Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
with great success by his successor Frederick Law Olmsted, whose under-
takings in New York's Central Park set off a mania for park building
throughout the country. These expansive reservations contained hundreds
of acres of rolling lawns and carefully composed naturalistic plantings.While
they were still steeped in the ideology of romantic landscape appreciation,
the new generation of park advocates cast nature in a more intellectually
accessible and essentially therapeutic role as an anodyne to the forces of
industrialization and urbanization that were rapidly transforming American
society. Scientifically organized horticultural displays and the intricate,
highly stylized “gardenesque” planting arrangements favored by Downing
gave way to broad vistas and simpler, more naturalistic groupings of trees
and shrubs that were meant to offer soothing relaxation rather than taxing
mental stimulation.Though less obviously manipulated, the topography and
vegetation of these urban and suburban parks were meticulously trans-
formed to present an idealized version of the pastoral scenery and wood-
lands that was increasingly beyond reach for most urban Americans.
According to Olmsted, parks developed in this vein would act “in a directly
remedial way to enable men to better resist the harmful influences of town
life and to recover what they lose from them.”
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As urban development began to spread into the rolling hills beyond the
boundary of the original L'Enfant plan, park advocates insisted that some-
thing had to be done to provide Washington with the sort of extensive
naturalistic playground that had come to be regarded as an essential
component of the metropolitan landscape.A consensus emerged by the end
of the Civil War that the largely undeveloped Rock Creek Valley afforded
the most advantageous location, though lengthy debate ensued over the
extent and boundaries of the proposed park and the question of who
should bear the responsibility of paying for its acquisition and development.
Advocates for the proposed Rock Creek park combined the flowery rhet-
oric of romantic landscape appreciation with democratic idealism and
Olmsted's concerns for the psychic needs of an increasingly congested
urban population. In 1866, Army Corps of Engineers Major Nathaniel
Michler asserted that the desirability of turning the upper reaches of Rock
Creek into a park was so self-evident that the basic merits of the proposal
scarcely needed to be addressed. Summarizing prevailing beliefs in the
moral, therapeutic, and democratic virtues of park development, Michler
advised that the proposed reservation would afford opportunities for “all
classes of society” to engage in “healthful recreation and exercise” while
