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

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

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[Footnote A: The length of roads, walks, etc., completed, will be found
in the last Annual Report, pp. 47-52.

The length of the famous drive in Hyde Park (the King Road) is 2 1/2
miles. There is another road, straight between two gates, 1 1/4 miles in
length. "Rotten Bow" (the Ride) is a trifle over a mile in length.

The length of Drive in Central Park will be 9 1/3 miles; the length of
Bridle Roads, 5 1/3 miles; the length of Walks, 20 miles.

Ten miles of walk, gravelled and substantially underlaid, are now
finished.

Eighteen archways are planned, beside those of the Transverse Roads,
equal 1 to 46 acres. When the planting is well-grown, no two of the
archways will be visible from the same point.]

To their supply there were hard limitations. On each side, within half
a mile of each other, there were to be lines of stone and brick houses,
cutting off any great lateral distance. Suppose one to have entered
the Park at the south end, and to have moved far enough within it to
dispossess his mind of the sentiments of the streets: he will have
threaded his way between hillocks and rocks, one after another,
differing in magnitude, but never opening a landscape having breadth or
distance. He ascends a hill and looks northward: the most distant
object is the hard, straight, horizontal line of the stone wall of the
Reservoir, flanked on one side by the peak of Vista Rock. It is a little
over a mile distant,--but, standing clear out against the horizon,
appears much less than that. Hide it with foliage, as well as the houses
right and left, and the limitation of distance is a mile in front and a
quarter of a mile upon each side. Low hills or ridges of rock in a great
degree cut off the intermediate ground from view: cross these, and the
same unassociated succession of objects might be visited, but no one of
them would have engaged the visitor's attention and attracted him onward
from a distance. The plan has evidently been to make a selection of
the natural features to form the leading ideas of the new scenery, to
magnify the most important quality of each of these, and to remove or
tone down all the irregularities of the ground between them, and by all
means to make the limit of vision undefined and obscure. Thus, in the
central portion of the Lower Park the low grounds have been generally
filled, and the high grounds reduced; but the two largest areas of low
ground have been excavated, the excavation being carried laterally into
the hills as far as was possible, without extravagant removal of rock,
and the earth obtained transferred to higher ground connecting hillocks
with hills. Excavations have also been made about the base of all the
more remarkable ledges and peaks of rock, while additional material has
been conveyed to their sides and summits to increase their size and
dignity.

This general rule of the plan was calculated to give, in the first
place, breadth, and, in the second, emphasis, to any general prospect
of the Park. A want of unity, or rather, if we may use the word, of
assemblage, belonged to the ground; and it must have been one of the
first problems to establish some one conspicuous, salient idea which
should take the lead in the composition, and about which all minor
features should seem naturally to group as accessories. The straight,
evidently artificial, and hence distinctive and notable, Mall, with its
terminating Terrace, was the resolution of this problem. It will be,
when the trees are fully grown, a feature of the requisite importance,
--and will serve the further purpose of opening the view toward, and, as
it were, framing and keeping attention directed upon, Vista Rock, which
from the southern end of the Mall is the most distant object that can be
brought into view.

For the same purpose, evidently, it was thought desirable to insist,
as far as possible, upon a pause at the point where, to the visitor
proceeding northward, the whole hill-side and glen before Vista Rock
first came under view, and where an effect of distance in that direction
was yet attainable. This is provided for by the Terrace, with its
several stairs and stages, and temptations to linger and rest. The
introduction of the Lake to the northward of the Terrace also obliges a
diversion from the direct line of proceeding; the visitor's attention is
henceforth directed laterally, or held by local objects, until at length
by a circuitous route he reaches and ascends (if he chooses) the summit
of Vista Rock, when a new landscape of entirely different character, and
one not within our control, is opened to him. Thus the apparent distance
of Vista Rock from the lower part of the Park (which is increased
by means which we have not thought it necessary to describe) is not
falsified by any experience of the visitor in his subsequent journey to
it.

There was a fine and completely natural landscape in the Upper Park. The
plan only simplifies it,--removing and modifying those objects which
were incongruous with its best predominating character, and here and
there adding emphasis or shadow.

The Park (with the extension) is two and three quarter miles in length
and nearly half a mile wide. It contains 843 acres, including the
Reservoir (136 acres).

Original cost of land to 106th Street, $5,444,369.90
Of this, assessed on adjoining property, 1,657,590.00
____________
To be paid by corporation direct, 3,786,779.90
Assessed value of extension land, (106th to 110th,) 1,400,000.00
____________
Total cost of land, $6,800,000.00[B]

[Footnote B: The amount thus far expended in construction and
maintenance is nearly $3,000,000. The plan upon which the work is
proceeding will require a further expenditure of $1,600,000. The
expenditure is not squandered. Much the larger part of it is paid for
day-labor. Account with laborers is kept by the hour, the rate of wages
being scarcely above the lowest contractor's rates, and 30 per cent.
below the rate of other public works of the city; always paid directly
into the laborer's hands,--in specie, however.

The thorough government of the work, and the general efficiency of its
direction, are indicated by the remarkable good order and absence of
"accidents" which have characterized it. See p. 64 of Annual Report,
1860. For some particulars of cost, see pp. 61, 62, of same Report.]

In all European parks, there is more or less land the only use of which
is to give a greater length to the roads which pass around it,--it being
out of sight, and, in American phrase, unimproved. There is not an acre
of land in Central Park, which, if not wanted for Park purposes, would
not sell for at least as much as the land surrounding the Park and
beyond its limits,--that is to say, for at least $60,000, the legal
annual interest of which is $4,200. This would be the ratio of the
annual waste of property in the case of any land not put to use; but,
in elaborating the plan, care has been taken that no part of the Park
should be without its special advantages, attractions, or valuable uses,
and that these should as far as possible be made immediately available
to the public.

The comprehensiveness of purpose and the variety of detail of the plan
far exceed those of any other park in the world, and have involved, and
continue to involve, a greater amount of study and invention than has
ever before been given to a park. A consideration of this should enforce
an unusually careful method of maintenance, both in the gardening and
police departments. Sweeping with a broom of brush-wood once a week is
well enough for a hovel; but the floors of a palace must needs be daily
waxed and polished, to justify their original cost. We are unused to
thorough gardening in this country. There are not in all the United
States a dozen lawns or grass-plots so well kept as the majority of
tradesmen's door-yards in England or Holland. Few of our citizens have
ever seen a really well-kept ground. During the last summer, much of the
Park was in a state of which the Superintendent professed himself to be
ashamed; but it caused not the slightest comment with the public, so far
as we heard. As nearly all men in office, who have not a personal taste
to satisfy, are well content, if they succeed in satisfying the public,
we fear the Superintendent will be forced to "economize" on the keeping
of the Park, as he was the past year, to a degree which will be as far
from true economy as the cleaning of mosaic floors with birch brooms.
The Park is laid out in a manner which assumes and requires cleanly and
orderly habits in those who use it; much of its good quality will be
lost, if it be not very neatly kept; and such negligence in the keeping
will tend to negligence in the using.

In the plan, there is taken for granted a generally good inclination, a
cleanly, temperate, orderly disposition, on the part of the public which
is to frequent the Park, and finally to be the governors of its keeping,
and a good, well-disposed, and well-disciplined police force, who would,
in spite of "the inabilities of a republic," adequately control the
cases exceptional to the assumed general good habits of that public,--at
the same time neglecting no precaution to facilitate the convenient
enforcement of the laws, and reduce the temptation to disorderly
practices to a minimum.

How thoroughly justified has been this confidence in the people, taking
into account the novelty of a good public ground, of cleanliness in our
public places, and indeed the novelty of the whole undertaking, we have
already intimated. How much the privileges of the Park in its present
incomplete condition are appreciated, and how generally the requirements
of order are satisfied, the following summary, compiled from the
Park-keeper's reports of the first summer's use after the roads of the
Lower Park were opened, will inadequately show.

Number of visitors in six months. Foot. Saddle. Carriages.
May, 184,450 8,017 26,500
June, 294,300 9,050 31,300
July, 71,035 2,710 4,945
August, 63,800 875 14,905
September, 47,433 2,645 20,708
October, 160,187 3,014 26,813
Usual number of visitors on a
fine summer's day, 2,000 90 1,200
Usual number of visitors on a
fine Sunday, 35,000 60 1,500
(Men 20,000, Women 13,000, Children 2,000.)
Sunday, May 29, entrances counted, 75,000 120 3,200
Usual number of visitors,
fine Concert day, 7,500 180 2,500
Saturday, Sept. 22, (Concert day,)
entrances counted, 13,000 225 4,650

During this time, (six months,) but thirty persons were detected upon
the Park tipsy. Of these, twenty-four were sufficiently drunk to justify
their arrest,--the remainder going quietly off the grounds, when
requested to do so. That is to say, it is not oftener than once a week
that a man is observed to be the worse for liquor while on the Park; and
this, while three to four thousand laboring men are at work within it,
are paid upon it, and grog-shops for their accommodation are all along
its boundaries. In other words, about one in thirty thousand of the
visitors to the Park has been under the influence of drink when induced
to visit it.

On Christmas and New-Year's Days, it was estimated by many experienced
reporters that over 100,000 persons, each day, were on the Park,
generally in a frolicksome mood. Of these, but one (a small boy) was
observed by the keepers to be drunk; there was not an instance of
quarrelling, and no disorderly conduct, except a generally good-natured
resistance to the efforts of the police to maintain safety on the ice.

The Bloomingdale Road and Harlem Lane, two famous trotting-courses,
where several hundred famously fast horses may be seen at the top of
their speed any fine afternoon, both touch an entrance to the Park. The
Park roads are, of course, vastly attractive to the trotters, and for
a few weeks there were daily instances of fast driving there: as soon,
however, as the law and custom of the Park, restricting speed to a
moderate rate, could be made generally understood, fast driving became
very rare,--more so, probably, than in Hyde Park or the Bois de
Boulogne. As far as possible, an arrest has been made in every case
of intentionally fast driving observed by the keepers: those arrested
number less than one to ten thousand of the vehicles entering the Park
for pleasure-driving. In each case a fine (usually three dollars) has
been imposed by the magistrate.

In six months there have been sixty-four arrests for all sorts of
"disorderly conduct," including walking on the grass after being
requested to quit it, quarrelling, firing crackers, etc.,--one in
eighteen thousand visitors. So thoroughly established is the good
conduct of people on the Park, that many ladies walk daily in the Ramble
without attendance.

A protest, as already intimated, is occasionally made against the
completeness of detail to which the Commissioners are disposed to
carry their work, on the ground that the habits of the masses of our
city-population are ill-calculated for its appreciation, and that loss
and damage to expensive work must often be the result. To which we
would answer, that, if the authorities of the city hitherto have so far
misapprehended or neglected their duty as to allow a large industrious
population to continue so long without the opportunity for public
recreations that it has grown up ignorant of the rights and duties
appertaining to the general use of a well-kept pleasure-ground, any
losses of the kind apprehended, which may in consequence occur, should
be cheerfully borne as a necessary part of the responsibility of a
good government. Experience thus far, however, does not justify these
apprehensions.

To collect exact evidence showing that the Park is already exercising a
good influence upon the character of the people is not in the nature of
the case practicable. It has been observed that rude, noisy fellows,
after entering the more advanced or finished parts of the Park, become
hushed, moderate, and careful. Observing the generally tranquil and
pleased expression, and the quiet, sauntering movement, the frequent
exclamations of pleasure in the general view or in the sight of some
special object of natural beauty, on the part of the crowds of idlers in
the Ramble on a Sunday afternoon, and recollecting the totally opposite
character of feeling, thought, purpose, and sentiment which is expressed
by a crowd assembled anywhere else, especially in the public streets of
the city, the conviction cannot well be avoided that the Park already
exercises a beneficent influence of no inconsiderable value, and of a
kind which could have been gained in no other way. We speak of Sunday
afternoons and of a crowd; but the Park evidently does induce many a
poor family, and many a poor seamstress and journeyman, to take a day or
a half-day from the working-time of the week, to the end of retaining
their youth and their youthful relations with purer Nature, and to their
gain in strength, good-humor, safe citizenship, and--if the economists
must be satisfied--money-value to the commonwealth. Already, too, there
are several thousand men, women, and children who resort to the Park
habitually: some daily, before business or after business, and women
and children at regular hours during the day; some weekly; and some at
irregular, but certain frequent chances of their business. Mr. Astor,
when in town, rarely misses his daily ride; nor Mr. Bancroft; Mr. Mayor
Harper never his drive. And there are certain working-men with their
families equally sure to be met walking on Sunday morning or Sunday
afternoon; others on Saturday. The number of these _habitues_ constantly
increases. When we meet those who depend on the Park as on the butcher
and the omnibus, and the thousands who are again drawn by whatever
impulse and suggestion of the hour, we often ask, What would they have
done, where would they have been, to what sort of recreation would they
have turned, _if to any_, had there been no park? Of one sort the answer
is supplied by the keeper of a certain saloon, who came to the Park, as
he said, to see his old Sunday customers. The enjoyment of the ice had
made them forget their grog.

Six or seven years ago, an opposition brought down the prices and
quadrupled the accommodations of the Staten Island ferry-boats. Clifton
Park and numerous German gardens were opened; and the consequence was
described, in common phrase, as the transformation of a portion of the
island, on Sunday, to a Pandemonium. We thought we would, like Dante,
have a cool look at it. We had read so much about it, and heard it
talked about and preached about so much, that we were greatly surprised
to find the throng upon the sidewalks quite as orderly and a great deal
more evidently good-natured than any we ever saw before in the United
States. We spent some time in what we had been led to suppose the
hottest place, Clifton Park, in which there was a band of music and
several thousand persons, chiefly Germans, though with a good sprinkling
of Irish servant-girls with their lovers and brothers, with beer
and ices; but we saw no rudeness, and no more impropriety, no more
excitement, no more (week-day) sin, than we had seen at the church in
the morning. Every face, however, was foreign. By-and-by came in three
Americans, talking loudly, moving rudely, proclaiming contempt for
"lager" and yelling for "liquor," bantering and offering fight, joking
coarsely, profane, noisy, demonstrative in any and every way, to the end
of attracting attention to themselves, and proclaiming that they were
"on a spree" and highly excited. They could not keep it up; they became
awkward, ill at ease, and at length silent, standing looking about them
in stupid wonder. Evidently they could not understand what it meant:
people drinking, smoking in public, on Sunday, and yet not excited, not
trying to make it a spree. It was not comprehensible. We ascertained
that one of the ferry-boat bars had disposed of an enormous stock of
lemonade, ginger-beer, and soda-water before three o'clock,--but, till
this was all gone, not half a dozen glasses of intoxicating drinks.
We saw no quarrelling, no drunkenness, and nothing like the fearful
disorder which had been described,--with a few such exceptions as we
have mentioned of native Americans who had no conception of enjoyment
free from bodily excitement.

To teach and induce habits of orderly, tranquil, contemplative, or
social amusement, moderate exercises and recreation, soothing to the
nerves, has been the most needed "mission" for New York. We think we
see daily evidence that the Park accomplishes not a little in this way.
Unfortunately, the evidence is not of a character to be expressed in
Federal currency, else the Commissioners would not be hesitating about
taking the ground from One-Hundred-and-Sixth to One-Hundred-and-Tenth
Street, because it is to cost half a million more than was anticipated.
What the Park is worth to us to-day is, we trust, but a trifle to what
it will be worth when the bulk of our hard-working people, of our
over-anxious Marthas, and our gutter-skating children shall live nearer
to it, and more generally understand what it offers them,--when its
play-grounds are ready, its walks more shaded,--when cheap and wholesome
meals, to the saving, occasionally, of the dreary housewife's daily
pottering, are to be had upon it,--when its system of cheap cabs shall
have been successfully inaugurated,--and when a daily discourse of sweet
sounds shall have been made an essential part of its functions in the
body-politic.

We shall not probably live to see "the gentility of Sir Philip Sidney
made universal," but we do hope that we shall live to know many
residents of towns of ten thousand population who will be ashamed to
subscribe for the building of new churches while no public play-ground
is being prepared for their people.

LIFE IN THE IRON-MILLS.

"Is this the end?
O Life, as futile, then, as frail!
What hope of answer or redress?"

A cloudy day: do you know what that is in a town of iron-works? The sky
sank down before dawn, muddy, flat, immovable. The air is thick, clammy
with the breath of crowded human beings. It stifles me. I open the
window, and, looking out, can scarcely see through the rain the grocer's
shop opposite, where a crowd of drunken Irishmen are puffing Lynchburg
tobacco in their pipes. I can detect the scent through all the foul
smells ranging loose in the air.

The idiosyncrasy of this town is smoke. It rolls sullenly in slow folds
from the great chimneys of the iron-foundries, and settles down in
black, slimy pools on the muddy streets. Smoke on the wharves, smoke on
the dingy boats, on the yellow river,--clinging in a coating of greasy
soot to the house-front, the two faded poplars, the faces of the
passers-by. The long train of mules, dragging masses of pig-iron through
the narrow street, have a foul vapor hanging to their reeking sides.
Here, inside, is a little broken figure of an angel pointing upward from
the mantel-shelf; but even its wings are covered with smoke, clotted
and black. Smoke everywhere! A dirty canary chirps desolately in a
cage beside me. Its dream of green fields and sunshine is a very old
dream,--almost worn out, I think.

From the back-window I can see a narrow brick-yard sloping down to
the river-side, strewed with rain-butts and tubs. The river, dull and
tawny-colored, _(la belle riviere!)_ drags itself sluggishly along,
tired of the heavy weight of boats and coal-barges. What wonder? When I
was a child, I used to fancy a look of weary, dumb appeal upon the face
of the negro-like river slavishly bearing its burden day after day.
Something of the same idle notion comes to me to-day, when from the
street-window I look on the slow stream of human life creeping past,
night and morning, to the great mills. Masses of men, with dull,
besotted faces bent to the ground, sharpened here and there by pain
or cunning; skin and muscle and flesh begrimed with smoke and ashes;
stooping all night over boiling caldrons of metal, laired by day in
dens of drunkenness and infamy; breathing from infancy to death an air
saturated with fog and grease and soot, vileness for soul and body. What
do you make of a case like that, amateur psychologist? You call it an
altogether serious thing to be alive: to these men it is a drunken jest,
a joke,--horrible to angels perhaps, to them commonplace enough. My
fancy about the river was an idle one: it is no type of such a life.
What if it be stagnant and slimy here? It knows that beyond there waits
for it odorous sunlight,--quaint old gardens, dusky with soft, green
foliage of apple-trees, and flushing crimson with roses,--air, and
fields, and mountains. The future of the Welsh puddler passing just now
is not so pleasant. To be stowed away, after his grimy work is done, in
a hole in the muddy graveyard, and after that,--_not_ air, nor green
fields, nor curious roses.

Can you see how foggy the day is? As I stand here, idly tapping the
window-pane, and looking out through the rain at the dirty back-yard and
the coal-boats below, fragments of an old story float up before me,--a
story of this old house into which I happened to come to-day. You may
think it a tiresome story enough, as foggy as the day, sharpened by no
sudden flashes of pain or pleasure.--I know: only the outline of a dull
life, that long since, with thousands of dull lives like its own, was
vainly lived and lost: thousands of them,--massed, vile, slimy lives,
like those of the torpid lizards in yonder stagnant water-butt.--Lost?
There is a curious point for you to settle, my friend, who study
psychology in a lazy, _dilettante_ way. Stop a moment. I am going to be
honest. This is what I want you to do. I want you to hide your disgust,
take no heed to your clean clothes, and come right down with me,--here,
into the thickest of the fog and mud and foul effluvia. I want you to
hear this story. There is a secret down here, in this nightmare fog,
that has lain dumb for centuries: I want to make it a real thing to you.
You, Egoist, or Pantheist, or Arminian, busy in making straight paths
for your feet on the hills, do not see it clearly,--this terrible
question which men here have gone mad and died trying to answer. I dare
not put this secret into words. I told you it was dumb. These men, going
by with drunken faces and brains full of unawakened power, do not ask it
of Society or of God. Their lives ask it; their deaths ask it. There is
no reply. I will tell you plainly that I have a great hope; and I bring
it to you to be tested. It is this: that this terrible dumb question is
its own reply; that it is not the sentence of death we think it, but,
from the very extremity of its darkness, the most solemn prophecy which
the world has known of the Hope to come. I dare make my meaning no
clearer, but will only tell my story. It will, perhaps, seem to you as
foul and dark as this thick vapor about us, and as pregnant with death;
but if your eyes are free as mine are to look deeper, no perfume-tinted
dawn will be so fair with promise of the day that shall surely come.

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