The Parks That Made the Man Who Made Central Park | Hacker News Reader

The Parks That Made the Man Who Made Central Park

nytimes.com

57 pointsjs212 comments

If only they'd let people build high-rise buildings around Golden Gate Park (same designer) . We'd have lots of beautiful apartment with gorgeous views of the park just like NYC.

Golden Gate Park is larger than Central Park and as far a I know has a much larger diversity of features tho it's doesn't feel as well maintained.

* conservatory

* art museum

* science museum / aquarium

* peddle boat pond

* rose garden

* two racing tracks

* Rc boat pond

* buffalo coral

* two windmills one with tulip garden

* soccer field

* japnese garden

and I'm sure I'm forgetting stuff. it's a great park.

I know some people will downvote this because they want Golden Gate Park / SF to stay as it is.

Just wanted to note that Olmsted ultimately didn't design GGP - the city consulted him for advice, which they ultimately ignored. William Hammond Hall, the topographic engineer, ended up being the commissioner.

Olmsted favored a different site [1] and, as I recall, the story was that when the city didn't go along Olmsted declined to be involved--at least to any significant degree.

[1] https://fromthethicket.com/2011/03/29/who-really-designed-go... "Interestingly, when Olmsted came to San Francisco in 1865, at the invitation of prominent citizens, and surveyed the landscape to determine a suitable location for a large urban park, he proposed an entirely different location and a very different configuration . . . more attuned to the lay of the land . . . a swath of park anchored by a large parcel hugging the lower, slopes of Buena Vista and Corona Heights, sweeping down to what is now Civic Center and from there turning north to the Bay in a wide, green boulevard along what is now Van Ness Avenue."

My landscape architecture professor called Olmsted the Kevin Bacon of American landscape history - you can probably trace any American landscape development back to Olmsted in four steps.

Also, it's interesting that when Olmsted designed Central Park, he didn't actually intend for it to be used for active recreation. In his vision of the park, you were either walking or riding a carriage, and scenery was only meant to be viewed (don't even think about eating or making out on the grass!).

Stories as these give me hope for humanity. A man visits and sees that which is good and seeks to re-create it elsewhere. “Better to light a candle than curse the darkness.”

Especially if there are only black people in the way of re-creating that good.

https://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/28/nyregion/unearthing-an-af...

I highly recommend the book Genius of Place, a biography of the man. He had many other remarkable contributions to American history, even in journalism and healthcare.

If you’re interested in this in much more detail, see The Power Broker (Robert Moses and the Fall of New York) by Robert A. Caro

This piece is about the English parks that inspired Olmsted. The Power Broker is about Robert Moses. Does it spend much time on Olmsted and his inspirations for Central Park?

I haven’t read the book, but would it even be possible to understand Robert Moses without understanding Olmstead?

I think you underestimate the sheer genius of Robert Caro. I cannot think of a biographer or scholar who researches, digs, puts his hands in the mud more to uncover the truth. He is a national treasure. His Moses and LBJ bios are absolute gems in the literary canon of biography as a genre.

I read the book a few years ago, and I'd summarise it as follows:

-In a democracy, it's extremely hard to build big projects, as there are too many stakeholders with conflicting interests

-Moses tried to do things democratically and failed. He then figured out a way to hack the system by things like appropriating tons of power into an obscure position (Parks Commissioner), using bond funding which was much more protected constitutionally because it's a contract between private citizens, throwing money into a project before it was authorised and then saying he had to finish it otherwise the money would have been wasted, etc.

-He was phenomenally successful, until he was eventually stopped, and since then everyone is stuck with the "not being able to build anything" problem, especially in NYC (eg [1] )

-The reason Moses was bad was basically that his ideas didn't move with the times, which happens to everyone but especially people in positions of huge and unaccountable power. He never appreciated the vibrancy of urban life and wanted to put highways and parkways everywhere. He was also very racist (again, not moving with the times).

-Which is kind of why we have democracy in the first place

-People's feelings about parks, though, haven't changed so much in all of that time. Central Park went into a bit of a decline after Moses (along with the city in general) but is now more vibrant than ever. Hence, I don't remember much in the book about Olmsted.

[1] http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/05/new-york-infrastructu...

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