Nature in the City: Urban Environmental History and Central Park
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very year, thirty-five million growing population that was people visit Manhattan’s deeply divided along lines of Central Park, a vast island of class, ethnicity, and race. It is green situated in the midst of one within this historical context that of the world’s largest cities. For a group of merchants, politicians, many of these visitors, walking and middle-class reformers began through one of the park gates pushing for the creation of a large means leaving the artifice of the urban park (2). city behind and entering into an innocent green world, a vestige of A Cleansing Landscape the original Manhattan that existed For some, the new park would prior to the rise of the city. For increase adjacent property values urban environmental historians, and provide a leisure ground for though, there are two serious probrides in well-appointed carriages. lems with viewing the park in this way. Most of the city elite, though, First, Central Park is not nearly as offered less self-serving argunatural as it may appear. Far from ments, at least publicly. A large predating the rise of Manhattan, green space would not only cleanse the landscape is very much a product the air of dangerous smoke and of the mid nineteenth-century city. miasmas, it would convince the As such, Manhattan’s “front lawn” overworked sons and daughters of can be read as a primary source, a Puritans to leave their homes and unique window on Victorian views offices, get out in the sunshine and of nature as well as the politics of fresh air, and indulge in healthclass, ethnicity, gender, race, and giving leisure. Even more, the park neighborhood. The second probwould draw workers and immilem is that the surrounding city of grants away from “dissipating” Manhattan is not nearly as artificial and “uncivilized” leisure practices, as park visitors might think. If we Figure 1. Born in Hartford, Connecticut, Frederick Law Olmsted (1822–1903) is such as drinking in saloons, gamsee Central Park as a rejuvenating widely considered the father of U.S. landscape architecture and was a bling, and cock fighting. Outdoors, co-designer of New York’s Central Park. Taking the Victorian English country retreat from unnatural urban life, park as his guide, Olmsted viewed Central Park as a restorative refuge from the all New Yorkers could engage in then we overlook the complicated hustle and bustle of urban industrial life. His plans substantially altered the natural healthy and restorative Victorian relationships that New Yorkers contours of the land that became the park, thus creating an unnatural “natural” nature tourism. Such refined and forged with nature outside the park space. (Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons) regenerating recreation would not walls, at home, and at work (1). only heal social divisions and add In 1850, the United States was still overwhelmingly rural and agrarmuch-needed culture to a frontier city far from Europe; it would also ian, but America’s largest city was growing at an extraordinary pace. make citizens more productive workers in the long run. As Frederick The opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 followed by rail lines connected Law Olmsted (the co-designer of the new park along with Calvert Vaux) New York merchants to a vast western hinterland and its valuable natuwould later put it: exposure to “beautiful sylvan scenes” during leisure ral resources. As a result of these trade connections, New York prosmade daily labor “more methodical and regular” (3) (Figure 1). pered, and by midcentury, the city boasted railroad companies, banks, Arguably the first intentional act of landscape architecture at the shipyards, ironworks, warehouses, sweatshops, and manufacturing Central Park site was the removal of the original inhabitants. Long plants. Less favorably, it also had an unhealthy, unsettled, and rapidly before the arrival of Dutch settlers, the Lenape Indians had lived on the
island of Manhattan, and for centuries they had transformed the environment. But by 1850, Lenape numbers had already been diminished dramatically by Eurasian diseases, war, and forced migration westward. The city, then, did not push out Native Americans, but far more recent arrivals: 1,300 African American, Irish, and German New Yorkers who, during the 1840s, lived on the park site and subsisted by selling their labor. They fished, farmed, raised livestock, logged, boiled bones, and scavenged through the city’s trash (4) (Figure 2). In removing these marginalized New Yorkers and outlawing their subsistence activities on the land, the city did nothing new. During the eighteenth century, European aristocrats sometimes displaced entire villages to build parks, a process described in Oliver Goldsmith’s celebrated poem, “The Deserted Village” (1761). The eviction of New Yorkers in the 1850s also foreshadowed the later dispossession of Native Americans from wilderness areas that became Yosemite, Yellowstone, and Glacier National Parks. It also anticipated the removal of local people from long-settled African, Latin American, and Asian landscapes now reclassified as wild (5). After removing local inhabitants, the park commissioners in 1857 organized a design competition, which Olmsted and Vaux won with their remarkable “Greensward Plan.” Although visitors sometimes think that Central Park preserves the original Manhattan that the Dutch “discovered,” the landscape architects’ plan did not call for the creation of an American wilderness park. While they incorporated some seemingly untamed sections into their design (most famously the Ramble), most of their creation is not technically picturesque, but pastoral—a landscape characterized by rolling stretches of grass framed by uneven groupings of trees. As Olmsted explained in 1870, urban parks should not contain “very rugged ground” or “abrupt eminences.” What is needed is “the beauty of the fields, the meadow, the prairie, of green pastures, and the still waters. What we want to gain is tranquility and rest to the mind. Mountains suggest effort” (6). Beyond a Victorian Escape Some scholars argue that while Central Park is not a wilderness park, Olmsted in particular sought with his parks to introduce heterogeneous urban populations to the social relations and natural environment that he had experienced growing up in rural New England. According to this view, Olmsted responded to rapid urbanization and industrialization not by setting aside wilderness, but by preserving for city people a vestige of Jefferson’s agrarian republic. But one significant problem with viewing Central Park as an American pastoral garden in the heart of the machine is that we lose sight of the degree to which Olmsted and Vaux drew explicitly on English precedents (7).
Starting in the early eighteenth century, English landscape architects began to abandon formal, geometric landscapes, such as those in back of the Palace of Versailles, just outside of Paris. Instead of linear walks, manicured trees and topiary, symmetrical beds, and elaborate fountains, English gentry embraced a far more informal garden composed of rolling greensward, informal groupings of trees, serpentine paths, and still ponds. Cultural critic Raymond Williams links the emergence of the informal English park to the enclosure movement, the creation of space for commercial agriculture through the seizure and privatization of common lands long used by peasants. As the rectilinear, efficient, and productive field rigidly surrounded by stone fence or hedge became an increasingly common site throughout England, the gentry re-created a lost pastoral world of ease and natural abundance for their own private use (8). During the nineteenth century, the English park, like other English innovations, spread well beyond the British Isles. Landscape architects working in Continental Europe, the U.S., and throughout the British Empire adapted the English park to often unfavorable local conditions. Insisting that Central Park is an exceptional, homegrown product of “Nature’s Nation” means turning a blind eye to the family resemblance between Manhattan’s “front lawn” and English parks built at roughly the same time in London, Paris, Munich, San Francisco, Montreal, Christchurch, Perth, Pietermaritzburg, Delhi, and Kuala Lumpur. Starting in 1858, Olmsted began to transform the Greensward Plan into reality. Far from trying to restore Manhattan’s wild or pastoral past, he set out to transform the often rocky, uneven, and swampy site into the gently rolling countryside characteristic of parks he had seen in England. This meant destroying fences, barns, and other vestiges of previous human occupation, moving enormous amounts of earth, burying a sophisticated drainage system, transforming swampy areas into lakes, blasting through gneiss, amending the soil with animal waste and compost, transplanting tens of thousands of native and exotic trees and shrubs, and constructing roads, bridges, and buildings, such as the gothic Belvedere Castle. To do this, Olmsted relied on mid-nineteenth century energy sources: coal (transformed into steam power), tons of gunpowder, thousands of horses, and twenty thousand human laborers. Regarding the laborers, Olmsted sought to transform what he called “a mob of lazy, reckless, turbulent and violent loafers” into “a well organized, punctual, sober, industrious and disciplined body.” As social historians Roy Rosenzweig and Elizabeth Blackmar note, this was easier said than done. Laborers fought for higher wages (and at least on one occasion struck) while Figure 2. Sketched by D.E. Wyand, this 1869 Harper’s Weekly illustration skilled craft workers, such as blackdepicts a community of squatters living near Central Park. These squatsmiths and gardeners, sought to ters were not unlike those evicted by the city a decade earlier to make way for the new Central Park. During the 1850s, Irish, German, and African maintain traditional independence Americans forged a productive rather than recreational relationship with and resisted commands from above. These historians argue that the ironic the natural environment. (Courtesy of Library of Congress)
28 OAH Magazine of History • October 2011
result of this contested social process was a landscape that many took as natural (9). Once open, Central Park remained contested ground. During the 1860s, the new landscape of leisure was of little use to the city’s working-class immigrants, who had little time for leisure and could not afford the cost of traveling uptown by street railroad. Plus these visitors faced strict park regulations. Olmsted believed that nature was most regenerative if experienced quietly, contemplatively, and through the eye. To ensure that everyone behaved like a proper Victorian nature tourist, he posted rules (no commercial vehicles, no walking or grazing animals on the grass, no fishing or swimming in the park lake, no picking flowers, no sports, and no music on the Christian Sabbath), which he enforced with a park police force, known derisively as the “sparrow cops” (10) (Figure 3). Despite the distance and the rules, during the last third of the nineteenth century increasing numbers of rank-and-file New Yorkers appropriated Central Park, making it their own. Rosenzweig and Blackmar argue that unlike Olmsted and the city elite, who saw the park as the rural antipode of the city, working-class and immigrant New Yorkers transformed their park into a public space more like the rest of the city. But evidence in their book, The Park and the People
(1992), suggests that rank-and-file New Yorkers did not always see the park as a simple extension of the city, as a mere public place. Like better-off Anglo Americans, some workers and immigrants also sought to cross a line between nature and culture during their limited leisure. They, too, wanted to escape the city and come into contact with grass, trees, fresh air, moving water, and sunlight. The difference is that marginalized New Yorkers often enjoyed nature in ways that Olmsted and his contemporaries found unfamiliar and sometimes threatening: they drank lager in beer gardens, they swam and played outdoor sports, they spoke foreign languages, they picnicked on the grass, they listened to music—and they did all of this on Sunday, a day that American conservatives felt should be devoted to indoor prayer and quiet leisure befitting “the Lord’s Day” (11). During the twentieth century, New Yorkers continued to appropriate and re-make their park. According to Rosenzweig and Blackmar, the landscape became the site of Jewish, Italian, and Scandinavian picnics, working-class baseball and soccer games, and outings of ethnic and religious organizations. Later in the century, Puerto Ricans used the park for the San Juan Festival, interracial groups of youth gathered around Bethesda Fountain, and large numbers of people gathered on Olmsted’s lawns to protest the war in Vietnam, demand gay rights,
Figure 3. In this 1869 Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper cartoon, two children gaze, perplexed, at the rules promulgated by designer Frederick Law Olmsted for the proper enjoyment of Central Park. These norms sought to ensure that visitors experienced the park quietly and contemplatively—as Victorian nature tourists. Responding to this rigid, elitist guide to conduct, the cartoon’s caption reads, ironically, “Central Park: A delightful resort for the toil-worn New Yorkers.” (Courtesy of Library of Congress)
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Figure 4. This 2010 aerial view of New York City shows how the 843 acres that comprise Central Park blend in with the rest of Manhattan Island. Located at the heart of the most environmentally efficient place in America—thanks to mass transportation and high population density—Central Park has been more than a place to retreat from city life. The interaction between the park and Manhattan’s ecological whole challenges the idea that Olmsted and Vaux designed an island within an island. (Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
celebrate Earth Day, and much more. They conclude that despite partial privatization in the 1980s and the Central Park Conservancy’s efforts to roll back the clock and return to Olmsted’s original vision of the park as a rural escape from the city, Central Park remains a vibrant public space. The park is a place where excluded groups converge and re-establish their identity and where complete strangers occasionally cross lines of race, class, ethnicity, generation, and neighborhood and create new subaltern forms of community. It is also a place where all New Yorkers can imagine themselves as members of a much larger civic community. As such, the park is the most democratic space in New York, if not America (12). The Trouble with the Unnatural City When visitors enter the “natural” park from the “artificial” city, they are entering a landscape that is far more a product of human history than they realize. At the same time, they are leaving a city that is in fact far more natural than it might at first appear. As environmental historians William Cronon and Richard White note, when we view nature as a mere tourist destination, as a place that we only visit during our leisure, we forget our much more vital relationships with nature at home and at work. It is these quotidian and far less examined relationships that have captured the interest of a growing number of environmental historians of New York City. Rather than focusing on Central Park as the only nature in the city, these historians figuratively jump the low stone wall that runs around the park, enter the seemingly unnatural city, and ask historical questions such as: how did New Yorkers feed themselves? Where and how did the city acquire its fresh water? How has the city dealt with its trash and sewage? How has the city harnessed energy sources? How has Manhattan’s extraordinary ecological footprint changed over time? What ecological effects has Manhattan had on its hinterland? To what degree, if any, have natural disasters (hurricanes, floods, fires) shaped 30 OAH Magazine of History • October 2011
New York’s urban history? What sorts of organisms thrive in Manhattan’s urban ecosystems? What impact did these new ecologies have on the biology of the peculiar animals we call Homo sapiens? To what degree have marginalized New Yorkers suffered from disproportionate exposure to the city’s environmental hazards, and how have communities mobilized to fight for environmental justice (13)? But just because urban environmental historians have jumped the park wall and entered the city does not mean that they would dismiss Central Park as unnatural. Yes, Central Park is socially constructed, but the participants in the project included not only unequally privileged humans, but also a sometimes unpredictable array of non-human agents: climate, soils, insects, plants, animals, fungi, and microorganisms. Even more, over the last one hundred and fifty years, the park has performed herculean “ecosystem services” for the rest of the city: absorbing and filtering polluted storm water runoff; diminishing Manhattan’s heat island effect; cleansing the air of particulates; reducing noise; providing habitat for plant and animal communities, including pollinating insects and migrating birds; metabolizing mountains of organic waste; and sequestering carbon. On a per capita basis, Manhattan today is arguably the most environmentally efficient place in America. This is due to an excellent mass transit system, very low levels of automobile use, very dense housing, consumption of “experiences” rather than “things,” and energy- and carbon-saving economies of scale. But Manhattan’s enviable environmental track record is due in no small part to Central Park, a vital component of Manhattan’s green infrastructure, a vast matrix that extends throughout the city and beyond (14) (Figure 4). Conclusion Central Park, then, is hardly an innocent escape from the artifice of Manhattan. Olmsted and Vaux and tens of thousands of workers built this landscape, and once open, New Yorkers continued to re-make the
park, appropriating it for themselves, investing the land with new meaning, and transforming a restrictive recreational landscape into an extraordinary public space. Far more than this, however, the park also contains non-human organisms that contributed to its creation and continue to play vital roles in its reproduction. In addition, the park is merely one component of a far larger green infrastructure that sustains all human life on the island. As such, the park is connected to the larger city not just politically, economically, and culturally, but also ecologically. And if New Yorkers question the fictional line between nature and culture that runs along 59th Street, 8th Avenue, 110th Street, and 5th Avenue, they may see their park as a place to imagine community in a far more inclusive and radical way than even Rosenzweig and Blackmar envision. From this perspective, the park is a place where New Yorkers might think of themselves as dependent members of ecological communities that extend well beyond the park’s stone walls (15). Acknowledgements The author wishes to thank Carl Weinberg, Sarah Elkind, Bob Johnson, and Douglas Sackman for feedback on earlier drafts of this article. Endnotes
1. For statistics on the park, see Central Park Conservancy, “The Official Website of Central Park,” accessed July 4, 2011, . 2. Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York to 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 649–73; Roy Rosenzweig and Elizabeth Blackmar, The Park and the People: A History of Central Park (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1992), 15–36. 3. Rosenzweig and Blackmar, The Park and the People, 15–36; Andrew Jackson Downing, “A Talk about Public Parks and Gardens” (October, 1848) and “The New York Park” (August 1851), both in Andrew Jackson Downing, Rural Essays, ed. George Williams Curtis (New York: Leavitt and Allen, 1857), 138–46, 147–53. Frederick Law Olmsted, “Preliminary Report in Regard to a Plan of Public Pleasure Grounds for the City of San Francisco,” March 1866, in The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted: The California Frontier, 1863–1865, ed. Victoria Post Ranney, vol. 5 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 522. 4. On the Lenape, see Robert S. Grumet, “American Indians,” in The Encyclopedia of New York City, ed. Kenneth T. Jackson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 25–28. On Central Park inhabitants and removal, see Rosenzweig and Blackmar, The Park and the People, 59–91. 5. Oliver Goldsmith, The Deserted Village (London: W. Griffin, 1770). On Indian and working-class dispossession from parks, see for instance Karl Jacoby, Crimes Against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). On dispossession outside the United States, see Guha Ramachandra, “Radical American Environmentalism and Wilderness Preservation: A Third World Critique,” Environmental Ethics 11 (Spring 1989), 71–83. 6. For quote, see Frederick Law Olmsted, Public Parks and the Enlargement of Towns (Cambridge, Massachusetts: American Social Science Association, 1870), 23. 7. For variants on this interpretation, see Lewis Mumford, The Brown Decades: A Study of the Arts in America, 1865–1895 (New York: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1931), 26–48; Lewis Mumford, “Frederick Law Olmsted’s Contribution,” in Roots of Contemporary Architecture (New York: Dover Publications, 1952), 3–14, 101–16; Julius Fabos, Gordon T. Milde, and V. Michael Weinmayr, Frederick Law Olmsted, Sr.: Founder of Landscape Architecture (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1968), 3–14; Albert Fein, “Introduction: Landscape into Cityscape” in Landscape into Cityscape: Frederick Law Olmsted’s Plans for A Greater New York City (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967), 3; Thomas Bender, Toward an Urban Vision: Ideas and Institutions in NineteenthCentury America (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1975), 187; Laura Wood Roper, FLO: A Biography of Frederick Law Olmsted (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 9. 8. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 22, 96–107, 120–26, 141. 9. Elizabeth Blackmar and Roy Rosenzweig, The Park and the People: Central Park and Its Public, 1850–1910, in Budapest and New York: Studies in Metropolitan
10. 11.
12. 13.
14.
15.
Transformation, 1870–1930 (New York: Russel Sage Foundation, 1994), 150–79. Rosenzweig and Blackmar, The Park and the People, 238–59. Rosenzweig and Blackmar, The Park and the People, 284–339. On subaltern nature recreation, see Colin Fisher, “African Americans, Outdoor Recreation, and the 1919 Race Riot,” in To Love the Wind and Rain: African Americans and Environmental History, ed. Dianne D. Glave and Mark Stoll (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006), 63–76; Chad Montrie, Making A Living: Work and Environment in the United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 13–34, 91–112; Lawrence M. Lipin, Workers and the Wild: Conservation, Consumerism, and Labor in Oregon, 1910–30 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007); Connie Y. Chiang, “Imprisoned Nature: Toward an Environmental History of the World War II Japanese American Incarceration,” Environmental History 15 (April 2010): 236–67. Rosenzweig and Blackmar, The Park and the People, 373–530; quote on 530. See William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” in Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1995), 69–90. Richard White, “Are You an Environmentalist or Do You Work for a Living?” in Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature, 171–85. On New York City environmental history, see Gandy, Concrete and Clay; Dolores Greenberg, “Reconstructing Race and Protest: Environmental Justice in New York City,” Environmental History 5 (April 2000): 223–50; Gerard Koeppel, Water for Gotham: A History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Marc Linder, Of Cabbages and Kings County: Agriculture and the Formation of Modern Brooklyn (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999); Gregg Mitman, Breathing Space: How Allergies Shape Our Lives and Landscapes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 130–66; Max Page, The Creative Destruction of Manhattan, 1900–1940 (University of Chicago Press, 2001), 177–216; Eric W. Sanderson, Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City (New York: Abrams, 2009); David M. Scobey, Empire City: The Making and Meaning of the New York City Landscape (Temple University Press, 2003); Christopher Sellers, “Nature and Blackness in Suburban Passage,” in To Love the Wind and Rain: African Americans and Environmental History, ed. Dianne D. Glave and Mark Stoll (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006), 93–119; David Stradling, The Nature of New York: An Environmental History of the Empire State (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010); David Stradling, Making Mountains: New York City and the Catskills (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007); Julie Sze, Noxious New York: The Racial Politics of Urban Health And Environmental Justice (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2006). On the social construction of nature by humans and non-humans, see Donna Haraway, “The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others,” in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg at al. (New York: Routledge, 1992), 297–337. On Manhattan and environmental efficiency, see David Owen, Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less are Keys to Sustainability (New York: Riverhead Books, 2009). Also see Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (New York: Verso, 2006), 121. On ecosystem services, see Per Bolund and Sven Hunhammar, “Ecosystem Services in Urban Areas,” Ecological Economics 29 (May 1999): 293–301. On envisioning community to include not only other humans but also plants, animals, microorganisms, soil, and other components of natural systems upon which humans depend, see Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There (New York: Oxford University Press, 1949), 201–26. For an application of Leopold to urban conditions, see Klingle, Emerald City, 265–80.
Colin Fisher is an associate professor of history at the University of San Diego. He is currently finishing a book entitled Urban Green: A Social History of Nature in Chicago. He has published an article on the 1919 Chicago race riot and natural space in “To Love the Wind and Rain”: Essays in African American Environmental History (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005) and one on race and environmental history in A Companion to American Environmental History (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010).
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