|
Preservation Case Study: Protecting Passive Scenery in Olmsted’s New York Parks “Dame Nature is a gentlewoman. No guide’s fee will obtain you her favour, no abrupt demand; hardly will she bear questioning, or direct, curious gazing at her beauty; least of all will she reveal it truly to the hurried glance of the passing traveller, ...always we must quietly and unimpatiently wait upon it. Gradually and silently the charm comes over us; ...we know not exactly when or how, but going away we remember it with a tender, subdued, filial-like joy.” The English pastoral landscape left such a strong impression on the young Frederick Law Olmsted (1822–1903) that he tried to re-create it on a smaller scale in parks he built later in America. “These Emersonian or Thoreauvian moments were what, through the art of careful design, he wished later to make possible for everyone to experience in the broader pastoral stretches of his great parks,” observed the Olmsted scholar Charles C. McLaughlin in a paper delivered in 1991. Olmsted called these moments “indirect recreation,” and through his artistry, “all the jarring sights and sounds of city life were . . . muted in an illusion of limitless countryside,” McLaughlin wrote. In its early years, the Long Meadow in Prospect Park, in Brooklyn, designed by Olmsted and Calvert Vaux in the 1860s, embodied one of the purest examples of this illusion: the rolling meadow, broken only by clumps of deciduous trees (and in the early days, grazing sheep), allowed the eye to rest on the distant horizon. Yet, despite widespread appreciation of these views, pastoral scenery and “indirect recreation” have been difficult to preserve in Olmsted parks, as demand for active recreational facilities has mounted. Although Olmsted himself included many such amenities in his parks, the greatest difference between later proponents of active recreation and Olmsted was that his facilities “did not interfere with tranquilizing vistas,” McLaughlin points out. After Olmsted’s death, advocates took up the defense of his open spaces, but by the mid-twentieth century, ballfields spanned the Long Meadow and clustered in Central Park’s Great Lawn. When Tupper Thomas, Prospect Park administrator and president of Prospect Park Alliance, arrived at the park in 1980, seven ballfields occupied the south end of the Long Meadow, surrounded by high fencing and bleachers. A backstop in the middle of the open space blocked north-south views. Thomas approached John Cortese, the head umpire for the neighborhood leagues. “I told him, ’baseball has a short season, and the views up and down the meadow are blocked all year,’” she recalls. “I assured him that I never wanted to get rid of baseball.” Cortese supported Thomas’s plan, which moved the playing fields to the ends of the meadow, pushed the backstops to the edges, removed all bleachers and fencing, painted the backstops black, reseeded grass, and planted deciduous trees in the meadow’s south end, as Olmsted had planned. The changes were finished in 1984. “People can sit out and walk through the space, and the views are grand,” Thomas says. “No one’s ever complained, and the ballplayers love it.” A similar scenario played out in Central Park’s thirteen-acre Great Lawn. Though the flat, Beaux-Arts oval, built in the 1930s, was not in the Olmsted design vocabulary, “it did provide an opportunity to open up more landscape,” notes McLaughlin. But again, the clamor for sports facilities won out: the city built eight ballfields on the oval in the 1950s. From the 1970s through the mid-1990s, open-air concerts on the greensward drew massive crowds, which trampled the lawn into hardpan. When Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, now a trustee of LALH, came on as park administrator and president of Central Park Conservancy in the mid-1990s, one of her first projects was to develop a restoration and management plan for the Great Lawn. It called for shrinking the oval, enlarging Belvidere Lake (now called the Turtle Pond), creating a more irregular, picturesque edge, and rearranging the ballfields to create a more generous passive area. The plan gained widespread support, and the restoration concluded in 1998. Both spaces now represent what McLaughlin envisioned when he wrote, “Properly and sensitively restored and intelligently used, the Olmsted parks will again ... serve the gregarious, athletic, and poetic sides of our nature, brightening our lives and those of generations to come.” Photographs: |
