Oz Volume 5 Article 11 1-1-1983 New Lessons from an Old Park Gerald Allen William Hubbard Follow this and additional works at: https://newprairiepress.org/oz This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License. Recommended Citation Allen, Gerald and Hubbard, William (1983) "New Lessons from an Old Park," Oz: Vol. 5. https://doi.org/ 10.4148/2378-5853.1064 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by New Prairie Press. It has been accepted for inclusion in Oz by an authorized administrator of New Prairie Press. For more information, please contact [email protected]. New Lessons from an Old Park Gerald Allen William Hubbard Recent restoration projects in The first thing is not about design, This fact continues to suggest its apparent casualness, a picture New York's Central Park have but is a lesson about a way of something else. In spite of much of what ideal nature might be. produced a series of notable perceiving the world, a way that vocal opinion to the contrary, designs carried out under the contrasts sharply with the logical, there may in the end be no true Central Park's other ancestor is of leadership of the Parks Depart­ deductive methods to which we distinction between " traditional" a social character, and it involves ment and Central Park Ad­ have become accustomed. All of designing and "modern" design­ what was known in mid­ ministrator Elizabeth Barlow. In us-architects as well as people ing, and that indeed there is only nineteenth century America as this work, architects have sensed who hire architects- have done designing itself. To invent the Parks Movement. This was the original spirit of the park' s rationalized, hard-nosed, bottom­ something new, to reconstruct based on an attitude that was fun­ design and resuscitated it for us line thinking for so long that we something old, or to wrap damentally anti-urban in senti­ all to experience. Carefu I seem somehow to have lost the something new around something ment, and it held that cities were reconstructions of the Dairy and knack, the attunement, for think­ old -all can be thought of as be­ unhealthy and unnatural places the Belvedere Castle by James ing in any other way. To us, Cen­ ing, in essence, the same act for people to I ive. In order to be Lamantia and the firm of Russo tral Park can come as a revela­ because they all are after the survivable, cities had to have and Sonder, respectively, are two tion, reawakening in us our ability same result. They give people the large, open-air parks as an an­ examples; another is the propos­ to be inductive, to fashion im­ means to fashion coherent con­ tidote to the stresses of urban ed restoration of the Bethesda aginative, speculative connec­ nections between this piece of life. Central Park became one of Terrace by the Ehrenkrantz tions not just from scenes in the the world they see and other these places, the " lungs of New Group. park, but indeed from all the pieces they might remember from York," as the novelist Henry scenes we may encounter in our the past, or encounter in the James once called it. Several designers, however, have daily lives. future. In turn, this process is been faced with the difficult analogous to, and in truth a pro­ Olmsted and Vaux were well challenge of making objects that A second thing we have learned is foundly important part of, the versed both in the tradition of are altogether new to the park, about design, a general concep­ fundamental human quest to find English picturesque landscape ar­ but which might still work the tion we believe to be valid for all intelligible patterns and meaning chitecture and the ideology of same kinds of magic on us as design. To design, we learned, is in experience. the Parks Movement. Both things, those by the park's original to choose from what exists-from after all, have very deep roots in designers, Frederick Law Olmsted what may exist physically on a Anglo-American culture, which and Calvert Vaux. One example is site, or from what exists only in Central Park and the Imaginative has for centuries shown a distinc­ Richard Oliver's whimsical and our memories and our imagina­ Mode of Thinking tive, profound, and sometimes altogether charming furniture tions-and to endow those schizophrenic suspicion of cities, recently installed in the Dairy. chosen things with the power to Central Park consists of 840 acres and indeed of the idea of urbani­ Two other examples, the Cherry set people's minds forth on the in the middle of Manhattan ty itself. Hill Concourse and the new Cen­ paths of wonder and reflection. Island and was designed in 1858. tral Park lamps, were done by our Olmsted and Vaux sensed this. If The design has two major Central Park is a living manifesta­ office, and here too the vision of having a tree in a certain place ancestors. The first is English pic­ tion ·of that characteristically Olmsted and Vaux guided the would stimulate the imagination, turesque landscape design, Anglo-American mistrust. On the work. We feel that we have pro­ then leaving an old tree in that which, in contrast to the most obvious level, it provides fited a great deal by laboring place would be precisely the geometric, formal arrangement the physical space for New under the imagined stare of those same design act as planting a new of Italian, French, and other Euro­ Yorkers to go to for recreation two eminent Victorians, and we one . The first is not pean gardens, attempted to and relaxation. On a much deeper would like to share some of the " preservation" and the second create a semblance of unspoiled level, it provides a setting to specific things we think we have " invention." They are both, nature itself-edited and stimulate the imagination. For 48 learned. equally, design. perfected, to be sure-but still in Olmsted and Vaux, a day in Cen- tral Park would not just renew our live in. We can do it on our own bodies, it would give us new eyes. at any time. They noted that we look at a broad stretch of slightly That is why Central Park is today undulating meadow without more crucial to the I ife of the city defined edge... , the imagina­ than ever before. There it is still tion, looking into the soft possible to experience the reflec­ conmingling lights and tive, affectionate thinking that shadows and fading tints of Olmstead and Vaux intended for color of the background, us. What remains unfulfilled, would have encouragement though, is the rest of their vi­ to extend those purely sion- and of ours: the vision that rural conditions indefinitely. we can turn that speculative No one... could be certain thinking upon everything we that at a short distance back build and read out of it an attach­ there are not glades or ment and affection for the places streams, or that a more open we ordinarily inhabit. We have disposition of trees does not lately been designing places not prevail. like that, and we need to learn anew how to do so. A landscape like this invites us to ponder, to imagine, to fabricate possibilities for what we see. It in­ Cherry Hill Concourse vites us not to resolution, to par­ ing down all the possibilities and 1. Central Park, south end. Cherry Hill is The Cherry Hill Concourse is part deciding what a thing must be. shaded in gray. Drawing: Gerald Allen restoration and part new design. Rather, landscape invites us to do & Associates. The original concourse, com­ just the opposite, to entertain all pleted about 1865 under the the possibilities of what a thing direction of Olmsted and Vaux, might be. done. To speculate was a real not merely the absence of the ci­ overlooked the newly created human need, without which a per­ ty, a piece of ground freed of lake. At its center was a stone Olmsted and Vaux knew that as son would be altogether in­ buildings and hustle and bustle. It fountain with polychromatic human beings, our spirits have complete, even uncivilized in the is a presence of scenes-each tiles, topped by a bronze finial those two complementary full sense of that word. shaped just as consciously as any with bird baths and gas lamps. In tendencies, the urge to winnow building-to give back to people recent decades, the finial had down and the desire to speculate. But they knew that life in a city that imaginative, speculative disappeared, the fountain had They saw this as the natural can be inimical to such thinking mode of thinking that city life fallen apart, and the concourse human condition, inevitable, and (we can't sit and wonder about suppresses . If this lesson of Cen­ had been paved in asphalt and also desirable. And they did not the things a green light might tral Park " takes" on us, we can turned into a parking lot. consider speculation the junior mean), and so they made Central carry it away from the park, partner of the pair, a merely Park a repository of suggestive realizing that we do not need a Our work at Cherry Hill began pleasurable respite from the landscape scenes that would backdrop of nature to make us with the restoration of the foun­ workaday, purposive mode of systematically and conscientious­ notice, know, and feel the tain, originally erected so that thought that actually gets things ly invite speculation.