Sprawl is shaping up to be an issue in the 2000 Bush-Gore presidential elections. It is easy to see why. The public is concerned about gridlock and the relentless urbanization of the countryside. Existing communities erect barriers to growth, pushing development yet farther out; rural towns feel threatened. There is a general feeling that things are out of control. Yet there is no consensus about how growth should be accommodated. On the whole, the public is undecided: we are alarmed at the consequences of sprawl but suspicious of the chief means of reining it in—centralized planning.
The public’s confidence in planning was soured by the debacles of the 1960s. High-minded urban renewal left thousands homeless, crosstown freeways fractured neighborhoods, and public housing superblocks, conceived by the best minds in the field, created high-crime zones. Faced with another round of planning “solutions,” the public is right to be skeptical. Yet the suspicion of planning runs further back in time than these relatively recent events. Americans have always been uncomfortable with centralized planning. We admire European cities, but we have resisted vesting as much power in an individual as, say, Rome did in Pope Sixtus V or Paris in Napoleon III. Instead of the grand gesture, we have preferred the generic grid, plain old Main Street, and its modern counterpart, the ubiquitous highway strip. This is not simply laziness. These modest planning solutions have generally provided a level playing field for “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” In the grid, or on the strip, everyone is treated equally. The house stands beside the church, which is next to the drive-in restaurant. Each has equal prominence; none assumes precedence over the other.
The history of planning the American city has been chiefly a story of private accomplishments and private monuments: palatial department stores, railroad terminals, skyscrapers, baseball stadiums. There is one exception, and it is a big one. During the second half of the nineteenth century, almost every large city—New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco—planned and built a public park. European cities already had parks, but London’s Hyde Park and Paris’s Tuileries Garden were relatively small. The American parks were huge: 843 acres in the case of New York’s Central Park, more than 1,000 acres in San Francisco, more than 3,000 in Philadelphia. This was planning on a heroic scale.
Many of these great public works were laid out by Frederick Law Olmsted, the remarkable planner and landscape architect who, with Calvert Vaux, built Central Park and Brooklyn’s Prospect Park as well as parks in Buffalo and Chicago. Later, working alone, Olmsted planned parks in Boston, Detroit, Louisville, Rochester, and Montreal. What was it that made Olmsted’s brand of city planning so successful?
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Olmsted lived at a time of spectacular urban expansion. “We have reason to believe, then, that towns which of late have been increasing rapidly on account of their commercial advantages, are likely to be still more attractive to population in the future,” he wrote in a paper delivered in 1870 to the American Social Science Association, of which he was a founder. “That there will in consequence soon be larger towns than any the world has yet known, and that the further progress of civilization is to depend mainly upon the influences by which men’s minds and characters will be affected while living in large towns.”
Although Olmsted loved the countryside, like most of his contemporaries he never suggested that urbanization could—or should—be curtailed. Nor was he nostalgic about the past. He understood the attractions of city life, cultural as well as commercial, social as well as economic. As a young man, enthusiastic about “scientific farming,” he had farmed for a living and knew about rural isolation and hardship. He had traveled across the South and the Texas frontier writing regular reports for the New-York Daily Times before the Civil War and had no romantic illusions about life in small, backward rural communities. Although he had grown up in a small New England town—Hartford, Connecticut—he had been apprenticed to a trading company in New York and understood that the future lay with the burgeoning metropolis.
Olmsted had spent many years writing—though never finishing—an ambitious book on American civilization. He was always concerned with the big picture. Huge cities were inevitable, of that he was sure. The questions were how to make them livable and how to influence “men’s minds and characters” so that civilization would prosper. He was far from sanguine about the future of the latter. After spending two years during his early forties managing a gold mine in California’s untamed Sierra Nevada, he had firsthand experience of the crudeness and roughness of frontier life. He was afraid that the booming industrial city would likewise brutalize its inhabitants.
His solution was the public park. It provided city dwellers with easy access to nature. That is something that distinguishes the American city park of that period: it is not an urban garden, nor a manicured parterre, nor a fantasy landscape. It is pastoral countryside, sometimes resembling wilderness. This rural quality is already present in Central Park’s Ramble with its rocky outcroppings, but it becomes more evident in later works such as Prospect Park’s ravines and waterfalls and the twisting mountain road of Montreal’s Mount Royal Park.
Olmsted was influenced by two landscapes: the picturesque grounds surrounding English estates, particularly those laid out by Lancelot “Capability” Brown, whose work Olmsted first saw as a young man; and Yosemite Valley. He visited the valley during his California sojourn, and as head of a commission to chart its future as a national park, he studied it closely. Yosemite was an eye-opener. Not only because of its grand scale—its American scale—but also because of the poignant contrast between the rugged cliffs and mountains and the tame, domestic atmosphere of the gentle valley floor. This contrast became a theme of many Olmsted landscapes.
Olmsted was not an aesthete, and the public park was not only a place to commune with nature. “Men must come together, and must be seen coming together [emphasis added], in carriages, on horseback and on foot, and the concourse of animated life which will thus be formed, must in itself be made, if possible, an attractive and diverting spectacle.” The public park was to be the great outdoor living room of the city, where its citizens would mingle and meet. In a sense, it was a large version of the New England town green that Olmsted knew so well. However, in a vast city even a thousand-acre park had a limited impact. In response, Olmsted and Vaux devised the parkway—an American version of the Parisian boulevard (and no relative of the later automobile rural highway). The original parkway was an urban pleasure drive, with traffic lanes in the center for carriages, two broad green treed strips for pedestrians and bridle paths, and additional lanes for local traffic. The 260-foot-wide swaths were linear parks that gave breathing room to the congested industrial city, brought green spaces into neighborhoods, and created fashionable settings for large residences. The latter point was important, for parkway construction was financed by the income from new property taxes.
The first parkways were in Brooklyn, stretching miles from Prospect Park to the edges of the city. In Buffalo, Olmsted went further and created an entire park system, three separate parks joined to one another and to the downtown by avenues and parkways (sadly, long since converted into expressways). It turned Buffalo, which became known as the City of Elms, into the best-planned city in the country. In Boston, where Olmsted moved in 1881 after he became frustrated by political bickering over Central Park, he laid out his masterwork of urban design, the so-called Emerald Necklace. Nine continuous parks forming a seven-mile-long system, stretched from the Common to Franklin Park.
Of course, it was a different time. Decisions were taken by a relatively small, educated urban elite of city fathers and patricians, without public hearings and the oversight of countless private interest groups. There were no environmental impact studies, no experts, no consultants. When Olmsted was invited to Buffalo in 1868 to give advice on the park system, for example, he spent two days visiting sites, personally digging test holes to evaluate the soil conditions. The following day, he addressed a public meeting for an hour and presented the rough outlines of a plan. It was immediately accepted, and he was hired to prepare a preliminary report to be submitted six weeks hence. In the meantime, the park backers petitioned Albany to form a park commission that would issue public bonds. The legislature approved the project the following year, and work began. With enthusiastic civic leaders, supportive state politicians (the federal government played no role in financing urban parks), and a public that expected results, these large public works were undertaken with astonishing rapidity. In the case of Central Park, the competition for the design was held in 1858, and by the following summer work was sufficiently advanced that a program of free concerts was inaugurated and daily attendance in the park reached as high as 100,000. The following winter, the frozen lake was ready to receive skaters.
New Yorkers still skate in Central Park in the winter and boat on the lake in the summer. What is striking about Olmsted’s parks is their endurance. Generally, American cities have proved impervious to planning. The City Beautiful movement lasted three decades after its birth in 1900, but except in Washington its grand plans remained largely incomplete. Today, only forty years after urban renewal we are demolishing public housing projects, and some cities have even dismantled urban freeways. The fad for pedestrian malls closed to traffic was likewise fleeting. Yet in the 140 years since Central Park was built, no one has ever suggested that it was a mistake. True, the park experienced periods of neglect, especially during the post–World War II decades. There were unforeseen encroachments such as the zoo and the skating rink. Joggers and Rollerbladers have replaced promenading ladies and gentlemen. There is probably too much automobile traffic for what were originally conceived as pleasure drives for horse-drawn carriages. Yet while the activities that take place in the park have changed, its fundamental role as a place of retreat and renewal remains. Today, Central Park is as much used—and cherished—as ever.
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Olmsted was not merely a park builder; he was a visionary city planner. He planned a new town for the western railhead of the Northern Pacific, devised a street layout for the Bronx when it was annexed by the City of New York, and oversaw a comprehensive regional plan for all of Staten Island. Yet there is no record that he ever designed an “ideal city.” He was no utopian. That, too, explains his success. Unlike later planners, Olmsted did not try to impose a predetermined template on the city. When Leland Stanford approached him to plan a new college in California, the railroad magnate wanted a New England–style campus; Olmsted reasonably pointed out that the arid climate demanded a different solution. Likewise, when the city of San Francisco commissioned a park expecting a version of Central Park, Olmsted proposed a different solution tailored to that city’s particular climate and geography.
Olmsted could be dictatorial. Once, when he was working on South Park in Chicago, one of the commissioners asked him, “I don’t see, Mr. Olmsted, that the plans indicate any flower beds in the park. Now where would you recommend that these be placed?” Olmsted’s curt answer: “Anywhere outside the park.” He immersed himself in details, not only creating a Central Park police, but designing their uniforms. Yet as a planner, he purposely avoided trying to control everything. He understood that the city was too volatile, too changeable, to be easily tamed. The parks and parkways were big enough to hold their own; in between, he left the ebb and flow of city life largely to its own devices. Similarly, in his suburban plans, while he laid down certain broad rules governing public areas, he left individual homeowners room for personal expression and liberty. His was a peculiarly American approach to planning: open-ended, pragmatic, tolerant.
He approached cities with the long view of a gardener. “I have all my life been considering distant effects and always sacrificing immediate success and applause to that of the future,” he once observed to his son Rick. “In laying out Central Park we determined to think of no result to be realized in less than forty years.” This proved to be a good principle for city planning. His ability to see into the future was uncanny. In the Bronx, he proposed acquiring railroad rights-of-way well in advance of development, ensuring cheaper land costs and more efficient routes. In Staten Island, he advised laying out residential subdivisions in advance of the demand for suburban homes that he felt sure would come. When he was advising on Yosemite, he correctly foretold that the annual number of visitors, which was then two or three thousand, would in a century surpass a million.
Olmsted’s landscaping contracts always included a clause requiring follow-up visits for several years. The plan was not an end in itself but the beginning of a process. He assumed that over time adjustments and improvements would be required. Mistakes would be made. Some trees would thrive; others would have to be replaced. Unpredictable natural effects would have to be taken into account. This pragmatic quality served him well as a city planner and is another reason, I think, for his marked success in a field where so many have failed. He not only took the long view; he was prepared to adjust his plans as circumstances demanded.
Olmsted’s thinking about cities was not confined to the center. Although he and his family lived for a number of years in a Manhattan brownstone on West Forty-Sixth Street, he spent the bulk of his adult years in suburban towns: Clifton on Staten Island and Brookline outside Boston. He liked suburban life and wrote that suburbs combined the “ruralistic beauty of a loosely built New England village with a certain degree of the material and social advantages of a town.” This was the way that cities would expand. “The construction of good roads and walks, the laying of sewer, water, and gas pipes, and the supplying of sufficiently cheap, rapid, and comfortable conveyances to town centers, is all that is necessary to give any farming land in a healthy and attractive situation the value of town lots,” he wrote.
Olmsted, the godfather of sprawl? He did build the country’s first large planned suburban residential community outside Chicago, and he was responsible for several master-planned communities, not least, beautiful Druid Hills in Atlanta. He assumed—correctly, it turned out—that future urban growth in the United States would take place at a relatively low density. Yet in his suburban plans, he always emphasized the railroad or trolley link to downtown, for he considered suburb and city to be distinct but complementary. Moreover, his commitment to improving life in the burgeoning industrial city was absolute; that is why he was devoted to creating urban parks. He might have lived in the suburbs, but he was also a man of the city.
Olmsted would be disappointed by the decline of our cities and the increasing isolation of our suburbs. As a nineteenth-century gentleman, he would doubtless be appalled at our consumer society. “More barbarism and less civilization,” he might say. But the practical planner was never one to despair. “So, you have Walmarts and strip malls and cineplexes. Very well, there is a place for everything. But that is not sufficient. You are obliged to create public places among all this private expansion. Places for all people to mix. You must think big, you know. And you must think far ahead. What is it that you really want the metropolis to become, forty years from now? Because you’ll have to start working on it now.”
This essay is dated only inasmuch as in a post-9/11 world it is hard to imagine suburban sprawl becoming an election issue. The suggestion that Olmsted was the godfather of sprawl was made tongue in cheek, but the challenge of dealing with sprawl remains and must be faced, not as a malady, but as part of our modern urban condition.