by Eric Rutkow
Like many great literary works, Walden appeared to tepid initial sales, but soon an audience found the book and it has remained in print ever since. Thoreau crafted his thoughts as though projected through a prism, such that each allowed for multiple interpretations. For some, the book was a transcendentalist call to arms against the excesses of modern society. For others, it was a new way to look at nature or a polemic for conservation. Many considered his lucid writing style to represent a break from a then fashionable circumlocution. At one point in the work, Thoreau declared, “How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book!” This statement, one of his many quote-ready aphorisms, might as well have been directed at Walden itself. Few books have had such a profound impact on American culture.
After publishing Walden, Thoreau’s fascination with the natural world only deepened. He produced a series of books based on excursions he’d taken to Canada, Cape Cod, and Maine, each landscape inspiring his prose anew. When Thoreau wasn’t traveling, he worked as a land surveyor, which allowed him to disappear into the wilderness around Concord, an unlimited source of new discoveries. Emerson once commented, “[Thoreau] loved Nature so well, was so happy in her solitude, that he became very jealous of cities, and the sad work which their refinements and artifices made with man and his dwelling.” The observations Thoreau made in the forests and meadows of Concord served as raw material for the journal he had begun on Emerson’s suggestion in 1837. Eventually, it contained more than two million words, the majority focused on how different organisms in the natural world interact, a field that later developed into ecology.
Thoreau’s health began to fail him in his late thirties, and in these final years the study of trees claimed more and more of his attention. Three of his final essays dealt with the subject exclusively. “Autumnal Tints” was a panegyric to the beauty of New England’s fall foliage. “Wild Apples” sang the praises of fruits propagated from seed. Lastly, “The Succession of Forest Trees” attempted to explain why forest compositions changed over time, as when pines repopulated an oak forest and vice versa. This final work was, in many respects, more ecology than transcendentalism. The scientist in Thoreau had overtaken the poet.
One evening in 1859, Thoreau ventured into the forest near Concord during a rainstorm to count the rings on tree stumps. It was slow, tedious work, requiring hours of uncomfortable kneeling and intense concentration, the sort of labor reserved for the fanatical. Thoreau spent that night with his knees digging into the cold earth, pushing down against the wet humus that coated the floor. Soon after returning, he became ill, having aggravated a case of tuberculosis that he’d first contracted in 1835. The disease consumed Thoreau’s lungs over the course of the next three years, leaving him bedridden for the final stage of his life. On his deathbed, with insight all that he had left, the man who had turned to the forests to find solace in an ever-developing world said, “I suppose that I have not many months to live; but, of course, I know nothing about it. I may add that I am enjoying existence as much as ever, and regret nothing.”
“A Democratic Development of the Highest Significance”
IN 1811, the architects of New York’s City Hall, looking to save costs, decided to use brownstone instead of marble on the back walls. Since the building was meant to mark the northernmost boundary of the city, no one should have ever seen the rear side. But New York City was about to expand faster than anyone had predicted. The establishment of the Stock Exchange Board in 1817, the cornering of East Coast steamship trading routes by the 1820s, and the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, among other things, provided the city with the foundation for almost unlimited economic growth. Immigrants flooded in from countries throughout Europe, while rural Americans and New Englanders moved to New York to capitalize on the new economic promise. The population exploded from approximately sixty thousand in 1800 to more than half a million in 1850. For comparison’s sake, Philadelphia, Boston, and Baltimore, which also grew as part of a national trend toward urbanization, each gained only about one hundred thousand residents during this period.
Within a decade of City Hall’s completion, the region to the north of its brownstone-clad rear wall, instead of being a tranquil, tree-filled zone outside the urban boundaries, held the nation’s first slum, Five Points. Containing a volatile mix of poor European immigrants and African Americans, the neighborhood became a hotbed of civil unrest, with frequent rioting and strikes throughout the 1820s and 1830s. These political struggles, repeated across numerous cities, were, in many respects, a reaction to the deplorable condition of urban life: streets dirtied with trash, human excrement, and horse manure; foul water; epidemics that ravaged the poor populations every few years; catastrophic cyclical financial crashes; incomprehensible income disparity—by 1845, New York’s top 1 percent owned half of the city’s wealth, while the top 4 percent controlled four-fifths.
Among the other indignities of urban life was an almost total absence of trees or wilderness. Dynamic growth came at the expense of standing trees—cities, the joke went, were places where you cut down the trees and then named the streets after them. The great metropolises of the Eastern Seaboard lacked anything resembling even the curtailed forest solitude of Walden. The few “parks” that existed in the populated section of Manhattan were rarely larger than a city block, not the type of space that made one feel outside of the urban chaos. And the paucity of trees stretched for miles in every direction. An urban population’s insatiable demand for timber and, especially, for fuel wreaked havoc on nearly all the locally accessible woodlands. The unbounded expansion of New York City depended on its access to the nation’s biggest logging network, which stretched up the Hudson River, through the Erie Canal, and into the Great Lakes.
The wealthy were able to escape the barrenness of New York and its environs. Some possessed manicured estates outside the city, and many of the well-to-do sought nature in upstate visits to spas and retreats at Saratoga Springs (near Albany) and in the Catskill Mountains—this latter destination became incredibly fashionable during the 1840s, in part due to the landscape paintings of the Hudson River School. Such picturesque refuges, however, were wholly inaccessible to the urban poor, whose ranks continued to swell.
In 1848, a powerful voice finally spoke out against this worsening metropolitan dilemma. Andrew Jackson Downing was a landscape gardener and, by almost all accounts, the most influential personality in American horticulture. In the mid-nineteenth century, when the newly wealthy were designing grand pastoral estates and the majority of the nonurban population still derived their income from husbandry, the national master of horticulture commanded everyone’s attention.
Downing’s reputation rested on his 1841 book, A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening, Adapted to North America, the first comprehensive manual on the subject from an American point of view. It drew heavily from the English gardening practices that had developed more than a century earlier and had fueled Bartram’s international trade in American trees. The central principle in the English tradition was the creation of a naturalistic setting, one that relied on artifice to imitate an ideal, almost imagined, wilderness. This aesthetic had captivated many wealthy Americans, including Washington and Jefferson early on, but Downing was the first to translate it systemically to American tastes and modify it to suit the nation’s more dramatic geography, places like the picturesque Hudson River Valley.
Of especial importance to Downing were trees. He devoted half of the book to them, writing:
Among all the materials at our disposal for the embellishment of country residences, none are at once so highly ornamental, so indispensable, and so easily managed, as trees, or wood. We introduce them in every part of the landscape,—in the foreground as well as in the distance, on the tops of the hills and in the depths of the valleys. They are, indeed, like the drapery which covers a somewhat ungainly figure, and while it conceals its defects, communicates to it new interest and expression. A tree
, undoubtedly, is one of the most beautiful objects in nature.
During the 1840s, Downing’s influence on American society had expanded through The Horticulturist, a magazine he founded, edited, and contributed to. While it had a wide readership, its impact was dramatically amplified through the countless periodicals that reproduced its content. Downing used this bully pulpit to advance issues that ran from the pragmatic to the aesthetic and, occasionally, the political, for he was committed to social reform.
In October 1848, The Horticulturist published an editorial by Downing titled “A Talk about Public Parks and Gardens.” The subject matter, while novel, was not entirely unfamiliar to city dwellers—William Cullen Bryant, for example, had suggested a “pleasure ground” for New York in an 1844 editorial in his New York Evening Post. Nonetheless, Downing’s editorial, reproduced nationally, marked the beginning of a serious debate on the topic and laid out the reasons that tree-rich public parks were a necessary next step for American democracy.
Downing began his piece with an appeal to national pride, noting that several European countries, while less republican than America in a political sense, were “far more so, in many of the customs of social life.” International cities such as Frankfurt, Munich, Paris, and The Hague all hosted elaborate parks, maintained at public expense. Within these communal spaces, Downing argued, citizens of all classes gained “health, good spirits, social enjoyment, and a frank and cordial bearing towards their neighbors, that is totally unknown either in England or America.”
In the mid-nineteenth century of Downing’s day, however, noncommercial public-works projects were almost unheard of in America, and the idea that public parks could justify the costs (financial and political) associated with their creation and maintenance was suspect. Downing’s editorial turned for guidance to the privately funded but publicly accessible rural cemeteries that had recently proliferated, such as Mount Auburn in Boston (1831) and Greenwood in Brooklyn (1836). These landscaped memorials, financed through the selling of lots, had, to the surprise of many, quickly become fashionable recreation spots, filled with carriages and picnicking families on the weekends. Public parks, according to Downing, would be superior to cemeteries for “allay[ing] some of the feverish unrest” of city life. Downing assured that the money could be found either through “voluntary taxation” or an “appeal to public liberality,” though he did consider a financing scheme, likely in jest, wherein patrons of the park would be “owners in ‘fee simple’ of certain fine trees.”
In the years following Downing’s editorial, plans for a public park in New York City slowly coalesced. The press picked up the debate, hashing out the pros and cons in passionate editorials, with Downing’s Horticulturist and Bryant’s Evening Post particularly stalwart proponents. By 1851, both mayoral candidates supported some form of a park, but a battle was raging over its size and location—whatever space was chosen would have an enormous impact on the city’s development and the value of all adjacent property. Downing again asserted himself, writing in an 1851 piece titled “The New-York Park”:
Five hundred acres is the smallest area that should be reserved for the future wants of such a city, now, while it may be obtained. Five hundred acres may be selected between Thirty-ninth-street and the Harlem River, . . . a good deal of which is yet waste area.
Political infighting continued for several more years, until July 21, 1853, when the New York state legislature finally authorized $5 million for the purchase of more than seven hundred acres within the region that Downing had proposed. The designated area, located in the middle of Manhattan island, was half a mile wide and two and a half miles long, bounded by Fifty-Ninth Street in the south, 106th Street in the north, Fifth Avenue in the east, and Eighth Avenue in the west.
Although more space had been allocated for a park than seemed politically possible a few years earlier, the massive rectangle contained some of the poorest-quality land in the entire city. Harper’s New Monthly Magazine put it bluntly: “Never was a more desolate piece of land chosen for a pleasure-ground.” Its barrenness had contributed to its availability, for few politically connected New Yorkers had claims to any of the seventeen thousand plots involved. The southern half, in particular, alternated between marshy lowlands and rocky highlands, with very few trees. But within the landscape still lived more than fifteen hundred poor and marginalized people, including a large African American community, known as Seneca Village—their claims to the land were eventually abrogated through eminent domain, one of the forgotten costs in creating the new park.
With the location settled, organizers needed to determine the park’s character and design. Downing’s pastoral, tree-rich landscape ideas were but one option among the many European antecedents. The popular Luxembourg Gardens of Paris, for example, were laid out in the older, formal landscaping style of the Continent. They contained straight avenues, smaller plants laid out in geometric patterns, and music and coffee houses. On the other hand, Tsarskoye Selo, the 350-acre residence of the Russian imperial family outside St. Petersburg, demonstrated an eclectic cultural style. Within its grounds were a complete model Chinese village, Egyptian-style pyramids, a Turkish mosque, and countless monuments.
In 1857, after rejecting several designs, the recently created Board of Commissioners for the Central Park decided to hold an open contest. The only requirements were that any proposed plan include four transverse east-west roads as well as a few then fashionable architectural elements. With the fate of the nation’s first major park hanging in the balance, the competition drew a large amount of interest, and landscape gardeners submitted entries that ran the gamut of styles. Notably absent from the competition was Downing, who had died tragically in a riverboat accident five years earlier. However, his former apprentice, a talented English landscaping architect named Calvert Vaux, did participate. And before entering the competition, Downing’s protégé made the politically savvy decision to team up with the park’s newly appointed superintendent, a little-known thirty-five-year-old named Frederick Law Olmsted.
Up to this point in time, Olmsted, whose name soon became synonymous with Central Park, had lived a life of promise without equivalent performance, unable to find a pursuit that used his natural practicality and industriousness. The son of a successful Connecticut merchant, he had received a privileged if haphazard education, but was unable to complete his college degree at Yale due to the lingering effects of severe sumac poisoning. His life following this was a series of jobs and travels whose sum was less than the whole of their parts. He apprenticed with local farmers, clerked for a silk importer, traveled to China as a ship’s boy, and ran a farm and orchard on Staten Island. He also authored a number of books based on travels first to England, where he studied parks and drainage projects, and later to the American South, where he strengthened his commitment to social equality. By August 1857, however, Olmsted’s life was spiraling downward personally, economically, and professionally: His brother was in the final stages of fatal tuberculosis; and the publishing firm in which he had invested five thousand dollars of his father’s money in exchange for a partnership share had collapsed, leaving behind thousands of dollars in debt.
Fate, however, seemed to find him at that moment. He crossed paths with a friend who had just been appointed to the park’s board of commissioners. The board, he learned, was searching for a new park superintendent to oversee labor. Olmsted quickly applied for the job, having determined, he explained to his brother, “what else can I do for a living?”
Becoming superintendent of Central Park brought Olmsted’s life into new focus. It was as though everything had been leading up to this moment. His peripatetic early life had armed him with a diverse knowledge of agriculture, engineering, and landscape design. His commitment to social justice aligned with the reformist ideas that led to the park’s creation—he described it as “a democratic development of the highest significance.” And his disposition—pragmatic, industrious, and organized—was perfect
ly suited to an ambitious project of this scope. He immediately tackled problems created through mismanagement, political favoritism, and a devastating 1857 financial panic. The biggest concern was the park’s initial labor force, an undisciplined and often delinquent group that held their jobs through political connections. Within months, Olmsted had remedied the situation, boasting that he had transformed “a mob of lazy, reckless, turbulent and violent loafers [into] a well organized, punctual, sober, industrious and disciplined body.”
Olmsted’s involvement with the park’s landscape design, much like his appointment as superintendent, arose serendipitously. He had been reluctant to participate in the design competition, fearing that he might offend his supervisor, who had submitted a preliminary plan that was discarded in favor of the open contest. “I should have had nothing to do with the design of the Central Park,” Olmsted later remarked, “had not Vaux invited me to join him. . . . But for his invitation I should not have been a landscape architect.” Ironically, Vaux had sought Olmsted less for his artistry than for his administrative skills and political connections—he was Republican, as was a majority of the board.
Once the two men began collaborating, however, Olmsted’s refined artistic sensibility blossomed. His vision for the park broadly followed the teachings of Downing: The goal was a heightened form of nature, one that depended heavily on trees to create a pastoral oasis and exploited natural features of the landscape to achieve the picturesque. The project consumed the two men throughout the winter of 1857–58, and they barely finished in time for the March 31 deadline. Their submission was a highly polished, professional presentation, complete with a ten-foot-long hand-drawn map and a series of tableaux juxtaposing the “present condition” against the “effect proposed.” Known as the Greensward Plan, it beat out more than thirty other entries to win the competition, though city politics likely played as large a role as aesthetics.