly represented by the image of a rural order, neither wild nor urban, as the setting of man’s best hope. Implied reconciliations of many other dichotomies come along with the middle state: rational/irrational, primitive/civilized, natural/technological, human/animal. As we saw with the terms “garden” and “machine,” considering the role of nature in Central Park draws out the dual role of the park as resisting and upholding the civilization represented by the machine. Elizabeth Meyer pinpoints this tension as the heart of the picturesque: “Curiously, this modern landscape—arguably beginning with the picturesque—was inextricable from the processes of urbanization and modernization. The picturesque was one of the first formal frameworks that embedded the ambiguity a particular society felt towards the progress and loss associated with urbanization and modernization.” [12, p. 22] In the attempt to negotiate garden and machine, Central Park remains outside of both. But this gives the park the ability to mediate between city and nature. Central Park is a transitional zone, where users are able to contemplate aspects of both city and nature because neither are wholly present. This corresponds to the three distances in painting. For picturesque landscape

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painters, an ideal view presented a smooth movement between foreground, middle distance, and background. Olmsted wanted to ensure that Central Park reproduced these views wherever possible. The city was not supposed to figure in any of the three distances. But with the construction of skyscrapers, the city became nearly impossible to escape, at least visually. New York, true to Olmsted’s predictions, grew taller than the trees. At a certain point in the first half of the twentieth century, the balance shifted from a pure sanctuary to a more contextual reconciliation. The inevitable rise of the machine put the picturesque aspects of Central Park in a new context. picturesque theory’s reconciling role is a complex one. The idea of the landscape as a scene (versus the site as a place) requires the acceptance of two contradictory conceptual frameworks. Somehow, these contradictions—held in tension by early theorists of the picturesque—were becoming untenable to late nineteenthand early twentieth-century designers. [12, p. 28] But Central Park has, somewhat miraculously, persisted through this precarious stage. Like the pastoral, Central Park is a borderland. The pastoral scene, according to Marx, has two vulnerable boundaries: “the side bordering upon intractable nature [and] the side facing advanced civilization.” [4, pp. 25-6] Central Park also possesses both of these borders. Interestingly, the border with civilization exists in material as well as figurative ways. The park borders “intractable nature” (wilderness) only in an ideological dimension. But the park has real, physical boundaries with the city, and it is to the city that we now turn. It is the border with the city that has most threatened the park. We will see how, in one particular instance, Central Park proved itself separate from the city by not integrating easily into sweeping visions of urban planning.

Resistances to Urban Planning The social conditions of New York were only one aspect from which Central Park offered freedom. Olmsted also used the irregularity and informality of the picturesque aesthetic to argue for wandering and meandering paths. When Olmsted mentions the “street-division,” he is referring to Manhattan’s infamous Grid. In 1811, when the city proper barely extended above Canal Street, a plan was adopted by the state legislature to impose a grid structure across the entire island above 14th Street. It was clear, even at the beginning of the nineteenth century, that eventually all Manhattan would be en-

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gulfed by the city. The plan superimposed on the island a network of blocks defined by twelve or thirteen north-south avenues and 155 east-west cross streets. This produced a finite number of blocks—just over two thousand— that defined the shape and character of New York City. It is hard to imagine Manhattan without the Grid; it simultaneously enables and frustrates navigation. The Commissioners’ Plan is a remarkably simple innovation in city planning, unrivaled in its scope and implications. Rem Koolhaas calls it “the most courageous act of prediction in Western civilization: the land it divides, unoccupied; the population it describes, conjectural; the buildings it locates, phantoms; the activities it frames, nonexistent.” [3, pp. 18-9] Again, the grid reflects the equivalence of New York with the frontier: the adjacent emptiness was something to be possessed, demarcated, and occupied: “on the frontier, nothing existed—it was a void to be filled up.”6 [11, p. 53] The Grid annexed Manhattan before it could be developed and paved the way for the thorough effacement of the natural characteristics of the island. As seen in the 1811 map, the entire island would have been leveled if Central Park had not been created. Surely this sort of image inspired those lobbying for the creation of a park. Against the Grid and the delirium, the spaces of Central Park argue for meandering paths, a dearth of straight lines, relaxation, and reflection. A map of the park immediately demonstrates the alternative to the grid. The paths seem aimless: they exist not to expedite getting from A to B, but to slow the user down. They never trace the shortest distance between two 6 For a detailed recounting of the relationship between The United States, the frontier, ideas of nature, and Native Americans, see Slotkin’s Regeneration Through Violence

Figure 4: The full extent of the Grid, in the 1811 Commissioners’ Plan. The gentlemen who first envisioned a public park must have easily imagined the dozen-fold replication of lower Manhattan over the entire island.

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points. The linearity of the park borders provide intense contrast: the Grid pushes up against the park like a prisoner to his cell bars, seeing the leisurely walks and the greenery and water. The two street plans offer relief from each other: someone walking from a 6-Line Subway station on Lexington Avenue faces block after block of the same: all right angles and straight lines. Arriving at the park would provide instant relief; he might think to himself, “How nice that the paths change direction without changing course. How wonderful that I can worry not about where I’m going but how I’m getting there.” But spend too long in the park, and the directness, the uncouthness, of the city streets become refreshingly straightforward. Without the perpetual salience of New York’s Grid or Central Park’s wanderlust, this contrast would not be so effective. Building on the idea of the Grid, it is useful to look at Central Park’s resistance to any sort of all-encompassing plan. New York planners cast the Grid over the island like a net even before major urbanization had seeped

Figure 5: A comparison of the meandering, curving paths against a smallscale Grid. [7, p. 66]

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Figure 6: The paring down of the Grid. A Hood sketch from 1927 shows a concentration and distillation of Manhattan’s streets without “conceptual reorganization.” [3, p. 166] north of Canal Street. Everything that stood in the Grid’s way was to be subsumed by its logic: “The farms and hamlets dotting nineteenth-century Manhattan were expected to be engulfed rather than incorporated as the grid on paper became building in fact.” [11, p. 53] Consider Koolhaas’ discussion of Raymond Hood’s early-century ambitions to re-design Manhattan. Raymond Hood (1881-1934), an architect who designed primarily in the Art Deco style, occupies the dubious position of the “human representative” of Koolhaas’ Manhattanism. [3, p. 162] Hood deified the skyscraper, and his initial theories about the future of New York revolved around a thinning-out of the cluttered and overcrowded island. Hood’s plan was thus. In reaction to the 1916 Zoning Law—which, by stipulating that as buildings grew taller they must grow thinner, produced the famous set-back or terraced building style—Hood proposed a plan encouraging developers to maximize the volume of their buildings by using ever-taller and ever-thinner buildings. [3, p. 166] At the same time, the shorter, bulkier buildings that made up the city block at the base of the towers would be eliminated to allow for the greater traffic these thin needle-like building would produce. Iteration of the process would eventually produce a “city of towers” in isolation from one another. But Hood doesn’t stop there. Koolhaas labels Hood an ideological schizophrenic. Hood had “developed a schizophrenia that allow[ed him] simultaneously to derive energy and inspiration from Manhattan as irrational fantasy and to establish its unprecedented theorems in a series of strictly rational steps.” [3,

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p. 173] The idea of a “city under one roof” takes his needle-skyscrapers and concentrates them in a myriad of individual units around the island. Hood, wanting to obviate the crisis of spiraling city growth, proposed instead a series of mini-cities. In this view, the “salvation of New York” rests on embracing “the tendency...toward related communities in the city—communities whose activities are confined within certain areas whose traffic does not need to to travel distant streets.”7 So the towering skyscrapers would then cluster, huddling together and providing workers their every need. By this method, circulation between these distinct and isolated nodes would become mostly obsolete. Here is a schizophrenic tension that Koolhaas either missed or ignored, one that will prove useful for understaning Central Park. Hood’s plan both unifies and compartmentalizes. Koolhaas cares about the degree to which the irrational juxtaposition of disparate activities are sandwiched into rationally-planned buildings. But Hood also says that “the salvation of New York depends on the wider application of [the city under one roof] principle.”8 The plan favors the iteration of a set of aesthetic, ideological, and pragmatic instructions over the entirety of Manhattan. Hood’s idea is fundamentally algorithmic. Although this is the sense in which Hood envisioned New York as “being under one roof”, the effect is hardly unifying. Each community, or minicity, is a base unit of Manhattan, and New York City becomes merely an aggregation of these independent systems. The city is then nothing more than an arbitrary boundary drawn around an arbitrary number of mini-cities. For Manhattan, the boundaries neatly coincide with the traditional boundaries: the East and Hudson Rivers. Tall, bustling and highly regular groupings would burst out of the empty spaces between them, perhaps recalling Le Corbusier’s sterile urban planning. Even though Hood, unlike Le Corbusier, had an ostensibly pragmatic aim with his plans,9 this programmatic “roof” can only alienate Manhattan from itself. The schizophrenia enters in when one considers the desire, implicit in the phrase “city under one roof,” to totalize Manhattan. In failing to actually order or contain the delirium, Hood must settle for imagining and then visu7

Koolhaas quoting Hood. [3, p.174] Koolhaas quoting Hood. [3, p. 174] 9 See Lewis Mumford’s “Yesterday’s City of Tomorrow”, where he writes that “the extravagant heights of Le Corbusier’s skyscrapers had no reason for existence apart from the fact that they had become technological possibilities; the open spaces in his central areas had no reason for existence either, since on the scale he imagined there was no motive during the business day for pedestrian circulation in the office quarter. By mating utilitarian and financial image of the skyscraper city to the romantic image of the organic environment, Le Corbusier had, in fact, produced a sterile hybrid.” 8

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Figure 7: Manhattan, 1950. Hood’s vision of the island once the city algorithm had run its course. Central Park remains unchanged; even when the entire city has been transformed, the park persists. [3, p. 176] alizing a New York where an algorithm removes congestion “from the streets [to be] swallowed by the architecture.” [3, p. 177] The whole of the vibrant life of the city occurs indoors, within the walls of the high needles. Circulation could then be matter of moving between the nodes in the system, and considering the whole would be the same as considering the part. In a sense, the city would be fractal, and fractured. Thus the whole of Manhattan could be known by the sum of its parts, and everything would be comprehensible. Hood made a “knowable Manhattan” by making explicit the multitude of

systems and subsequently levelling them all to a lowest common denominator. This results in a collage by Hood, depicting the culmination of his plans for Manhattan, the “Manhattan 1950” project. The mini-cities (“Mountains” in Koolhaas’ vocabulary) rise up and dot the island’s surface, showing explicitly the clustering implied by the “city of towers.” Twenty-four visible bridges connect the island to New Jersey and the other Boroughs (though Lower Manhattan is still unblemished by a bridge to State Island). The accommodation of practical business interests—keeping your workers from wandering too far from their work places—has spread, virus-like, over the city and concentrated urban activity into localized packets. The dramatic bird’s-eye view spreads the island out flat and diminishing into the distance, the black-and-white of the cityscape sometimes seeming like fallen snow. But in the midst of this vision, Central Park rests near the picture’s top. It is hard to tell if the park has been overlooked, or if it stubbornly resisted Hood’s designs until he eventually conceded, leaving it untouched. The attempt to depict the city under one roof requires a view that takes in the whole city. Only then does one find a singular space that the algorithm cannot assimilate. From the perspective of Hood’s master plan, Central Park is a void, a hidden space that must be ignored if the project is to run to completion. But the park still exists, stubbornly retaining its identity. If “Manhattan 1950” depicted Hood’s vision from ground level, perhaps a sense of the repeated pattern could emerge. This technique would actually be more effective in communicating the desire to re-design New York under one roof: the viewer’s imagination will extrapolate the uniformity ad infinitum. But to provide a visual, macro-scale representation must confront the reality of Central Park, either to be bulldozed or ignored.

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Bibliography [1] John Dixon Hunt. Greater Perfections: The Practice of Garden Theory . University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999. [2] John Dixon Hunt. The Picturesque Garden in Europe . Thames and Hudson, 2002. [3] Rem Koolhaas. Delirious New York . The Monacelli Press, second edition, 1994. [4] Leo Marx. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America . Oxford University Press, 1964. [5] Charles Chaplin McLaughlin and Charles Beveridge, editors. The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted, Volume III: Creating Central Park. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977. [6] Roderick Frazier Nash. Wilderness and the American Mind. Yale Nota Bene, fourth edition, 2001. [7] Elizabeth Barlow Rogers. Rebuilding Central Park: A Management and Restoration Plan. The MIT Press, 1987. [8] Roy Rosenzweig and Elizabeth Blackmar. The Park and the People: A History of Central Park. Cornell University Press, 1992. [9] Witold Rybczynski. A Clearing in the Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the Nineteenth Century . Scribner, 1999. [10] Wolfgang Schivelbush. The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century . University of California Press, 1977. [11] Richard Sennett. The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities . Alfred A. Knopf, 1990. 23

[12] Simon Swaffield, editor. Theory in Landscape Architecture. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002.

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