October 18th, 2024
A Beginner’s Education in the History, Natural History, and Landscape Design History of Central Park: Part One
Because of my simultaneous employment in the combined public-private career positions of Central Park administrator and president of the Central Park Conservancy between 1979 and 1996, I am by assumed by most people to be a born-and-bred New Yorker. When asked about my origins and I reply that I am from Texas I can imagine that the interlocutor is thinking, “Why did she believe she could invent a job that had never existed but was based on the reversal of a situation of neglect when a large number of New York residents were fleeing to the suburbs, arsonists were burning down many of the apartment buildings in the South Bronx, and well-to-do citizens were carping, “I’m a taxpayer, after all; why can’t they (meaning civil-service workers on the city payroll) do something about the taking care of the park?” The nutshell biographical answer is that as a graduate from Wellesley College in 1957 with a major in art history and a 1964 graduate of Yale’s School of City planning with new urban design paradigms for open space preservation as my thesis subject, I settled with my first husband Edward Barlow and our six-year-old daughter Lisa in an apartment on the East Side of Manhattan. I soon began to take regular walks in the park and nod my head in agreement with anyone who said, “Central Park: I don’t know how I could live in New York without it!”
Knowing that the true story of Central Park was not the one that was being written in graffiti on all available hard surfaces from rock outcrops to carved stonework to granite bases for sculptures and the brick walls of kiosks and comfort stations throughout its 830 acres and desiring to know as much about the park’s past and present as possible, I purchased Central Park: A History and A Guide upon its publication in 1967. It was from this noteworthy book by the architecture critic Henry Hope Reed (1916–2013) and Sophia Duckworth, which can still be purchased online, that I learned that the park had been created as a work of land art by the widely traveled Staten Island farmer and pre-Civil War anti-slavery journalist Frederick Law Olmsted in partnership with the British émigré Victorian-style architect Calvert Vaux, Reed, who was fiercely opposed to modern architecture, saw that Central Park’s picturesque design aesthetic in which nature and art are united in a deliberate embrace as an appropriate subject for a book that remains as instructive a Central Park walker’s companion today as it was for me fifty-seven years ago.
Because of his reputation as an activist in terms the historic preservation of landmarks and Central Park had been conferred landmark statue as a National Historic Landmark in 1863 and a Scenic Landscape of the City of New York in 1974, it was natural that, in assembling an advisory staff, Mayor John Lindsay’s (1922–2000) Parks Commissioner Thomas F. P. Hoving (1931-2009), an art historian and subsequent director of the Metropolitan Museum, who held the office of Parks Commissioner for fourteen months between 1966 and 1967, created the title Curator of Central Park, which he conferred on Reed. Unfortunately, Hoving was himself little more than a fun-and-games parks commissioner whose policy for enlivening Central Park’s then deteriorating scenic landscape was to condone sit-ins and protest marches and promote the organization of riotous events such as rock concerts and a varied assortment of happenings in order be in step with the times and make the park’s primary mission to be a rollicking hippie heaven.
I personally took a dim view of Hoving’s “fun-and-games” managerial approach, which increased ubiquitous unchecked vandalism apparent in the rampant slathering of graffiti artists’ tags on rock outcrops, statue pedestals, and the walls of refreshment kiosks, comfort stations, recreation buildings, and even the great heart-of-the-park centerpiece, Bethesda Terrace.
Lacking the political smarts, clout, and official status to immediately attempt to address this egregious destruction of Central Park’s landscape, I cheered myself by reimagining the park in its still unmarred beauty as conceived by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux’s original 1858 Greensward Plan, which at the time hung in the Park Department’s Conference Room in the Arsenal. In addition to determining the partners’ design intentions by running my eyes over it on many occasions, I read and reread the park-building progress reports in the Central Park Board of Commissioners’ annual reports. Besides comparing the appearance of the park following the implementation of the Greensward by 1872 with its condition now a hundred years later, I frequently took walks through the park with Henry Hope Reed’s Central Park: A History and A Guide in hand. To make this book speak not simply on the page but in the park itself, the reader must imagine that she is following the author step-by-step through the park’s principal sights as directed. Reed thus arranged its contents so as to provide a first chapter on the park’s history followed by a second one that is a walking tour of the southern half of the park and a third that takes the reader through the northern half.
In addition to providing a number of on-the-ground learning experiences for his readers, Reed fosters a factual familiarity with Central Park in its totality by means of eight appendices containing site-specific information in catalogs of natural phenomena, which include annotated lists of the “Birds of Central Park” and “Approximate Dates of Leafing, Budding, Blossoming, and Fruiting of Plants in Central Park.” With regard to the park’s mission as a host space for memorials, another appendix provides a list of “Monuments, Tablets, and Plaques in Central Park.” Catering to the visitor whose motive in going to the park is athletic recreation rather than simple walking and the enjoyment of scenery alone or in the companionship of a partner or friend, there is an appendix that lists the locations of team-sport facilities, including hockey fields, baseball diamonds, and sites accommodating popular personal physical activities, such as bicycling, row boating, ice skating, model-boat yachting, horseback riding, wintertime sledding, roller skating, tennis, and swimming. This appendix also contains a list of the facilities that offer popular events, which include the Delacorte Theater for plays by Shakespeare and a marionette theater for puppetry shows for children as well as food facilities, including refreshment stands, the Loeb Boathouse, and Tavern-on-the-Green. A final appendix provides an instructive bibliography.
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After I had studied Central Park through the eyes of Henry Hope Reed, my reverence for Frederick Law Olmsted would shine through in a book that I would write myself. This occurred when an Olmsted devotee and subsequent founder of the National Association of Olmsted Parks named William Alex contacted me to request my participation in a project to commemorate the sesquicentennial of Olmsted’s birthday in 1822. Alex had heard that I was a would-be Olmsted biographer engaged in acquiring knowledge about my subject’s history as a gentleman farmer on Staten Island, agriculturally and scenically motivated traveler to England, anti-slavery journalist, New York literary figure, co-designer of Central Park, and eventually the revered father of the profession of Landscape architecture in America.
My ambition to become an Olmsted biographer, however, quickly vanished when I discovered that FLO: A Biography of Frederick Law Olmsted by Laura Wood Roper would be published by The John Hopkins Press in 1973. In the meantime, with grants from the J. M. Kaplan Fund and the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, Alex was able to persuade the director of the Whitney Museum to commission him to curate an Olmsted exhibition that would open on October 19 and run through December 3, 1972.
Because of the favorable recognition I had received following the publication of my first book, The Forests and Wetlands of New York City (Little Brown, 1969) and Alex’s knowledge of my interest in Frederick Law Olmsted, he had approached me with the request that I collaborate with him in writing descriptions of the historic reproductions of prints, maps, and photographs that would constitute the contents of the Olmsted sesquicentennial exhibition. I was pleased to honor this request; however, my role became something more than writer of a simple compendium of catalog entries. Titled Frederick Law Olmsted’s New York, it is a book that focuses on Olmsted’s self-nourished talent through travel and the reading of certain eighteenth-century authors on the subject of romantically naturalistic landscape design. These included Sir Uvedale Price (1747–1829) who advocated the study of the eighteenth-century masters of idyllic landscape paintings for the purpose of artistic training of the eye toward improving the naturalistic appearance of existing estate properties and Rev. William Gilpin (1724–1804), an English clergyman who is best known as a travel writer who originated the idea of the picturesque.
Before returning to Central Park as the subject of Reed’s book, I will conclude my first part of this essay on A Beginner’s Education in the History and Landscape Design of Central Park by quoting some short excerpts from my book Frederick Law Olmsted’s New York, which quotes Olmsted’s own words justifying the building of Central Park as a great work of land art with an important social mission. As background, it should be told how over the years of Central Park’s construction hundreds of thousands of cartloads of rocks and glacial till – a legacy of the great sheet of ice that had once covered Manhattan – were carried away or repositioned in the park, and hundreds of thousands of cubic yards of topsoil were brought in and spread across its surface. All the blasting and laborious hauling and earth-moving in those pre-bulldozer days were, as Olmsted observed, only the priming of the canvass upon which a landscape artist would paint picturesque scenes, the full outlines of which might not be realized for generations. As he was to point out in one of several letters of resignation prompted by what he felt was interference in his role as architect-in-chief by the comptroller Andrew Haswell Green:
The work of design necessarily supposes a gallery of mental pictures, and in all parts of the park I constantly have before me more or less distinctly, more or less vaguely, a picture, which as Superintendent I am constantly laboring to realize. . . . The design must be exclusively in my imagination.
In other words, the Greensward Plan was not a static document, but a creative long-term construction plan, and Olmsted felt that his on-site direction of the building of Central Park was vital to its successful outcome. It is important to note here that for Olmsted, recreation and contemplation of scenery were synonymous, and he felt that the pastoral beauty of the park would bring refinement and happiness to the city’s inhabitants by producing a certain influence on their minds, which would make life in the city healthier and happier. His rationale was thus:
The character of this influence is a poetic one and it is to be produced by means of scenes, through observation of which the mind may be more or less lifted out of moods and habits into which it is, under the ordinary conditions of life in the city, likely to fall.
Now, as I get up from my desk and put the Reed-Duckworth book back in its accustomed position on the bookshelf reserved for my collection of Central Park-related books, I am glancing at the titles of other Central Park books with relatively old publication dates. After leafing through some just now, I am setting aside the ones that appear as immune from obsolescence and remain as instructive as they were when I first read them. I trust that you and other readers of my forthcoming journal entries posted on the REVIEWS section of my website will interpret my professor-like advocacy of certain books that formed the initial rungs on the ladder that I have climbed in my long and ongoing education on the history, natural history, and landscape design history of Central Park to constitute a helpful bibliography as you increase your own love of the park and deeper understanding of validity of the boast, “Central Park: I don’t know how I could live in New York without it.” In re-reading this journal entry’s posting and thinking about future reviews of the body of Central Park literature that I consider to be time-honored, you may hope to also read the works I write about, which you may wish to read in their entirety or place on a bookshelf of your own. To do so, you can search the catalogs of various academic, institutional, and public libraries with which you are familiar or go to an online bookseller such as Amazon where, according to my recent checking to test this option, their purchase for your own library is still possible.
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