Architecture: Parks and Landscape

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Architecture: Parks and Landscape

The small cities and towns of the new American Republic did not have public parks. They did not need them; their inhabitants had only to walk a short distance to reach nature. Nevertheless, there were park-like urban spaces. Almost every New England village had a turfed green at its center, used for markets and other public gatherings. When villages grew into towns, these greens were often enlarged, as in the case of Boston Common. The other type of American urban space was the square, which appeared early in formally planned colonial towns such as New Haven (1638), Philadelphia (1681–1683), Annapolis (1694), Williamsburg (c. 1699), and Savannah (1733). Squares were often faced by important civic buildings such as churches and courthouses. The American square had one unique characteristic: unlike the Italian piazza and the French place, it was grassy rather than paved. These little patches of green were the precursors of the great urban parks of the nineteenth century.

A distinctive landscape feature of many New England squares and commons was a huge tree—usually an American elm. The trunk of a mature elm, a fast-growing species, is easily 10 or 12 feet in diameter and more than 120 feet high, so these public trees assumed the role of both landmarks and civic monuments. Elms were often given names. New Haven had the Benjamin Franklin Elm, which was planted on the day of the great man's death; Kenne-bunk, Maine, had the Lafayette Elm, which stood in front of a house where the general had stayed during his triumphal tour of 1824; and Cambridge Common in Massachusetts had the Washington Elm, below whose spreading branches the general had assumed command of the Revolutionary Army. Most of these great elms were later destroyed by Dutch Elm disease, which ravaged urban America in the mid-twentieth century.

Public parks originated in European cities when royal gardens such as the Tuileries and Regent's Park were opened to the general public. America, lacking an aristocracy, had nothing of that kind. A few cities, such as New York, Charleston, and Boston, provided their citizens with waterside promenades (sometimes disused batteries), but these were a rarity, for river banks were usually taken up by docks and warehouses, commerce taking precedence over recreation. Washington, D.C., was planned to have a parklike space. Pierre L'Enfant (1754–1825) intended a mile-long Grand Avenue flanked by public gardens, but it was never built. The future Mall sat vacant until the middle of the nineteenth century, when Andrew Jackson Downing (1815–1852) laid out a national park.

The art of gardening in America remained a private affair. After 1750, it was common for northern mansions and southern plantation houses to have extensive walled gardens, laid out in a formal manner derived largely from Britain and France, a practice that continued after independence. Handsome though they were, these early gardens did not exhibit distinctly American characteristics. For that, one has to look to the most important work of public architecture of the early nineteenth century, Thomas Jefferson's University of Virginia at Charlottesville (1817–1826). His idea of a green, open space enclosed by rows of buildings was entirely original. The socalled Lawn, bordered by rows of trees, was conceived as an outdoor room. It was a sort of idealized town green for what Jefferson called an "academical village." This was not a closed quadrangle on the cloistered Oxford model, however, for it was open at one end and symbolically faced the West—the frontier. Jefferson looked to the ancient Roman world for inspiration—the library was patterned on the Pantheon—but he interpreted classicism in a singular way. His unusual combination of the formal and the bucolic set a pattern that Americans would follow, in cities and suburbs, until the present.