Parks in Cities, 1991
The role of parks in American cities, from a 1991 term paper. Parks have served a number of purposes, from relief to recreation to indoctrination. It is instructive to consider the various programming, design, and funding decisions made and unmade. A park is almost never just a park.
133 YEARS OF NATURE IN THE CITY
In 1963 Serge Chermayeff declared that the modern city, unlike its ancient counterpart must consider nature within its walled compound. During Antiquity, cities were small. Without suburbs the wilderness was never more than a few steps away. Rightly so, designers of the urban landscape only concerned themselves with stone and mortar.
Today with people commuting up to two hours each way through a metropolitan region to get to their job, the need for rest and relaxation is all too necessary. With the ever-expanding ring of suburbs, the wilderness has become a subject only of our imagination or reality perhaps two weeks out of the year. Given the nature of urban/suburban sprawl, it has become imperative to consider nature within the city.
One needs a place to lay his head even before the grave.
NATURAL PASSIVITY
In 1858 Frederick Law Olmstead and Calvert Vaux provided a natural park for New York City and its growing population, beginning an American tradition of public urban parks. Heirs to the European model, Americans returned from abroad with tales of vast open spaces in the middle of the city. By the 1850's Europeans had confiscated the previously private villas, part of the republicanization of the continent following the French Revolution. These were freed and opened to the public without regard to economic or social standing. (Schuyler 1986) The people had publicized the private.
Previously, America had almost no parkland. According to Thomas Jefferson, the city was a cancer on the body politic. Americans were infatuated with the romantically open landscape and its possibilities for a “…philosophical system which deprecated artificiality and science, feared technology as the enemy of sensibility, and regarded the American city as a threat to basic values.” (White and White, p. 210)
Ralph Waldo Emerson was the main proponent of this theory and advocated that the urban mob should just as well be left in Europe. To the romantic's chagrin the Industrial Revolution, migration and a population explosion all forced the creation of cities. By the mid 19th Century many cities bustled to the life of the streetcar, factory and tenement while only in memories lived the mere villages that were once there. (Cranz 1982)
The new cities were built along commercial lines in an effort to concentrate the labor needed for the new factories. The 1811 Commissioners Plan for New York City outlines a street hierarchy dedicated to the movement of traffic from the piers on both East and West Rivers. Other expansion plans of 19th Century cities detail a higher regard for commercial endeavors than other special consideration. (Cranz 1982) Any park space was along the genteel variety that one finds at Grammercy or Washington Parks. Pitted against the density and pollution of the smoke belching factories, health and welfare did not fare well.
While post-Civil War urbanity was accepted as necessary for the life of the nation's emerging industry, its initial formation received criticism from both sides. The romantics like Emerson held that the real American dream was to be found in the great outdoors. Simultaneously figures like Henry James and John Dewey found the city to not be urban enough. (White and White) These intellects wished for the city to embrace urban life and make it livable.
To his credit, Olmstead bisected these opposing views and brought the great outdoors into the city. He believed that pure wilderness was the appropriate antidote for the vulgar, concrete jungle. That this was impossible led Olmstead to offer the pastoral middle landscape as a compromise to "heighten the idea of naturalness with forms suggested by nature but not to rely on what nature actually provided." (Cranz 1982, p. 26) The result was the naturally passive pleasure garden.
These pleasure gardens (Central Park, Prospect Park, Franklin Park) brought a natural passivity into the center of the emerging metropolis. They promoted spontaneous activities and acted as urban steam-valves opposing the restlessness of the masses. Many of the events occurring in the park were organized by families and churches: racing, tobogganing, tennis. The games transpired out of doors as a relief to the many hours of indoor home or factory labor. Many families would spend an entire Sunday in the park relaxing and observing the promenade of the well-heeled in their high-falutin’ carriages. (Cranz 1982) This psychic renewal afforded escape from the often tense and crowded civic life.
An important aspect leading to the development of the pleasure garden is beheld in the Sunday carriage promenade. Through this the upper classes strove to introduce American morality unto the vast influx of Old World immigrants. “The promiscuous mixing of all ages and sexes in cramped tenements was breaking down the barriers of modesty and conducing to the corruption of the young.” (Boyer 1978, p. 246)
In the public theater known as Central Park, those new to the country could observe the proper decorum displayed by upstanding Americans. The masses knew that the American dream was to be attained through the constraints of society and were eager to slip into the mold.
Ultimately the creation of pleasure gardens solidified open space as intrinsic in the creation of the city; though for many purposes they were just too big and far away to be enjoyed every day.
LINKING AND REFORM
At the turn of the century, creation of urban American park space focused on linking the great parks via parkways and playgrounds. The parkways linked the pleasure gardens together with a continuous green circuit. In New York, Ocean Drive connected Coney Island with Prospect Park. Eastern Boulevard pushed eastward from Prospect Park. (Schuyler 1986) The idea was to provide a natural weaving in and amongst the city.
Olmstead designed a 260 foot wide strip of parkway with 65 feet of roadway. It was residential in scale and for the primary use of the surrounding neighborhoods. It provided a fire break at a time when fires were epidemic. It also was seen as an aesthetically pleasing route for commuters as the city grew. (Schuyler 1986) Sadly the Parkway idea fell victim to increased pavement and less foliage. The prime example is Park Avenue which in 1928 had two lanes of traffic; now it has maybe two trees.
Playgrounds came into vogue at the turn of the century during the Progressive reform era. Between school and supper, most urban youth hung-out on street corners waiting for the arrival of vice, sin and corruption. Eventually they all wound up drinking and smoking in the pool hall. To change this social order was not to come through repression, but by giving the youngsters and outlet for their energies. Playgrounds were the answer. They were "the womb from which a new citizenry - moral, industrious, socially responsible - would emerge." (Boyer 1978, p. 235) Through this social engineering the virtues and morality of the Progressive Era would be brought to the masses via their children.
The first playgrounds were unsupervised play lots with limited equipment seeking to bring a rural freedom to the city. These were soon discarded as the urban masses were incapable of structuring their own recreation. By 1913 the city of Chicago had instituted a formal playground instructor school where adults learned to organize and lead youngsters in play. Thus was born the recreation center. Open year round, the 1922 Model Reform Park of Chicago contained a Field House with assembly hall, library showers and lockers. Outside was a swimming pool, a track and field and tennis and basketball courts. (Cranz 1982)
The playgrounds of the early 20th Century also differed from their larger predecessors in design and concept. The designers, increasingly on the payroll of the municipal parks departments, strove for utility. No attempts were made to screen out urbanity. Asphalt was substituted for grass. Trees were only allowed where they would not interfere with fly balls. They were not the product of any great design decision but crowded into vacant lots and the backyards of tenements. (Cranz 1982)
Conceptually, these smaller parks began to deal with the city as a homogeneous unit. “We have passed the time when a city was simply a conglomeration of individuals...the city is becoming a unit...like a man, a city is mind, body and spirit...it is more than the individual citizens; for it lives on...” (Boyer 1978, p. 257)
The effort here was to direct the emotions of the populace from the supernatural to the civic. The urbane ideals only compromised in the pleasure gardens were now to be embraced. The city was seen as part of the natural order of things. (White and White 1962) It was to be accepted and appreciated. It was the City Beautiful.
To this end, civic pageants such as the 1914 St. Louis Pageant and Masque were held. On four consecutive summer nights, 100,000 people came together for outdoor musicals depicting the power of virtuous and moral denizens in the struggle to create a better world. Civic leagues were founded (e.g. Municipal Arts Society, Architectural League) and land was acquired to preserve the natural beauty of the area (e.g. Twin Peaks, Randalls Island). (Boyer 1978) By making the city lovely, people would come to love the city.
PROGRAMMED PARKS
By the end of the Roaring Twenties, the growing middle class became known as the leisure class. Because of the reforms of the Progressive Period, the work week was shorter, people retired earlier and had more vacation time. While the city grew in sheer numbers, each family had fewer children. The rise of the automobile eliminated the street as a safe play area and also meant those who could, left town for the weekend. Couple this with daylight savings time and the unemployment of the Depression and you have a lot of spare time. (Cutler 1985)
An important consequence of the rise of the leisure class was the loss of idealism. The country had witnessed the rise of communism and fascism despite the effort of World War I. With the Great Depression, people wondered more about their next meal rather than any grand civic ideas. Parks, while expanding physically, bore the brunt of operating budget cuts. Gone were the play supervisors and gardeners. The authority and prestige once bestowed upon the upper class was now lost to economic peril.
The parks, facing monetary extinction, consolidated within themselves and searched for partners to share funding. In 1930, all five boroughs of New York City consolidated parks departments. They joined with schools and colleges to create park/playgrounds used by school children during the day and their fathers in the evening. In 1941, San Francisco coordinated its parks with housing projects. (Cranz 1982)
During the Great Depression, President Franklin Roosevelt did not nationalize banks or establish a minimum income, instead he federalized public recreational development. (Cutler 1985) The incredible amount of park acquisition and development during this period came as a direct response to unemployment. With so many people looking for work the Works Progress Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps put men and boys to work on the land. Park development required intensive labor with almost no overhead all you needed was a shovel. What they created were parks and recreational areas for the new leisure class.
While vast in quantity, the newer parks lacked in quality. No longer seen as luxuries within the urban fabric, parks were essential and now subject to financial, and other more banal criteria. The city would take parks as they came, relying on capricious federal money and spending it before the government changed its mind. (Cutler 1985)
The WPA constructed stadiums like Soldiers Field in Chicago to house football, circuses and Fourth of July celebrations. Symphonies took their shows outside in freshly built bandshells. Jazz fests and Shakespeare had his open air revues. In Queens, Flushing Meadows was drained and filled in for the 1939 New York "World of Tomorrow" World's Fair. Within two years of the Fair's closing, America entered World War II and so did its parks. Temporary barracks were set in Central Park along with military training and daycare for the children of women laboring the war effort. Vegetable gardening, patriotic photography and arts & crafts clubs were established to relieve the tensions of the war. (Cranz 1982)
While these intrusions were only temporary, their legacy lived on. The wartime regularization of physical training and hierarchy of play areas all but formalized recreation and declared it to be a sober experience. At issue was a change in lifestyle from the use of imagination to the conformity of war uniforms. (Cutler 1985) By war's end, the country had witnessed a shift from the pleasure garden ideal to the embracing and rational institutionalization of urban industrial culture. The systematizing of the landscape stripped the urban centers of their imagination. The characteristic logic included:
multiplicity of offerings
justification by demand
defensiveness of orientation (Cranz 1982, p.48)
PARKS WITHOUT CITIES
Considering the tidal wave of forces that rapidly inundated American cities during about a century and a half, it is no wonder that they should not have taken on all the characteristics of stable social settlements. Instead they retained or developed many of the characteristics of the socially fluid frontier. The vast, unsettled continent of the United States was continuously inviting the population to disperse westward into rural areas, while at the same time the combined forces of capitalism, industrialization, rapidly increasing population, and immigration from the ends of the earth were producing urban concentration. After the Civil War , while people began pouring into the cities, the autonomy of cities was being more and more undermined, not only by the advance of nation-wide capitalism and industrialization, but also by the full development of the national state. Moreover, an increasingly strong undertow in the direction of suburban dispersion began in the early years of the twentieth century to drain the vitality of the central city, and to create ill-defined metropolitan areas. And finally, the rapid technological advances in building, transportation, and communication hastened the detachment of individuals from any one fixed, permanent locality or social group. (White and White, p 219)
I will not belabor the reader with an intimate description of the suburbanization of the country following World War II. The automobile and facsimile machine have made possible decentralization with obvious implications for the central cities and their parks. Budget crises sharply reduced or eliminated park budgets as the middle class no longer frequented parks. The years of riots in the late 1960s proved that parks could not provide the "safety value" feature of the preceding century. (Cranz 1982) The parks became havens for vice and crime - elements in society in which the parks were originally intended to impede.
In 1948, Edward Shils observed that “The contemplation of wholes has never taken root in the United States as a fundamental scientific attitude. American social scientists...could not remain wholly satisfied with the ecstatic self-immersion into wholeness or the undifferentiated sense of the interconnectedness of all things.” (White and White, p 235)
I believe this to be an accurate assessment of the reason why Americans deserting their own. At the beginning of the park movement, pleasure gardens allowed society to passively mold itself. With the actively programmed recreational space, the statutes of society were force-fed onto the masses. Then the definition of society changed.
Beginning with integrated Armed Forces, continuing into school desegregation and the Civil Rights movements, our definition of society has changed. The concept of America has been expanded (or diluted) to encompass a more gorgeous mosaic. The majority has become a minority. As Mr. Shils observed, this did not sit well with the majority. They simply left, in the phenomenon known as white flight.
In their wake, the cities were left a skeleton of their former selves.
While the city has been pressed to homogenize so as to provide its citizens a more equal fare of public goods and permits its inhabitants to freely roam its streets, the metropolitan area has become a rich smorgasbord of land uses to meet the tastes and purses of a highly varied public. (Long 1972, p 37)
The result is a city without clearly defined boundaries and less clearly defined goals. As our Constitution declares that all citizens, regardless of habitation be accorded equal rights, the identity with a certain locale blurred. (Long 1972)
The other more obvious element to the decentralization of the city is the automobile. At first, the car was seen as a tool of freedom. We even went so far as to incorporate them into parks with parkways. [By the time parkways had made their way across the continent, planners were excluding them from parks and had shunned the parkway. (Cutler 1985)] Yet the auto made possible the exodus to suburbia and has further served to blur geographical divisions. One division is plainly clear. Left behind are the upper and lower classes in the cities. Those wealthy enough can insulate themselves from their surroundings; those poor enough have nowhere else to go. (Long 1972)
Lastly, the riots and protests of the 1960s demonstrate a will of the young people that is disembodied from their elders (the young in this case being all minorities, whether by age or race or ethnicity.) The youth, undisciplined by society or bored with affluence joined with the oppressed minorities to demonstrate for equal rights. Naturally these protests took place in the public domain, more often than not, in the public park. Vietnam War protests and smoke-ins took place in the great lawns of Central, Golden Gate and other parks. (Cranz 1982) These places, designed for passive recreation were now being used insidiously as places of propaganda. It was as if the forces of control had been unleashed against the controllers. This did not bade well for the future of parks.
The backlash to this rejection took two directions: restoration and privatization. The first included attempts to regain the past glory of parks. In the mid 1960s Central and Prospect Parks were declared national historic landmarks, forever rendering them impossible to alter. The cities tried to breathe her life into the old parks by incorporating the various programs of the newer generations: rock concerts, be-ins, wall paintings, and tennis for ghetto children. (Cranz 1982) In 1967 the loop road was closed to automobile traffic on Sundays, bringing a hoard of bicyclers.
In privatization we have a rejection of public in the development of urban parks. The two examples of private/urban parks are Battery Park City and Parc de la Villette. Battery Park City, a 92 acre development is built on five million cubic yards of land from the digging of the World Trade Center. It is a 1 1/4 mile long strip on the eastern edge of Manhattan beginning at Battery Park. The project began in 1963 as a component of the World Trade Center. Originally designed as a meglo-maniacal, single-phase, Le Corbusier-type housing and commercial strip, the state could not afford to finance it. The land was sold to the Urban Development Corporation who chose to develop it in smaller parcels arranged along an extension of the existing city fabric. The lots were to be developed privately with the proceeds channeled into public amenities. The result is a yet uncompleted, vibrant community with parks, sculpture and a huge esplanade offering unparalleled views of the Maxwell House sign in New Jersey. (New Yorker 1990)
The final example is Bernard Tschumi's Parc de la Villette. Here we find Tschumi confronting four different design strategies: composition, complement, palimpsest or mediation. A composition subscribes to old architectural myths. A complement is limiting in its pragmatism. A palimpsest is inevitably figurative or representational and not compatible with complex programming. A mediation refers to an intermediary - an abstract system allowing varied programs. The latter strategy was chosen as it gave a structure within which to incorporate the various economic and ideological programs. The structure would exist "independent of use, without center or hierarchy, negating simplistic assumptions." (Tschumi 1987) The ensuing construction became an open-air cultural center, encouraging integrated programmatic policy related both to the city's needs and its limitations. It is a very large discontinuousbuilding. The evidence is a series of follies appearing at nodes on a structural grid.
We find here both a rejection and acceptance of the Olmsteadian ideal. Whereas the great pleasure gardens of the late 19th century created a non-city within the city, Tschumi has deconstructed the city to form an anti-city. Neither of which are part of the built urban fabric. Conversely, the Olmsteadian ideal created a passive holding tank for any and all programs. Families and church groups flocked to the park for their weekend outings and socials, planning their own events and programming the park accordingly. Similarly, Tschumi's series of follies serve as structure for independent programs and accordingly, people will act within their own groups and interests.
CONCLUSION
As the definition of society has expanded, so to have the demands upon public parks. No longer can they serve to instruct and incorporate the masses into a homogeneous body. Neither can they program one ideal into the minds of many. The forces of inclusion naturally belie an exclusionary policy where minorities and rebels must be rejected. In the end, we are left with acceptance. In Battery Park City there is no one design but a series of developments producing an eclectic yet well maintained and financed park. At La Villette, there is one design which invites multiple programming. Perhaps we must accept that no one group controls the world and to imagine otherwise is foolish. It is though the nature that Chermayeff considered, is to be truly wild as the wilderness it emulates.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Boyer, Paul S. 1978. Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820-1920.
Cranz, Galen. 1982. The Politics of Park Design.
Cutler, Phoebe. 1985. The Public Landscape of the New Deal.
Long, Norton E. 1972. The Unwalled City: Reconstituting the Urban Community.
"The Skyline of Battery Park City", New Yorker, 20 August 1990.
Schuyler, David. 1986. The New Urban Landscape.
Tschumi, Bernard. 1987. Bernard Tschumi, Cinégramme Folie : Le Parc De a Villette.
White, Morton, and Lucia White. 1962. The Intellectual Versus the City: From Thomas Jefferson to Frank Lloyd Wright.