December 5th, 2024
A Beginner’s Education in the History, Natural History, and Landscape Design History of Central Park: Part Four
As I take another volume from the four-foot-long shelf in my library reserved for books on Central Park with publication dates that fall prior to the year 2000, I find myself increasingly appreciative of the diligence with which the Central Park board of commissioners’ official reports detail the realization in terms of employee hirings and expenditures in terms of labor and materials the work that achieved fulfillment of Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux’s Greensward Plan. The commissioners’ annual reports detailing year-by-year the building and management payments that actualized Central Park.
In addition to watching the park’s official design in the form of Olmsted and Vaux’s Greensward plan come into being under the watchful eye of the park’s board of commissioners chaired by Andrew Haswell Green take a few minutes now to read the excellent timeline that provides a synopsized story of the takeover of the building and administration of Central Park by William “Boss” Tweed during in 1870, with a new city agency, the Department of Public Parks.
With this background information helping you to visualize the Central Park landscape as it was reaching maturity and had not yet received the “makeover” by power-broker Robert Moses you may enjoy visiting Central Park vicariously in the pages of the novels of Edith Wharton and Henry James as much as I do.
In Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, which is set in the New York City of the Gilded Age, we find the male protagonist Newland Archer has become recently engaged to a pretty young woman named May Wellan and that the courtship of this upper-class pair consists of something beyond the bouquets of lilies-of-the-valley that he orders to be sent to her on a daily basis as a token of his love. Now, in addition to purchasing the usual lilies-of-the-valley for May, he has ordered a lavish bouquet of roses to be sent to her cousin Countess Ellen Olenska, whose unhappy marriage and expatriate existence has brought her back home to New York as a visitor to her relatives. Before turning Newland and Ellen’s affair into the principal plot of the novel, Wharton has Newland assume his persona as fiancé in the following scene in Central Park:
The next day he persuaded May to escape for a walk in the Park after luncheon. As was the custom in old-fashioned Episcopalian New York, she usually accompanied her parents to church on Sunday afternoons, but Mrs. Wellan had condoned her truancy, having that very morning won her over to the necessity of a long engagement, with time to prepare a hand-embroidered trousseau containing the proper number of dozens.
The day was delectable. The bare vaulting of trees along the Mall was ceiled with lapis lazuli, and arched above snow that shone like splintered crystals. It was weather to call out May’s radiance, and she burned like a young maple in the frost. Archer was proud of the glances turned on her, and the simple joy of possessorship cleared away his underlying perplexities.
I have put The Age of Innocence back on my bedside table for the time being, since I have not yet come to the author’s final denouement and will go to sleep tonight after praying for a nice snowfall that will turn the forms of bare snow-brushed trees in Central Park into black-and-white architectural drawings of themselves in the winter that officially begins on December 21, 2024, six weeks from today. Before turning out the light, however, I will finish today’s journal entry by holding Henry James’s elitist looking glass up to the fin de siècle appearance and social meaning of Central Park in The American Scene, the fascinating chronicle of his trip through the United States as a returned expatriate during the years 1904–1905. According to James:
The perception comes quickly in New York, of the singular and beautiful but almost crushing mission that has been laid, as an effect of time, upon this limited territory, which has risen to the occasion, from the first, so consistently and bravely. It is a case, distinctly, in which appreciation and gratitude for a public function admirably performed are twice the duty, on the visitor’s part, that they may be in other such cases. We may even say, putting it simply and strongly, that if he doesn’t here, in his thought, keep patting the Park on the back, he is guilty not alone of a failure of natural tenderness, but of a real deviation from social morality. For this mere narrow oblong, much too short, had directly prescribed to it, from its origin, to “do,” officially, on behalf of the City, the publicly amiable, and all the publicly amiable – all there could be any question of in the conditions: incurring thus a heavier charge, I respectfully submit, than one has ever before seen so gallantly carried. Such places, the municipally-instituted pleasure-grounds of the greater and smaller cities, abound about the world and everywhere, no doubt, agreeably enough play their part; but is the part anywhere else as heroically played in proportion to the difficulty? The difficulty in New York, that is the point for the restless analyst; conscious as he is that other cities even in spite of themselves lighten the strain and beguile the task – a burden which here on the contrary makes every inch of its weight felt. This means a good deal, for the space comprised in the original New York scheme represents a wonderful economy and intensity of effort. It would go hard with us not to satisfy ourselves in other quarters (and it is of the political and commercial capitals we speak) of some such amount of “general” outside amenity, of charm of the town at large, as may here and there, even at widely-scattered points, relieve the over-fraught heart. The sense of the picturesque often finds account in strange and unlikely matters, but has none the less a way of finding it, and so, in the coming and going, takes a chance. But the New York problem has always resided in the absence of any chance to take, however one might come and go – that is, before reaching the Park.
To the Park, accordingly, and to the Park only, hitherto, the aesthetic appetite has had to address itself, and the place has therefore borne the brunt of many a peremptory call, acting year after year the character of the cheerful, capable, bustling, even if overworked, hostess of the one inn, somewhere, to take in all the travel, who is often at her wits’ end to know how to deal with it, but who, none the less, has, for the honor of the house, never once failed of hospitality. . . That is how we see Central Park, utterly overdone by the “run” on its resources, yet also never having to make an excuse. When once we have taken in thus its remarkable little history, there is no endearment of appreciation that we are not ready to lay, as a tribute, on its breast; with the interesting effect, besides, or our recognizing in this light how the place had to be, in detail and feature exactly what it is. It has had to have something for everybody, since everybody arrives famished it has had to multiply itself too extravagance, to the pathetic little efforts of exaggeration and deception, to be, breathlessly, everywhere and everything at once and produce on the spot the particular romantic object demanded: lake or river or cataract, wild woodland or teeming garden, boundless vista or bosky nook, noble eminence or smiling valley. It has had to have feature at any price, the clamour of its customers being inevitably for feature. That is its sole defect – its being inevitably too self-conscious, being afraid to be just vague and frank and quiet.
You are perfectly aware, as you hang about her in May or June, that you have, as a travelled person, beheld more remarkable scenery or fairer forms; but it is quite definite to you that none of those adventures have counted more to you for experience, for stirred sensibility – inasmuch as you can be, at the best, and in the showiest of countries, only thrilled by the pastoral or the awful, and as to pass, in New York, from the discipline of the streets to this so different many-smiling presence is to be thrilled at every turn.
The condensed geographical range, the number and kinds of scenery in a given space, competed with the number of languages heard, and the whole impression was of one’s having had but to turn in from the Plaza to make in the most agreeable manner possible, the tour of the little globe. And that, frankly, I think, is the best of all impressions was seeing New York at its best, for if ever one could feel at one’s ease about the “social question,” it would be surely, somehow, on such an occasion. The number of persons in circulation was enormous – so great that the question of how they got there, from their distances, and would get away again, in so formidable public conveyances, loomed, like a skeleton at the feast; but the general note was thereby, intensely, the “popular,” and the brilliancy worth the speaking of, to my sense, in the general American scene – the air of hard prosperity, the ruthless pushed-up and promoted look worn by men, women, and children alike.
It was little to say, in that particular light, that such grossnesses as want or tatters or gin, as the unwashed face or the ill-shod, and still less the un-shod foot, or the mendicant hand, became strange, unhappy, far-off things – would have been an insult to allude to them or to be explicitly complacent about their absence. The case as unmistakably, universally, of the common, the very common man, the very common woman, and the very common child; but all enjoying what I have called their promotion, the rise in the social scale, with that absence of acknowledging flutter, that serenity of assurance, which marks, for the impressed class, the school-boy or the school-girl who is accustomed, and always quite expects, to “move up.” The children at play, more particularly the little girls, formed the characters, as it were, in which the story was written largest; frisking about over the greenswards, grouping together in the vistas, with an effect of the exquisite in attire, of delicacies of dress and personal “keep-up,” as though the shimmer of silk, the gloss of beribboned hair, the gleam of cared-for teeth, the pride of varnished shoe, that might well have created a doubt as to their “popular” affiliation. This affiliation was yet established by sufficiencies of context, and might well have been, for that matter. By every accompanying vocal or linguistic note, the swarm of queer sounds, mostly not to be interpreted, that circled round their pretty heads as if they had been tamers of odd, outlandish, perching little birds.
As I left the Plaza, I left the Park steeped in the rose-color of such a brightness of Sunday and of summer as had given me, on a couple of occasions, exactly what I desired – a simplified attention, namely, and the power to rest for the time in the appearance that the awful aliens were flourishing there in perfections of costume and contentment. One had only to take then in as more completely, conveniently and expensively endimanchés than one had ever, on the whole, seen any other people, in order to feel that one was calling down upon all the elements involved the benediction of the future – and calling it down most of all in one’s embraced permission not to worry any more.
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