This week, we are celebrating the 200th Anniversary of the birth of Frederick Law Olmsted on April 26, 1822. He is most famous as the designer of parks in New York City.

Perhaps, his greatest creation was Central Park, which he believed was an artistic exhibit of “God’s handiwork.” Based on the theology of his family friend Horace Bushnell, he hoped that the park would heal “the hundreds of thousands of tired workers” of their “vital exhaustion,” “nervous irritation” and “constitutional depressions.”

His and Calvert Vaux’s design of Central Park artfully and systematically provided vistas and paths that would help make one feel like the special object of a loving God and a beautiful city. Olmsted said every path, rock, flower, and tree had a functional purpose in the creation of a healing scene. The park would then revive “the poetic element of human nature” and exercise a “harmonizing and refining influence…favorable to courtesy, self-control and temperance.”*

Designing a subtle display of the presence of God in Central Park

In 1858 Olmsted and Vaux were given the nod to proceed with designing Central Park. The land had already been cleared of inhabitants such as the African Americans in Seneca Village and its buildings which included two churches, the African Union Methodist Church and the American Methodist Episcopal Zion Church.

The designers split their duties, with Vaux taking the main responsibility for the design of structures like bridges and archways. As an apprentice on Lewis Nockalls Cottingham’s project to return Hereford Cathedral in England to its Romanesque appearance, he learned much about building solid structures. (He later designed the Chapel, at Beth Olom Cemetary in Brooklyn.)

Untrained as an architect, Olmstead learned from Vaux how to draw up plans. Olmsted led the design of the landscape elements and supervised construction. It is fair to say that the overall vision of the park was Olmsted’s, which drew on the theology of Horace Bushnell.

Olmsted was particularly taken by Bushnell’s belief that a person is most influenced by God through “unconscious influences” from one’s social circles and natural environment. The concept launches off the premise that Christ’s love is more influential than appeals to logic. Olmsted wrote, “When our ministers will not feel it their duty to preach Christ solely to the understanding, but let Christ come as Love and not as Logic, the world will grow better faster than if ever has done before.”

On February 20, 1842, five years after he had become administrator-first of Central Park, Olmsted and his friend Charles Loring Brace sat riveted in a pew listening to Bushnell preach his immensely influential sermon “Unconscious Influence.”  Brace wrote a friend that the sermon “affected my whole life,” according to Brace’s biographer Stephen O’Conner.

Charles S. Beveridge, the editor of Olmsted’s papers, observed, “When in later years Olmsted described the process by which he wished his own landscape designs to have their effects, his basis was the same theory of unconscious influence.” The landscape designer believed that all art should have this effect.

Horace Bushnell’s theology

The pastor began his sermon with a quotation from the twentieth chapter of the Gospel of John so brief that most of his audience probably missed it: “There went in also that other disciple.”

Bushnell then rehearsed the Biblical story of the Resurrection.  After hearing from Mary Magdalene that Jesus had risen from the dead, John and Peter hurried to check out the cave of Jesus’ entombment. John arrived first but hesitated to enter. At the moment of decision, he froze.

Then, Peter arrived and entered the cave without hesitation. Only then did John unbend from his arrested state and follow. And so, both disciples came to “see and believe.”

Bushnell pointed out how every person hesitates before acting until unconsciously influenced by the action of another. “And just so, unawares to himself, is every man the whole race through, laying hold of his fellow-man, to lead him where otherwise he would not go. We overrun the boundaries of our personality—we flow together. A Peter leads a John, a John goes after a Peter, both of them unconscious of any influence exerted or received. And thus our life and conduct are ever propagating themselves, by a low of social contagion, throughout the circles and times in which we live.”

The “unconscious influences,” like those of Peter’s action on John, are so powerful because a person believes that the feeling toward action comes out of his or her essential character. “The Bible calls the good man’s life a light, and it is the nature of light to flow out spontaneously in all directions…” Coming from deep within, our influences may even be unnoticed by ourselves. To other people, the spontaneous exercise of one’s character appears to be more genuine and believable than contrived presentations of self.

The influence of our unself-conscious deeds and words may resonate in the heart of other people like delightful music rings in the ear. Friends sharing their pleasure in the sounds may not be able to tell exactly why they like them so much. It is the unconscious influence touching the inner ears attuned over time by relationships, experience, and preference.

Central Park’s environment evokes God’s creation in a similar way that may convince the heart before the mind understands. In Olmsted’s designs, he systematically worked to eliminate all elements that might distract the viewer from this unconscious unmediated delight of the park. He didn’t want scenes to seem as if they were designed to evoke emotional responses.

Landscapes layered into artful, smoothly flowing natural scenes can cause an “unbending” of tensions and prejudices so that we can be released to reflect upon our higher purposes on earth. The natural environment of a park could bring the glory of God in an intangible way to produce our awe for nature, and, maybe, nature’s God. 

Olmsted certainly felt that for him the Park’s panorama spoke about God’s glory, but he was also concerned that other people should have the freedom to come to a different conclusion.  The landscaper liked the application of Bushnell’s theology of influence because it allowed the person walking through the park the freedom to formulate his or her own response. For similar reasons, Olmsted favored the building of ameliorative institutions like the park or schools in the liminal area between lower and upper-class neighborhoods so that all classes freely could intermingle their experiences of nature.

What Olmsted thought would affect all people of all beliefs and classes was an experience of a singular refreshment, a high appreciation of the city and its peoples, and a growth of brotherly feeling between diverse peoples. Historian Beveridge wrote, “The most important and constant influence that people exert on each other, Bushnell believed, was not verbal, but rather a silent emanation of their real character that showed in their habitual conduct and made itself felt at a level below that of consciousness.” Olmsted recalled how he grew to appreciate nature by watching his mostly silent father enjoy nature during their rides through the countryside.

Like other Christians, Bushnell emphasized service to others, an outworking of the Golden Rule as enunciated by Jesus: “Do unto others as you would have them do to you” (Gospel of Matthew 7:13). Olmsted wrote that the purpose of park design must start above all with this principle. In an unpublished manuscript cited by Beveridge, the landscape designer wrote, “Service must precede art, since all turf, trees, flowers, fences, walks, water, paint, plaster, posts, and pillars in or under which there is no a purpose or direct utility or service are inartistic if not barbarous.”

Central Park as a civilizing force

Olmsted summarized the hoped-for effects of the park as civilizing the populace to virtuous habits of self-control and serving one another. Olmsted recalled theologian Bushnell’s observation in his 1847 sermon “Barbarism the First Danger” that “a new settlement like the United States “involved a tendency to…a relapse toward barbarism…” The dominance of ruffians over poor immigrants on their way to America, the chaotic slum life, the lawlessness of the frontier, and slavery threatened to throw the United States democracy into a war in which “the strong, the cunning, the sly and selfish rule over and spoil the sick, the simple…”, the designer observed in his “Notes on the pioneer condition.” Bushnell prescribed an ordering of society according to the principles of Christianity so that the Good is reinforced, the weak strengthened and the depraved find no favorable place to act out their wretched dramas.

Just in case the park’s ambiance was not enough to enforce morality and discourage the evil-doer, Olmsted established the Central Park Keepers. In his discussion of the design of Prospect Park, Olmsted told a scientific association that the Keepers were to restrain the “many ignorant, selfish and willful [persons] of perverted tastes and lawless dispositions.” Their primary task was to make sure that the park design wasn’t changed even in its smallest particulars.

In an essay called “Park,” he claimed, “that every foot of the Park’s surface, every tree and bush, as well as, every arch, roadway, and walk had been fixed where it is with a purpose, and upon its being so used that it may continue to serve that purpose to the best advantage, and upon it not being otherwise, depends its value.”

The Keepers arrested a couple of hundred miscreants a year. In 1860, for example, they made 228 arrests, half of which were for mere violations of park ordinances (e.g. using indecent language, throwing stones, defacing property, picking flowers, or walking on the grass). Drunken and disorderly conduct made up another third reports sociologist Dorceta Taylor.

Critics have pointed out that Bushnell’s theology seemed to deemphasize the pervasive presence of sin and evil, and so, underestimates their power of unconscious influence. In the park, natural beauty is influential only to a limited degree against evil desires. In fact, a park left unpoliced could become a wilderness of terror. The park design includes elements clearly speaking of charity but not so visibly about sin and forgiveness.

 

Reviving the civic spirit of democracy

Olmsted and his contemporaries tried various ways to keep the democratic civic spirit strong. They feared that the flaws of 19^th Century America might fatally undermine the sense of unity, trust, and mutual concern necessary for a democracy. (This section is indebted to the political philosopher Scott Roulier)

Many Europeans, too, wondered if a new nation in a wilderness could sustain democracy or would it be forced back into subjugation under a home-grown dictator or an imperial power as a colony. Even if the democracy survived, might its streets be red with the rule of tooth and claw of gangs and bossism? The debate persisted for a long time in the United States.

A French visitor, Alexis de Tocqueville, came in 1831 with some similar misgivings but discovered that the American democracy, though raw in formation, was thriving. He concluded that the view of American space as a wild wilderness was incorrect. Tocqueville found the democratic spirit bubbling up both in the city and the countryside. The future of American democracy was being led onward by “the habits of the heart” (religion and character) and “the small platoons of civic, fraternal and church organizations.” Much later, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner lapsed back into a hysteria against urban America. He said that the great open spaces of the United States promoted the democratic spirit while the city and town weighed the nation toward bossism and chaos.

 

Olmsted’s group of friends and allies laid their hopes somewhere between de Tocqueville, who minimized the spatial element in the formation of the American character, and Turner, who maximized the importance of space in the form of the frontier. Olmsted did find certain rural areas poised threats to civilization, but other rural communities were full of the ripening fruits of a democratic culture. The free intermingling of diverse peoples was itself creating an unconscious influence toward a democratic union.

The young New Yorker wanted to find out what was happening in the rest of America. So, he persuaded the editor at The New York Times to send him as a journalist to explore the American character as it was being formed in the Southern states. The result was that in 1852 he wrote articles that served as an influential witness to the conditions of slavery. His dispatches were published in the book The Cotton Kingdom, which had such an impact that even a century later it taught Malcolm X about the horrors of slavery.

On the trip to the deep South, Olmsted found evidence of the deleterious effects of slavery on the hidden economy of positive unconscious social influences. A rigid society based upon a highly controlled populace produced little soul-enlightening unconscious influences that mixed together to propel ordinary people forward to robust participation in public life. Lower and middle-class Southerners were highly dependent on the Slavocrat elite. In contrast, the Northern common people created public squares full of “clubs, Bible classes, debating societies…[groups] to pant road-side trees…, or getting up fireworks displays…” The French visitor Alexis de Tocqueville associated this rise of “the little platoons” of democracy with the type of popular Christianity prevalent in a society without a state-ordained church.

On an 1853 trip to Texas for The New York Times, Olmsted developed mixed feelings about the frontier state. On the one hand, he loved the “bewildering beauty” of the land, “an almost inexpressible” feeling of the sky being so close to the earth.  He even brought back a couple of “horny toads” that he kept as pets for years to remind him of his trip. He admired the land and the Germans of Neu-Branfels (New Braunfels) so much that he and his brother John even considered settling there. However, he had a foreboding that the slave economy would drive out the advantages of social diversity which generates unconscious mutual influences that move as an unseen hand driving cultural and economic progress.

Olmsted’s conclusion is that a landscape designer should create a democratic common space that serves as the anti-plantation to the overly-controlled formal spaces of the elites in Europe and the plantations of the slavocrats in the Deep South. The result would be a park that promoted the well-being of the common people, not just their social control. Olmsted found a number of allies for his democratic aesthetic.

Charles Eliot Norton, Washington Irving, and Henry Adams all decried the excesses and immorality of their day. Norton suggested that they needed cities that would mature civic virtue and fraternity. Andrew Downing, the leading landscape gardener of the mid-19^th Century, urged designers needed to plan parks that would nurture a “more fraternal spirit to our social life.” In a series of letters from 1849-1850, he argued for the “necessity of a great park” for New York City.

To promote this idea, his magazine Horticulturalist published Olmsted’s first essay, which observed the democratic qualities of a publicly financed park in England. Later, Olmsted argued that parks should be designed so that they sparked the “gregarious” instinct of people, the need to assemble and mingle in large groups. A park feature like the Mall in Central Park or the “Concert Groves” in Prospect Park would bring people of all classes, ethnicities, and beliefs together. The park created a sense of civic fraternity that went beyond neighborliness and family loyalty.

In an essay entitled, “Parks and the enlargement of towns,” Olmsted wrote, “Consider that the New York and Brooklyn Park are the only places in those associated cities where, in this eighteen hundred and seventieth year after Christ, you will find a body of Christians coming together, and with an evident glee in the prospect of coming together, all classes largely represented, with a common purpose, not at all intellectual, competitive with none, disposing to jealousy and spiritual or intellectual pride toward none, each individual adding by his mere presence to the pleasure of all others, all helping to the greater happiness of each. You may thus often see vast numbers of persons brought closely together, poor and rich, young and old, Jew and Gentile…I have looked studiously but vainly among the for a single face completely unsympathetic with the prevailing expression of good nature and light-heartedness.”

Tocqueville emphasized the religious aspects of American civic fraternity, but Turner not much. Here again, Olmsted struck a middling position. He opposed the imposition of a rich patron’s idea for a “Cathedral avenue” in Central Park to force a sense of centralized control.  Olmsted and his allies also blocked the desires of the city’s political potentate Boss Tweed, who rather fancied a park centered on an iconic statute of himself. (Some critics replied that Olmsted and his friends were part of an elite group that was bent on controlling threats from the masses.)

Rather, Olmsted favored a non-centered design in which the spiritual heart, the Bethesda Fountain with its Angel, was an intricate part of the complex social life of leisure that swirled around multiple centers like the relaxation on the Sheep Meadow, the intercourse on the Mall, and the vital materialism of the Reservoir. Without the deeper meaning of the angel of Bethesda Fountain, the disparate centers of the park’s social life would lack heart and transcendent meaning.  He was perhaps over-optimistic about the evangelistic potential of Central Park, but it still affects a testimony of sublime beauty.

Unfortunately, the bickering within the churches and among public leaders took their toll on Olmsted’s faith, which receded into a mere memory. He came to look upon his early agonizing over correct theology as a “queer” situation. The “unconscious influence” of his spiritual character became ever more obscure. Yet, his closest friend remained the Christian leader Brace and his landscape philosophy kept theologian Bushnell’s concept of “unconscious influence.” His biographer Laura Wood Roper noted that as Olmsted contemplated his death, he decidedly turned his thoughts back to God and started studying the Bible again. The “unconscious influence” of Central Park reached forward into the fate of its designer.

* Rybzynski 2003, 177; Olmsted 1997a, 345; Olmsted 1997c, 52; Hall 2002, 46.

Some of the works consulted:

Charles E. Beveridge. 2000 Fall. “Olmsted—his essential theory,” Nineteenth Century. The journal of the Victorian Society in America. 20, 2, 32-37.  pp. 1-6.

Horace Bushnell. 1852. Unconsicous Influence. London: Partridge and Oakey.

Charles Loring Brace. 1894. The life of Charles Loring Brace: chiefly told in his own letters, volume 3. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

Robert Lansing Edwards. 1992. Of singular genius, of singular grace. A biography of Horace Bushnell. Cleveland: Pilgrim Press.

Albert Fein. 1969. Frederick Law Olmsted: His development as a theorist and designer of the American city. Phd dissertation, Columbia University.

Daniel Walker Howe. 1983 Sept. The social science of Horace Bushnell. The Journal of American History. 70, 2, 305-325.

Francis R. Kowsky. 1998. County, Park & City. The Architecture and life of Calvert Vaux 1824-1895. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Justin Martin. 2011. Genius of Place. The Life of Frederick Law Olmsted. New York: Da Capo Press.

Robert Mugerauer. 1995. Interpreting environments: tradition, deconstruction and hermeneutics. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Robert Bruce Mullin. 2002. The Puritan as Yankee: A life of Horace Bushnell. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans.

Stephen O’Connor. 2004. Orphan Trains: the story of Charles Loring Brace and the children he saved and failed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Frederick Law Olmsted. 1852. Walks and talks of an American farmer in England. New York: George P. Putnam.

Frederick Law Olmsted. 1977. The papers of Frederick Law Olmsted, Vol 1. The formative Years 1822 to 1852. Charles Capen McLaughlin, editor. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press.

Frederick Law Olmsted.1990. “Notes on the pioneer condition,” in The California Frontier. Vol 5 of The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted, eds. Charles E. Beveridge and Carolyn F. Hoffman. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press.

Frederick Law Olmsted. 1997a (1971). Civilizing American Cities. Writings on city landscapes. New York: Da Capo Press.

Frederick Law Olmsted. 1997b. “Address to the Prospect Park Scientific Association,” in Writings on Public Parks, Parkways, and Park Systems, Vol 1.  The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted, eds. Charles E. Beveridge and Carolyn F. Hoffman. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press.

Frederick Law Olmsted. 1997c. “Park,” in Writings on Public Parks, Parkways, and Park Systems, Vol 1.  The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted, eds. Charles E. Beveridge and Carolyn F. Hoffman. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press.

Frederick Law Olmsted. 1997d. “Parks and the enlargement of towns,” in Writings on Public Parks, Parkways, and Park Systems, Vol 1.  The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted, eds. Charles E. Beveridge and Carolyn F. Hoffman. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press.

Frederick Law Olmsted. 2004 A Journey through Texas. Or a saddle-trip on the southwestern frontier. Lincoln” University of Nebraska.

Witold Rybczynski. 1999. A clearing in the distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Scribner.

Laura Wood Roper. 1973.  FLO: A biography of Frederick Law Olmsted. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 42-43, 59, 470-471.

Scott Roulier.  2010. “Frederick Law Olmsted. Democracy by design,” New England Journal of Political Science, Iv, 2, 311-343.

Scott Roulier. 2018. Shaping democracy: landscapes and urban design. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Dorceta E. Taylor. 1999. “Central Park as a model for social control: urban parks, social class and leisure behavior in Nineteenth Century America,” Journal of Leisure Research 31, 4, 420-477.

Read part 1

For more on God in NYC gardens:

Gardens of Vishnu and Shiva

Back to the Garden: an a national movement to “bear fruit in every good deed”

The Biblical Gardens of NYC

The Medieval Gardens of NYC

Central Park Celebrity Audio Guide (free)

The 10 best spots for plant classes in NYC

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