director Peter Minuit made his famous bargain purchase ofManhattan Island from the Native Americans who hunted,fished, and traded there. As Adriana Van Zwieten points out inher 2001 doctoral dissertation “A Little Land to Sow Some Seeds”:Real Property, Custom, and Law in the Community of NewAmsterdam, Minuit’s purchase signaled policies entirely foreignto the sellers but important to the settlers and their descendantsdown to the present: namely, the recognition of property rightsand the transfer of landownership according to commercialtransaction. Ever since, Lower Manhattan’s real estate has gener-ated a number of private fortunes.

The seventeenth-century character of the mother city ofAmsterdam as a multiethnicbourgeois capital of great rich-es gained from seafaring trade continued on page 3

Garden History

and Landscape Studies

at the Bard Graduate Center

Volume ıı | Number ıı | Spring/Summer 2005

The Changing Landscape of Lower Manhattan

Dutch settlers and their masters, the owners of the WestIndia Company, which had in 1621 been granted acharter from the States General of the Republic of theUnited Provinces to claim for their expansive com-mercial empire the northeastern Atlantic seaboard

between the Fresh (Connecticut) River and the South (Delaware)River, could not in their most ambitious dreams have imaginedthe landscape of Lower Manhattan today nor the technology thatcreated it. But commerce, the economic engine that has definedit all these years, they well understood. With its ample bay at theconfluence of two navigable rivers, a more fortunate site for afuture port metropolis could not have been chosen.

In 1626, after a committee of the West India Company hadassessed the potential of two other locations, the New Amsterdam

The word landscapeis commonly usedin reference towilderness, ruralscenery, or social

and domestic spaces such asparks and gardens – plant-dominated places for themost part. We often forgetthat great technologically dri-ven cities are just as much apart of nature as any otherlandscape. The complexity oftheir contents and the rela-tionship of their parts to oneanother are what make themso interesting to historians,especially those who seek totrace the ways in which thephysical city both resists andembraces change throughtime.

The first-year surveycourse for Garden Historyand Landscape Studies stu-dents at the Bard GraduateCenter deals with urban andregional planning as forms oflandscape design. It examines

the ways in which cities andtheir environs are being con-tinually transformed bysocial, economic, and culturalforces. This past fall, somerecently designed parks inLower Manhattan served asopportunities for field studyin Professor Erik de Jong’s“Reading the Landscape” continued on page 2

Letter from the Editor

Left: Niew Amsterdam of Nue

Nieuw lorx opt ’T Eylant Man[hat-

tan] (New Amsterdam, now New

York off the Island of Manhattan).

Below: The same view today.

1

2

class. This part of New Yorkis a particularly fertile area for such attention as more build-ing and rebuilding of publicspaces are happening herenow than in many years.

Since the tragedy ofSeptember 11, 2001, thereconfiguration of LowerManhattan has been muchdiscussed in the press, pro-moting an unprecedented butwelcomed interest in architec-ture and urban planning.Unfortunately, that interesthas centered almost exclu-sively on the sixteen acres ofGround Zero. In this issue of Viewpoints we wish to widenthe lens of landscape vision toinclude everything from CityHall to the Battery and fromthe East River to the HudsonRiver and the New YorkHarbor, which is the reasonfor the city’s being locatedhere in the first place.

From its Dutch colonialinception, Lower Manhattanhas been inscribed with morehuman dreams and drivethan perhaps any other land-scape in the world. Its naturalsite is incomparable. Itsrapid, dynamic, and continualmetamorphosis is unparal-leled. Today the rebirth ofNew York City’s birthplace isbeing nurtured by many peo-ple who are far less celebratedyet ultimately more importantperhaps than the competitorsfor the highly publicizeddesign commissions atGround Zero. Theirs is thestory we wish to tell here.

Calendar

Exhibits

February 2 – March 15Twenty-fifth Anniversary of the Central Park Conser-vancy “Central ParkConservancy: CelebratingCentral Park’s 25-YearTransformation.”

The exhibit celebrates theachievement of Central Park’srestoration by the Conser-vancy from 1980 to 2005with seventy images of park-wide projects. These includebefore-and-after photographsof the park’s meadows, water bodies, gardens, play-grounds, woodlands, build-ings, bridges, statues andrustic details. The exhibit fea-tures park furniture, utilities,and sculpture restorations.

Location: Urban CenterGallery, Municipal ArtSociety, 457 Madison Ave.

response to contemporaryexistential problems, howtheir owners and visitors haveresponded to these gardens,and how garden artists/designers are continuing tocreatively confront emergingcultural or social issues withthe invention of new gardentypes. Most presentations willbe centered on a single artist.On the day prior to the open-ing of the symposium,Dumbarton Oaks and theUnited States Botanic Gardenwill host an event at theNational Arboretum at whichparticipants will meet someof the garden creators whowill not be giving presenta-tions during the symposium.A picnic on the Arboretumgrounds will follow.

For further informationand registration visitwww.landscape@doaks.org.or contact: Garden & Landscape Studies1703 32nd Street NWWashington, DC 20007(202) 339-6460

tural, stylistic, and functionalvariations. It will also recordthe history of botany, horticul-ture, and plant collecting asglobal travel, trade, and explo-ration grew rapidly.

Location: New York BotanicalGarden: LuEsther T. MertzLibrary, William D. Rondinaand Giovanni Foroni LoFaroGallery. (Gallery openTuesday through Sundayfrom 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.)

Conferences

April 6 – 10, 2005 Annual Meeting of theSociety of ArchitecturalHistorians

One of the many themesof the meeting in Vancouverwill be the architecture,urbanism, and landscapes ofthe city. Study tours willexamine landscape and gar-den traditions in a coastal/mountain setting. Partic-ipants will be able to visit thegardens of Cornelia HahnOberlander in Vancouver andthe Butchart Gardens in

Victoria. Two scholarly papersessions will be devoted tonew research in landscapehistory. The ten topics includ-ed will range from “IslamicGardens in India” to“Eighteenth-Century EnglishGardens” and from “TheSocial Agenda of WomenLandscape Architects” to“The Tennessee Valley andthe Rhetoric of Planning.” Inaddition, a meeting of thenewly reconstituted Land-scape Chapter of the Societyof Architectural Historianschaired by Marc Treib willprovide an opportunity forlandscape and garden histori-ans to meet one another.

For an informationalbrochure and registrationmaterials, please visit theSAH website at www.sah.org.If you would like to receive acopy of the meeting brochureby mail, please call the SAHoffice at (312)573-1365 oremail SAH at info@sah.org.

Location: Fairmont Hotel,Vancouver

May 4 – 7, 2005Dumbarton Oaks and theUnited States BotanicGarden Present: Existenceand Experience inContemporary GardenDesign

A three-day symposiumexploring how contemporarygardens have been created in

May 13 – August 14, 2005Glasshouses: TheArchitecture of Light and Air An exhibition of more thanthree centuries of evolvingarchitecture, social class andstyle, horticulture, and plantcollecting.

Curated by ThereseO’Malley, Ph.D., associatedean at the Center forAdvanced Study in the VisualArts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.,and current president of the Society of ArchitecturalHistorians, “Glasshouses:The Architecture of Light andAir,” will feature more thanthree centuries of glasshouseevolution and history. It willdisplay drawings, prints,paintings, photographs, andillustrated books, many fromthe extensive collections ofthe library itself, includingbotanical illustrations ofglasshouse plants such ascamellias, palms, ferns,pineapples, and oranges. Itwill cover the structural andtechnological history ofglasshouses, primarily inEurope, illustrating architec-

Forcing Garden, in Winter

Hand-colored aquatint

Humphrey Repton (1752-1818)

in Fragments on the Theory and

Practice of Landscape Gardening

London: Printed by T. Bensely

& Son for J. Taylor, 1816

3

on the library committee ofthe Horticultural Society ofNew York, and is the authorof Grounds for Pleasure: FourCenturies of the AmericanGarden (Harry N. Abrams,Inc., 2002).

Melanie Simo is a historian ofart and landscape who hasheld teaching positions at theHarvard Design School,Rhode Island School ofDesign, and Carnegie MellonUniversity. She is the authorof several books on landscapehistory, including Loudon &the Landscape: From CountrySeat to Metropolis, 1783-1843(Yale University Press, 1989),Invisible Gardens: Search forModernism in the AmericanLandscape (with Peter Walker.MIT Press, 1996), and Forest& Garden: Traces of Wildnessin a Modernizing Land, 1897-1949 (University of VirginiaPress, 2003). A companionvolume, Literature of Place:Dwelling on the Land BeforeEarth Day 1970, is in press.

Marc Treib is Professor ofArchitecture at the Universityof California, Berkeley. Hismost recent book is Noguchiin Paris: The Unesco Garden(William Stout Publishers,2003).

Contributors

Mac Keith Griswold, a jour-nalist and garden historian, isdirector of archival researchat the Sylvester ManorProject, Shelter Island, NY,where the papers date to theearliest European coloniza-tion of America. Griswold hastaught landscape and gardenhistory at Sarah LawrenceCollege, where she was recipi-ent of the Noble Chair in Artand Cultural History, and haslectured on gardens and land-scape as cultural history atthe School of EnvironmentalDesign, University ofGeorgia; The New YorkBotanical Garden; and theSchool of EnvironmentalDesign, University ofPennsylvania. The author ofthree books of garden history,she is currently at work on afourth, Rediscovering SylvesterManor, a Seventeenth-CenturySlave Plantation on LongIsland (Houghton MifflinCompany), which will be pub-lished in 2006.

Denise Otis is an indepen-dent writer and editor. Sheholds a B.A. in History andLiterature from RadcliffeCollege, and was for manyyears an editor at House &Garden magazine. She serves

New Amsterdam’s increasingly prosperous merchant elite toform institutions of self-government and to further institutional-ize the capitalization of land.

The view of New Amsterdam around 1650 in a watercolordrawing found in the Royal Archives in The Hague depicts theEast River waterfront as seen from Nut (now Governors) Island(see page 1). A tall crane dominates the foreground, and besideit we see what was probably a weighing beam (thought by someto represent a gallows). Within the walls of the fort stand theGovernor’s Mansion made of brick, the church built in stone,and a wooden barracks. At the far right is the tavern, which was

gave the infant colony – a hud-dle of thirty bark houses – acommercial purpose from thestart. Unlike its rival Britishcolonies of New England andVirginia, its cultural complex-ion was more urban than agri-culture-based. Initially, landownership in Nieuw Amsterdamwas vested in the company; however, freemen (those who paidtheir own seaboard passage or who had fulfilled the term oftheir company contracts) could claim and transfer by saleparcels of land that they had settled. Then, in 1653, in spite ofownership privileges asserted by the West India proprietors, thecity fathers in Amsterdam granted to the colonists a city charter,giving certain democratic powers to the colonists, which allowed

Redraft of the Castello Plan

(Afbeelding Van De Stadt

Amsterdam in Nieuw Neederlandt),

1908, after original pen-and-ink

watercolor drawing of 1665-70. Date

depicted: 1660.

4

converted into the State House (City Hall) after the promulga-tion of the 1653 Charter, the same year that the wall (now com-memorated in the alignment and name Wall Street) was built.

By 1660, the year depicted in the redraft from the I. N.Phelps Stokes collection of the Castello Plan (so named becausethe original, based on a drawing by an unknown artist of an ear-lier one by the surveyor Jacques Cortelyou, is preserved in thearchive of the Villa Castello in Florence), clearly urbanity wasascendant. In this remarkable view of New Amsterdam justprior to the British takeover, the harbor is filled with merchantvessels and local trading craft. The town has grown to a popula-tion of 2,500, and the recently enfranchised colonists have madenumerous public improvements, notably the digging of a canalfor transporting goods into the heart of the settlement (themodel for transport by canal was derived from old Amsterdam)and the construction of a bulkhead and docks on the waterfront.The canal lies in the middle of Broad Street and has a narrowperpendicular subsidiary arm running down Beaver Street.Lively traffic passes by the fifty-one houses facing Heere Strraet(our Broadway), and a handsome new city hall has replaced thetemporary one housed in the former tavern. What strikes theviewer most, however, is the apparent greenness of the city.House lots all have gardens – mostly vegetable but several orna-mental ones as well. Trees are planted along property lines, andon larger tracts of land there are orchards.

Fast-forward to today, 340 years after the Castello Plan wasdrawn. Lodged in the canyons of Lower Manhattan is a scatter-ing of tiny triangles created where the awkward juncture of oldpregrid-plan Manhattan streets left parcels of land too small fordevelopers to build on. Designed to serve as small parks, theseare the only remaining fragments of Lower Manhattan’s oldgreen townscape. Along with infilling the old slips, previousgenerations of New York City developers swelled the girth ofLower Manhattan by adding landfill for additional streets. Later,engineers added more landfill for Manhattan’s twentieth-centuryshoreline-hugging highways. Now, with the relocation of thecity’s port activities to Staten Island and New Jersey, this water-front is being transformed into a chain of parks.

Battery Park City’s handsome public art-studded, 1.2-mile-long waterfront promenade was begun in the 1980s in conjunc-tion with the World Financial Center and a cluster of newresidential apartments built on landfill created by spoil excavatedfor the footings of the nearby World Trade Center. It is nowjoined on the north by 550-acre Hudson River Park, whose 150-acre land-and-pier deck is a landscape in progress, and on thesouth by historic 23-acre Battery Park. There, the BatteryConservancy led by urban visionary Warrie Price is exchangingseedy decrepitude for landscape beauty with the installation of

Saratoga Associates’ $8.5 mil-lion, 8.75-acre Bosque. It willcontain planting beds by thenoted Dutch garden designerPiet Oudolf, who also isresponsible for the linear plant-ing beds that line the Conservancy’s graceful redesign of theHarbor Promenade. Partially funded is a new $60 million exhi-bition and performing space that will occupy a restored and deli-cately expanded Castle Clinton, one of the city’s most historicstructures (it has sequentially served as fort, concert hall, immi-gration center, aquarium, and National Park Services visitor cen-ter for tourists bound for Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty).

Price’s dream is for the city to enlarge the park by acquiringthe land to the east, now occupied by U.S. Coast Guard (with theevacuation of the Coast Guard station from nearby GovernorsIsland, its onshore administrative building has lost its principalreason for being in this location). This would be the first steptoward creating a continuous pedestrian linkage via Battery Parkbetween the East River shoreline and the series of promenadesnow edging the Hudson.

Along the East River there are more structural impedimentsto waterfront regreening than along the Hudson. In addition,the roadbed of the FDR Drive crowds the water’s edge. Buturban designers are coming up with imaginative ideas for cir-cumnavigating the choke-point at the Battery Marine Terminalin order to carry a proposed stretch of waterfront parkland to theSouth Street Seaport and then further north to East River Park,

which extends along the Lower East Side and East Village up to14th Street.

The renewal of thirteen small, publicly owned parcels scat-tered across Lower Manhattan, including Bowling Green, the city’s first park, is being funded with a $25 million grantfrom the federal government to the Lower ManhattanDevelopment Corporation, which was created by the New YorkState Legislature in the wake of the attack of September 11,2001. Heeding Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s directive to accom-plish this work within a year, Commissioner Adrian Benepeshort-circuited the process whereby outside landscape architectsare selected to design city-funded projects. Instead, he hadDeputy Commissioner Amy Freitag assign several ParksDepartment staff landscape architects to complete designs inrecord time using materials that could be bid as a packagerather than individually for each park.

One of the newly created parks, Drumgoole Plaza, wasdesigned by Steven Whitesell, a landscape architect nowenrolled in the Bard Graduate Center’s program in GardenHistory and Landscape Studies. Previously, its remarkably inhos-pitable site, a strip of no-man’s-land overshadowed by the giantsteel supports for the approach ramp to the Brooklyn Bridge,was used for parking. Now, hardy, vigorous-growing, shade-toler-ant plants with light-colored foliage – golden black locust(Robinia pseudoacacia ‘Frisia’), gold-variegated Japanese angelica(Aralia elata ‘Aureovariegata’), golden barberry (Berberis thungergii‘Gold Nugget’), and other yellow-leaved shrubs and grasses – mitigate the gloom of its almost sunless location. With benchesand a curvilinear swath of simulated brick-asphalt paving run-ning down its center, Drumgoole Plaza has begun to attract visi-tors and no longer seems forbiddingly derelict.

Nearby, at Hanover Square, another of the small triangularparcels that punctuate the Lower Manhattan streetscape, theBritish Memorial Trust has begun construction of a $3.5 milliongarden honoring the sixty-seven victims who perished in the World Trade Center disaster. Its design is the result of aninvitational competition won by the British landscape architectsJulian and Isabel Bannerman, who are perhaps best known fortheir work for Prince Charles and other members of the royalfamily. A jury of public art experts, including Therese O’Malley,landscape historian and current president of the Society ofArchitectural Historians, selected the artist Anish Kapoor to create the twenty-foot-high black granite sculpture to honor theunity of the United States and the United Kingdom, which willreplace the over-life-size bronze statue of Abraham De Peyster, a Dutch colonial merchant and prominent city official (the DePeyster statue is being moved to City Hall Park). Kapoor’s sobermonument of polished stone will stand in bold contrast to the

Warrie Price, the president of the

Battery Park Conservancy beside

one of the Harbor Promenade

planting beds by Dutch plantsman

and garden designer Piet Oudolf.

5

Bannermans’ English Country House-style landscape composedof a sinuous water rill flanked by topiary, curving benches, boxwood hedges, and paving stones from Caithness, Scotland,into which the sculptor Simon Verity has engraved the names of the sixty-seven victims.

There are other Lower Manhattan projects by prominentlandscape architects that recently have opened or are on thedrawing boards. At the northern end of Battery Park City, setwithin a frame of new residential buildings is Michael VanValkenburgh’s 1.8-acre Teardrop Park, so named because of itsshape. In contrast to the ornamental, stately home approachadopted by the designers of Hanover Square, Van Valkenburghhas sought to create a rus in urbe, an evocation of the wildHudson River scenery to the north. Inspired perhaps byFrederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux’s design of CentralPark, he has created a rolling topography with a meadowlikelawn and a miniature woodland stream similar to the one in theRamble. An architectural doorway at the base of a sloping “cliff”of quarried blocks of Hudson Valley alcove bluestone set toresemble the uptilted strata of some geologic formation allowsthe visitor to pass from one area into the next with a sensationof surprise since here the steeply graded topography with itsprotruding rocky ledge into which the door is intriguingly cut

conceals from one another the rolling lawn for picnicking and the sandy “beach” for children’s play.

At the confluence of West Broadway and Greenwich Street, landscape architect Ken Smith was commissioned by developer Larry Silverstein to create a plaza at 7 World Trade Plaza, one of the tiny triangular parcels dotting LowerManhattan. Scheduled to open in 2006, the plaza will contain a large bench-surrounded, multijet, circular fountain, geometric-ally aligned beds containing azaleas in the spring and boxwoodin the winter, and attractive bollards (a standard security featurethese days for almost all new Lower Manhattan architecture)adjacent to Silverstein’s rebuilt office tower. On the opposite side of downtown, at 55 Water Street, is another new plazadesigned by Smith. In contrast to Van Valkenburgh’s plant-rich, nature-evoking aesthetic, both of these small spaces bearSmith’s stamp of minimalist elegance.

It goes without saying that no other new landscape in thecountry has drawn more recent public interest than the site ofthe World Trade Center. Ground Zero will have at its heart thememorial to the victims of the September 11 inferno: architectMichael Arad’s austere and emphatically subterranean proposalReflecting Absence, the winning entry in the independently jurieddesign competition sponsored by the Lower Manhattan Develop-

ment Corporation. Lessbanally sentimental thansome of the other entries, it honors the buildings’ foot-prints with a pair of reflectivepools submerged thirty feetbelow street grade. The jurysubsequently mandated col-laboration with Peter Walker,the landscape architect whosedesign aesthetic probably cor-responds better to Arad’sminimalist approach thanthat of any other. As RobertYaro, the president of theRegional Plan Associationand leader of the CivicAlliance, the coalition of citizen advocates that spear-headed the revisioning of thefuture of the site after thefirst disappointing architec-tural scheme was scotched,puts it, “While public

response to the selected memorial design can best be describedas lukewarm, it satisfies some parties’ hope of reconnecting thememorial site with the surrounding neighborhood by creatingan at-grade plaza.”

Even before September 11, Lower Manhattan was a landscapewhere the precincts of death laid claim to valuable real estate,thus creating open spaces where otherwise there would be none.The city’s earliest remaining cemeteries are here at TrinityChurch and Saint Paul’s Chapel. The eighteenth-century AfricanBurial Ground, discovered in 1991 in the course of diggingfoundations for a new federal building, quickly became a sacredsite for many African-Americans and a cause for historic preser-vationists. Battery Park has been a magnet for memorials to warheroes and others who lost their lives in defense of their countryas well as to the emigrants who came through Castle Clinton tofind freedom and opportunity in America. A few blocks to thenorth is the Vietnam Veterans Memorial honoring the 250,000men and women of New York City who served in the armedforces from 1964 to 1975, especially the 1,741 who died in theVietnam War. Its architecture – a wall of translucent glass blocks – lacks the emotional impact of Maya Lin’s muchadmired Vietnam Memorial on the Mall in Washington, D.C.,but its moving inscriptions of excerpts from servicemen’sdiaries, poems, and letters give it poignant immediacy. Its loca-tion in Jeannette Park, built when Coenties Slip was filled in1835 and redesigned several times over the years, is now a three-quarter-acre plaza with views of Pier 6 and the East River. Its $7 million restoration in 2001 by the city and a coalition of othersponsors makes it an attractive setting for the memorial as wellas an important contribution to downtown serenity.

Although funded in the wake of catastrophe, with or withoutmemorials, the new parks of Lower Manhattan are more thanhealing gardens, a stricken city’s response to sudden violence.They are needed, lobbied for, and still inadequate to meet theneeds of the residential population now moving into renovatedcommercial buildings and newly built apartment towers inLower Manhattan. While the market for office space continuesto lag behind that for the rest of Manhattan, the housing marketis flourishing. Lower Manhattan below Chambers Street nowhas a residential population of 30,000 that is expected to grow to 50,000 by 2008. Tax incentives from the Liberty Bondprogram created by an act of Congress following September 11combined with an earlier program allowing a tax break to devel-opers for office-to-residential building conversion have sparkedthe construction of several new residential buildings and the

Teardrop Park, Michael Van

Valkenburgh & Associates, 2004.

rehabilitation of a number ofold office towers. At this time,there are 4,000 residentialunits in construction and anoth-

er 6,900 that are estimated to be built by 2008. New schools,stores, shops, and restaurants are opening to serve the currentand expected population growth.

Given the push ever since Dutch colonial times toward turning as much land as possible into marketable real estate,one is prompted to wonder whether there can in fact be aunified network of public and private landscape spaces connect-ed by pedestrian-friendly streets in Lower Manhattan. Thisdepends upon interagency cooperation, something that has been difficult always to achieve in New York City and nowheremore so than in Lower Manhattan where there are multiplejurisdictional claims. Nevertheless, the same kind of thinkingthat envisions the waterfront as an unbroken, continuous promenade is going on with regard to creating crosstown linkages, a strategy impelled by the perceived need to restricttraffic on Wall Street and keep other areas car-free as both anantiterrorist measure and as a means of making LowerManhattan a more inviting tourist destination.

The City Planning Commission and the Alliance forDowntown New York, the business improvement district thatextends from Murray Street to the Battery, are thinking aboutopportunities for connectivity, and this involves improving the streetscape and increasing pedestrian amenity. Thanks to an investment of $22 million by the Alliance that includes a

6

$4 million contribution by the Lower Manhattan DevelopmentCorporation, Broadway between City Hall Park and Battery Park – the spine of Lower Manhattan – has acquired a face-lift. Placing its faith in the ability of present-day designersto create new lines of street furniture more appropriate to thecontemporary cityscape of tall glass office buildings than themiscellaneous pseudohistoric and just plain ugly items that clutter the sidewalks today, eight years ago the Alliance commis-sioned and has now overseen the installation of new streetlightsand litter receptacles designed by the architectural firm ofCooper, Robertson and Partners.

Suzanne O’Keefe, the Alliance’s vice president for designwho has been in charge of this effort to use private BusinessImprovement District funding to spark innovation in the NewYork City Department of Transportation’s design vocabulary, alsoworked with the New York City Department of Sanitation toinstall a companion litter receptacle and to make these items of street furniture the standard municipal ones for LowerManhattan streets, as is now the case. At the same time, newenvironmental graphics developed by Pentagam have producedbetter-looking signs on Broadway as well as navigational cuesfor visitors wending their way through the tortuous side streetsin the area. O’Keefe has overseen the replacement of brokenconcrete curbs along Broadway with twelve-inch granite ones,and these are also now accepted as standard throughout LowerManhattan. At intervals of every ten to fifteen feet betweenBowling Green and Vesey Streetnext to City Hall Park, new light-gray concrete sidewalks havebeen inset with two hundredhorizontal bands of black graniteincised with the names of visiting kings, American presi-dents, military generals, sportschampions, aviators, and astro-nauts who once waved to cheer-ing crowds as ticker tape raineddown from brokerage-housewindows on the parades held intheir honor.

Paving provides perhaps themost subliminal yet powerfulvisual cue that makes a streetinviting to walk on. The conver-

sion of Stone Street from a forlorn, traffic-choked alley into ahistoric district for pedestrians according to a $1.8 millionstreetscape redesign by Beyer Blinder Belle and executed by theRBA Group and landscape architect Signe Nielsen has sparkedan array of new restaurants and sidewalk cafés with umbrella-shaded outdoor tables on the bluestone sidewalks and traffic-free roadbed of Deer Isle granite paving blocks. A Soho inminiature.

Just above Stone Street is the heart of the Financial District atthe intersection of Wall and Broad streets. As anyone who walksthere now knows, the area is under heavy police and militarysurveillance and is closed to through vehicular traffic except fortruck deliveries at certain specified times of day and taxis thathave been checked by security guards. It is now perforce apedestrian zone. Sealed off by ugly concrete barriers and planterboxes in which hardly anything can grow on the skyscraper-shadowed narrow streets, its appearance seems designed torepel rather than attract visitors. Here, in order to protect theNew York Stock Exchange and other important nearby build-ings, New York City Planning Commission staff members underthe direction of Manhattan Office Director Vishaan Chakrarbartiare working in conjunction with the New York City PoliceDepartment, the Department of Transportation, and the Alliancefor Downtown New York to install a series of artfully disguisedsecurity features that are also genuine pedestrian amenities.Drawing on $10 million of the funds made available through the

Pedestrian amenity, public art,

or safety feature? NOGOs prevent

vehicle entry on Wall Street.

Manhattan’s new green edge at

Battery Park City looking across the

Hudson River toward New Jersey.

federal government’s Community Development Block Grantprogram for the rebuilding of this part of the city in the wake ofSeptember 11, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporationcommissioned the architectural firm of Rogers Marvel to designsecurity-oriented street furniture. Prominent among these is alarge bronze-sheathed, cubelike structure made up of variouslyangled planes. When set in different ways depending on whichsurface is used as the base, these appear slightly dissimilar toone another. Called NOGOs, these stationary building guardsmight appear to be a constellation of sculptural forms constitut-ing a public art project. Or one may wish to think of them assidewalk seats put there as a consideration for passersby. Atleast, this is what the planning team hopes will be the case.

There will be new streetlighting at each of the sevenentrances to the stock exchange area. Broad Street across fromthe stock exchange has been repaved with a product called Euro-Cobble, preset-by-hand paving blocks of Italian granite thatcome in 20 x 20 square-inch forms. Claimed to be equal toasphalt as a roadbed surface, it will signal the street’s newpedestrian character. Newly designed barriers will preventthrough traffic, but they will be retractable so as to allow vehiclesto enter the area for specified purposes at certain times of day.

A second phase of the Financial District improvement project envisions the reintroduction of water as a latter-day echoof the canal that ran up the middle of Broad Street from the harbor. (The planners clearly consulted the Castello Plan for this inspiration.) If funded, the water will be fed from a series offountains into a channel that will replace the forbidding-lookingbarrier fence that now keeps sidewalk traffic away from thestock exchange.

Lower Manhattan will never be as green as it was when theCastello Plan was drawn in 1665, but it is becoming greenerthan it has been in more than a century. Under vastly differentcircumstances it is harking back to Dutch colonial times wheneveryone walked and businesses and residences were in closeproximity or under the same roof. Wounded but now recovering,this most compelling of landscapes in this most commercial of cities is seeking its future within the physical and economicframework of its historical past. It is a challenging task but onefilled with promise if it reveals Lower Manhattan’s extraordinarycombination of natural and man-made qualities and allows the incomparable whole of it to function as a richly varied butintegrated urban district in which the multi-layered past and contemporary architectural design, public art, memorials,streetscape, and parks are experienced in relation to one another. – EBR

7

Rensselaer’s History of theCity of New York in the 17thCentury [1909] or E. B.O’Callaghan’s even hoarierbut equally wonderful Historyof New Netherland [1848]).

More recently there hasbeen a rush of scholarly arti-cles such as Karen OrdahlKupperman’s “Early Amer-ican History with the DutchPut In” in The Journal of

AmericanHistory (21,1993), fruits ofa broad newinterest in theseventeenth-century worldof exploration, conquest, andtrade – newlyconfigured as“the Atlanticworld.” By the beginningof the seven-

teenth century, “the Atlanticworld” stretched from theBaltic ports of the HanseaticLeague to South America, the Caribbean, and NorthAmerica. “The Atlantic world” – a multiethnic andmulticultural network, as the slave historian Ira Berlinhas pointed out in his firstchapter of Many ThousandsGone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America –was a “melting pot” longbefore Israel Zangwill wrotethe Broadway play of thatname in 1908. New York Citycan now take its place in pop-ular consciousness both as avery early trade hub in and acultural contributor to that

expanded world, thanks toShorto.

This is also a timely publication in view of thedocumentary torrent pouringout of the New NetherlandProject at the New York StateLibrary in Albany. Shortogives Charles Gehring, thescholar who has been trans-lating and editing the DutchColony’s papers for morethan thirty years, his properdue. These papers and therecent scholarship they haveinspired provide irrefutabletestimony to Shorto’s thesisthat we should significantlyalter the commonly held belief that America’s colonialstory begins with the Pilgrimsettlement at Plymouth.

Shorto is also well awarethat giving primary sourcesample space pays off, quotinggenerously to portray Man-hattan’s vanished landscapeand society as a place rich inwildlife and opportunities foragriculture and trade with thetribes of Native Americanswho still lived in the vicinityof Nieuw Amsterdam. Hedraws on descriptions of contemporary explorers topaint rapid, convincing pictures such as this: “Fishstreamed thickly aroundthem: salmon, mullet, wraith-like rays,” and the land was rich in primordial oaksand “an abundance of blueplums.”

He engages in a lively stylistic hunt for Adriaen Vander Donck, who is his protag-onist (Peter Stuyvesant ismore or less his villain), asthe author of unattributedarguments that eventuallypushed the Dutch govern-ment to give New Netherlan-ders broader liberties thanother colonies enjoyed.Shorto notes that Van derDonck, the only trained juristin the colony in the period tohold such political views, hadused the highly unusual word“American” to describe theIndians in one document. He correlates the use of theword in eight other docu-ments, all of which frame thesame views in the same legallanguage. On this basis, he proposes (as have otherscholars independently andsimultaneously with Shorto)that Van der Donck is theindisputable author of all ofthese documents. This illustration of the landscapeof law and politics of NewNetherland, so fundamentalto understanding Shorto’sconception of its legacy in theUnited States, is only one ofmany he sketches.

Shorto sets up the colony’sdefinition of itself as a strug-gle between the two men.Van der Donck, the forgottenintellectual and man ofaction, was a lawyer who hadtrained at the University ofLeiden under the greathumanist, Hugo Grotius. The authoritarian Stuyvesant,heretofore a mere cartoon

Books

The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Storyof Dutch Manhattan & the Forgotten Colony ThatShaped America by Russell Shorto (New York: Doubleday, 2004)

NieuwAmsterdam, thecapital of theshort-livedcolony of NieuwNetherland,established bythe Dutch in1626 and peace-fully taken overby the Englishin 1664, is atlast enjoying awell-deservedrevision of itshistory with the publicationof The Island at the Center ofthe World: The Epic Story ofDutch Manhattan & theForgotten Colony That ShapedAmerica. Russell Shorto’s col-orful narrative of those briefthirty-eight years of Dutchdomination is accessible,detailed, and fast-moving.Almost all previous worth-while histories of the DutchColony were published long ago in multivolume for-mat (try Marianna van

figure complete with a peg-leg, steel breastplate, andsword, is painted with appro-priately tragic shadows. Thetwo men tangled for years.Was New Netherland to be amilitary trading post or amunicipality – what Shortolabels “an eighth province inthe Dutch republic, a noncon-tiguous state along the linesof an Alaska or Hawaii”? Itwas on its way to that nearlyautonomous eighth-provincestatus when the British tookover in 1664.

The book is divided intothree parts. In Part One, “ACertain Island NamedManathans,” Shorto offers avariety of exploration narra-tives. An “Indian told ofsighting ‘a large house of various colors’ floating on thewater. (Dutch ships wereindeed vividly painted withgeometric motifs).” Tradingbegan: “Out came the prod-ucts. Hemp, dried currants,oysters, beans. Knives, hatch-ets, and beads.” During sub-sequent exploration of “anintricate mesh of islands,bays, and rivers, making therounds of Brooklyn, StatenIsland, and coastal NewJersey,” two violent encoun-ters took place between theDutch and the Indians.Shorto often jumps to thepresent at moments such asthis, as when he writes, “It’sironic that immediately upon

entering the watery perimeterof what would become NewYork City, these two thingstake place: trade and vio-lence.” For the most part, his full-bodied and colorfulnarrative style can bear theweight of such generalizing.

Shorto uses some horrify-ing material to great effect. In Part Two, “The Clash ofWills,” he graphically de-scribes the initial sea battlesof the First Anglo-Dutch Warin the English Channel andthe North Sea when “ships of each fleet arrayed stem tostern so that their side-mounted guns could form along deadly chain.” Followingthis encounter, they werereduced “to floating wrecksby the onslaught of flyingmetal, their masts and tack-les, according to one witness,moiled with brains, hair,pieces of skull.”

Part Three, “Inheritance,”covers the denouement of thestruggle between Stuyvesantand Van der Donck and setsup the scene of a peacefulEnglish takeover that includesStuyvesant’s surrender andthe handover of the Dutchstate papers. This is Shorto’smoment to deal with what heconsiders to be the Dutchlegacy and how it has beentreated historically. In almostevery chapter, he already hasclaimed that this history hasbeen ignored or misrepre-sented, as indeed it appearsto have been. He describeshow, almost from the begin-nings of the New NetherlandColony, an English cultural

bias existed against theDutch, swelling at themoment when the first ofthree Anglo-Dutch wars forsupremacy of the seas – in1653, 1664, and 1673 – werewaged. The Dutch finally leftthe Atlantic arena (keepingCuraçao, Suriname, andGuiana) to concentrate ontheir Indonesian conquests.Shorto argues that the death-blows were administered tothe very idea of any seriousDutch cultural inheritance byeminent nineteenth-centuryhistorians who focused onNew England’s patrimony:John Winthrop’s “shining cityon a hill,” along with its lat-ter-day descendant, the doc-trine of Manifest Destiny.

In arguing for the recogni-tion of a Dutch heritage, how-ever, Shorto makes his claimin a tone so partisan it occa-sionally injures his point. Hisstatement that the tradition ofDutch tolerance, particularlyreligious and ethnic tolerationas it existed in seventeenth-century Amsterdam, wasinstrumental in shaping notjust New Netherland colonialpolicy in the form of theEnglish charter of 1686 but anational American sensibilityregarding immigration andreligious toleration seemsoverstated. It is a thesisShorto offers so persistentlythat he sometimes made this

reader momentarily wonder ifhe knew about the broadreaches of English humanismand the shaping of commonlaw in the seventeenth centu-ry or the role of religiousminorities such as theQuakers in extending theconcept of religious tolerationin Philadelphia or that of theCatholics in Maryland or theexample of Rhode Island. (Alook at Shorto’s bibliographynevertheless is reassuring onthese points.) He does notdiscuss the lockdown on allfreedoms for those of Africandescent, the so-called “blackcodes” that, at the end of theseventeenth century, followedthe previous period of com-parative tolerance underDutch rule for blacks in NewYork.

In his last pages Shortocounters his own large claimswith a scaled-down versionthat “the story of the originalManhattan colony matters” interms of an American intel-lectual, political, and sociallegacy. “Its impact is so dif-fuse that it would be perilousto declare and define it tooconcretely,” he writes, “sohere is a modest attempt: Ithelped set the whole thing in motion.” One might arguethat this acknowledgment –that there were many tradi-tions and events in Americanhistory that “helped set thewhole thing in motion” – issomewhat overdue and atvariance with previous state-ments in the book. However,questioning the strength of

his thesis recedes in light ofwhat this brief history (325pages of text with an addition-al fifty-eight pages of backmatter) actually offers. Whowould want to walk aroundGreenwich Village or theLower East Side without hav-ing read this passage describ-ing the landscape ofStuyvesant’s BouwerieNumber One?

Within five minutes theywere in open country,meadows and pasturelandpunctuated by stands offorests. The road turnedsharply to the right . . . then cut northward, elbow-ing through wildernessbefore opening . . . onto an expanse of lots that were being farmed by freed slaves . . . a settler from the Long Island dis-trict of Greenwyck (Pine District) would relocate here and give his property that name. . . . Stuyvesant brought his family down a lane and into the patch of island he was in the process of taming as his own. In its marshy sereni-ty snipes and widgeons alighting on swampy ponds, stiff winds coming off the river bending the grasses, cows hunkering under bruised skies – it may have reminded him of home. . . . Here he built a manor and a chapel.

Here he would live out his life and be buried, and here, over the parade of centuries, flappers, shtetl refugees, hippies, and punks – an aggregate of local residents running from Trotsky to Auden to Charlie Parker to Joey Ramone – would shuffle past his tomb.

In a note, Shorto neatlyscores his major point onelast time: “As a nice metaphorfor the way history has muddled Manhattan’s Dutchperiod, Stuyvesant’s tomb-stone, embedded in the foundation of the Church ofSt. Mark’s-in-the-Bowery,manages to get both his ageand title wrong.” – Mac Griswold

Gardens of the Arts andCrafts Movement:Imagination and Reality by Judith Tankard (New York: Harry N. Abrams,2004)

The last twentysome yearshave seen a widespreadrevival of interest in the Artsand Crafts Movement both inGreat Britain and the UnitedStates with an increasingnumber of books devoted toexamining its various facets.In Gardens of the Arts andCrafts Movement: Imaginationand Reality, Judith Tankardmakes a substantial contribu-tion to this critical literature.She briefly but clearly estab-lishes the movement in its

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respect for artistic achieve-ment in any material, whichaimed to erase hierarchic dis-tinctions between the fineand decorative arts.

While acknowledging thelabeling fragmentation of theearly years, Tankard makesclear that ideas and idealsflow seamlessly from Ruskinthrough the last half of thenineteenth century andbeyond. From the beginningthe proponents of Arts andCrafts considered it as mucha moral and social programas an aesthetic one. Perhapsthe current interest in themovement can be read as asearch for a solution totoday’s perceived iniquitiesjust as the original was tothose of the mid-nineteenthcentury. For Ruskin, Morris,and others, triumphantindustrialism dehumanizedworkers, destroyed regionalcharacter and traditionalcrafts with the mass produc-tion of meretricious quality,and poured dark disease-bearing blankets of smokeover cities. On an aestheticlevel, they deplored the ostentatious exoticism, darkcolors, heavy furnishings, andexcessive, that is to say vulgar,ornamentation of HighVictorian taste in houses andgardens alike.

The Arts and CraftsMovement called for simplici-

ty, utility, and artistic integra-tion of house, garden, andinterior. Such a programplaced no bar to individualityon the part of designers, butit also created a movementfull of complex and some-times contradictory currents.Tankard’s first chapter,“Gardens Old and New,”offers a prime example. Wethink of Reginald Blomfield,author of The Formal Gardenin England (1902), andWilliam Robinson, author ofThe Wild Garden (1870) andThe English Flower Garden(1883), as the polar oppositesthat their vigorous and vitu-perative verbal battles overgarden design suggest.Tankard places both firmly –and convincingly – in theArts and Crafts lineage.Blomfield, a member of the Art Workers’ Guild, andfellow architects H. InigoTrigg and John Sedding calledfor clearly structured archi-tect-designed gardens: certainly one way to unifyhouse and garden. Theychose Elizabethan andJacobean gardens as modelsand displayed a passion fortopiary extending fromhedges and simple geometricshapes used as vertical mark-ers to the kind of whimsicalbirds and animals found invernacular gardens. Given theArts and Crafts goal of inte-grating house and garden, itis not surprising that most ofits gardens were designed byarchitects.

Nonetheless, as one stud-ies the collection of architects’renderings in that chapterand the one on architecturalgardening, one realizes thathowever successful theirstructure and relation to thehouse as outdoor rooms,architects’ gardens were oftenpretty thin stuff. It is veryeasy to see why Robinsonexcoriated them for their sim-plistic plantings and lack ofhorticultural knowledge. Hiscall for the use of nativeplants and hardy perennials,a slap at greenhouse-depen-dent, bedding-out plantings,would lead to the herbaceousborder, a still popular legacyof the Arts and Crafts garden.In a later chapter examiningRobinson’s home groundsand those of Jekyll, the era’smaster gardeners, Tankardnotes that Robinson quietlyadopted some of the archi-tects’ ideas for the gardensaround his own GravetyeManor. But unlike most archi-tects, he also considered theland beyond the terraces andgarden walls, and his practiceof naturalizing bulbs and wildflowers in woodlands andmeadows has become a com-mon feature in landscapedesign. The partnershipbetween Lutyens and Jekyllwould demonstrate that archi-tecture and horticulture couldjoin hands – if those handsbelonged to gifted designers –

to create magnificent gar-dens. Theirs, with many ofthem recently restored, arethe best known and moststudied of the Arts and Craftsgardens.

The Arts and CraftsMovement championed coun-try living, but Tankard makesthe very important point thatthe great majority of its hous-es and gardens were domesticin scale: “Small country houses within easy reach ofLondon for weekend retreatsfor the upper middle classwould be the realm of a newgeneration of architects.”True, most of these were larger than most of today’ssuburban, or even exurban,properties but nowhere nearthe size of the great countryestates that architects andgarden makers had beencalled upon to create in previous eras. Sometimes the architects were commis-sioned to restore and creategardens for Elizabethan,Jacobean, or Regency manorhouses; but in their owndesigns they rejected histori-cism and sought simply tocapture the spirit of the past,using local materials but cre-ating plans to suit the waytheir contemporaries lived.

Inspired by Morris’s multi-faceted craft production andhis exaltation of working withone’s hands, many of thesearchitects took up one formor another of handcraft –often furniture making ormetalwork – or chose theinterior furnishings if they

9

intellectual and social contextbefore focusing on its gar-dens and their creators, withBritish projects during thecrest years forming the coreof the book. While she givesdue appreciation to majorfigures including WilliamMorris, C. A. F. Voysey,Edwin Lutyens, and GertrudeJekyll, her attention to thework of many less well-known designers provides avaluable enrichment to ourunderstanding of the period.Plans; period drawings, paint-ings, and photographs; andTankard’s own excellent colorphotographs of surviving or,more frequently, restored gardens illuminate her veryreadable text.

Few “movements” in theworld of design can be clearlybracketed by dates, but theArts and CraftsMovement isone of the slip-periest. Almostall art histori-ans recognizeJohn Ruskin’sexhortations in the 1849Seven Lamps ofArchitectureand in the 1851-53 Stonesof Venice as itstheoretical underpinning, afoundation more completelydeveloped by Morris.However, many label early

responses like NormanShaw’s houses and CharlesEastlake’s 1868 Hints onHousehold Taste as Aestheticor House Beautiful or QueenAnne, limiting Arts andCrafts as such to the periodbetween 1888 and 1914.These may have been theglory years, but such limitsdisregard the fact thatMorris’s very influential RedHouse, designed by PhilipWebb, was built in 1859.World War I did not put anend to the movement – majorfigures such as Lutyens,Jekyll, Thomas Mawson,Clough Williams-Ellis, andRobert Lorimer went on cre-ating gardens all through thetwenties – and what aboutCharles Rennie Mackintoshand Frank Lloyd Wright?Both architects subscribed to

Arts andCrafts ideals,but theirwork ledright intotwentieth-centurymodernism.

Tankard’ssuccinctdefinition inthe prefaceclears theground: “the

movement was a philosophi-cal approach to design ratherthan an identifiable style.”Central to the Arts and Craftsapproach was a belief in thedignity and fulfillment ofhandwork, a reliance forinspiration on nature andregional traditions, and a

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did not produce them.Tankard does not write muchabout this branch of the Artsand Crafts design trinity ofhouse, garden, and interior,but the pages of patterns byMorris, Voysey, and CandaceWheeler that serve as chapterheadings provide a constantvisual reminder of the domi-nant role that nature’s formsplay in Arts and Crafts interi-ors and decorative arts.

Tankard recognizes theimportance of magazines –The Studio, The Garden, andCountry Life, for example –and books in spreading themovement’s goals and cre-ations. Jekyll’s books, particu-larly those dealing with herplanting style and use ofcolor, have had a broad andenduring influence. Muchcurrent British garden designis still rooted in her ideas,and they have seen a revivalin this country. Tankardpoints out, however, that sensitivity to color was a hallmark of the Arts andCrafts approach and that inthe period there were othergarden makers renowned fortheir skill in planting design,among them Alfred Parsons,Ellen Willmott, and NorahLindsay. Less known todaybut as influential as Jekyll’sbooks in the first decades ofthe twentieth century wasMawson’s The Art and Craft

of Garden-Making. It wentthrough five editions by 1926.His exceptional knowledge ofpractical horticulture andexcellent design skills earnedhim one of the largest nation-al and international landscapedesign practices of his gener-ation, and he was invited tospeak at Harvard, Cornell,and Yale.

Its very complexity pre-cludes, as she acknowledges,more than the quick sketchthat Tankard gives of theAmerican Arts and CraftsMovement. It would take awhole new book to examinein detail the various forms ittook in different decades andin different parts of this coun-try. The gardens she choosesto illustrate, with the excep-tion of Charles Greene’sGreen Gables in Woodside,California, are ones ratherreminiscent of British prac-tice, but she still names mostof the important figures inAmerican Arts and Crafts.

As a demonstration of therelevance of Arts and Craftsprinciples to small contempo-rary gardens, Tankard endsthe text with an epilogue fea-turing four gardens. Bryan’sGround, since 1993 an ongo-ing creation by editor/pub-lisher David Wheeler and artdirector Simon Dorrell of theBritish magazine Hortus;York Gate; and Tony Ridler’sgarden, all in Britain, areshown in beautiful drawingsby Dorrell, who also did manyof the plans in the book. The

fourth garden, Robert Dash’sMadoo on Long Island, is briefly described but notillustrated.

Tankard’s endnotes andbibliography are helpfulguides to learning moreabout the people and placesthat she mentions. There isan additional bonus: a list,including contact informa-tion, of houses and gardensthat can be visited in bothGreat Britain and the UnitedStates. Gardens of the Artsand Crafts Movement is aninvaluable resource on manylevels. – Denise Otis

Waterfront: A JourneyAround Manhattan by Phillip Lopate (New York: Crown Publishers,2004)

There is agenre of writ-ing that can becalled “On theRoad” litera-ture. It oftenattempts to portray theenigmatic ordinary ofElsewhere in a series of trenchant, ifnecessarilysuperficial,observations.Writers of this kind of osten-sible nonfiction are almost

always outsiders, intellectual-ly curious sophisticates with awandering bent who bring asharp eye, ear, and journalis-tic voice to their travels.Photographers hit the roadfor the same purpose, some-times producing indeliblymemorable, culture-definingimages. Still, there are pitfallshere. Within the seeminglydispassionate writer’s pen orphotographer’s purportedlytruthful lens lurk precon-ceived political positions andan inevitable, if unconscious,sense of superiority, whicheven the most sympatheticartists and writers havetoward their subjects simplybecause they are in control ofthe presentation of theirmaterial.

In Waterfront: A JourneyAround Manhattan, Phillip

Lopate haschosen a morerestricted com-pass and anapproach thatis both moretentative anddeeply explor-atory than thatof the “On theRoad” authorswho turn thefodder of asingle journeyinto a book ofvivid quick-

take vignettes and one-stopanecdotes. Lopate can enter-tain us with these, too, buthis writer’s sensibility leadshim into meditative bywaysthat carry him (and the read-

er) to a less complacent con-viction of having fixed inwords a particular local iden-tity. He is not a motorcycleman streaking across MiddleAmerica, interviewing cattleranchers, barflies, trailer-parkresidents, marine reservists,and gas station attendants.He is, first and foremost, ason of the city (New York City,of course), an inveterateurban walker, a latter-dayflâneur, and a master of thepersonal essay, especially theperipatetic personal essay.

Lopate has two other tautstrings in his literary bow. Heis an anthologist and anaficionado of film. His firstanthology, The Art of thePersonal Essay, reflects hisfamiliarity with the literaryform he has appropriated forhis own, and the second,Writing New York, madehandy for immediate recall arich body of New York water-front literature. Linking wordand place, he can summon atwill lines of Walt Whitmanand Hart Crane, make refer-ence to the lurid and tantaliz-ing plethora of nineteenth-century “Lights and Shadows”books that sensationalizedNew York’s high- and lowlife,or heighten our social aware-ness of the past with inci-dents drawn from Jacob Riis’sHow the Other Half Lives orHerbert Asbury’s The Gangs

of New York. As someonewhose lifelong love affair withthe movies has yielded a bodyof reviews and essays on thesubject of film, he sees streetlife cinematically and remem-bers the streets of the city (orthe Hollywood set designs ofthem) in all their moody film-noir glory and Woody Allensatirical charm.

As Lopate points out, mostof our solitary walks takeplace not only on the pave-ment but also in our heads asour thoughts shuttle back andforth between self-absorptionand observation. It is good,therefore, to find ourselves inthe company of such a well-furnished head as his and toknow that all the seeing andlearning and rememberingthat are stored up in him willcome to us as the same kind of interior monologuewe would like to have withourselves – pondering some flash of beauty ordecrepitude, some piece ofhistory or personal memory,some missed opportunity orqualified urban planning success – if we only had somuch lightly worn historicalresearch, behind-the-scenesinterviews, quick recall ofgreat old movies, and pas-sages from hundreds ofbooks about New York in ourheads. Moreover, it is good tobe reminded that we all seethe world idiosyncraticallyand to realize that, if we livelong enough in as restless a

remarks, “The walker-writercannot help seeing, superim-posed over the present edificeits former incarnation, andhe/she sings the necropo-lis.…”

In Waterfront we followLopate first up Manhattan’sHudson River shoreline fromthe Battery to WashingtonHeights and Inwood and thenfrom the Battery to High-bridge Park along the EastRiver as he traces the presentshoreline and its borderingneighborhoods, reading themas layered accumulations ofolder narratives. Though itscacophonous vibrancy isstilled, his Manhattan water-front is yet haunted by color-ful, if continually fading,ghosts. He calls attention tothe comparative vacancy ofthe once-busy harbor as aban-doned piers rot or, as heexplains in one fascinatingchapter, are eaten away byshipworms. Always, we seetantalizing opportunity forwaterfront “reclamation”being tortuously realized orjust out of reach of politicalwill and economic necessityas we follow Lopate’s physicaland intellectual perambula-tions.

Because Waterfront is per-sonal in its perspective, onehas to recognize Lopate’spenchant for the vulgar,seedy, and picturesquely

decrepit: the “rotting timbers,tall grasses, jagged rocks, andwharfside warehouses whichconstituted the 1970s-1980sNew York waterfront, after ithad been given up as a portbut before it had begun to be’rehabilitated.’” Even beforethen, the waterfront hadbecome a kind of abstractiondevoid of almost all of its oldmarine traffic and commerceand sealed off from physicalcontact by highways. At best(and indeed a blessing), itcould be viewed from a highpromenade such as the onethat decks over the FDR Driveas it passes beneath thegrounds of Gracie Mansionand Carl Shurz Park. Only ina few marginal places can youthread your way throughriprap, rusty fences, and highweeds alongside the water’sedge, as is the case in EastHarlem.

However, it is not preciselythis “ragged, unkempt, undis-covered, and unidentified ter-ritory” that, sore of foot andleg, Lopate means as an anti-dote to the manicured edgerepresented by the BatteryPark Promenade. What frus-trates him are the too-timid,official planning visions andbland consumer-orientedpublic space improvementsprevalent nowadays. He longsfor an older, crustier realitythat somehow acknowledgesthe vanished dockworkersand harbor traffic – but with-out turning pockets of thewaterfront into self-themed,

commercially driven historicpreserves, as is the case at theSouth Street Seaport. Butnone of us knows how tosummon back an economical-ly defunct past without having it seem like a stagedrevival. At best, one can joinLopate in applauding the kindof vigilante urbanism by com-munities that give up on gov-ernment and improve derelictpublic spaces on their own.

Shoreline meditation gives rise to here and therean excursus, or digression.These chapters constitute thematic essays of a historicalor biographical nature, thusdiffering from the more pure-ly descriptive ones elsewhere.For this reader, the mosttelling of these excursuses isthe story of the bitterly foughtand defeated plan to replaceManhattan’s West SideHighway with Westway, asubmerged shoreline trans-portation corridor in theHudson River that wouldhave been decked over withseveral hundred acres of park-land. Lopate explains howthis proposal for a boldlyimaginative, federally fundedpublic-works project wouldhave reconnected the city’sstreet grid with its waterfront,making the Hudson between79th Street and the Battery as accessible as it is above79th Street in the neighbor-hoods adjacent to Riverside

Park. Yet it was killed after aprotracted fight that pittedcommunity activists and plan-ners against one another.

Lopate helps us see inhindsight how Westway fellvictim to historical timing. Bythe late 1960s, when federalfunding was available andthis project was on the draw-ing boards, proposals for thekind of highway mega-pro-jects advocated by mid-twenti-eth-century planners,particularly the misguidedproposal of Robert Moses tobuild the Lower ManhattanExpressway, had begun togenerate vociferous antipathyfor the reasons that weresoon to turn their mostthoughtfully original andinfluential critic, Jane Jacobs,into a revered sage of newurbanism. Recounting theensuing hearings and law-suits, Lopate concludes thatWestway would not have rentan important part of theurban fabric as the LowerManhattan Expressway wouldhave done and that the pro-posed ninety-acre public parkwas, as its planners claimed,the essential feature of theplan. However, in the early1970s, as lawsuits to blockWestway were wending theirway through the courts, anyRobert Moses-style top-downurban planning project hadbecome de facto suspect, andnewly established communityplanning boards were findingtheir principal political powerto be opposition to large-

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city as New York, the sceneryof our past and present walksin the same neighborhoodswill become increasingly disassociated through change.

Nowhere is urban fluxmore evident than on Man-hattan’s twenty-first-centurywaterfront. Not only in NewYork but in many formerlyimportant port and manufac-turing cities, industrial lands adjacent to shorelinesand river docks have become“brownfields,” so-calledbecause sites vacated by ship-ping and industry now pre-sent an opportunity to createrecreational “greenfields.”And nowhere is the opportu-nity to renew the urban edgemore potently dramatic ormore fraught with politicaland bureaucratic obstaclesthan in New York. In his self-assigned task of exploringon foot as much of theManhattan waterfront as possible (the entire 578-mileNew York City waterfront was understandably beyondthe scope of his book and the endurance of his body),Lopate tells us that “All along,I kept coming up against cer-tain underlying questions:What is our capacity for city-making at this historical junc-ture? How did we formerlybuild cities with such casualconviction, and can we stillcome up with bold, integratedvisions and ambitious works?

What is the changing mean-ing of public space? How toresolve the antiurban bias inour national character withthe need to sustain a vital cityenvironment? Or reconcileNew York’s past as a port/manufacturing center withthe new model of a postin-dustrial city given over toinformation processing andconsumerism?”

While these pressingissues engage Lopate’s atten-tion as they must ours,Waterfront is anything but aprescriptive book offering theories and best practices of a new urbanism. LikeBaudelaire or Walter Ben-jamin, Lopate’s real métier is walking to write, a desire to sample the pleasures andperils of modernity with asensibility attuned to history,to experiencing what he callsthe enigmatic fusion of pres-ence and absence. He is, inother words, a connoisseur ofhow the transformation ofcities by industrial, and nowpostindustrial, forces isplayed out in the lives andvisages and words of casuallyencountered strangers. At thesame time, he sees the water-front as an anthology of pastlives and a palimpsest of pastplaces. It is a landscape thathe has tried to read like a text,conjuring back the stevedoresand the sailors, the gaminsand the grit, the factories andthe foghorns. Often pullinghimself up short of senti-ment, Lopate neverthelessslips into elegy, for, as he

scale, government-sponsoredurban renewal. For more thana decade, opponents foughtthe project, at last winning onenvironmental grounds basedon the importance of theHudson estuary as a breedinghabitat for striped bass. Now,thirty years later, instead ofthe large park that wouldhave united the riverfrontwith its adjacent inlandneighborhoods, 9A – arebuilt West Side Highway in the guise of a wide boule-vard – continues to separatethem from the bikeway andrecreational pier projects thatare gradually aggregating asstate funding becomes avail-able for a much narrowerHudson River Park. Such isLopate’s revisionist take onthe project that he, like manyother New Yorkers, opposedat the time.

This affinity for planninganalysis, combined with asensory appreciation ofManhattan’s old waterfrontlandscape – a description ofwhat was, is, might havebeen, and is coming intobeing in this most incessantlyself-transforming of cities –makes Lopate’s book moreoriginal, balanced, andnuanced than others on the subject. That he himselfconsidered becoming a cityplanner at one point makeshim sympathetic to certainmembers of New York City’svast civil service bureaucracy

who still maintain the idealis-tic perspective and dreams of social betterment throughgood urban design that characterized the reformmovement and urban plan-ning philosophy in the firsttwo-thirds of the twentiethcentury. Thus, in the sameevenhanded way that he was able to rethink Westway,Lopate provides a thoughtfulanalysis of the city’s housingprojects, penitential in designand often castigated as ghet-tos for the poor. The beliefthat government has an obligation to see that allmembers of society should bedecently housed produced, inhis view, some very success-ful, as well as some direlyflawed, public housing experi-ments, and he laments ourstinginess in providing taxfunds for this purpose today.Since many of the projectsare sited on or near the waterfront because, whenbuilt, this land was not theprime real estate it is now,Lopate takes us on an excur-sive journey through a previ-ously untold piece of NewYork City urban history as wefollow in his footsteps alongthe East River from theBowery to Harlem in a chap-ter called simply “TheProjects.”

It is hard to say which ofthe personal essays that con-stitute Waterfront is best. The entire circuit that thiswalker in the city makesaround Manhattan’s water-

front, narrated as the story of one man’s love affair withthe greatest city on earth and the incomparable estuarineharbor that set its dynamicdevelopment in motion, isfascinating and timely as the city experiences profoundchange and its old waterfrontlandscape of commerce givesway to a twenty-first-centurylandscape emphasizing sports and recreation. – EBR

The Modern Garden by Jane Brown (London: Thames & Hudson,2000)Modern Garden Design:Innovation Since 1900 by Janet Waymark (London: Thames & Hudson,2000)

While thereare literallythousands ofbooks on thehistory ofmodern artand hundredsif not thou-sands on modern archi-tecture, a goodhistory ofmodern land-scape architec-ture remains to be written –and even a good history of themodern garden alone wouldbe most welcome. Sadly, nei-

ther Jane Brown’s TheModern Garden or JanetWaymark’s Modern GardenDesign: Innovation Since 1900is that book. Admittedly, thetask before a potential authortoday is far more difficultthan it would have been inthe past. At one time a historyof landscape meant a chroni-cle and explanation of stylisticdevelopment. Today, oneneeds to address a far broaderrange of considerations:examining social issues, thegeopolitical situation, envi-ronmental factors, and thelike – some of which arguablydeny the very idea of evolu-tion, stylistic or other, at all.

That all makes the taskmore difficult but not impos-sible. On the one hand, boththese books qualify as “sur-

veys” andtherefore arelimited by thepublisher to acertain num-ber of wordsand a certainnumber ofimages. Onthe otherhand, bothauthors – andthe publisherof both

books – are British, no doubtinjecting a bias toward thehome team. But limitationsare the realities of any writingproject, and it is the author’srole to determine the stancefrom which he or she willview the subject, choose thedramatis personae and pro-

jects, and weave the tale.Constraints are not necessari-ly a bad thing: they maycoerce a writer to be succinctand focus on ideas ratherthan minutiæ. Let’s add onemore ingredient to the mix:the images. For the most part,the photographs in bothbooks are of high quality andare very well reproduced.While the Waymark book isshort on plans, the Brownvolume is quite the contrary.In fact, for some, gardenplans constitute the principalmeans of representing thework, which also can be ashortcoming. The questionthen is how the images areused: Are they integratedwith the text or played againstit?

To start: the words “garden”and “modern.” To Jane Brownthe garden is a specific areaand an artifact with a specificdefinition:

The word Garden in my title is also carefullyemphatic: it implies the use and enjoyment ofa private space, withinsimilar parameters tothose we apply to our pri-vate lives, allowing roomfor friends and close andknown local communities.

Janet Waymark, in con-trast, seems to equate gardenwith landscape and casts hernet farther afield, encompass-ing public landscapes and

even town planning. Shetakes her definition from the1981 International Council onMonuments and Sites (ICOMOS) Florence Charter:

“an architectural and horti-cultural composition of interest to the public from the historical or artistic point of view” . . . whichlater makes it clear that the term “garden” could equally well apply to landscape parkland, cemeteries, allotments, and culti-vated and managed green areas in an urban context.

If that is so, why notannounce landscape ratherthan the garden as the subjectof the book? Brown wants toavoid this less constrainedview: “There is a definite lineto be drawn between themeaning of the word garden,and that other word, land-scape, with which it is so persistently confused.” So attheir very roots the two booksare problematic for thoseseeking a concise position, a good stance, and a precisedefinition of modern and garden and modern garden.

“Modern,” by contrast, is even more slippery, notnecessarily as an abstract con-cept but as the qualifier addedto the term garden. For Way-mark: “The term ’Modern’ isused here inclusively, andrefers to the present and the recent past.” For Brown,modern is used more or less as it is found in the

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dictionary: “of the recent past,and most emphatically, ’notantiquated.’” As her examplesand case studies demonstrate,however, the modern path ishardly linear; in fact, it is lessa path than a scattered field ofbits and pieces linked weaklyby chronology. The issuebecomes further complicatedas she includes in her view anotion of manner – or style,if you will – the form andspaces and materials of whichthe garden is made and theway in which they came to be.

Brown’s The ModernGarden is very curiouslystructured, with a collage ofthe author’s own writing,inserted project descriptions,and many quotations from books; its central idearemains elusive to the end.She centers modern gardenactivity from the 1930s to the1950s and quite inexplicablyclaims: “Within a decade it was dead, mainly throughmisunderstanding, and a smothering in historicrevivals and rampantly eclec-tic postmodernism.” I wouldbeg to differ, but that’s another story. The book com-prises numerous subsectionsand ultimately reads more as a series of vignettes ratherthan a history as the readerstruggles for any sense ofcoherence.

The author begins bynominating her “oracles” ofthe modern landscape. Theseinclude, somewhat strangely,the Finnish architect ElielSaarinen, Erich Mendelsohn,J. J. P. Oud, Le Corbusier, and Paul Klee. This is an odd, almost bizarre, set ofprotagonists for the modernlandscape whose selection wemight welcome as a veryfresh take. But quite typicallyfor this book, the case isnever made. Like a militaryambush, the author throwsout some statement and thenleaves quietly with neitherqualification nor develop-ment. While Saarinen theelder was a very fine architectand site planner, his land-scapes were only profession-ally competent and firmly inthe model of the northEuropean/Germanic formal(or architectonic, as it wastermed) garden. He was sen-sitive to the site but he wasno innovator in landscapedesign. So why is he elevatedto “oracle” status? We are left wondering.

Nor is the inclusion ofErich Mendelsohn more con-vincing. His own 1928 ’amRuperhorn garden thatBrown refers to on severaloccasions appears to be ratherstandard and almost mun-dane when viewed in bothplan and photo. Either theauthor sees qualities in it thatshe does not elucidate or myeyes are failing me (which, ofcourse, may be the case). Asfor Le Corbusier: DorothéeImbert has shown rather

clearly that probably no oneuntil Ian McHarg in the1960s has argued more per-suasively against gardens andlandscapes concerned withform. Early singular workssuch as the Villa Meyer andthe Beistegui roof terraceaside, the architect’s idea ofgeneric greenery rather thanconfigured spaces under-mined the importance ofdesigning any landscape atall, much less a garden. Paul Klee? Well, we know he provided inspiration forGeoffrey Jellicoe, but has anyother influence on landscapebeen documented? Hereagain is the basic shortcom-ing of The Modern Garden:pronouncements withoutsubstantiation leave the read-er at best tantalized but ulti-mately unfulfilled.

Normally, to be polite, areviewer foregoes mention oferrors in a text, but these areso plentiful that the potentialreader warrants a warning.For example, the images ofthe Mexican Luis Barragán’swork near the end of the bookcombine three projects as ifone: the horse stables andhouse at San Cristóbal withthe horse-drinking trough atLas Arboledas and the LoversFountain at Los Cubes; and itis not Dolliver “Tommy”Church but Thomas DolliverChurch; and his 1955 bookGardens Are for People is

decidedly not an autobiogra-phy. In addition, descriptionsof people – interjected per-haps for color or to enliventhe writing – appear drawnfrom out of the blue, causinginformed readers to questionwhether they are reading a factual study or fictionaltreatment.

Brown’s lack of research –or perhaps, more kindlyphrased, lack of evidence ofresearch – is troubling. Thebibliography lists only booksand neither articles or prima-ry documents. One wondersalso how many of the land-scapes described in her bookthe author actually has visit-ed. While the descriptions ofthe projects based on photosand drawings are usually tothe point, the readings anddeductions are at times farfrom the mark. Admittedly,the historian is constrainedby the extant materials,whether textual, graphic, orvegetal, and landscapes arenotoriously ephemeral, but …

Waymark’s Modern GardenDesign: Innovation Since 1900is a more respectable study. It follows a generally chronolog-ical order, which makes itsstory easier to follow. It ismore inclusive than Brown’sbook, and this is one of itsstrengths. Waymark discussesthe American modernists andthe Brazilian Roberto BurleMarx, the British ThomasMawson, and even the influ-ential German nurserymanKarl Foerster. She maps out a

very broad constellation andpresents a credible, if limited,view of the present and the future. Because Waymarksees the garden and the landscape as somewhat synonymous, however, hernarrative wanders from timeto time and one questions the balance of discussion onher various subjects. ClaudeMonet and Lord Astor receive extended discussionswhile J. C. N.Forestier – who is arguablyfar moresignificant –receives only apassing men-tion. Given thatthe length ofthe book proba-bly was set bythe publisher,the chapter onthe garden sub-urb feels out ofplace – espe-cially since none of the gar-dens in the garden suburbsmerits any treatment. Thegarden suburb has receivedextensive discussion in bookson urban and suburban plan-ning, and little here adds to the basic story at the levelof garden.

Like Brown, Waymarkfocuses on description andbiography (these, and geneal-ogy, appear to be favorites of

British writers) rather than onideas and the integration ofplaces and people. It seemsthat behind all of theseshould be the question: Howdoes this person or this land-scape contribute significantlyto the development, matura-tion, or history of the moderngarden? A history is morethan a list of people andplaces and less than fictionalflights of fancy – a good

history dis-cusses interac-tions and thedrama ratherthan just intro-ducing theplayers. Onewould hopethat a thesisundergirds allthe facts anddiscussions.The readerneeds to knowabout the con-sequences as

well as the stimuli. Instead, atthe end of these books, onerecalls the entries rather thana comprehensive narrative.While we are always toldwhat, we are rarely told why.

In general, it is far moredifficult to fashion a historyof the future than one of thepast, and the final sections ofboth books are quite uncon-vincing. I would not look tothe American firm Oehmeand van Sweden for futuredirections in garden designalthough they are masters at

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using perennials, which, ofcourse, fits very neatly in aBritish view of the course ofthe garden – as does the workof the eminent Dutch plants-man Piet Oudolf.

Stating the criteria forselection would havestrengthened each author’srespective stance: Whatmakes a particular designeror landscape a key player inthe history of the modern gar-den? Were the selections of projects based on availablephotographs or were theyconstrained by reasonabletravel distances? The inclu-sion and exclusion of certainpersonages are troubling, butto be fair, that is the call ofthe author. We can only thinkof our own nominees, ourown discourse, and wonderwhy the garden of WalterGropius’s house in Lincoln,Massachusetts (a thoroughlyordinary landscape utilizingelements already common to1930s England), is includedwhen more significant works – like Dan Kiley’s larger projects – are not.

How can any history of themodern garden or landscapearchitecture avoid discussingLawrence Halprin and PeterWalker? Halprin in someways saved landscape designin the United States by bring-ing it firmly into the city and, as such, into the politicalrealm. His fountains and

plazas and his urban schemes– not to mention his psychosociological work withindividual and communityparticipation – were probablythe most important contribu-tions to American landscapearchitecture after the genera-tion of Garrett Eckbo. Anaccount of Richard Neutra’sattitude toward garden making also would have beenwelcome since he often took charge for designing the settings of his houses.Walker, who drew on the plastic arts in other ways,reintroduced a vitality to thegarden and the corporatelandscape that had sufferedanorexia in the ecological age.

More positively, bothbooks do include detailedmention of plant materials, asBrown puts it: “dressing themodern garden.” Rarely dowould-be historians of themodern landscape examinethe planting of the landscapesthey discuss to this level ofdetail. Both Brown andWaymark are to be congratu-lated on providing theirexpertise in this area. Never-theless, neither author reallytakes on the subject of space,a more central concern formost modern landscapearchitects, certainly to theAmerican contingent.

What then made the modern garden modern?Brown hints at the qualitiesof modern landscape whileWaymark assumes it to beimplicit in the works underdiscussion. Some years ago I

laid out some ten qualifica-tions for making a modernlandscape, a list that I amsure could be improved upon.But in that discussion I attempted to provide a cohesive presentation of thesubject so that the readermight evaluate this thoughtstructure in part and as awhole. I wish that each of the authors would have proposed her own structurefor understanding the mod-ern garden rather than, with a few exceptions, just reintro-ducing known personae and places.

In a recent review concerning a symposium on modernism in landscape,I asked the following ques-tions: “Could modernism beany project from the twenti-eth century or only those thatshared some sort of formalresemblances, for example,with architectural modernismor modern painting andsculpture? Need they employthe spare clarity of modernistarchitecture or the shapes ofsurrealist painting? Shouldmodernism be better definedby social agenda rather thanby shape? What was the roleof spatial production and usein formulating modernistideas? And in addition, howwas all this received from thevarious populations con-cerned?” These are difficultquestions to ask, and they are

likewise difficult to answer.As noted at the start of thisreview, we demand – orshould demand – more ofauthors today; we demandmore about the many dimen-sions by which the landscapecan be made, lived, and evaluated. There is a growingnumber of anthologies in all fields these days as ourrequirements grow and thetime for research and writingis compressed. This is why somuch writing today appearsto be the product of team-work. It may be too much torequire this sort of compre-hensive vision from any single author. Also unfair,perhaps, but let’s demand itanyway in the hope that someone or some group will someday rise to the occasion. – Marc Treib

Benton MacKaye:Conservationist, Planner,and Creator of theAppalachian Trail by Larry Anderson (Baltimore: Johns HopkinsUniversity Press, 2002)

In his autobiog-raphy, A Questfor Life (1996),Ian McHargrecalled the“great and unexpectedefflorescence inenvironmentalsensibility” thathe sensed on thefirst Earth Dayin April 1970.

Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring(1962) had mobilized themovement, he noted, andbefore her there had beenGeorge Perkins Marsh, JohnMuir, Frederick Law Olmsted,Charles Eliot, GiffordPinchot, Fairfield Osborne,Benton MacKaye, and PaulSears. Benton MacKaye, agedninety-one that spring, wasnot on the frontlines withMcHarg, the outspoken land-scape architect, biologistsBarry Commoner and PaulEhrlich, and others who traveled across the nation toaddress cheering crowds. ButMcHarg rememberedMacKaye, placing him ingood company.

After MacKaye’s death in1975, recollections of his lifeand work appeared in theJanuary/March 1976 issue ofLiving Wilderness, the journalof The Wilderness Society, ofwhich Mackaye was a founderand former president. In fact, most of the issue was atribute to MacKaye, the manwho had conceived and led the efforts to create the2,160-mile Appalachian

Trail. By manyaccounts, hewas a Yankeevisionary, a wildernessphilosopher, a geotechnician, a forester, a

regional planner, and socialinventor, as well as a writer,neighbor, and friend.

In this special issue Lewis Mumford, MacKaye’s fellow founder of the Region-al Planning Association ofAmerica (RPAA) in 1923, remembered his friend’sunique personality and pro-phetic ideas, such as townlesshighways and highwaylesstowns. Those ideas weregrounded in a real place –MacKaye’s boyhood haunts in and around Shirley Center,Massachusetts, to which hewould return from sojournsin Boston, New York, Wash-ington, or Knoxville. AndMacKaye had insisted on afirm grounding at RPAAgatherings. “He never allowedus to think of technologicaladvances or urban formswithout reference to the geo-logical and biological founda-tions upon which our entirecivilization rests,“ Mumfordrecalled. Others recalledMacKaye’s stories of forestrywork with Gifford Pinchot,his years at the TennesseeValley Authority, his zest forhiking, haying, good talk –and solitude. But the plan-ning consultant FrederickGutheim suspected that,behind MacKaye’s craggy,Thoreauvian persona laysomething as yet unknown.

Now we have LarryAnderson’s excellent biogra-phy, the result of many yearsof research, travel, writing

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and, I imagine, re-writing.The prose is spare, understat-ed. Anderson, the author ofmany articles on planning,conservation, and the envi-ronment, is also cofounderand past president of theHarvard Common Press. Like Mumford, who editedMacKaye’s study in regionalplanning, The New Explor-ation (1928), Anderson hasworked his way through agreat mass of MacKaye’s writings and found gems –bits of wisdom, flashes ofinsight – that he quotes nowand again in this book.Unlike Mumford, however,Anderson never met MacKayeor listened to his reputedly spirited, salty conversation.As Mumford confessed to afriend, “If [MacKaye] couldonly write the way he talks,he would surpass MarkTwain.”

Anderson’s entrée toMacKaye was through otherchannels. He was brought upwithin a few miles ofMacKaye’s boyhood homeand knew the same gentle,glacier-rounded landformsthat young Benton studiedlike a map from the summitof Hunting Hill. In the late1960s and early 1970s,Anderson studied at Mac-Kaye’s alma mater, Harvard,where he took J. B. Jackson’scourse on the man-madeAmerican landscape and read

through the works of LewisMumford. A few more per-sonal glimpses in the intro-duction – the author’sbackpacking in northern NewEngland, reading Thoreau’sWalden and Aldo Leopold’sSand County Almanac – sug-gest what the entire biogra-phy bears out: Andersonfound in Benton MacKaye akindred spirit. In time, whileappreciating more analyticalworks by Paul T. Bryant,Robert Gottlieb, Paul S.Sutter, Robert McCullough,and other scholars ofMacKaye and wildernessissues, Anderson set out toexamine how this visionaryman, MacKaye, lived his life.The result is marvelous: ascholarly biography thatseems to live and breathe inthe open air.

A man of few materialneeds, content with Spartanquarters, MacKaye had a passion for exploration, onthe ground and in the imagi-nation. He tossed out ideasand proposals freely – notwith the brilliance of a MarkTwain or an Ian McHarg, butwith colorful metaphors, afew scientific concepts, andplain words. He was animportant figure in Americanenvironmental history,despite his modest number of “solid” independentachievements. As a catalystand collaborator, he had noneed of the limelight but agreat desire for balance, equilibrium, some measureof peace for himself and

others. On the job with theForest Service and later, inthe Labor Department,among the loggers, farmers,and mill workers he came toknow, MacKaye recognizedmore desires and needs – forfairness, a living wage, aplace to call home, communi-ty. And so, rather than takesides in the battles betweenutilitarians and preservation-ists, he began to reframe theissues of conservation. By1919, he was pressing forsomething akin to what wenow call “environmental justice.”

Born in 1879 in Stamford,Connecticut, MacKaye livedin several cities and villagesas a child. Steele MacKaye,his father, was an actor, playwright, producer, andentrepreneur whose liveli-hood was often precarious.The members of Benton’simmediate family (four olderbrothers, a younger sister,and parents) were creative,resourceful, and generallysupportive. Cultural institu-tions in New York andWashington, D.C., stimulatedthe boy’s curiosity, and so didopportunities to roam thecountryside of New England.The untimely death of hisfather – Benton was fourteenat the time – was a terribleblow, but out of it came a

lifelong desire to emulate hisfather on his own terms. Asin a theater, Benton wouldvisualize and then dramatizehis planning ideas with draw-ings, maps, metaphors, sometimes with dry humor.

Telling MacKaye’s lifestory in a continuous narra-tive, Anderson takes care toexplain the historical andintellectual contexts and toconvey the essence ofMacKaye’s major writings.Some experiences clearlyinspired MacKaye. HearingJohn Wesley Powell speak inWashington about his 1869exploration of the ColoradoRiver and the Grand Canyon,for instance, stimulatedyoung MacKaye’s expeditionsaround Shirley Center. Twogeology professors at Harvardalso left penetrating impres-sions – Nathaniel S. Shaler, acaptivating lecturer with areverence for all life on earth;and William M. Davis, a theo-rist attentive to “the earth as ahabitable globe.”

Men are the major playersin this story. The few womenare often troubled, ill, orunderemployed: In the era ofmuckraking journalism, a talented young woman’scareer and her engagement toMacKaye are abruptly ended.MacKaye’s wife, a suffragistand peace activist, suffersfrom an obscure, chronicdepression and eventuallytakes her own life. MacKaye’ssister, a designer of pageants,finds no work in the era of

cinema and is, in time, committed to a series of institutions. MacKaye actsresponsibly, nobly, turninginward. But he also turns outward, to blaze trails andplan greenways like the “BayCircuit” around Boston. Hedefends wild lands againstencroachment by metropoli-tan growth, or sprawl. Thequest is endless – to broaden“our mental and spiritualhorizon.”

One of the pleasures ofreading this biography is torecognize the multiple con-nections – a non-electronicweb – through which peoplecommunicated and accom-plished a great deal. Throughhis father’s and grandfather’sfriends, MacKaye was connected back in time toRalph Waldo Emerson andWilliam James. Benton’sintroduction to the wildernesswas a hiking trip in NewHampshire’s WhiteMountains with his collegefriend James Sturgis Pray,later a professor of landscapearchitecture at Harvard and aclose colleague in planningthe Appalachian Trail. Andthat entire project dependedon a vast network of friends,colleagues, and hiking clubmembers from Maine toGeorgia. MacKaye’s circles of friends included AllenChamberlain and Pray of the

Appalachian Mountain Club;Walter Lippmann, LincolnSteffens, John Reed, and oth-ers who met at the HarvardSocialist Club; Clarence Stein,Henry Wright, Mumford, and others of the RPAA; andthe foresters, naturalists, and other professionals whoformed The WildernessSociety, including AldoLeopold, Robert Marshall,Robert Sterling Yard, andHarvey Broome.

What linked these circlesof friends and colleagues wasan ability to imagine alterna-tives to current patterns oflife and work in a nation thatwas chronically troubled bywar, depression, poverty,nuclear weapons capabilities,and other issues. To dream ofgarden cities and truly urbanecities, an Appalachian net-work of trails and greenwaysflanked by recreational com-munities and farm camps, aridgeline trail along theContinental Divide, a nationalnetwork of wildland “belts”created gradually by localgroups, and a global effort topreserve wilderness – all mayhave seemed preposterous attimes. But as Mumford wroteto MacKaye in the mid-1960s,“Go on dreaming, dear Ben.There is plenty of time, andyou have had far better luckin your dreams than the rest of us have had, For mostof mine have been turninginto nightmares, or have beenlost like water in the sand.”–Melanie Simo

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Volume 11, Number 11

Spring/Summer 2005

Editor:

Elizabeth Barlow Rogers

Assistant Editor:

Margaret Sullivan

Copy Editor:

Margot Dembo

Design:

Skeggs Design

Contributors:

Mac Keith Griswold

Denise Otis

Melanie Simo

Marc Treib

For more information about

Garden History and Landscape

Studies at the Bard Graduate

Center, please call 212-501-3064

or visit www.bgc.bard.edu and

www.elizabethbarlowrogers.com

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