Nature by Design: Reading Urban Parks as Environmental History

I used to live in a city with a very big and beautiful park by the sea. Halifax, Nova Scotia, is a midsized city (more than three hundred thousand in the urban core, and approximately a hundred thousand in the amalgamated “regional municipality”) with the best harbor on this side of the Atlantic Ocean. The city was founded in the mid-eighteenth century because of that harbor, as a base for the British navy, with a carefully planned town set out on the small peninsula. At the south end of the peninsula, soldiers built a Martello tower, star-shaped batteries, and roads to the Citadel atop a drumlin a few miles away. Amid the pine, purple heather took root, possibly a result of a Black Watch regiment’s encampment. In 1866, the city leased the entire south end from the Crown as Point Pleasant Park, which was then bordered with low stone walls and landscaped in curving carriage roads, sea views, a small swimming beach, and a caretakers’ stone cottage. The world wars saw new defenses and submarine nets, and memorials erected facing the sea; industrial deep-water shipping filled in the adjacent shoreline; and in 2003, Hurricane Juan leveled much of the park’s tree stands (and, ironically, reopened strategic viewscapes that had been blocked by growing trees). Point Pleasant still looks very much like a nineteenth-century urban park, its gravel paths tread by joggers and dog-walkers, but it records the history of Halifax and, indeed, much of the north Atlantic.

The books reviewed in this article reveal something about particular cities and their parks. Like Point Pleasant, they open much larger questions about our expectations and uses of nature in the modern era. Each tells a story about the relationship between the intellectual designs of park planning and the dynamic, material reality it produced. Environmental history documents the role of nature in human history and the relationships humans have had with nature in the past. At first glance, a city park suggests a deliberate, oppositional intervention: a space of wild in the urban jungle, a place of repose instead of work, a block of green surrounded by gray. The most convincing fictions of all suggest an older nature preserved amid modern construction. These books, however, show that the history of parks is the story not of natural spaces but of human calculation and consequence.

These eight books cluster into two camps and, specifically, two types of biography: the biography of the human actor and the biography (to borrow a phrase from Lisa M. Benton) of the place. The first group tends to see parks through the career and craft of an individual and his (almost always his) intellectual milieu, as profiles in environmental design. The second group places greater emphasis and consequence on societal context, the political life of the city, and the ecological dilemmas of park management. In this selection, we see something of an evolution from the one to the other, as historians have become more interested in the interplay of individual agency, societal forces, and ecological circumstance. Accordingly, these historians reveal a shift in emphasis in the ostensibly paradoxical concept of urban park, from the park to the urban, from the planned and bounded space of the park itself to the city in, to, and for which it was created.

To the first group, then, we have works about Calvert Vaux, Frederick Law Olmsted, and Alfred Caldwell. To begin at the end, in terms of historical chronology at least, we might start with Phyllis Lambert’s Viewing Olmsted. This is a catalogue of a 1996 exhibition of photographs held at the Centre of Canadian Architecture in Ottawa. The premise here is historical in spirit—to revisit Olmsted’s park designs a century later, to examine how they “matured” (p. 7)—but strongly aesthetic in form, with the emphasis on the photographer’s gaze and frame more than the subjects per se. Indeed, one might see this collection as rather more about the photographers than about Olmsted, how they “rediscovered” places caught in the process of changing from their formal intention. As John Szarkowski notes in his essay “The Photographer in the Garden,” the photograph has its own logic that “sometimes, with luck, will be consonant in its own rhythms and structure with the photographer’s intuition of the nature of the place” (p. 25).

We meet Olmsted himself in Witold Rybczynski’s lengthy but highly readable A Clearing in the Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the Nineteenth Century (1999). A Canadian connection exists here—Rybczynski came to know Olmsted through Montreal’s Mont Royal Park; “it was like taking a drive in the country” (p. 13) even in Canada’s second largest city. To its credit, this is a comprehensive biography that devotes extensive attention to Olmsted’s influences years before his most famous design at Central Park: from his childhood on the Connecticut River through tours of Europe, a checkered career in land management, and writing for a burgeoning middle-class audience interested in home and garden improvement. This Olmsted comes across at first as a slightly dilettantish entrepreneur, but Rybczynski shows us how this kaleidoscope of early experiences—from New York tree nurseries to English hedgerows—shaped Olmsted’s ideas about the capacity of planned or manipulated nature for romantic and scenic ends. The design of “Greensward” (as the original design for Central Park was called) is easily visualized here, but this Olmsted is less a visionary than a capable manager of both nature and people; he built the park and supplied regulations for its use. To Rybczynski’s credit, this is a rounded biography in which Central Park is only one chapter; beyond the numerous other parks and suburbs such as Brooklyn, and later plans (some realized, some not) for San Francisco, Buffalo, Chicago, and Montreal, there are aspects of Olmsted’s life—such as his writing about the South and slavery, his work with sanitation and hospital transport during the Civil War, and as a mine manager in California—which present him as a citizen of nineteenth-century America far beyond New York in the 1860s.

Despite this, Olmsted remains synonymous with Central Park in the public lexicon. For this reason, Francis R. Kowsky felt the need to give Calvert Vaux—an English émigré and Olmsted’s longtime partner—some attention, particularly as the artistic imagination—“devoted to artistic purposes, as he would have said” (p. 5)—behind many of the partners’ projects. (Vaux had the good or mis-fortune, depending on your point of view, to partner with the two most famous landscape designers in American history, in Andrew Jackson Downing and then Frederick Law Olmsted.) Consequently, Kowsky’s Country, Park, and City: The Architecture and Life of Calvert Vaux (1997) is more about Vaux’s architectural designs and sensibilities, from his plans for country villas on the upper Hudson River—many of which, sadly, are now lost—to his efforts to cultivate “a true professional class of architects and an informed public” (p. 54) in mid-nineteenth-century America. Even those in frontier settlements, he felt, should exercise “a little judicious forethought” and retain enough remnants of the “benevolent forest” (p. 75) to supply picturesque views. Following his clientele, Vaux moves from the “country” (really exurb) to the city, producing a design for “Parisian flats” (apartment buildings) in 1857, and then, of course, Greensward (which Kowsky attributes primarily and at length to Vaux). Vaux seems to have regarded Central Park as both “natural scenery” (p. 134) and “the great art work of the Republic” (p. 120)—a contradiction that goes essentially unchallenged and yet still underlies much of this design approach to park history. Kowsky also credits Vaux with coining the phrase “landscape architecture” to describe their practice (p. 173), and which, tellingly, puts more weight on act of design (i.e., as architecture) than its subject. The partners’ design for Brooklyn’s Prospect Park was even more influential, as it modeled a suburban community of parkways and “corridors of well-mannered woods” where the pleasures of nature also paid off in property values (p. 181). Vaux, too, came to Canada—and found himself once again shunted to the side after preparing a plan for the Canadian parliament grounds (pp. 246-7)!

Finally, in Alfred Caldwell: The Life and Work of a Prairie School Landscape Architect (1997), Dennis Domer compiles the writings of a designer responding to the ecology of the Midwest. Caldwell did not invent the “prairie style”—characterized by the use of native plants, stratified rock formations, and horizontal lines—but spread its influence through his work in New Deal projects in the Midwest, and more famously, postwar Chicago. Caldwell saw his designs as “melting into the landscape” (p. 36), a sharp contrast from Olmsted and Vaux, who blithely ordered in tens of thousands of trees and shrubs to be planted in Chicago’s Riverside suburb. At Eagle Point State Park in Iowa, for example, Caldwell envisioned that the “garden would be the identity of the town’s own native landscape” (p. 131), part of a larger quest to redeem the city with “the power of the prairie: the power of the great simplicity, the stretched, straight line of the earth” (pp. 94-5). During his career, Caldwell became increasingly critical of the “sprawling lunacy” of the modern city (p. 72), pollution, and rapacious capitalism decentralizing and destabilizing the city. His diagnoses formed the basis of several influential essays, here in their entirety, such as 1942s “The City in the Landscape” and “Columbus Park.”

In this group, then, the male hero—as imagination, as authority—is very much at the center. Advocates for Vaux and Caldwell naturally wish to lobby for inclusion in the American canon, but much of the writing verges on hagiographic. Vaux “was one of American art’s most intelligent and sympathetic partisans” (Kowsky, 9); Olmsted had “indomitable energy and iron determination” (Rybczynksi, 19); Caldwell “had proven himself the kind of universal talent needed” (p. 41), and his writings “thunder with emotion and wit and flow with Delphic wisdom” (Domer, 76). The amusing counternote is Rybczynski’s version of Olmsted as mostly concerned with getting “a decent living” (p. 260), perhaps why his national standing rankled Vaux as much as it did.

But whereas biographers might expect to have a solid and familiar body of sources from which to work, here it seems rather more complicated. Certainly, these men published extensively in (and helped found) a new generation of popular periodicals on art, architecture, and agriculture, such as The Cultivator. Vaux, for example, set out many of his ideas in 1857’s Villa and Cottages, but without much of his correspondence, Kowsky relies frequently on speculative slipstreaming, or drawing parallels from Vaux’s contemporaries. Ironically, such correspondence is frequently more managerial than artistic, that is, more revealing of the personalities and conflicts of mid-nineteenth-century American municipal politics, “old-stock New Englanders [who] believed in the primacy of efficient planning and organization” (Rybczynksi, 185). Plans and designs supply historians and readers with a wonderful source of illustrations but were often never contracted or completed by their commissioning city. We, therefore, see what the designers wanted to do but not necessarily what they did. Olmsted imagined how the trees in Central Park might fill out in maturity, but as Lambert’s photographic project demonstrates, he could not have envisioned the full course of the park’s life. This is a common difficulty in environmental history predicated on reports, plans, and policies: much of it speaks to what planners and designers want to happen, as opposed to recording what actually did.

In a similar vein, neither the artists nor their biographers seem entirely sure as to how to characterize this new mode of design. Was it art? Architecture? Landscape composition? All these terms are used at different points with all three men—sometimes in the same sentence!—although Vaux and Caldwell (and their biographers) would have most insisted on their status as artists. Rybczynski describes Olmsted as something between a horticulturalist and planner, whose work was “not based on a theory of design or a predetermined set of aesthetic rules,” and yet Olmsted insists his, too, was “sylvan art” (pp. 261-2). Vaux and Olmsted appear to have been conscious of the need to camouflage the art to succeed in this new profession; they authored their own myth, even Vaux eventually writing “Nature first and 2nd and 3rd—Architecture after a while” (Kowsky, 57). None of these authors really confront the paradox of such work, in artistic arrangement, replication, and manipulation of natural features. Domer romantically pictures Caldwell imagining the garden at Eagle Point as having “that rarest of all qualities, the quality of innocence . . . as if in some unaccountable way just this space of the beautiful earth had been left unspoiled” (pp. 126, 130). And yet the garden was entirely an act of (human) artifice. I found myself thinking that “park construction” or “park engineering” would be more appropriate. Central Park, for instance, involved extensive drainage, excavation, blasting, and seeding.

These four books, then, are about urban environments as seen through the lens of design, concerned primarily with the imagination, intent, and intellectual context of the designer. I found myself wondering how an environmental historian would tell the story differently. For one, I think environmental history looks for a wider context, stressing institutional or systemic factors over individual genius. Consider the enormous wealth acquired by owners of those Hudson River villas or metropolitan banks, derived from industrial and capital resource development elsewhere in the United States. Vaux, Olmsted, and Caldwell compartmentalized nature, and thereby segregated their designed spaces from the wider American landscape that demanded and paid for them. Historians, though, can reestablish those connections, material as well as aesthetic. There might also be a longer temporal context, of the history of the place beyond the lifetime of the artist, whether indigenous peoples before or the ecological implications afterward. This is not to minimize the value of these contributions—Rybczynski’s, especially, is wonderfully readable, and accurately presents Olmsted as a man of nineteenth-century America. But the contrast with the next group of books is considerable.

Lisa M. Benton’s The Presidio: From Army Post to National Park marks in some sense a generational leap: the first of these books to identify explicitly as environmental history, to consider its task a biography of place (p. 5) rather than of person. The Presidio, she explains, is both a park within a city and a city within a city (pp. 3-4). Benton’s story encompasses its internal as well as external dynamics. She offers primarily an institutional history—read through the documents of military and park planners who managed the site—but Benton consistently situates the Presidio in a wider narrative of environmental history, from the Gold Rush to the Gilded Age and its concern for urban health, to early thinking about national parks, and local environmentalism in the postwar period. This interplay of local and national would make this book a great choice for an undergraduate seminar. She presents fascinating details on the ecologies of a coastal park (whose dunes required extensive engineering), the relationship between the Presidio and the expanding city of San Francisco, and the demarcated coexistence of military and public space. (Between conventional post-amenities like a movie theater and a Burger King, and its views of the Pacific, it does sound like a plum posting!) The Presidio asks observers to consider military landscapes and processes of reclamation: how do we adapt older (military, industrial, potentially toxic) landscapes for other uses? And are we willing to pay for them? When the Presidio was to be decommissioned as a military base in the late 1980s, it became the subject and symbol of ideological divides in Congress over the cost, management, and utility of public lands. As Benton notes, debates over the Presidio evoked “a broad, fundamental debate about the meaning of parks in American society” as an urban park in a national tradition that privileged wilderness over recreation, where recreation areas and urban parks “floated ambiguously outside of the national park ideals” (p. 161). The National Park Service had never dealt with such a complex, multiuse site, and now they were expected to manage several hundred buildings inside of a “national park.” Consequently, Benton devotes considerable attention to the new processes of site planning and private/public partnerships that emerged in the 1990s as required by a multiuse, multifaceted, urban park.

Terence Young, in contrast (and in complement), focuses on the Progressive era and the reform imperative behind urban parks in Building San Francisco’s Parks, 1850-1930 (2004). Young concentrates on four societal objectives or “virtues”: public health, prosperity, democratic equality, and social coherence. As a result, he tends to reinscribe the original voice of authority—that is, the white, upper-to-middle class, male park advocates who defined such virtues, but it is also a good introduction to the socioeconomic concerns and environmental dynamics of industrializing America. Young tracks the rise and rivalry of two competing philosophies of city parks: the “romantic,” favoring scenery and repose, and the “rationalistic,” promoting leisure and sport, although both were intent on countering the moral and physical pollution of the modern city and producing “responsible, involved citizens” (p. 11). At Golden Gate Park, for example, park planners were conscious of the physical conditions of the site—notably the Pacific climate and shifting dunes, which would suggest sand-anchoring grasses—but undaunted commissioners and councilors believed that seeing a diverse collection of plants in close proximity would promote feelings of tolerance toward different kinds of peoples (and conveniently, profitably, attract tourists). Social engineering through biomimicry of a sort? By the early twentieth century, however, it is the rationalistic vision and non-natural features that predominate, peopling city parks with playgrounds and museums, conservatories and athletic fields, all to restore health and strength to an enervated urban workforce. The result was more activity but also more segmentation according to use, “a patchwork of special-use settings” (p. 165). At times Young’s theoretical framework feels a bit forced, but he reminds us just how successful the rationalistic, Progressive-era vision of city parks has been.

Heath Massey Schenker adopts a different approach in Melodramatic Landscapes: Urban Parks in the Nineteenth Century (2009). He identifies efforts to “orchestrate certain types of behavior” through parks in three different cities and three different countries: Baron Haussmann’s Bois de Boulogne, Emperor Maximilian’s Chapultepec Park (strongly influenced by contemporary Paris), or Olmsted’s Central Park (of course). As the title suggests, Schenker is informed by cultural studies, notably the rise and psychology of the urban bourgeois (p. 8), and the concept of spectacle. Supported by texts drawn from theater and literature (i.e., after all, the era of the flâneur), he argues that the nineteenth-century park was staged as if a melodrama, as a vehicle for conveying moral messages (p. 150) to redress middle-class anxiety. Certainly, parks were stages of a sort: as Schenker points out, their main purpose was to allow the sociable bourgeois to display their newly acquired wealth in a “parade of fashionable equipages” in a “daily display of wealth and fashion” (p. 103). Parks also enabled ruling elites to frame and organize their city neighborhoods and, in the case of Mexico, signal the achievement of national independence (although given the French influence, I also wondered at the use of design and urban planning as a means of colonization). The transnational comparison is very interesting, a reminder of the intellectual exchanges linking rival empires. Schenker provides a useful account of the earlier history of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century parks, especially their social and commercial functions, as well as a compelling reading of the class interests at work, and parks as a form of urban capital, viewed as markers of international status to attract investment as well as mark distinction (p. 17).

Ranging across time and space and scale, these biographies are linked by several important themes. For one, the creation and administration of urban parks reflects and required a new world of bureaucracy in the modern era, from municipal government to federal agencies responsible for lands and resources. Second, they remind us that what we expect to see in city parks—from promenades to statuary, flower beds to playgrounds—are artifactual aesthetics, that is, they were invented and cast in place at certain points in time, as responses to (and thus markers of) prevailing social and political concerns. That they have become naturalized and normalized to us a century later makes it easy to forget how engaged these places were with the political life of their time. On the note, it is interesting to see how expectations of nature (planned or otherwise) produce blinders against our actual surroundings; in one irony, the runaway success and status of Central Park convinced residents of cities like San Francisco that a city required a single, signature park—that is, another Central Park—instead of a citywide system, or one that suited the coastal conditions of their own place (Young, 65). What drives or hinders innovation in park design? What (and whose) paths have we not taken? And finally, consider how frequently we identify a city by its park—a quasi-natural space has become as a signature for the very symbol of human space.

The last book in this grouping is rather different, in two ways: it is the only one to center issues of race and racial politics, in parks deliberately located outside (but still in the service) of urban areas. William E. O’Brien’s Landscapes of Exclusion: State Parks and Jim Crow in the American South (2016) addresses the question of authority over public land, and parks as a tool of contemporary political agendas. In this case, that agenda was to maintain separate but unequal standing for African Americans in the postwar south even after the Supreme Court–ruled segregation in state parks was unconstitutional. Environmental history has been (and remains) a strongly white field in subject and authorship, and this is a valuable illustration of how we might do things differently. As O’Brien pithily notes in his introduction, he examines two major themes in American history: racial subjugation and park development. “The latter a feature of what has been called ‘America’s best idea’ and the former representing its worst” (p. 4). This is a fairly liberal, teleological account of activism and court challenges by African Americans and their white allies until they “eventually emerged victorious” (p. xiv). O’Brien might say more about differences across the region in environment and attitude; for instance, variations in the kinds of landscapes preferred or heroized in different parts of the south, and why some states desegregated while Virginia and South Carolina chose to keep parks closed rather than concede to federal law. Landscapes of Exclusion offers several lessons to environmental historians and scholars of race. As physical locations, segregated parks were the subject of court appeals under the Supreme Court order; local places were tools to destabilize a much wider, entrenched system of prejudice and exclusion. At the same time, federal actors and policies—from the New Deal to the National Park Service—were not only conservative and cautious but also intervened at times and modeled other kinds of park management. Finally, O’Brien speaks bluntly about the white privilege and black stereotypes, the racialized and racist definitions of nature that remain “durably imprinted across southern landscapes . . . still apparent for anyone who cares to see” (p. 16) This is a historical landscape that needs to be addressed in park interpretation.

So what can we say of these histories taken together, biographies of person and place? What can these books teach us about how we interact with the natural world? For one, it is important to recognize that the parks we have inherited were not created out of a desire to preserve nature; these were not wild spaces walled off to be kept for future generations. These sites were deliberately selected and landscaped to influence civic behavior or orchestrate human actions in the moment, whether cultivating bourgeois sociability, Progressive beautification, or justifying racial segregation. Even places designed to provide solitude and contemplation of natural scenery were framed by the methods and markets of industrial America. In city or suburb, park spaces were purposeful complements to the predominant trajectory of capitalist growth; the same “influential, elite rationalistic park proponents” of San Francisco’s beautification projects supported the damming of Hetch Hetchy at Yosemite (Young, 184). Is there any reason to believe that our cities, and our parks, do not operate in essentially the same way today? As Young (p. xiii) and Schenker (pp. 3-4) both observe in passing (kind of burying the lead!), these parks survive largely unaltered since their original creation—making them nearly unique in the urban landscape.

The perennial question for environmental historians is always “So what do we do now? What do we do differently?” Although most of these books refrain from drawing such conclusions, we can glean partial lessons for sustainability, and better practices going forward. First, parks do not absolve us from what Caldwell called “a national policy” of industrial harvest (Domer, 226). But they can be useful places to experiment with more sustainable practices. When, where, and why did these emerge? Did the Great Depression teach a certain restraint in urban planning? Can we revitalize the prairie school’s interest in local and resilient plants? Second, parks invite us to consume nature and define ourselves by that consumption. So they cannot be separated from issues of social and economic inequality. They ask us to consider how inclusive our idea of “public” space really is. Third, effective environmental protection requires consistent federal intervention. Such a reminder could not be more timely. As I write, such protections are being repealed across the United States. At the same time, parks supply tangible, accessible places to focus public attention and mobilize citizen action. Finally, we need to consider the full range of options of “greening the city” beyond the signature park. A park system? Greenbelts? Greenbuildings? Olmsted was taken with the working rural landscape of southern England; Caldwell was influenced by the Danish designer Jens Jensen. There are lessons for Americans from both these regions for a postindustrial landscape. As William Cronon pointed out in his landmark 1995 essay, the trouble with wilderness as an ideal (especially in the American tradition) is that it locates nature out there, somewhere beyond. ¹ City parks remind us that nature is next door, as well.

Environmental historians like to describe their field as a “big tent”—not only one that draws on many other fields in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities, but also one that invites, and makes room for, different interests in the discussion. This collection of books gives us several paths into that tent, from art and design to the politics of race, but all consider the implications of designed nature. We see a move from considering the city park as the work of the artist to the city park as product of urban and even national politics, and more broadly, of the driving ideologies of industrial modernity still at work in contemporary America. These books represent twenty years of thinking about our parks. It will be interesting to see what the next twenty years will bring.