Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 by Various

V >> Various >> Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861

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Many observers have ascribed the rapid change which for twenty years
past has been going on in the relative character of towns and villages
on the one hand, and cities on the other, to the mere operation of the
railroad-system. But that system itself grew out of higher instincts.
Equal communities demand equal privileges and advantages. They tend
to produce a common level. The country does not acquiesce in the
superiority of the city in manners, comforts, or luxuries. It demands
a market at its door,--first-rate men for its advisers in all medical,
legal, moral, and political matters. It demands for itself the
amusements, the refinements, the privileges of the city. This is to
be brought about only by the application, at any cost, of the most
immediate methods of communication with the city; and behold our
railroad system,--the Briarean shaking of hands which the country gives
the city! The growth of this system is a curious commentary on the
purely mercenary policy which is ordinarily supposed to govern the
investments of capital. The railroads of the United States are as much
the products of social rivalries and the fruits of an ineradicable
democratic instinct for popularizing all advantages, as of any
commercial emulation. The people have willingly bandaged their own eyes,
and allowed themselves to believe a profitable investment was made,
because their inclinations were so determined to have the roads,
profitable or not. Their wives and daughters _would_ shop in the city;
the choicest sights and sounds were there; there concentrated themselves
the intellectual and moral lights; there were the representative
splendors of the state or nation;--and a swift access to them was
essential to true equality and self-respect.

One does not need to be a graybeard to recall the time when every
county-town in New England had, because it needs must have, its
first rate lawyer, its distinguished surgeon, its comprehensive
business-man,--and when a fixed and unchanging population gave to our
villages a more solid and a more elegant air than they now possess. The
Connecticut river-villages, with a considerable increase in population,
and a vast improvement in the general character of the dwellings, have
nevertheless lost their most characterizing features,--the large and
dignified residences of their founders, and the presence of the once
able and widely known men that were identified with their local
importance and pride. The railroads have concentrated the ability of all
the professions in the cities, and carried thither the wealth of all the
old families. To them, and not to the county-town, repair the people for
advice in all critical matters, for supplies in all important purchases,
for all their rarest pleasures, and all their most prized and memorable
opportunities.

Cities, and the immediate neighborhood of cities, are rapidly becoming
the chosen residences of the enterprising, successful, and intelligent.
As might be supposed, the movement works both ways: the locomotive
facilities carry citizens into the country, as well as countrymen into
the city. But those who have once tasted the city are never wholly
weaned from it, and every citizen who moves into a village-community
sends two countrymen back to take his place. He infects the country with
civic tastes, and acts as a great conductor between the town and the
country. It is apparent, too, that the experience of ten years, during
which some strong reaction upon the centripetal tendencies of the
previous ten years drove many of the wealthy and the self-supposed
lovers of quietude and space into the country, has dispersed several
very natural prejudices, and returned the larger part of the truants
to their original ways. One of these prejudices was, that our ordinary
Northern climate was as favorable to the outdoor habits of the leisurely
class as the English climate; whereas, besides not having a leisurely
class, and never being destined to have any, under our wise
wealth-distributing customs, and not having any out-door habits, which
grow up only on estates and on hereditary fortunes, experience has
convinced most who have tried it that we have only six months when
out-of-doors allows any comfort, health, or pleasure away from the city.
The roads are sloughs; side-walks are wanting; shelter is gone with the
leaves; non-intercourse is proclaimed; companionship cannot be found;
leisure is a drug; books grow stupid; the country is a stupendous bore.
Another prejudice was the anticipated economy of the country. This has
turned out to be, as might have been expected, an economy to those who
fall in with its ways, which citizens are wholly inapt and unprepared to
do. It is very economical not to want city comforts and conveniences.
But it proves more expensive to those who go into the country to want
them there than it did to have them where they abound. They are not to
be had in the country at any price,--water, gas, fuel, food, attendance,
amusement, locomotion in all weathers; but such a moderate measure of
them as a city-bred family cannot live without involves so great an
expense, that the expected economy of life in the country to those not
actually brought up there turns out a delusion. The expensiveness of
life in the city comes of the generous and grand scale on which it there
proceeds, not from the superior cost of the necessaries or comforts of
life. They are undoubtedly cheaper in the city, all things considered,
than anywhere in the country. Where everything is to be had, in the
smallest or the largest quantities,--where every form of service can be
commanded at a moment's notice,--where the wit, skill, competition of a
country are concentrated upon the furnishing of all commodities at the
most taking rates,--there prices will, of course, be most reasonable;
and the expensiveness of such communities, we repeat, is entirely due to
the abundant wealth which makes such enormous demands and secures such
various comforts and luxuries;--in short, it is the high standard of
living, not the cost of the necessaries of life. This high standard
is, of course, an evil to those whose social ambition drives them to a
rivalry for which they are not prepared. But no special pity is due to
hardships self-imposed by pride and folly. The probability is, that,
proportioned to their income from labor, the cost of living in the city,
for the bulk of its population, is lighter, their degree of comfort
considered, than in the country. And for the wealthy class of society,
no doubt, on the whole, economy is served by living in the city. Our
most expensive class is that which lives in the country after the manner
of the city.

A literary man, of talents and thorough respectability, lately informed
us, that, after trying all places, cities, villages, farmhouses,
boarding-houses, hotels, taverns, he had discovered that keeping house
in New York was the cheapest way to live,--vastly the cheapest, if
the amount of convenience and comfort was considered,--and absolutely
cheapest in fact. To be sure, being a bachelor, his housekeeping was
done in a single room, the back-room of a third-story, in a respectable
and convenient house and neighborhood. His rent was ninety-six dollars a
year. His expenses of every other kind, (clothing excepted,) one dollar
a week. He could not get his chop or steak cooked well enough, nor his
coffee made right, until he took them in hand himself,--nor his bed
made, nor his room cleaned. His conveniences were incredibly great. He
cooked by alcohol, and expected to warm himself the winter through on
two gallons of alcohol at seventy-five cents a gallon. This admirable
housekeeping is equalled in economy only by that of a millionnaire, a
New-Yorker, and a bachelor also, whose accounts, all accurately kept by
his own hand, showed, after death, that (1st) his own living, (2d) his
support of religion, (3d) his charities, (4th) his gifts to a favorite
niece, had not averaged, for twenty years, over five hundred dollars.
Truly, the city is a cheap place to live in, for those who know how! And
what place is cheap for those who do not?

Contrary to the old notion, the more accurate statistics of recent times
have proved the city, as compared with the country, the more healthy,
the more moral, and the more religious place. What used to be considered
the great superiority of the country--hardship, absence of social
excitements and public amusements, simple food, freedom from moral
exposure--a better knowledge of the human constitution, considered
either physically or morally, has shown to be decidedly opposed to
health and virtue. More constitutions are broken down in the hardening
process than survive and profit by it. Cold houses, coarse food
unskilfully cooked, long winters, harsh springs, however favorable to
the heroism of the stomach, the lungs, and the spirits, are not found
conducive to longevity. In like manner, monotony, seclusion, lack of
variety and of social stimulus lower the tone of humanity, drive to
sensual pleasures and secret vices, and nourish a miserable pack of
mean and degrading immoralities, of which scandal, gossip, backbiting,
tale-bearing are the better examples.

In the Old World, the wealth of states is freely expended in the
embellishment of their capitals. It is well understood, not only that
loyalty is never more economically secured than by a lavish appeal to
the pride of the citizen in the magnificence of the public buildings
and grounds which he identifies with his nationality, but that popular
restlessness is exhaled and dangerous passions drained off in the
roominess which parks and gardens afford the common people. In the
New World, it has not yet proved necessary to provide against popular
discontents or to bribe popular patriotism with spectacles and
state-parade; and if it were so, there is no government with an interest
of its own separate from that of the people to adopt this policy. It has
therefore been concluded that democratic institutions must necessarily
lack splendor and great public provision for the gratification of the
aesthetic tastes or the indulgence of the leisure of the common people.
The people being, then, our sovereigns, it has not been felt that they
would or could have the largeness of view, the foresight, the sympathy
with leisure, elegance, and ease, to provide liberally and expensively
for their own recreation and refreshment. A bald utility has been the
anticipated genius of our public policy. Our national Mercury was to be
simply the god of the post-office, or the sprite of the barometer,--our
Pan, to keep the crows from the corn-fields,--our Muses, to preside over
district-schools. It begins now to appear that the people are not likely
to think anything too good for themselves, or to higgle about the
expense of whatever ministers largely to their tastes and fancies,--that
political freedom, popular education, the circulation of newspapers,
books, engravings, pictures, have already created a public which
understands that man does not live by bread alone,--which demands
leisure, beauty, space, architecture, landscape, music, elegance, with
an imperative voice, and is ready to back its demands with the necessary
self-taxation. This experience our absolute faith in free institutions
enabled us to anticipate as the inevitable result of our political
system; but let us confess that the rapidity with which it has developed
itself has taken us by surprise. We knew, that, when the people truly
realized their sovereignty, they would claim not only the utilitarian,
but the artistic and munificent attributes of their throne,--and that
all the splendors and decorations, all the provisions for leisure,
taste, and recreation, which kings and courts have made, would be found
to be mere preludes and rehearsals to the grander arrangements and
achievements of the vastly richer and more legitimate sovereign, the
People, when he understood his own right and duty. As dynasties and
thrones have been predictions of the royalty of the people, so old
courts and old capitals, with all their pomp and circumstance, their
parks and gardens, galleries and statues, are but dim prefigurings of
the glories of architecture, the grandeur of the grounds, the splendor
and richness of the museums and conservatories with which the people
will finally crown their own self-respect and decorate their own
majesty. But we did not expect to see this sure prophecy turning itself
into history in our day. We thought the people were too busy with the
spade and the quill to care for any other sceptres at present. But it
is now plain that they have been dreaming princely dreams and thinking
royal thoughts all the while, and are now ready to put them into costly
expression.

Passing by all other evidences of this, we come at once to the most
majestic and indisputable witness of this fact, the actual existence
of the Central Park in New York,--the most striking evidence of
the sovereignty of the people yet afforded in the history of free
institutions,--the best answer yet given to the doubts and fears which
have frowned on the theory of self-government,--the first grand proof
that the people do not mean to give up the advantages and victories of
aristocratic governments, in maintaining a popular one, but to engraft
the energy, foresight, and liberality of concentrated powers upon
democratic ideas, and keep all that has adorned and improved the past,
while abandoning what has impaired and disgraced it. That the American
people appreciate and are ready to support what is most elegant,
refined, and beautiful in the greatest capitals of Europe,--that they
value and intend to provide the largest and most costly opportunities
for the enjoyment of their own leisure, artistic tastes, and rural
instincts, is emphatically declared in the history, progress, and
manifest destiny of the Central Park; while their competency to use
wisely, to enjoy peacefully, to protect sacredly, and to improve
industriously the expensive, exposed, and elegant pleasure-ground they
have devised, is proved with redundant testimony by the year and more of
experience we have had in the use of the Park, under circumstances far
less favorable than any that can ever again arise. As a test of the
ability of the people to know their own higher wants, of the power of
their artistic instincts, their docility to the counsels of their most
judicious representatives, their superiority to petty economies, their
strength to resist the natural opposition of heavy tax-payers to
expensive public works, their gentleness and amenableness to just
authority in the pursuit of their pleasures, of their susceptibility to
the softening influences of elegance and beauty, of their honest pride
and rejoicing in their own splendor, of their superior fondness for what
is innocent and elevating over what is base and degrading, when
brought within equal reach, the Central Park has already afforded most
encouraging, nay, most decisive proof.

The Central Park is an anomaly to those who have not deeply studied the
tendencies of popular governments. It is a royal work, undertaken and
achieved by the Democracy,--surprising equally themselves and their
skeptical friends at home and abroad,--and developing, both in its
creation and growth, in its use and application, new and almost
incredible tastes, aptitudes, capacities, and powers in the people
themselves. That the people should be capable of the magnanimity of
laying down their authority, when necessary to concentrate it in
the hands of energetic and responsible trustees requiring large
powers,--that they should be willing to tax themselves heavily for the
benefit of future generations,--that they should be wise enough to
distrust their own judgment and defer modestly to the counsels of
experts,--that they should be in favor of the most solid and substantial
work,--that they should be willing to have the better half of their
money under ground and out of sight, invested in drains and foundations
of roads,--that they should acquiesce cheerfully in all the restrictions
necessary to the achievement of the work, while admitted freely to the
use and enjoyment of its inchoate processes,--that their conduct and
manners should prove so unexceptionable,--their disposition to trespass
upon strict rules so small,--their use and improvement of the work so
free, so easy, and so immediately justificatory of all the cost of so
generous and grand an enterprise: these things throw light and cheer
upon the prospects of popular institutions, at a period when they are
seriously clouded from other quarters.

We do not propose to enter into any description of the Central Park.
Those who have not already visited it will find a description,
accompanying a study for the plan submitted for competition in 1858, by
Messrs. Olmsted and Vaux, and published among the Documents of the New
York Senate, which will satisfy their utmost expectations. We wish
merely to throw out some replies to the leading objections we have met
in the papers and other quarters to the plan itself. We need hardly say
that the Central Park requires no advocate and no defence. Its great
proprietor, the Public, is perfectly satisfied with his purchase and his
agents. He thinks himself providentially guided in the choice of his
Superintendent, and does not vainly pique himself upon his sagacity in
selecting Mr. Frederick Law Olmsted for the post. This gentleman, in his
place, offsets at least a thousand square plugs in round holes. He is
precisely the man for the place,--and that is precisely the place for
the man. Among final causes, it would be difficult not to assign the
Central Park as the reason of his existence. To fill the duties of his
office as he has filled them,--to prove himself equally competent as
original designer, patient executor, potent disciplinarian, and model
police-officer,--to enforce a method, precision, and strictness, equally
marked in the workmanship, in the accounts, and in the police of the
Park,--to be equally studious of the highest possible use and enjoyment
of the work by the public of to-day, and of the prospects and privileges
of the coming generations,--to sympathize with the outside people,
while in the closest fellowship with the inside,--to make himself
equally the favorite and friend of the people and of the workmen:
this proves an original adaptation, most carefully improved, which we
seriously believe not capable of being paralleled in any other public
work, of similar magnitude, ever undertaken. The union of prosaic
sense with poetical feeling, of democratic sympathies with refined
and scholarly tastes, of punctilious respect for facts with tender
hospitality for ideas, has enabled him to appreciate and embody, both in
the conception and execution of the Park, the beau-ideal of a people's
pleasure-ground. If he had not borne, as an agriculturist, and as the
keenest, most candid, and instructive of all our writers on the moral
and political economy of our American Slavery, a name to be long
remembered, he might safely trust his reputation to the keeping of New
York city and all her successive citizens, as the author and achiever of
the Central Park,--which, when completed, will prove, we are confident,
the most splendid, satisfactory, and popular park in the world.

Two grand assumptions have controlled the design from the inception.

First, That the Park would be the only park deserving the name, for a
town of twice or thrice the present population of New York; that
this town would be built compactly around it (and in this respect
of centrality it would differ from any extant metropolitan park of
magnitude); and that it would be a town of greater wealth and more
luxurious demands than any now existing.

Second, That, while in harmony with the luxury of the rich, the Park
should and would be used more than any existing park by people of
moderate wealth and by poor people, and that its use by these people
must be made safe, convenient, agreeable; that they must be expected
to have a pride and pleasure in using it rightly, in cherishing and
protecting it against all causes of injury and dilapidation, and that
this is to be provided for and encouraged.

A want of appreciation of the first assumption is the cause of all
sincere criticism against the Transverse Roads. Some engineers
originally pronounced them impracticable of construction; but all their
grounds of apprehension have been removed by the construction of two of
them, especially by the completion of the tunnel under Vista Rock, and
below the foundation of the Reservoir embankment and wall. They were
planned for the future; they are being built solidly, massively,
permanently, for the future. Less thoroughly and expensively
constructed, they would need to be rebuilt in the future at enormously
increased cost, and with great interruption to the use of the Park; and
the grounds in their vicinity, losing the advantage of age, would need
to be remodelled and remade. An engineer, visiting the Park for the
first time, and hearing the criticism to which we refer applied to the
walls and bridges of the Transverse Roads, observed,--"People in this
country are so unaccustomed to see genuine substantial work, they do not
know what it means when they meet with it." We think he did not do the
people justice.

The Transverse Roads passing through the Park will not be seen from
it; and although they will not be, when deep in the shadow of the
overhanging bridges and groves, without a very grand beauty, this will
be the beauty of utility and of permanence, not of imaginative grace.
The various bridges and archways of the Park proper, while equally
thorough in their mode of construction, and consequently expensive,
are in all cases embellished each with special decorations in form and
color. These decorations have the same quality of substantiality and
thorough good workmanship. Note the clean under-cutting of the leaves,
(of which there are more than fifty different forms in the decorations
of the Terrace arch,) and their consequent sharp and expressive shadows.
Admitting the need of these structures, and the economy of a method of
construction which would render them permanent, the additional cost of
their permanent decoration in this way could not have been rationally
grudged.

Regard for the distant future has likewise controlled the planting; and
the Commissioners, in so far as they have resisted the clamor of the
day, that the Park must be immediately shaded, have done wisely. Every
horticulturist knows that this immediate shade would be purchased at an
expense of dwarfed, diseased, and deformed trees, with stinted shade, in
the future. No man has planted large and small trees together without
regretting the former within twenty years. The same consideration
answers an objection which has been made, that the trees are too much
arranged in masses of color. Imagine a growth of twenty years, with the
proper thinnings, and most of these masses will resolve each into one
tree, singled out, as the best individual of its mass, to remain. There
is a large scale in the planting, as in everything else.

Regard to the convenience, comfort, and safety of those who cannot
afford to visit the Park in carriages has led to an unusual extent and
variety of character in the walks, and also to a peculiar arrangement by
which they are carried in many instances beneath and across the line of
the carriage-roads. Thus access can be had by pedestrians to all parts
of the Park at times when the roads are thronged with vehicles, without
any delays or dangers in crossing the roads, and without the humiliation
to sensitive democrats of being spattered or dusted, or looked down upon
from luxurious equipages.

The great irregularity of the surface offers facilities for this
purpose,--the walks being carried through the heads of valleys which are
crossed by the carriage-ways upon arches of masonry. Now with regard to
these archways, if no purposes of convenience were to be served by them,
the Park would not, we may admit, be beautified by them. But we assume
that the population of New York is to be doubled; that, when it is so,
if not sooner, the walks and drives of the Park will often be densely
thronged; and, for the comfort of the people, when that shall be the
case, we consider that these archways will be absolutely necessary.[A]
Assuming further, then, that they are to be built, and, if ever, built
now,--since it would involve an entirely new-modelling of the Park to
introduce them in the future,--it was necessary to pay some attention to
make them agreeable and unmonotonous objects, or the general impression
of ease, freedom, and variety would be interfered with very materially.
It is not to make the Park architectural, as is commonly supposed, that
various and somewhat expensive _design_ is introduced; on the contrary,
it is the intention to plant closely in the vicinity of all the arches,
so that they may be unnoticed in the general effect, and be seen only
just at the time they are being used, when, of course, they must come
under notice. The charge is made, that the features of the natural
landscape have been disregarded in the plan. To which we answer, that on
the ground of the Lower Park there was originally no landscape, in the
artistic sense. There were hills, and hillocks, and rocks, and swampy
valleys. It would have been easy to flood the swamps into ponds, to
clothe the hillocks with grass and the hills with foliage, and leave the
rocks each unscathed in its picturesqueness. And this would have been a
great improvement; yet there would be no landscape: there would be
an unassociated succession of objects,--many nice "bits" of scenery,
appropriate to a villa-garden or to an artist's sketch-book, but no
scenery such as an artist arranges for his broad canvas, no composition,
no _park-like_ prospect. It would have afforded a good place for
loitering; but if this were all that was desirable, forty acres would
have done as well as a thousand, as is shown in the Ramble. Space,
breadth, objects in the distance, clear in outline, but obscure,
mysterious, exciting curiosity, in their detail, were wanting.

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