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THE NEW YORKER: The Future of Public Parks

2022-05-07 Author:Alexandra Lange Source:THE NEW YORKER

Central Park is considered by some to be Frederick Law Olmsted’s crowning achievement. Photograph by Matthew Pillsbury


The landscape architect Sara Zewde met me at the corner of Malcolm X Boulevard and Central Park North, a busy intersection that overlooks both the Harlem Meer and a Dunkin’ Donuts, the park and the city. Her home and her office are nearby, but there’s a deeper meaning in this location for Zewde, who is one of a small number of Black women licensed in landscape architecture in the United States. Glancing at Central Park, which is considered the crowning achievement of Frederick Law Olmsted (and his collaborator Calvert Vaux), Zewde told me how Olmsted’s writing had been “formational” for Malcolm X during his time in prison, when the civil-rights leader was searching, as he later recounted, for texts that spoke “the truth about the black man’s role.” He found part of that truth in Olmsted’s account of his travels through the South before the Civil War, collected in “The Cotton Kingdom.” “Books like the one by Frederick Olmstead,” Malcolm X said, “opened my eyes to the horrors suffered when the slave was landed in the United States.”

 

In 2019, Zewde, a native of the South, embarked on a four-month-long project retracing Olmsted’s journey from D.C. to Louisiana. She regards Olmsted’s Southern travels and, indeed, his way with words, as a core yet understudied aspect of his career. “Obviously, Olmsted could not have seen the future and his influence on Malcolm X, but I reflect on this intersection a lot,” Zewde said. “Olmsted did talk about the value of Black people gathering,” she continued. “He didn’t foresee Harlem becoming the mecca that it is for the global Black diaspora, but here we are.”

 

On the occasion of Frederick Law Olmsted’s two-hundredth birthday, Zewde is part of a generation of landscape architects wrestling with his end-of-day shadow. Olmsted espoused abolitionist views, but his projects displaced Black and Native communities. He was a democrat who modelled America’s public parks on aristocratic estates, and a nature lover who moved mountains of dirt to reshape topography for aesthetic purposes. To the general public, he is a venerated name, most often recalled during strolls through his parks in New York City, Boston, Chicago, Hartford, and Montreal that bring the forest to the city and the city to the forest. Contemporary landscape architects invoke Olmsted to help convince planners and politicians that parks are worth the investment, but Olmsted’s style and his politics don’t necessarily address the needs of 2022. Landscape architects want to present themselves as the designers who are most able to combat climate change and reduce spatial inequalities, and, for those ideals, they are looking beyond Olmsted.

 

“He was wildly unsuccessful at everything except his writing and his landscape-architecture career, which came later in his life,” Billy Fleming, a professor in the Weitzman School of Design at Penn, told me. Olmsted was the child of an affluent Hartford merchant, and he tried farming and journalism before settling on construction and park planning. Popularizing the term “landscape architecture” (which Olmsted did) and transforming the discipline into a licensed Ivy League pursuit (as his son did) cut off its history and its practitioners from the millennia of expertise acquired by humans working on the land. Fleming prefers to teach a longer history of landscape architecture that includes Indigenous communities and the ways in which they continue to design the land, as well as radical groups like Britain’s Diggers, who used gardening as a way of taking back public space and building political power.

 

Kian Goh, an assistant professor of urban planning at U.C.L.A., said she uses Olmsted as an example of the lineage of urban parks—but one for which students swiftly see the limits. “Yes, you have idealistic ideas of full access, but, really, parks like Central Park and others have become centers of real-estate speculation in the city,” and the recent critiques of both the High Line and Little Island on Manhattan’s West Side bear this out. “This is where I find the most purchase among students,” Goh said: “the idea that green space has a history of exclusion, even though the original ideals might have been different. They don’t think that the ideas of folks like Olmsted stand the test of racial and social-justice critique now. How do we decolonize ideas for public parks?”

 


Parks like Little Island, in Manhattan, have raised questions about green-space design and inequality.Photograph by Gary Hershorn / Getty



The High Line, in Manhattan, has been critiqued for its role in real-estate speculation.Photograph by Spencer Platt / Getty


Kian Goh, an assistant professor of urban planning at U.C.L.A., said she uses Olmsted as an example of the lineage of urban parks—but one for which students swiftly see the limits. “Yes, you have idealistic ideas of full access, but, really, parks like Central Park and others have become centers of real-estate speculation in the city,” and the recent critiques of both the High Line and Little Island on Manhattan’s West Side bear this out. “This is where I find the most purchase among students,” Goh said: “the idea that green space has a history of exclusion, even though the original ideals might have been different. They don’t think that the ideas of folks like Olmsted stand the test of racial and social-justice critique now. How do we decolonize ideas for public parks?”

 

The Emerald Necklace Conservancy, which has a robust schedule of two-hundredth-birthday plans, has made community the centerpiece of its programming. In the run-up to this year, staff members and consultants have held meetings in the neighborhoods surrounding the park, compensated community members for their time (rather than just the “professionals” at the front of the room) and emphasized the idea, articulated by Olmsted in an 1870 speech, that “it does men good to come together in this way in pure air and under the light of heaven” in parks, and that such gathering “must have an influence directly counteractive to that of the ordinary hard, hustling working hours of town life.” In 2022, some of this work is very mundane: How easy is it to get a permit for a party? Hire a food truck? Access a bathroom?

 

Focussing on the communities around parks is another way to decenter Olmsted: even in places where he originally designed the park, he hasn’t been the one maintaining it for the past hundred and twenty-plus years. “The history of these places didn’t start and stop with this man,” Gina Ford, who worked on a master plan for Hartford parks, including Keney Park, which Olmsted’s successors designed in his native city, told me. “These places that were designed by him have oftentimes been at risk and have been saved by and reclaimed by communities of color.” At Keney Park, the carriageway conceived by Olmsted’s firm for open-air clip-clopping is now a popular spot for another kind of public display. “The carriage drive is where people bring their cars and open up the doors and play really loud music,” Ford said. “The best landscapes adapt and evolve.”



 The Emerald Necklace, in Boston, is a more sprawling Olmsted project than the bounded parks he designed in New York City.Photograph by David L. Ryan / The Boston Globe / Getty



The Emerald Necklace connects a chain of parks of every personality.Photograph by Marcus Baker / Alamy 


Back at the Harlem Meer with Zewde, I asked her if she uses Olmsted in her professional practice. She thought for a minute and then brought up a current project to design a one-and-a-half-acre park on the site of the Kingsboro Psychiatric Center campus in Brooklyn. The assumption was that the street grid would go through the site and cut it up into lots of little programmed bits. Olmsted and Vaux, famously, insisted on sinking the transverse roads through Central Park, and asserted the importance of passive recreation—of strolling as a civilizing influence. “You go to parks in the hood and it is basketball courts every square inch,” she says. “Implicit and explicit is a sense of control. People don’t have a place to just be, to just hang out—that is something that there is a dearth of and it is something that we are fighting for in a lot of our projects.”

 

Despite her intellectual closeness to Olmsted, and her belief in the ongoing importance of passive recreation, when she’s looking for an example of a park that allows people to just be, her model is Walter Hood and his 1999 redesign of Lafayette Square in Oakland. “The tradition of squares also comes from Europe, usually centered on some sort of axis or monument or destination. Walter instead designs for people in the middle. He studied the social patterns of the park before his design: that’s where they hung out before, that’s where they hang out now.” Coming out of the pandemic, when urban spaces of all descriptions have proved their worth yet again, Zewde weighs the understanding of the park as “a place you can engage with people outside of ownership of each other, or outside of labor and capital” with the labor required to maintain an Olmsted landscape. As we stroll, Lasker Rink, on the west side of the Meer, is fenced off and under construction as part of a project to make the location more accessible and more responsive to twenty-first-century recreation needs. It doesn’t pay to be too precious with your heroes: the landscapes of the future can acknowledge the beauty of Olmsted’s vision while also celebrating the work that it takes to keep a city, and its citizens, healthy in 2022.


Source:The Future of Public Parks | The New Yorker

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