Parks & Re-creation

   We all need a getaway now and then, an escape to the "wide open spaces" and the outdoors with no walls or barriers; thus has continued the idea of office spaces with few if any cubicles, and homes with grand combined rooms and fewer defining walls.  For those without those additions, there are always the parks...not the large national parks (the National Park Service cautiously celebrated its 100th anniversary) but the smaller-scaled neighborhood parks, the ones parents take their children to or where young teens take a stroll and perhaps sneak in an innocent first kiss, and even those patches of green that somehow magically appear to have wedge themselves into a space between shadowy buildings.  Some of these are grand and generations old (such as Golden Gate Park in San Francisco) while others proudly display their smallness and newness with plasticized (and safety-oriented) playgrounds and manicured walkways or a simple set of benches.  So because such places seem to be almost everywhere, one would think that the building of such parks would be a rather simple project, after all they've been popping up for years; a few slides and sand lots here, a few bits of landscaped trees, some parking and voila, a park for everyone.  But if you happen to be watching the BBC's City in the Sky, you know that behind the scenes of anything there is a lot more involved to bring such an idea to fruition.

   There are many architects who have tackled such ventures, some readying areas for world fairs or replacing old military staging areas and statues with more public-friendly attractions such as fountains or ponds (this was the history of many such parks in Europe).  But for some such as Frederick Law Olmsted (designer of both Golden Gate Park and New York's Central Park, among others) what he faced was swamp lands and tight budgets that would strain his efforts to bury pipelines and roadways and to move or replace massive boulders.  A new book is out on Olmsted's writings and history, as well as those designing newcomers now in the news such as Thomas Woltz; and what they all seem to share is a grander vision of what hundreds of thousands can now enjoy, that escape into a private world --one buried among waterfalls and towering trees and a world sometimes deemed unnecessary or too costly by politicians-- is both necessary and healing; and for the courageous designers who have persisted with this belief, their tales are (for the most part) only now being revealed.

   In a piece in The Atlantic, author Nathaniel Rich wrote that early "...city dwellers in search of fresh air and rural pastures visited graveyards."  If that sounds ridiculous to you, it seemed the same to Olmsted who described the practice as a "miserably imperfect form...a wretched pretext."  But what to do about it?  These questions (said a review in The London Review of Books) came from someone who was often physically beaten by a teacher at school while a young boy, temporarily blinded by sumac poisoning, and later worked with laborers and described that as: Nine times out of ten, at least…I slept in a room with others, in a bed which stank, supplied with but one sheet, if with any; I washed with utensils common to the whole household; I found no garden, no flowers, no fruit, no tea, no cream, no sugar, no bread (for corn pone –let me assert in parenthesis, though possibly, as tastes differ, a very good thing of its kind for ostriches– is not bread…); no curtains, no lifting windows (three times out of four absolutely no windows), no couch –if one reclined in the family room, it was on the bare floor– for there were no carpets or mats.  For all that, the house swarmed with vermin.  During a visit to England, he happened to visit Birkenhead Park (the first park in England to be created using public funds and open to all; formerly only hunting preserves for the wealthy --such as Hyde Park-- were turned into parks and even then were available for use only to the upper class) and after admiring all of the landscaped paths and undulating hills added: ...we were threatened with a shower, and hastened back to look for shelter, which we found in a pagoda…It was soon filled…and I was glad to observe that the privileges of the garden were enjoyed about equally by all classes.  There were some who even were attended by servants, and sent at once for their carriages, but a large proportion were of the common ranks, and a few women with children, or suffering from ill health, were evidently the wives of very humble laborers…All this magnificent pleasure-ground is entirely, unreservedly, and forever the People’s own.  The poorest British peasant is as free to enjoy it in all its parts, as the British Queen...I was ready to admit that in democratic America, there was nothing to be thought of as comparable with this People’s Garden.  These experiences were all to fill his thoughts as he returned to New York and faced (as described by an 1844 editorial in an earlier review in The New York Review of Books) a:...politically corrupt city, where no official activity was free from favoritism and graft.  Under the so-called spoils system, the elected party had absolute control over public funds and distribution of municipal jobs, with abrupt shifts in allocations and appointments when power changed hands.  Hmm, it's sounding strangely familiar...

   The stories go on, fascinating all; in building Central Park facing over 800 acres of rocks and clay and swampy water, having to bury roadways so that the "flow" of movement wouldn't be interrupted, changing the angular lines of the city with "sinuous thoroughfares," and working to override the Biblical perception that wilderness connoted "dread, danger, bewilderment, chaos."  Monstrous tasks, but ones he would overcome with the help of fellow visionary Calvert Vaux.  Olmsted would go on to recommend that Yosemite Valley be given federal protection, design college campuses, even adding open air designs to asylums in his belief that: Women suffer more than men, and the agricultural class is more largely represented in our insane asylums than the professional, and for this, and for other reasons, it is these classes to which the opportunity for such recreation is the greatest blessing (in a sad twist, Olmsted would recognize his own oncoming of dementia and was placed in an asylum that he had earlier chosen, dying there five years later).  But perhaps Olmsted's greatest insight was described by the above review from author Martin Filler: During the 1840s, New York City was flooded by somewhere between a million and a million and a half immigrants, mainly Irish and German, who were largely unaccustomed to living in a dense, heterogeneous urban setting.  Olmsted grasped how a park like Birkenhead could serve New York as a vast outdoor classroom for mass acculturation, where uneducated newcomers would be on an equal footing with the established citizenry and observe modes of improving behavior --in dress, deportment, and leisure pursuits-- that they otherwise might not encounter. 

   Jump to the world of today, where the BBC show reveals how many of Olmsted's ideas are now used in airports, the serpentine S-lines creating a sense of movement, the different layers of moving speeds, the limited signage, and the hidden underground operation that helps it all to appear so natural.  In the recent park design in Boston, Thomas Woltz told Fast Company: As a society, we do a pretty good job of creating urban parks as destinations, but it’s important to see those destinations as connected to our daily lives via the streetscape, public transportation, the systems of storm-water management.  It’s about seeing [everything] as one giant complex system.  Massive cooling, rainwater storage, ecological research, a linked system of 14 acres of open space with the other 14 acres holding six skyscrapers, a hotel and a performing arts center...Frederick Law Olmsted redux, only this time the price tag is $25 billion.  One character in Annie Proulx' book Barkskins describes one forest as: ...the forest of the world.  It is infinite.  It twists around as a snake swallows its own tail and has no end and no beginning.  No one has ever seen its farthest dimension. 

    It was pointed out that all of Olmsted's "forests" and parks are man-made, just as that of designers such as Thomas Woltz.  Added author Rich in the magazine piece: We continue to place lawns and swimming pools in deserts, skyscrapers in swamps, and mansions on beaches.  In search of fuel, we decapitate mountains, turn forests into lumberyards, and break our promises to defend the sanctity of public land.  We reserve our most beautiful landscapes for the wealthiest, restricting the poor to overcrowded slums or depleted agricultural zones.  Unlike Olmsted, we tend to favor temporary effects at the expense of the future.  We have already become landscape architects but we have not used our powers as artfully as we might.  We have left too much to chance, too little to design.  We remain apprentices.  But Olmsted, the master of the form, has left behind a clear instruction manual.  From the grave he urges us to use our increasingly sophisticated tools to make our global landscape more beautiful—more “natural.”  

    It would appear that we can sometimes mimic a small bit of nature in her grandeur, to bring nature to places she might not have naturally appeared and that when we do so, to do it without gates or admission fees, or singling out visitors by age or race or color or belief, or segregating people by what one does or doesn't have or own, and by not blocking those who want to just rest in the sun or to run in the rain...we can learn a lot from nature, and from designers such as Frederick Law Olmstead.  These healing and necessary pieces of nature are called parks and the lesson is a simple one. Re-create ourselves...and bring that vision to others.