Another great article from Karrie Jacobs, this one on Prospect Park: here. I’m not even going to attempt to summarize it. You should read it because it’s a fascinating look at how parks in New York have developed over the last 150 years.
Jacobs’s painstaking descriptions of the work that went into the creation of Prospect Park drive home the point that is in this post’s title. Cityscapes are manmade even when they incorporate natural elements. Manhattan’s landscape is famously artificial, with cut-down hills, filled-in valleys, a great deal of landfill, and buried streams. The landscape of Central Park is nearly all artificial. More specifically, it was designed and built, which are not words associated with nature.
Even if a piece of natural landscape survives, its presence in a city changes it. Inwood Hill Park, at the northern tip of Manhattan, is often described as the last natural landscape on the island. Even if that were true – and the fact that a highway runs through the eastern fringe of the park suggests that it’s not – a small isolated piece of nature is no longer untouched nature. The animals present are different because animals no longer freely roam the surrounding terrain, the plants are different because some (such as poison ivy) are removed for the benefit of people and plants as a whole are influenced by the animals that live in the areas, the drainage patterns are different because of the paving around the park and the drains at the paved areas within the park, and so on. It’s more natural than Central Park, but that’s not saying that it’s nature.
This post and its argument are not criticism. Prospect Park is beautiful. It’s loved because of that and because it serves the needs of the surrounding communities for green space, recreation space, and rest space. It is successful because it is not nature: an untouched chunk of the primeval Brooklyn landscape would not look as good or function as well as Olmsted and Vaux’s masterpiece. When I emphasize that it’s manmade, I’m complimenting its designers and builders on adding something to the city that is so much better than what nature could have provided.
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