Hedgelords

TEN YEARS AGO, two psychologists and a landscape architect designed a study to answer the question of whether formal gardens—flat plots laid out in Euclidean figures, organized according to radial or bilateral symmetry and comprising bright manicured beds of sundry foliage—offer a more suitable environment for psychic rehabilitation than settings whose “natural” curvilinearity suggest a lack of intervention in a primordially rural terrain. The researchers took their cues from a handful of popular theses about the curative powers of the outdoors, most prominently those of the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, who believed the contemplation of organic scenes to be an incomparable balm for the sick soul. Using Amazon’s digital labor marketplace, the group recruited three hundred individuals to click through images of gardens wrought to varying degrees of formality and assess each space in terms of visual appeal, apparent naturalness, and—most importantly—“perceived restorative potential.” A slider allowed them to indicate on a scale of zero to one hundred the extent to which a garden seemed to offer “not at all a good place for a break” or “very much a good place for a break.” Participants were asked to sustain a mood of distress through the course of the assessment so as to more easily fantasize the relief a patch of flora might induce.

To the researchers’ presumable delight, the subjects (mostly white, with a diversity of household incomes) plainly signaled that they judged informal gardens—gardens that “contained more ‘nature’”—to possess greater regenerative capability. Lower-income respondents expressed a special affinity for structurelessness; men, overall, did not. Perhaps the most gratifying finding was that the participants were sensitive to the difference at all, an indication of basic receptivity to the subtleties of landscape art that would have come as no surprise to Olmsted. It was precisely this receptivity that provided the mechanism for his vision of urban reform. Olmsted’s purpose, however, transcended relaxation; a park was never just a place to take a break.

Today, the principal irony of Central Park’s topography lies in the assiduously maintained tracts at its northeast corner that make up the Conservatory Garden, constructed eighty years after Olmsted and Calvert Vaux’s Greensward Plan. This recently renovated trio of formal plots, revered by its patrons but not especially well known, represents everything the planners rejected in their original rus in urbe design; nothing else in the park’s 840 acres approaches the garden’s geometric rigidity. Even so, the garden appears to complement—in its air of acute civility—Olmsted’s dream of a spiritually ordered park.

CENTRAL PARK WAS OLMSTED’S first landscape project, and his writings make clear that he’d envisioned it as an arboretum of bourgeois manners. In the ideal, he explained in an 1870 lecture, public parks exercise “a distinctly harmonizing and refining influence upon the most unfortunate and lawless classes of the city—an influence favorable to courtesy, self-control, and temperance.” He and Vaux, his better half in design, inherited this notion from Andrew Jackson Downing, a horticulturalist who’d translated the English picturesque tradition to American landscapes. The picturesque made a dialectic of the traditional binary between beautiful and sublime—between the pastoral delicacy or terrific vastness of a natural scene—and spurned straight lines in an attempt to emulate nature’s intelligent spontaneity and sensual transience. It represented, in Downing’s phrase, “an idea of beauty or power strongly and irregularly expressed.”

Downing communicated his enthusiasm for the picturesque in his advocacy for urban parks, which he predicted would prove “better preachers of temperance than temperance societies, better refiners of national manners than dancing schools, and better promoters of general good feeling than any lectures on the philosophy of happiness.” No undertaking tested this theory on a grander scale than Central Park. As the park’s first superintendent, Olmsted issued a series of guidelines that ordered users “not to walk upon the grass,” “not to pick any flowers, leaves, twigs, fruits,” “not to throw stones or other missiles,” “not to annoy the birds,” and “not to publicly use any provoking or indecent language.” From the beginning, a police force—“more like a military unit than the public park liaisons or educators they were touted to be,” sociologist Dorceta Taylor wrote in 1999—applied these prohibitions.

New York’s elite, in turn, quickly recognized the space as the externalization of psychic order for which Olmsted had hoped. In an early appraisal, the Unitarian preacher Henry Whitney Bellows acknowledged “daily evidence” that the park was accomplishing the “most needed ‘mission’” in urban life: “To teach and induce habits of orderly, tranquil, contemplative, or social amusements, [to] moderate exercises and recreation, soothing to the nerves.” Olmsted had longed for courtesy, self-control, and temperance; Bellows noticed that after surrendering to Central Park’s environs, “rude, noisy fellows” became “hushed, moderate, and careful.”

Olmsted and his fellow advocates for the picturesque were adamant in their belief that formal landscapes were limited by didacticism. To impress upon the human spirit, a landscape needed to work discreetly. For Olmsted, this meant inducing what he suggestively described as a “tranquilizing influence” over the individual, a quieting achieved by an “unbending of the faculties” that would leave them in a passive and compliant state. A landscape’s adherence to a set of readily apparent geometrical rules risked instructing its visitors too forcefully, rendering them unreceptive to subliminal education.

In a report to Brooklyn’s park commissioners, Olmsted and Vaux explained moreover how the presentation of “a class of objects to the perceptive organs” in the form of a picturesque landscape brought about precisely the kind of rehabilitation necessary for individuals to maintain a life of steady toil. “All wealth is the result of labor,” the architects observed, and labor, in turn, required “recuperation.” Such was “the great advantage which a town finds in a park,” the designers wrote: “the addition to the health, strength, and morality which comes from it to its people, an advantage which is not only in itself very great and positive, but which as certainly results in an increase of material wealth.”

Embedded in the local vision of Central Park, in other words, was a national one: a well-ordered fabric of wealth-producing individuals prospering in the young republic. Bellows, in concert with his peers, hailed the park’s premises as “the most striking evidence of the sovereignty of the people yet afforded in the history of free institutions,” a horticultural expression of autonomy that sacrificed nothing of the “advantages and victories of aristocratic governments.” The execution of the “manifest destiny of the Central Park,” a “royal work, undertaken and achieved by the Democracy,” proved not only Americans’ “superior fondness for what is innocent and elevating over what is base and degrading” but also the “almost incredible tastes, aptitudes, capacities, and powers in the people themselves.” The park’s contemporary managers and benefactors, in turn, have continued to present the park as an arena for citizen formation. What kind of citizen? is the question that abides.

DESPITE ITS RECENT refurbishment, the Conservatory Garden has not changed dramatically since its inception. The site was the concept of Gilmore D. Clarke, a landscape architect who was responsible for much of the resurfacing of New York City during Robert Moses’s reign and whose exploits are the subject of a recent survey by the historian Thomas J. Campanella. Designing the American Century: The Public Landscapes of Clarke and Rapuano, 1915–1965 (Princeton University Press, 2025) is an extensive and belated account of Clarke’s collaborations with designers, engineers, and municipal officials—primarily Michael Rapuano, his business partner, but also the fortuitously named Betty Sprout, who made the planting schemes for many of the city’s new or reimagined gardens. The literature on Clarke and Rapuano before now was slim, on Sprout basically nonexistent. Campanella’s study of their many projects, which understandably devotes only a short section to the Conservatory Garden, is opulently illustrated with blueprints, photographs, and wash renderings—an impressive archival assemblage that demonstrates the designers’ rigor and finesse.

The Conservatory Garden was built using Works Progress Administration labor, a fact Moses overlooked in remarks he delivered at the site’s inauguration in the fall of 1937. Under a wisteria-bestrewn pergola perpendicular to the central Italianate lawn, workers set an elevated promenade with thirteen disks in homage to the original American colonies, the placement of the disks reflecting the sequence of their founding. On three beds descending from the walkway, gardeners laid 6,700 White Lady narcissi—a revolutionary battalion of daffodils. The large turf rectangle proceeding from the pergola was flanked by parallel lines of Japanese yew hedges, each culminating in a sharp spiral. Set farther off on both sides of the lawn were two dozen crabapple trees and, on either side of those, the complementing gardens: to the north, a French plot of concentric ovals sown with memorial roses, Korean chrysanthemums, and flowering quince; to the south, an English-style garden whose scattering of saucer magnolias presided over manifold annuals and perennials. All this efflorescence would have been spectacle enough, but typical for Moses, the opening of the gardens entailed great fanfare. A troupe of Bronx children in calico skirts danced the tarantella; another in kilts performed a sword dance. A third youth ensemble, from Brooklyn and clad in pastels, undertook a waltz.

Campanella contends that the Conservatory Garden’s neoformal thrust was the result of Clarke’s “dyed-in-the-wool” classicism. A scion of Manhattan’s floral trade, Clarke was raised on the Upper West Side. He graduated from the Dwight School and then Cornell, whose maturing landscape program was breaking from the Olmstedian doctrine that held sway at Harvard. (Olmsted’s disciples “have almost as tight control over American gardening,” an observer noted in 1927, “as the Klan once had over Indiana politics.”) In the 1910s and ’20s, Cornell funneled architecture students into a fellowship at the American Academy in Rome to train in the Italianate mode—Renaissance layouts preoccupied with linearity and forced perspective—which they would later bring to bear on “Country Place” commissions for Brahmins hoping to emulate the aristocratic feeling of European estates.

In 1922, Clarke became chief architect for Westchester’s parks commission and quickly brought on a spate of Cornellians, including Rapuano. They spent much of the following decade sculpting a network of parkways that still carries vehicles in and out of the city: the Saw Mill, the Hutchinson, and the Taconic, the last of which Campanella deems the “superlative example” of American parkway design, prompting the book’s most poetic reflections. The highways were Hogarthian “lines of beauty” whose “sigmoidal sashay” induced in motorists an invigorating aesthetic attentiveness; they “emulated the apparent randomness of nature, shunning all things ‘artificial,’” preferring to hard angularity the gradual turns of a wooded stroll. Whatever disdain the Cornell graduates had for the pastoral-picturesque, in other words, they had not entirely escaped it. Clarke’s own mentor, Bryant Fleming, had apprenticed with Olmsted.

Clarke met Moses (another Dwight alum) on the banks of the Bronx River while supervising construction on the parkway that bears its name, one of the world’s first limited-access roads. He advised on Moses’s first civic masterpiece, Long Island’s Jones Beach, and when Moses ascended to the chair of New York City’s Parks Department, in 1934, he hired Clarke to run its landscape arm. Along with him came many others, including Rapuano and Sprout—who’d obtained a degree in landscape architecture from a small women-only program and later married Clarke—as well as Thomas Drees Price, a Rome fellow who’d led a reconstruction of Horace’s Villa in Tivoli. Spending Moses’s New Deal cash, Clarke and Rapuano’s team set out on the first of many projects to construct and reconstruct city parks (Jacob Riis, City Hall, Flushing Meadow, Madison Square, Carl Schurz, Bryant, Forest, Riverside), parkways (Henry Hudson, the Belt, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway), and public housing (Ten Eyck, Harlem River, Vladeck, Kingsborough). All that in just the first five or so years. Campanella attributes the department’s astounding efficiency to the house style of the Cornellians, who in response to New Deal imperatives for “economy, toughness, and simplicity” readily superimposed the classical forms they’d been marketing to the American gentry onto city property. “What had long been a design tradition associated with wealth and privilege,” Campanella writes, “was retooled now to serve the people.”

Nowhere was this approach better distilled than in the Conservatory Garden, which Clarke conceived alongside Sprout, who handled the complex planting scheme, and Price, who planned the terracing and architectural elements. The garden took its name from the structures it replaced, a collection of turn-of-the-century glass conservatories that had once been among Central Park’s most popular attractions but by the 1930s was deemed too expensive to maintain. The new grounds were more in line with Moses’s vision for a systematic landscape. He “did not revere the spontaneity of nature,” Elizabeth Blackmar and Roy Rosenzweig wrote in a 1992 history, but opted instead for efficiency, order, and a “principle of neatness” that eventually “doomed some of the most colorful features of the eclectic park.” Speaking at the garden’s opening, Moses spared no sympathy for its ferrovitreous predecessor: “I must confess that I am not so much entertained as others by leafy palms and exotic plants that eat beefsteak at night and bloom once in one thousand years.”

ROBERT MOSES WAS NOT the only eminent orator at the Conservatory Garden’s ribbon cutting. Campanella excerpts another set of remarks, by New York Times editor John H. Finley, who saw in the symmetry of its planting beds the seeds of an orderly society. “I am glad to know that it is to be a formal garden,” he explained, “where each plant has its place, where each group of plants contributes its share to the perfection of the whole, instead of a crowd of plant and flower of mob potentialities that may break into a riot and deprive the minorities of their rights or become a drab, uninteresting anarchic mass of vegetation where things seem to grow haphazard.”

Finley attributed the garden to the “thought” of Olmsted—plainly incorrect, as both Olmsted and Vaux would have been repulsed by the site’s conspicuous geometry. Vaux in particular believed that humans basically longed for the “well-balanced irregularity” of the picturesque, not just in their parks but in “almost every thing,” as he wrote in 1857. Evidently it was this irregularity that Finley and others feared in the city’s public space; New Yorkers were better confined to their “ordered receptacles” to avoid subsumption into the wanton energies of urban mobs, riots, and anarchic masses. The function Finley assigned to the garden echoed the prescriptions of the park’s earliest bourgeois boosters: that the landscape impart a vision of temperate democracy, free of protest.

Who precisely, though, comprised the “mob” Finley feared? The answer lies in an ill-considered omission of Campanella’s. Clarke did not write widely about his own work, but he did comment briefly on the Conservatory Garden in a mid-1950s oral history from which Campanella quotes: “[Clarke] often visited in later years and enjoyed ‘seeing the little kids … getting a good deal of pleasure out of it.’” Only in passing does Campanella mention the displacement of impoverished residents of color that was so typically a consequence of Moses’s reforms. Even as he acknowledges that Moses “loathed” Black and Puerto Rican New Yorkers, he is cautious not to overplay the significance of the parks director’s personal racism. Instead Campanella insists on the “European” character of the prewar city, pointing to the small proportion of the population that immigrants of color composed. But Clarke’s full comment, recovered in the archive, brings race into the foreground:

Campanella’s elision strips Clarke’s comment of its racial tenor such that the continuity between Clarke’s intent and that of the park’s original designers—the desire to mollify the city’s ethnic working class through landscape design—is obscured. The quote in context (“why I designed formal gardens”) demonstrates, moreover, that Clarke shared both Olmsted’s broad view (that landscape could be a subliminal means of improvement for the denizens of the “slums”) and Finley’s more immediate one (that a formal design was the preferred means to that end).

Only by locating the garden in continuity with the city does a possible motive for Clarke’s reasoning emerge. As the editor of the Times, Finley would have been aware of the unrest percolating in East Harlem during the year leading up to the opening of the Conservatory Garden. The previous August, the paper had covered an enormous parade celebrating the return of Congressman Vito Marcantonio, an Italian American champion of Puerto Rican independence who’d spent two weeks on the island where Pedro Albizu Campos, the leader of the nationalist movement, was imprisoned for conspiring against the colonial government. Just half a mile from the site of the future garden, some ten thousand Puerto Ricans—roughly a fifth of their entire population in New York—marched in condemnation of American imperialism with chants of “Free Puerto Rico.”

Migration to the US from the island, a spoil of the Spanish-American War, began in earnest after the Jones Act extended nominal citizenship to Puerto Ricans in 1917. Many who came to New York settled in the blocks adjoining the northeast corner of Central Park, a neighborhood inhabited up to that point by Jewish and Italian immigrants. The mid-1930s were a feverish moment for the city’s Puerto Rican left. Depression hit an already impoverished barrio especially hard, and Puerto Ricans (sometimes shut out from mainstream labor unions) fought to receive a share of New Deal relief. At least a few were able to obtain employment through the Works Progress Administration, which launched in 1935; nearly all of that program’s first $19 million disbursement went to New York, where Moses soon oversaw seventy thousand WPA workers in city parks. Some of the laborers who built the Conservatory Garden may have been Puerto Ricans living a few blocks away.

Political tensions climaxed in the spring of 1937, when on Palm Sunday the US-appointed Puerto Rican governor ordered police to open fire on a peaceful march in the southern coastal town of Ponce. The Ponce Massacre prompted demonstrations of unprecedented scale in the streets of El Barrio. The activist Evelina Lopez Antonetty, then only fourteen, recalled joining a seismic gathering: tens of thousands of people putting aside internecine conflicts to denounce colonial violence. “All of a sudden, when the massacre in Puerto Rico occurred, everything sort of stopped,” she told her sister in a 1976 oral history. “We were a minority, a tiny minority. It was working people from all over who came.” The protest, Antonetty remembered, was held at the northeast corner of Central Park.

The Times declined to cover it. Even later chroniclers of the park (Blackmar and Rosenzweig, for example, who tracked Central Park’s limited record as a site of direct action) make no mention of the gathering. How to account for this? The historian Lorrin Thomas has described the way in which Puerto Ricans’ attempts to obtain the full benefits of US citizenship were constrained by the perception of “their ‘mongrel’ racial origins” and their subjugation as a colonized people. In the 1930s, as in the preceding decades, the unwillingness to recognize the colonia as a political community was grounded in a view of Puerto Ricans as fundamentally lacking the capacity for self-government. But charges of lawlessness masked a more fundamental and contradistinctive fear—of the political force Puerto Ricans wielded, at least for a moment, in the city’s public spaces. Years later, residents along the park’s border were still writing to Moses to complain about the Puerto Ricans who “swing from the sturdy healthy branches like monkeys” and to propose fines for “destroying shrubbery,” a means of scourging “these people who are not yet aware of the privilege of American citizenship and how it is to be respected.”

CENTRAL PARK REMAINS, in the story it continues to tell of itself, less a space for the action of politics than for the production of virtue. It is hailed both for its democratic character and, often in the same breath, for its status as a crucially anti- or even suprapolitical zone. The current head of the Central Park Conservancy has emphasized its “neutral” character, portraying the park as a respite from the anxieties of ideology. Its spaces have been fenced off from the kinds of democratic activity that might justifiably earn it the title “the People’s Park,” as it has been credulously dubbed.

Olmsted’s sesquicentennial in 1972 saw the publication of a raft of books analyzing his life and work, including an illuminating monograph by a young urban planner named Elizabeth Barlow. In “Whatever Happened to Central Park?,” published in the Times that year, Barlow submitted that Olmsted would have been “horrified” by the extent to which recreational uses—Moses’s hallmark—had stripped the park of its pastoral essence. The city’s fiscal crisis in the mid-1970s subsequently spurred a yearslong remaking of the park. Advocates for its privatization fixated on the condition of public spaces: the volume of litter, the prevalence of crime, the poor maintenance of the landscape, the general impression of abeyance. New York City gradually acquiesced to the insistence of financial elites (Iphigene Ochs Sulzberger, Richard Gilder, George Soros) that Central Park would be better cared for in private hands, and in 1980, Barlow herself took the reins of the newly established Central Park Conservancy.

In 1982, she deputized a painter named Lynden Miller to lead a restoration of the Conservatory Garden. Miller solicited contributions by showing potential donors photos of the luxuriant scenery at historic English manors—Sissinghurst, Great Dixter, Hidcote. Her own set was skeptical. “Half the people you knew wouldn’t go above 79th Street without an armed escort,” she recalled in 2010. “People kept saying to me, ‘You’re crazy, you’re going to get raped and maimed in there.’” A transformative windfall arrived in 1987, when the children of New York real estate titan Jack D. Weiler donated $1.5 million to the garden in honor of their parents. It was the single largest donation the park had ever received, and it established the endowment that ensures the garden remains the most scrupulously tended corner of the park. (Weiler, who died in 1995, was already then known as the “father of Israeli housing,” a kingpin of settlement in the occupied West Bank; “Kiryat Jack Weiler” lies in the infamous Gilo tract.) Soon the bulk of the park’s operating budget was coming from private coffers, with the single-largest fundraising event—the Frederick Law Olmsted Awards Luncheon, known locally as the “hat lunch” for its farrago of millinery vanity—held annually in the Conservatory Garden.^*

To accelerate the park’s remediation, union workers would be weeded out and replaced with private staff. The conservancy gradually integrated other forms of labor: trainees on city welfare, community service mandates, and lots of volunteers. Conservancy employees abide by the garden’s dictate of propriety. “You don’t want people to be too conscious of who’s doing this work,” Diane Schaub, the current head gardener, has said. “We don’t want to call attention to ourselves.” By the 1990s, conservancy workers far outnumbered the handful of municipal employees in the park, which had completed its transformation, as historian Benjamin Holtzman wrote, from “a space entrusted to government to one ‘guarded’ by elites.” Free labor has meanwhile gone a long way to maintain the landscape—and to preserve its superegoic character. In a memoir, Miller admiringly described the enterprise of an elderly “Mrs. Russell” who lived in a nearby building. Every Sunday after church, Mrs. Russell would sit on a bench and keep watch in the Conservatory Garden. Equipped with whistle, pad, and pen, she “beamed fondly as she explained that if anyone got out of hand, she would blow her whistle and pretend to write down their names.” Miller made Russell and her husband “the garden’s honorary godparents.”

In addition to trimmed hedges, Miller seemed to have restored to the garden the tranquilizing spell that had been broken in the park around midcentury. By 1999, a correspondent for the Times could notice that, as before,

In the first decade of the conservancy’s tenure, the share of Black and Hispanic parkgoers dropped by nearly 40 percent.

Central Park today is hardly more open to collective action than it was a hundred years ago, and no instance of repression better illustrated the current order than when, in 2004, Michael Bloomberg turned away an enormous protest planned for the park’s Sheep Meadow—on the grounds, as the critic Michael Sorkin wrote, of potentially “deleterious effects on the freshly restored grass.” (Bloomberg proposed without a trace of irony that the demonstrators assemble instead on a stretch of the West Side Highway.) Barlow, for her part, has gone on lauding the park as “one of the great achievements of American democracy.”

The neurotic maintenance of the landscape all the while corresponds to an operation of the kind Olmsted outlined at the start, when he insisted that visitors would need to be “trained” in the “use” of the park and “restrained” in its “abuse”—every park-goer a deputy. In Frederick Wiseman’s documentary Central Park (1989), Henry Stern, the park commissioner under Ed Koch and Rudy Giuliani, foregrounds the “timeless” process of “informing people the rules” of Central Park, a ritual that (he stresses) must be “done and re-done until people are aware of what’s expected of them.” The framing of the problem in terms of its ceaselessness is a reminder that such a rules-based order presumes its subjects will always fall short of its demands.

IT SEEMS LIKELY that only regular visitors to the Conservatory Garden will recognize that it has once again been restored. The renovation of the past several years focused on subtler improvements to the pergola, the drainage system, the pavement. When I visited in spring of 2025, just as the garden was reopening, the atmosphere of fanatic upkeep was almost too much to bear. For fifteen minutes I watched a conservancy worker endeavor to wrangle a rosebush in the French garden back within the confines of a wrought-iron fence, from which it was attempting a prison break. (Clarence Cook, a Ruskinian critic who at Olmsted’s behest wrote an early book-length encomium of the park, had wondered: “Who ever knew … what the honeysuckle can do when it can follow its own inclination, and is not urged to climb a trellis it has no mind for?”)

During another visit, I followed a tour unfolding in the English garden, where a park ranger was extolling the virtues of a weeping higan cherry. Around the corner, she warned us not to consume the leaves of a flowering Japanese andromeda shrub lest we suffer blindness or death. A man leaning over to inspect the leaves stumbled onto a patch of mulch, incurring a sharp rebuke from our guide: “Please don’t step off the path.” If one is more ready to hear this kind of admonishment in a gallery of paintings than in a park, that is exactly the point. “What are parks—urban parks?” Barlow asks rhetorically in a scene from Wiseman’s film. “They’re recreation, they’re open space, the traditional definition of parks. But they’re also other things as well. They’re like museums: They’re collections, they’re collections of trees and public sculpture and beautiful things.”

In her 1972 book about Olmsted, composed before she became entangled in the conservancy’s privatization project, Barlow herself had taken a different stance. Keeping Olmsted’s “aristocratic paternalism” in view, she had acknowledged that it would seem

The ravine between this notion of the park (as a venue for extemporaneous social life) and Barlow’s later casting (as a “collection of beautiful things”) marks the impact of the decimation New York endured in the 1970s: the fiscal crisis, the retrenchment of federal support, and the passing of the city’s keys to private hands under a concordat of austerity. The acceptance, in other words, of its hardening as a public space. In the Conservancy era, the park bends more than ever to an original demand: the augmentation of adjacent property values. In 1851, before the city had settled on a centralized plot, an observer wrote of the proposal for a Manhattan green at nearby Jones Wood: “Will anyone pretend the Park is not a scheme to enhance the value of up-town land, and create a splendid centre for fashionable life, high rents &c, without regard to, and even in dereliction of, the happiness of the multitude upon whose hearts and hands all the expenses will fall?”

The Conservatory Garden’s formal severity, meanwhile, seems once again to obscure the park’s potential as a site of struggle. As if to render this fact unmistakable, the imperious iron gates that have long defended the garden at its 105th Street entrance turn out to have been repurposed from Cornelius Vanderbilt II’s Fifth Avenue palace: one more thorn in the side of Calvert Vaux. When in the early 1860s Central Park’s commissioners suggested installing grand gateways—designed by Richard Morris Hunt, later the architect of the Vanderbilt mansion—at the two southern entrances, Vaux decried the proposed ostentation at the park’s ingress, writing to Clarence Cook that “the first need of the visitor when he leaves the city sidewalk is a perfectly free & unencumbered draught of ‘Park.’” (Cook himself later wrote witheringly of the unrealized Hunt designs: “Apart from the sculpture heaped upon them, they had nothing to recommend them to an educated taste, and very little to catch even the popular eye.”) Above all, Vaux hoped to avoid for Central Park the kind of capitalist spectacle exemplified by the recently constructed boulevards of Paris, where Hunt had studied architecture. Hunt’s planned entrances were everything “we have been fighting against—it is Nap[oleon] III in disguise all over.” Protecting the park from the specter of Haussmannization meant deferring its transformation, as T. J. Clark later wrote of the Baron’s Paris, from a form in which “capital incidentally happened” to a “form of capital itself.”

On a visit this past March, with well over an hour of sunlight left, I found the garden’s forbidding doors already locked. Observing a scene of wintry repastination through the bars, I wondered again: What does the visitor to Central Park gain by relinquishing their impression of the landscape as subject to chance and change? A wan sense of participation in the value creation of the prohibitive park. “In a beautiful, well-maintained place where they feel safe, people behave in a civil and pleasant way, and by extension they feel pride in themselves,” Lynden Miller wrote in her memoir. “The subtle unspoken message is ‘We did this for you and you are worth it.’”