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Frederick Law Olmsted FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED 1822 April 26, Friday: Frederick Law Olmsted was born, as the son of a comfortable drygoods merchant of Hartford, Connecticut. HDT WHAT? INDEX FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED 1825 What had once been a nice 5-acre pond, “The Collect,” about which New-Yorkers had congregated for summer pic-nics and winter ice-skating, had by this point become a slum, and the worst of our nation. It was being referred to as “Five Points” because it was near the complex intersection of Baxter, Park, and Worth. It was under the control of gangs denominated, in the public press, the “Dead Rabbits” and the “Plug Uglies,” the thugs of which could travel underneath the tenements by means of secret tunnels. The “Old Brewery” tenement, which slept more than 1,000 persons in its 95 rooms, would average a murder per night for the next 15 years. Commenting on the Scorsese movie “Gangs of New York”: “In my own research of New York history, through first-person accounts and newspaper reports, I have found that our past was often at least as violent and squalid, if not more so, than the movie depicts.” — Kevin Baker Charles Dickens, one of the notables who would go slumming there,1 would write: Let us go on again, and plunge into the Five Points.... Where dogs would howl ... men and women and boys slink off to sleep, forcing the dislodged rats to move away in quest of better lodgings.... All that is loathesome, drooping and decayed is here. John Whitehead, a New-York deliveryman, began selling off parcels of his farm higher up on Manhattan Island to black New-Yorkers. A trustee of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church who was earning his living as a common laborer, Epiphany Davis, either on his own initiative or for his church, purchased twelve of the lots in what would come to be known as “Seneca Village” for $578. A 25-year-old “shoe shine boy” named Andrew Williams purchased three lots for $125.00 and by 1832 his little farm would have been subdivided into more than 24 land parcels owned by black citizens. Due primarily to segregation, of the 100 black voters in New-York in 1845, 1 in 10 would live in Seneca Village, and of the 71 black property owners in New- York as of 1850, 1 in 5 would own their property there. The first stage in ethnic cleansing would therefore seem to be the segregation of the ethnics who are later to be cleansed. The second state of this ethnic- 1. Other notables who would go slumming there would include a Russian grand duke, Davy Crockett, Richard Henry Dana, Jr., and Abraham Lincoln. HDT WHAT? INDEX FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED cleansing effort would be that this is the area which would be targeted for demolition by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux in 1857 when they set out to create a “surpassingly beautiful pleasure grounds [for the] refreshment and recreation” of the real citizens of New-York. You can visit this Seneca Village area near the West 85th Street entrance to the present Central Park, where a spring now trickles picturesquely through picturesque rolling hills covered with picturesque white oaks. In the course of creating these hills and this spring in 1871, and installing these trees, decomposed bodies would be dug up.2 Brillat-Savarin’s PHYSIOLOGY OF TASTE described “Edward,” a sumptuary monster he had encountered in 2. And, may one presume, discarded? —The record which remains does not state. According to Roy Rosenzweig’s and Elizabeth Blackmar’s THE PARK AND THE PEOPLE (NY: Henry Holt, 1994), no historical village of the Senecas ever has been situated anywhere near this site — so that is not going to provide us with an explanation for the name. HDT WHAT? INDEX FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED America during the mid-1790s on display in a tavern window on Broadway Avenue in New-York: Edward was at least six feet four in height, and as his fat had puffed him out in every direction, he was almost nine feet round the waist. His fingers were like those of the Roman emperor who used his wife s bracelets as rings; his arms and his thighs were tubular, and as thick as the waist of a man of ordinary stature, and he had feet like an elephant, covered with the thick fat of his legs. The weight of fat kept down his lower eyelids and made them gape; but what was hideous to behold were three round chins hanging on his breast, and more than a foot long, so that his face appeared to be the capital of a truncated column. Thus Edward passed his life, sitting at a window on the ground floor looking out on the street, drinking from time to time a glass of ale, of which a pitcher of huge capacity stood always near him. So extraordinary an appearance could scarcely fail to arrest the attention of the passers-by; but they had to take care not to stop too long, as Edward quickly put them to flight by saying to them in a sepulchral voice: “What are you staring at like wild cats? Go your way, you lazy bodies! Begone, you good-for- nothing dogs!” and other similar amenities. (MED. XXI) HDT WHAT? INDEX FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED 1845 In the segregation phase of ethnic cleansing, of the 100 black voters on Manhattan Island, 1 in 10 lived in the district known as Seneca Village which eventually would be seized by Frederick Law Olmsted in order to enact his grand Central Park as a “surpassingly beautiful pleasure grounds [for the] refreshment and recreation” of the real citizens of the area. Although during this year Olmsted put in a semester at Yale College, study turned out to be too much like work, and he therefore abandoned academia to operate as a gentleman farmer, first in Connecticut and then on Staten Island. For his pears he would win a silver spoon! At some point during this period of his life he would see fit to denounce American outhouses as offensive to refined sensitivities: “troublesome, unhealthy, indelicate, and ugly,” and would attempt a Gothic summer- house thingie featuring on the one side a view of his garden but on the other a two-hole or four-hole necessary. HDT WHAT? INDEX FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED 1849 Charles Kingsley, author of the manly adventure WESTWARD HO!, advised an audience at the University of Cambridge that degenerate races such as, for one instance, the North American Indian, were better dead than red: The truest benevolence is occasional severity. It is expedient that one man die for the people. One tribe exterminated, if need be, to save a whole continent. “Sacrifice of human life?” Prove that it is human life. Later, in a private letter, he would explain how Anglo-Saxons could spread virtue through extermination: Because Christ’s kingdom is a kingdom of peace; because the meek alone shall inherit the earth, therefore, you Malays and Dyaks of Sarawak, you are also enemies to peace ... you are beasts, all the more dangerous, because you have a semi-human cunning. Clearly, by “Westward Ho!” he did not mean “Ho-Ho-Ho, Merry Christmas!” Sometimes sanitation through ethnic cleansing was something that simply took care of itself, without the intermediation of any white man. Conveniently, a cholera epidemic was at this point filling the cemeteries of the colored Seneca Village district of upper Manhattan Island, which eventually Frederick Law Olmsted would be able to seize in order to enact his Central Park scheme for a “surpassingly beautiful pleasure grounds HDT WHAT? INDEX FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED [for the] refreshment and recreation” of the peaceful white citizens of the civilized city of New-York. Speaking of New-York, it was in this year that John Snow did his investigations at the Broad Street pump which led to his suggestion that cholera was spread by way of contamination of the public water supply.3 Snow had worked as an anesthetist with the stricken coal miners outside Newcastle-upon-Tyne during England’s 1st great epidemic of the cholera, in 1831-1832. His new theory would not be immediately accepted, as the forces of colonialist denial were very strong and the Indian Medical Service was engaged in the usual blaming of the victims, by alleging without evidence that cholera actually was afflicting only those who were anyway predisposed to such infections: The alleged predisposition was nothing visible or evident: like the elephant which supports the world, according to Hindoo mythology, it was merely invented to remove a difficulty. Eventually a simplistic story would be derived, which now requires neutralization. According to this simplistic story, it was the removal of the handle of the Broad Street pump that ended the outbreak of cholera, thus demonstrating the correctness of Dr. Snow’s theory on the mode of communication of cholera. However, the pump handle was not removed until September 8th, after the outbreak had largely waned, its peak having been on September 1st. Dr. Snow himself never made any allegation that the epidemic had waned because of the removal of the pump handle, nor does the raw data support such an inference. Dr. Snow’s actual suggestion as to what had caused the waning of the epidemic was that this had been brought about by a general public flight 3. Rosenberg, Charles E. THE CHOLERA YEARS: THE UNITED STATES IN 1832, 1849, AND 1866.
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