Building Nature

Yesterday’s post about the possibility of creating a park in the New Jersey Meadowlands didn’t touch on an interesting aspect of the proposed park: little of it would be built by people. Instead the park would be made by removing built structures and letting nature have its way.

It’s easy to forget that most urban and suburban parks are artificial landscapes. They are constructed as thoroughly and painstakingly as the buildings around them, even if they are presented as pieces of nature preserved in the city. For example, the big park of my childhood, Flushing Meadows, was a swamp before it was drained and cleaned for the 1939-1940 World’s Fair.

The picture above shows Bethesda Terrace in Central Park in 1862, as the park was reaching the state of “mostly completed.” The masonry portion of the complex stair looks much as it does today, but the high ridge behind it was mostly removed. This could seem almost like the natural landscape was being fitted into the park, but that’s not true. The south end of the park’s area was a swampy mess and the north end was too hilly.

Here’s a better example:

The path on the right that has a stone wall on either side of it? That’s the 86th Street transverse road. Those walls are still visible today, but only on the side facing the road because the earth was built up on either side of the road to effectively bury it below grade. All of the foreground land was raised after this picture was taken.

Finally, a photo that really shows the work involved in making nature:

That tangle of pipes is part of the system used by a reservoir – it’s not clear from the 156-year-old label if that’s the lake-like reservoir still in the park or the rectangular reservoir filled in the 1930s and turned into the Great Lawn. The water features in the park, including the two reservoirs, the lake, the pond, and the Harlem Meer, are all artificial to some degree, and there is a lot of buried pipe keeping them functioning.