From Promenade to Park: The Gregarious Origins of Brooklyn's Park Movement

Abstract

his sense of professional frustration to his friend and colleague Frederick Law Olmsted. I get heart-sick and disgusted at times with the twaddle that passes for 'love of nature' -in the face of the evidence have everywhere that to the great mass of the so called cultivated people nature has no attraction except when aided by the merest clap traps of fashionable entertainment which the real lover of nature seeks to escape from. A year earlier Cleveland had proposed a solution to this clashing of ideals and interests; he wrote Olmsted, we need two systems of parks, -one for the comparatively few who really want seclusion and the beauty of nature-another for the multitude who can only enjoy solitude in crowds-to whom any work is artistic in proportion as it is artificial. ' Cleveland recognized a central tension pervading the nascent park movement of the second half of the nineteenth century. The designs of and social aspirations evoked by the urban park curiously juxtaposed natural, rural, and solitary associations with more cultivated, cosmopolitan, and gregarious ideals. Within the realm of urban leisure the earlier nineteenth-century European and American custom of promenading furnished substantial precedent for the more urbane elements of the park movement. Early in the century urban promenades were defined less by distinctive landscape plans than by a characteristic set of social ideals and practices. As urban spaces they varied considerably from city to city. Formal walks, lines of trees, gardens, and fountains were often laid out in connection with sweeping vistas over water, across the landscape, or along streets lined with elegant residences. In the urban social world promenading assumed a place between the convivial associations of informal visiting, etiquette-controlled parlor calling,2 and the structured encounters of periodic civic and religious celebrations. On warm evenings after dinner and on Sundays after church, many well-dressed city residents, with parasols and walking sticks in hand, on foot and in carriages, departed home and congregation for the broader world of the promenade. There, the heterogeneous urban crowd, with its tenuous social connections, was transformed into a unifying body of leisure, enjoyment, and refinement.