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Chapter 2 Urban Parks History and Social Context A s Michael Brill (1989), Sam Bass Warner (1993), and perhaps others have noted, the variety of park types has multiplied since parks first appeared in North America in the early nineteenth century. Many kinds of public spaces fall under the general rubric of “park.” The case studies in this volume are a sampling of urban park types: a landscape park, two recreational beach parks, and two historical parks. To situate these cases from New York and Philadelphia within a national context, this chapter provides a comparative review of the history of various park types in the United States. The first urban parks in the United States were relatively unimproved commons, places originally set aside for grazing cattle and training militias. New York’s original common is now the heavily gated City Hall Park. Boston Common is perhaps the best example of the type. Set aside only six years after the original settlement, Boston Common has maintained its 44 acres and something of the informal, unornamented character of a colonial common. Straight, paved paths lined with benches crisscross its territory in practical fashion , enabling people to cross over easily in their travels about town. Large trees shade the grass-covered ground with no shrubs, ornamental trees, flower beds, or other plant varieties to complicate the picture. The Common has several frankly recreational facilities: tennis courts, ball field, children’s playground, and seasonal skating/wading pond. Like many smaller city squares in New York and elsewhere, Boston Common is more an extension of urban space than a refuge from it. No perimeter plantings screen the surrounding cityscape from view. Rather, much of the character of the place comes from the visibility of adjacent structures from within the grounds. Boston Common was less parklike before the early nineteenth century. The 1820–1840 period brought a movement to create tree-lined paths for strolling by the fashionable citizens who lived nearby (Domosh 1998). The formal paths and tree-lined promenades date from this period, and the practice of grazing cattle was ended. Similar improvements were made at this time to the coarse open spaces of town commons and squares throughout New England, New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. Philadelphia’s original five squares were similarly devoid of landscaping until this time, when paths were laid and trees 20 R ETHINK ING UR BAN PAR K S planted. Today, Rittenhouse Square functions like Boston Common as a simply planted, central open space that complements the urban concentration that surrounds it. Full of people sitting and strolling, lying on the grass, playing ball, or listening to buskers and soapbox orators, these simple places are about as close as eastern North American cities come to the Latin American plaza. J. B. Jackson (1984) stresses the essentially political character of these urban plazas: in them one is revealed as a citizen. The Landscape Park Urban landscape parks, beginning with Central Park in New York, have quite different origins. Typically much larger than squares and commons, they were designed as refuges from the city according to an exacting aesthetic formula that simulated the idealized English and North American countryside. Prospect Park in Brooklyn, among the best examples of the type, encompassed 526 acres and incorporated pastures, woods, gathering places, and systems of surface waters , carriage drives, and footpaths. It was designed by the firm of Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, beginning in 1866, several years after their first and most famous design collaboration that produced Central Park. Unlike the older urban squares, Prospect Park kept the surrounding city out of view with a high, thickly planted earthen berm along its perimeter. Prospect Park was a product of the park movement that swept through North America during a 50-year period beginning in the 1840s. The movement had philosophical, theological, and nationalistic sources. The philosophical basis lay in romanticism and its belief that nature and natural scenery had the power to uplift and restore the human spirit. Romanticism arose in reaction to the effects of industrial capitalism evident already in the 1840s and 1850s—rapidly growing cities, tenement housing crowded with immigrants, factory life, epidemic disease, and smoke. Romanticism took many forms of expression, one of them being landscape gardening. The landscape gardener sought to arrange nature’s best qualities in prospects of quiet repose. The romantic sensibility in gardening called for a naturalistic imitation of nature, rejecting the once dominant baroque design idiom of straight lines in formal perspective. The...

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