Voices in Time

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As the city grows larger, projects for the public benefit multiply, land becomes more valuable, and the park more and more really central. For what worthy purpose could the city be required to take out and keep excluded from the field of ordinary urban improvements a body of land in what was looked forward to as its very center, so large as that assigned for the park? For what such object of great prospective importance would a smaller body of land not have been adequate?

To these questions a sufficient answer can, we believe, be found in the expectation that the whole of the island of New York would, but for such a reservation, before many years be occupied by buildings and paved streets; that millions upon millions of men were to live their lives upon this island, millions more to go out from it or its immediate densely populated suburbs only occasionally and at long intervals, and that all its inhabitants would assuredly suffer, in greater or less degree, according to their occupations and the degree of their confinement to it, from influences engendered by these conditions. The narrow reservations previously made offered no relief from them because they would soon be dominated by surrounding buildings, and because the noise, bustle, confinement, and noxious qualities of the air of the streets would extend over them without important mitigation.

Provisions for the improvement of the ground, however, pointed to something more than mere exemption from urban conditions: namely, to the formation of an opposite class of conditions, conditions remedial of the influences of urban conditions. Two classes of improvements were to be planned for this purpose: one directed to secure pure and wholesome air, to act through the lungs; the other to secure an antithesis of objects of vision to those of the streets and houses which should act remedially, by impressions on the mind and suggestions to the imagination.

A broad stretch of slightly undulating meadow without defined edge, its turf lost in a haze of the shadows of scattered trees under the branches of which the eye would range, would be of high value. If beyond this meadow occurred a depression of the surface, and the heads of other trees were seen again at an uncertain distance, the conditions would be most of all valuable for the purpose in view. First, because there would be positive assurance of a certain considerable extent of space free of all ordinary urban conditions, and in the soft, smooth, tranquil surface of turf, of immunity from the bustling, violent, and wearing influences which act upon the surface of the streets. Secondly, because the imagination, looking into the soft commingling lights and shadows and fading tints of color of the background would have encouragement to extend these purely rural conditions indefinitely.

The pleasing uncertainty and delicate, mysterious tone which chiaroscuro lends to the distance of an open pastoral landscape certainly cannot be paralleled in rugged ground, where the scope of vision is limited. But a similar influence on the mind, less only in degree, is experienced as we pass near the edge of a long stretch of natural woods—the outer trees disposed in irregular clusters, the lower branches sweeping the turf or bending over rocks, and underwood mingling at intervals with their foliage. Under such circumstances, although the eye nowhere penetrates far, an agreeable suggestion is conveyed to the imagination of freedom, and of interest beyond the objects which at any moment meet the eye. While elements of scenery of this class would both acquire and impart value from their contrast with the simpler elements of open pastoral landscapes, their effect, by tending to withdraw the mind to an indefinite distance from all objects associated with the streets and walls of the city, would be of the same character.

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