A Publication of the

Foundation

for Landscape Studies

Volume vı | Number ı | Fall 2010A Journal of Place

Essays: Landscape as Monument,Monuments in the Landscape 2

David Sloane: Memory and Landscape: Nature and the History of the American Cemetery

Elizabeth Barlow Rogers: An Island Named Roosevelt: Presidential Monument and Planned Community

John H. Stubbs and Stefan Yarabek: Lednice-Valtice: A Monumental LiechtensteinLandscape within the Prague-Vienna Greenway

Place Marker 16Elizabeth Barlow Rogers: Theodore Roosevelt and the Native AmericanPatrimony

Book Reviews 17Elihu Rubin: Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban PlacesBy Sharon Zukin

Cynthia Zaitzevsky: The Collected Writings of Beatrix Farrand: American LandscapeGardener, 1872–1959Edited by Carmen Pearson

Beatrix Farrand: Private Gardens, PublicLandscapes By Judith B. Tankard

Tour 23

Contributors 23

In this issue of Site/Lines wehave chosen to focus onmonuments – monumentsin landscape settings andlandscapes themselves as

monuments. The formerinclude statues and memori-als such as obelisks, columns,and other symbolic forms, as well as commemorativeart and architecture in ceme-teries, parks or other pub-licly accessible places. Thelatter consists of the preser-vation of particular land-scapes because of their his- toric importance or scenicand recreational values. Italso consists of the settingaside of certain sites inhonor of an individual orhistorical event, or the sanctification of a place as a reminder of heroic deathor acts too terrible to be forgotten.

It would be impossible ina single issue to explore allof the ways in which people

mark places as monumentsor place monuments inlandscapes. Indeed, it wouldtake a book – and severalhave in fact been written – todescribe the evolution of a landscape such as theNational Mall in Washing-ton, DC, as a designed spaceor to discuss the form andsignificance of its numerousmonuments and memorials.Battlefields and nationalcemeteries also deserveessays in a future issue, as doprison camps, Holocaustmemorials, and monumentsto the civil rights movement.Spontaneous memorials,such as roadside shrinesmarking automobile deathsor offerings of flowers, can-dles, and mementoes mark-ing private losses, areanother topic awaiting atten-tion. In addition, we arepostponing an article on theWorld Trade Center memor-ial until an informed analy-sis can be made followingthe long-awaited realizationof its much-debated design.

Here, however, is a pre-liminary exploration of aspecial genre of place mak-ing. We begin with cemeter-ies, monumental landscapesthat typically contain mau-soleums, sculptures, or stonemarkers to perpetuate thememory of the deceased. In“Memory and Landscape:Nature and the History ofthe American Cemetery,”David Sloane traces practicesfor burying the dead fromthe committal of remainsbeside the community meet-ing house to the new trendof woodlands burial (featur-ing gravesites in a dedicatednatural landscape marked by GPS coordinates). In“Lednice-Valtice: A Monu-mental LiechtensteinLandscape within thePrague-Vienna Greenway,”John Stubbs and StefanYarabek describe the way theWorld Monuments Fund

is fostering protection of anentire regional landscape asa scenic monument withrecreational, cultural, andeducational uses. Its crownjewel, the Lednice-Valticeestates – a UNESCO WorldHeritage Site – will serve as aself-supporting enterpriseperpetuating a large piece ofthe cultural, architectural,and landscape patrimony ofthe Czech Republic.

In “An Island NamedRoosevelt: PresidentialMonument and PlannedCommunity,” I have writtenabout the dual form of com-memoration embodied inthe Franklin DelanoRoosevelt Memorial in NewYork City and the “new townwithin a city” that was con-structed forty years ago fol-lowing the honorificrenaming of the island onwhich it is sited. The con-struction of the monument,which was sponsored by theFour Freedoms Foundationand designed by the latearchitect Louis I. Kahn, waslong delayed but is at last

moving forward. My articleis based on conversationswith proponents about itshistory, planning, and archi-tecture. I also interviewedsome of the longtime resi-dents of the new town on Roosevelt Island – now amature community – whodescribe what it has beenlike to live there over time.

In previous issues ofSite/Lines we have includedan essay on either a placemaker or a place keeper: adesigner or steward of place.In this issue we feature a“place marker”: TheodoreRoosevelt, the twenty-sixthpresident of the UnitedStates. Roosevelt’s champi-onship of the Antiquities Actof 1906 made it possible forthe United State to designateand thereby preserve a largenumber of Native Americansites as historical monu-ments – a protection thatwas extended by later presi-

dents to other importantaspects of the nation’s archi-tectural and landscape patri-mony.

We would like to drawyour attention to aFoundation for LandscapeStudies-sponsored tour inMay 2011 of the CzechGreenway, led by StefanYarabek, coauthor of theessay on this special land-scape in the current issue ofSite/Lines. Further details canbe found on page 23. Wewish to remind you as wellthat this journal is entirelydonor-supported. We urgeyou therefore to help theFoundation for LandscapeStudies continue its publica-tion by sending a contribu-tion in the envelope you will find in the centerfold ofthese pages.

With good green wishes,

Elizabeth Barlow RogersPresident

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Letter from the Editor

On the Cover:

The National Cemetary, Santa Fe,

NM. Photograph by Elizabeth

Barlow Rogers.

Landscape as Monument, Monuments in the LandscapeMemory and Landscape:Nature and the History of the American Cemetery

Ancient cemeteries remind us that humans havebeen constructing homes for the dead for thou-sands of years – perhaps as long as we have beenconstructing houses for the living. Why do we careso deeply about the dead? They represent our past

and our future, our mortality and our morality. Over the lasttwo centuries, the cemetery has also come to exemplify ourneed to maintain a relationship to nature within the context oflarge-scale industrial cities. It is a pastoral haven meant toprovide respite from the frenetic routine of our daily lives. Thedesire to have the cemetery express memory and spirituality –to be both monument and landscape – creates a tensionbetween nature and culture with which we continue to strug-gle today.

Forever Fernwood Cemetery, in Mill Valley, California, is anindicator of America’s growing environmental sentiment andreflects a potentially radical change in the nation’s burial prac-tices. While the cemetery still offers conventional burial plotswith modest monuments set on fairly steep lawns, its owners,drawing upon the “woodlands burial” movement, have setaside part of their thirty-two acres for “natural burials.” Inthese sections, the hills are covered with tall grasses and aslightly ragged arrangement of trees and shrubs. The gravesare not marked by stones but by trees, whose positions arerecorded by a Global Positioning System (GPS). Burials aremade in unfinished pine boxes and families are discouragedfrom embalming the body.

The idea of the woodlands cemeteryemerged about twenty years ago in Englandbut has only very recently found a place inAmerica. To date, twenty-seven cemeterieshave been certified by the Green BurialCouncil, and only nine of those have receiveddesignation as “conservation” or “natural”burial grounds; the first was Ramsey CreekCemetery in North Carolina, which opened in1998. At Ramsey Creek, unlike ForeverFernwood, natural burial is the only disposi-tion option. The landscape is disturbed as lit-tle as possible, retaining its natural stylerather than being reconstructed as a pic-turesque garden or a suburban lawn. In aprofile published in Landscape Architecture in2002, J. William Thompson reported that Billyand Kimberly Campbell created the cemeteryas a way to conserve land from developmentand as a rejection of the modern way of deathcritiqued by Jessica Mitford a half-centuryago; the Campbells feel that contemporaryburial more closely resembles the disposal of toxic waste thana spiritual ritual.

The role of nature in the landscapes of the dead has alwaysreflected popular perceptions of the relationship between thebuilt environment and the natural landscape. Tracing the his-tory of its evolution helps us to understand the current trendtoward the growing practice of burial in unadorned nature.

Nature and Culture in the Cemetery LandscapeThe earliest American burial places were small spaces alongthe side of a pasture or adjacent to the town’s meeting houseor church. These grounds reflected established European prac-tices, and were as unplanned as the ones across the sea. Andwhile the delicate carvings of East Coast gravestones poignant-ly remind us of the constant presence of death in the earlycolonists’ lives, these cemeteries display no correspondingsentimentalism about the often inhospitable natural world thesettlers did battle with daily.

Later generations, however, would embrace Romanticism –which valorized the serenity and moral meaning of nature –leading them to redesign many old burial places with newtrees, shrubs, and flowers. New cemeteries would result fromthese changing cultural attitudes to nature and the growing

density of towns and cities.Although the new buryingground (later Grove StreetCemetery) in New Haven,Connecticut, in 1797 provided sections for indigents, visitors toNew Haven, blacks, and members of the Yale community, italso marked the creation of the nation’s first chartered associa-tion dedicated to preserving the graves of the city’s families.John Brinckerhoff Jackson noted in Landscape in Sight that the“novelty” of the new cemetery was “the nonpublic, almostdomestic quality” of the grounds, where people paid to ownfamily lots so they could inter family members next to eachother in a “secluded place,” ensuring the privacy of the gravesand the survivors’ mourning.

The establishment of Mount Auburn Cemetery outsideBoston, Massachusetts, in 1831 forever altered the look andexperience of the burial place in the United States. Groups ofcivic leaders, such as the fifteen Protestants who established

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Nature provides the setting. Bench

seating area, Forever Fernwood.

Photograph by David Sloane, 2007.

Lowell’s Monument, Willow

Avenue, Mount Auburn Cemetery.

Engraving by James Smillie, 1851.

Mont Royal Cemetery in Montreal, created cemetery compa-nies throughout North America. As Brian Young has related inRespectable Burial, his history of that cemetery, the companieswere looking for parcels that possessed “sufficient depth ofsoil, rivulets and springs to make ponds and lakes, well wood-ed, and with an undulating surface. . . retired from the bustleand heat of the City, and yet near and convenient of access.”The founders imagined cemeteries that were not only a placeof stone memorials, but also of natural peace and tranquility.As Frederic Whitney reminded the crowd at the 1850 consecra-tion of Evergreen Cemetery in Boston, “the Saviour was laid ina garden.”

By the 1870s, virtually every city and town in North Americaproudly advertised its new “rural cemetery” – so namedbecause the founders contrasted them to urban burial places.Catholics and Protestants, northerners and southerners,sophisticated urban elites and western boosters, all embracedthe need for what civic leader Elias W. Leavenworth called in1859, at the dedication of Oakwood Cemetery in Syracuse, NewYork, the “last great necessity” of the city, “an ample perma-nent and attractive resting place for our dead.” The words wereindicative of the movement’s aspirations to create a newmemorial space in the growing cities: the cemeteries were farmore “ample” in size than previous places; the graves would be “permanent” in this protected space; and the sites’ naturalbeauty combined with the inserted artificial monumentswould define the “attractive” place of remembrance. Leaven-worth presumed that visitors and mourners would “com-mune with nature in her loveliest form, and in these secludedretreats forget for an hour the toils and cares of life.”Enveloped in nature, visitors could be enticed to leave behindtheir commercial concerns and focus on the moral valuesreformers hoped the cemetery would inculcate.

As Leavenworth’s words suggest, nature was more than abackdrop for the monuments; it played an active role in thevisitor’s experience of the space. Jackson quotes a Boston cler-gyman who exults that the “child of nature is clasped again to the sweet bosom of its mother, to be again incorporated inher substance.” At the same time, artistry and status vied forprominence in the landscape. Increasingly elaborate familymonuments and individual markers, carved in revival architec-tural styles, appeared throughout the grounds. Representa-tional images of nature itself proliferated as well. A brokentree trunk signifying a brief life, a crown of ivy for faithfulness,and a lamb of innocence for a child’s grave: all were part of

the complex, nineteenth-century language of memorials. Thecrowds that visited the cemeteries came for both the monu-ments and the bucolic setting that reinforced the powerfulmoral message of death and memory.

Smoothing NatureJust as the rural cemetery movement was spreading acrossAmerica in conjunction with the Anglo-American settlementof the Midwest and California, cities began constructing urbanparks. These were built to a large degree in response to thepopularity of rural cemeteries as pleasurable retreats from thecity. In 1859, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux’s CentralPark officially opened to the public, propelling a nationwideurgency to imitate New York City. Although the first parksmimicked the Romantic “rural” taste of the antebellum ceme-teries, a new field of city management soon appeared, with

park superintendentsfocused on providing activeand passive recreation. ThePicturesque aesthetic of theantebellum period did notsuit this need well, sinceclusters of trees and shrubshid views and interruptedmovement. In the parks, andthe cemeteries that emulatedthem, a new conception ofnature emerged that wouldsmooth the edges of thelandscape.

The first generations ofprofessional landscape archi-tects, such as AdolphStrauch, Jacob Weidenmann,and Ossian Cole Simonds,refined the principles of thenew aesthetic, called the

“lawn plan.” Strauch, a German horticulturalist, was namedsuperintendent of Spring Grove Cemetery in Cincinnati, Ohio,in the 1850s. Confronted by a swampy area near the cemetery’sentrance, he designed a long natural vista of ponds and islandsleading into the main burial sections. Water, lawns, and moreformal plantings were the principal components of the newdesign rather than fenced family plots enclosing impressivemonuments set within groves of trees. In this generation’sview, the cemetery’s entire landscape, rather than any singlemonument or flower bed, made it a work of art. The focusneeded to be on the complementary function of each elementto ensure the cemetery’s beauty for perpetuity.

No cemetery space exemplified the starkly coherent land-scape as effectively as the new national cemeteries reserved forthe nation’s veterans. During the Civil War, even as workerswere moving the earth in Manhattan to finish Central Park,hospital transport ships were bringing the Union dead backnorth for burial. These bodies were interred in existing ceme-teries such as New York’s Green-Wood, but later, as the warprogressed and the battlefields became sacred spaces, thenotion of burial with military honors for even ordinary sol-diers gave birth to national cemeteries – the most prominent

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Nature envelops the visitor.

Oakwood Cemetery, Syracuse NY.

Photograph by David Sloane, 1985.

being Arlington National Cemetery, the former home ofRobert E. Lee, across the Potomac from the capital. Here thebright white individual markers, identically carved and pre-cisely placed, create endless geometric patterns against thesparkling green lawns. The result is a stunning collectivememorial of honor and loss, sharply contrasting with thechaos of the battlefield. At Arlington, a visitor is awed by thenation’s commitment to remembrance of the honored dead; itand other military cemeteries elsewhere in the country serveas patriotic celebrations of national purpose.

In national cemeteries and private ones as well, the rela-tionship of nature to culture shifted. Instead of emphasizingbotanical diversity in a Picturesque landscape of woodlandsand green glades, cemetery designers now opted for broaderlawns and sparser plantings. This style provided an effectivebackdrop to the increasingly large and sometimes beautifulmausoleums and monuments that Gilded Age clients commis-sioned well-known architects to design. Neoclassical and goth-ic motifs dominated in these mausoleums, as well as insculpted memorials produced by prominent sculptors and themonument companies that imitated them. Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s dramatic statue in honor of Henry Adams’ wife,Clover, in Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington, DC, capturedthe emotion of the deceased’s tragic death and spoke of loss toany visitor. Nevertheless, many monuments of the period werestandardized obelisks and angels, with little artistic merit.

America’s growing ethnic and religious diversity meant thatdifferent communities created very different cemeteries. Evenas lawn-park cemeteries emulated urban parks, small cemeter-ies for Catholic Italians and Poles or Russian Jews maintainedthe tradition of individual markers tightly lined up in sparsenatural spaces. The remnants of fenced graves, iron crosses,and small gravestones in thecampo santo churchyards ofthe Southwest are vernacularexpressions of the impor-tance of family relationshipsbeyond the grave. Ceramicphotographs grace somemarkers, enforcing a height-ened form of remembranceand intimacy between theliving and the dead.

The general trend, though, was to tamenature into serving as a backdrop for theartistry of the memorial. In the last decades ofthe nineteenth century, some cemeteries, suchas Spring Grove, had the resources and skilledsuperintendents to sustain a lovely parklikelandscape, but in too many others the memori-als overwhelmed the natural setting as lot hold-ers vied to erect monuments to their economicstatus. Mausoleums imitated French châteaus,while obelisks raced toward the sky. The com-petition became so intense that by the earlytwentieth century, superintendents and criticsbegan searching for an alternative approach –an effort that resulted in the development of thememorial park.

The memorial parks were the creation ofanother generation that wished to separate itselffrom the past – this time from the perception ofthe cemetery as an overcrowded assortment ofgravestones. Yet these new cemeteries did notreverse the decades-long shift of the balancebetween nature and culture; nature continuedto assume an almost passive, stage-setting role.

Memorial parks tended to be more like other twentieth-century consumer businesses, focused on profits although stillstructured as nonprofit organizations. Their management alsoexerted ever greater control over the landscape, replacingupright individual gravestones and family monuments withmarkers flush to the ground. Very elaborate memorials werestill erected, but these reflected institutional values such aspatriotism, family, and religion, rather than commemorating

individuals or families. As aresult the memorial parktook on the appearance of avast lawn punctuated hereand there with monumentsof a generic nature such as astatue of Christ, an eagle, ora Masonic emblem. Thenumber of plantingsdeclined dramatically as thelandscape was simplified totrees and lawns, with anoccasional flower bed, andindividual vases on thegraves.

Portraits in Granite vs. Treesas Monuments Although innovative andengaging when it was origi-nated in the early years ofthe twentieth century, thememorial park as a designparadigm came to be per-ceived as increasingly staleover time. As the practice ofcremation grew, gardenmausoleums with cremationniches became de rigueur.Changing family demo-graphics led to orderly rowsof two-grave lots meant for ahusband and wife; thediminishing number andsize of family monumentsgave rise to long, attractivelylandscaped, communalmemorial walls. These alter-ations, though, did nothing

to resuscitate the culturalexcitement cemeteries inspiredduring the antebellum periodor to recapture the popularity

achieved by the early memorial parks. James Stevens Curlnotes in Death and Architecture that society seemed to turnaway from “a celebration of death,” suggesting a form of emo-tional anemia. As a result, today many Americans never erect amemorial anywhere, much less in the cemetery, and rarely visitfamily gravesites after the burial.

Yet these trends have hidden important developments thatmay invigorate old traditions and offer new hopes. First, per-haps due to a combination of recent wars, the AIDS epidemic,and other tragedies, 21st-century theater, film, television, andother arts have persistently and graphically portrayed deathand dying. Perhaps in response, a new public emotionalism isevident in the growing number of roadside shrines andmemorial graffiti in our cities.

Borrowing from the tradition of the ceramic photographsand even older epitaphs, a new generation utilizes innovations

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Stewart Mausoleum, Green-Wood

Cemetery, Brooklyn, New York.

Grave marker with ceramic portrait,

Green-Wood cemetery, Brooklyn,

New York.

in the technology of monument carving to produce more per-sonalized memorials in America’s cemeteries. Many of thesenew memorials also draw on the old symbolic language ofnature, employing deer and crowns of ivy in bucolic portraitsgracing black granite.

Perhaps most importantly, a desire to have a more “natural”disposition of the dead has driven both the green burial move-ment and a rise in cremation. As late as April 1970, whenAmericans celebrated the first Earth Day, fewer than 5 percentof dead bodies were cremated, according to the CremationAssociation of North America. In the decades since, the rise inthe numbers has been stunning, given religious objections andconservatism regarding changing burial options. In someregions, such as along the West Coast, over 50 percent of thedeceased are now cremated. Many Americans view cremationas a disposition of remains that reconnects death and nature,and therefore prefer it for their loved ones. Although not asradically innovative as the woodland cemeteries with theirgreen burials, cremation represents a similar perspective.

All these trends create an intriguing cultural paradox: thecemetery continues to recede from cultural visibility for someAmericans even as it grows in importance and meaning forothers. One group wishes to bury the dead in a place that onlyallows biodegradable memorials intended to disappear intothe earth, with nothing left in the end but a digital record ofthe grave. Another set of Americans is using real-life imagestransferred from their still and video cameras to create elabo-rate portraits of the dead on black granite tombstones. Othercontemporary technologies offer additional means of com-memorating the dead – for example, posting tributes andmemories of friends and relatives on Internet memorial sites.

How will memory endure in places that only allow trees asmonuments and where survivors rely on GPS to mark thegrave? Is the decision to return to a more natural burialprocess in keeping with the mobility and alienation of post-modern life, where ties to communities are ephemeral andmemories of achievements short? Is portraying a stylized nat-ural scene on a monument the same as designing a com-pelling physical environment of tranquility and solace? Canwe integrate the digital ether with the physical space of mem-ory? How will we continue to balance memory and landscape,nature and culture? The remarkable reality is that the evolu-tion will continue, reflecting the tensions and the opportuni-ties of American life and death. – David Charles Sloane

An Island Named Roosevelt: Presidential Monument andPlanned Community

In 1973, Welfare Island was renamed Roosevelt Island inhonor of the thirty-second president of the United States.Unlike the rechristening of Idlewild Airport as JFK in honorof President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, or the designation ofthree acres of Central Park as Strawberry Fields in memory

of John Lennon, however, this name change was not merely atitular form of homage. The very identity and purpose of theisland was already being radically altered, and its new incarna-tion was to include an impressive Franklin Delano RooseveltMemorial designed by architect Louis Kahn.

As it turned out, the rebirth of the island as a town of four-teen thousand inhabitants proceeded at a speed unusual ingovernment, whereas the eponymous monument soon becamemired in setbacks. Only now, almost forty years later, hasground been broken for Kahn’s last project. This is a matter ofconsiderable rejoicing for the segment of the architecturalcommunity for whom Kahn ranks, after Frank Lloyd Wright, asthe twentieth century’s preeminent American architecturalgenius. It is also a celebratory moment for the Four FreedomsFoundation, the monument’s sponsor throughout the entireperiod.

Welfare Island – originally called Blackwell’s Island –seemed in many ways an unlikely place for a presidential com-

memoration. For centuries, this isolated protrusion ofManhattan bedrock in the middle of the East River had beenthe location of choice for public institutions serving thosewho were either quarantined or ostracized by society. Scatteredacross the island’s 143 acres, these institutions had included a smallpox hospital, a lunatic asylum, a workhouse, an alms-house, and a penitentiary. In 1968, when I first explored theisland, many of these buildings had either been torn down orsurvived only as vine-covered ruins in a rubble-strewn wild-scape; the two municipal hospitals remaining, Bird S. Colerand Goldwater Memorial, served patients with long-term dis-abilities and chronic illnesses. A forlorn, out-of-sight-out-of-mind place, the island was also an arguably odd location forhonoring the wheelchair-bound Roosevelt, who had been care-ful to disguise his disability in order to protect his politicalimage.

Yet by 1970 the island was already undergoing a profoundtransformation. It had recently grown by three acres at itssouthern tip – part of a thousand-foot-long extension createdfrom the disposal of excavation debris from a new subway tun-nel beneath the East River. This publicly owned parcel of landwas in effect up for grabs. With its views of the Manhattan sky-line and the United Nations, the latter almost directly oppositeon the Manhattan shore, the site was a tabula rasa awaitingsome kind of dramatic punctuation. Hence it appeared to

some to be the most logicalspot in New York City for animportant presidential mon-ument. Furthermore, theisland had already been slat-ed to become a site for badlyneeded, middle- and lower-middle-income housing – anentire new town – a sociallybeneficial goal that theDemocratic president wouldcertainly have embraced.

The 1960s and 70s wereconfidently utopian decadeswhen such terms as “masterplanning,” “urban renewal,”and “slum clearance” had notyet fallen into disrepute.

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Roosevelt Island, contemporary

view from the East River.

or using it as a place to reinterthe remains of those buried inthe large cemeteries of Brook-

lyn and Queens in order to free up land for housing in thoseboroughs. All of these ideas were eventually dismissed as eco-nomically or politically impractical. With no firm plan in handbut determined to move forward, Mayor Lindsay confirmedthe city’s intention to redevelop the island soon after he tookoffice in 1966. The first stage of this process was its “cleanup,”and at Lindsay’s behest the New York City Department ofBuildings promptly condemned forty-five of the island’s dete-riorating structures.

In 1968 Governor Nelson Rockefeller, a man with a passionfor building and a penchant for modern architecture, encour-aged state legislators to pass a bill establishing an indepen-dent, public-benefit corporation that would be structured tofast-track the design andconstruction of large-scale,urban projects. Funded bymoral-obligation bonds andthereby relieved of layers of state and city bureaucracy,the Urban DevelopmentCorporation (now known asthe Empire State Develop-ment Corporation) wasintended to create jobs, com-munity facilities, and hous-ing. To head the newgovernment entity, Rocke-feller appointed EdwardLogue, an urban-renewalplanner with a reputationalmost as formidable as thatof the legendary RobertMoses.

To implement specificprojects, the state createdsubsidiary corporationsoperating under the aegis ofUDC. The first of these was the Battery Park City Authority,which was established by the New York State Legislature in1968 to finance and supervise the construction of offices,

apartment houses, and a park on a section of Hudson Rivershoreline that had been augmented with landfill derived fromthe construction of the World Trade Center in LowerManhattan. A year later the city signed a ninety-nine-year leasewith the state, creating the Welfare Island DevelopmentCorporation to build and subsequently manage a plannedcommunity on Welfare, soon-to-be Roosevelt, Island.

Logue lost no time in commissioning Philip Johnson, thecity’s most renowned architect at the time, and his partner,John Burgee, to develop a master plan. The WIDC plan calledfor the retention of the two hospitals; the construction of fourbuilding groups containing twenty thousand low- and moder-ate-income apartment units (because of the large disabledpopulation on the island, around fifty of these were reservedfor hospital patients who could be mainstreamed into thecommunity); the creation of five parks and four miles ofwaterfront promenade; and the building of a two-thousand-cargarage. Its financial underpinnings were provided by the 1955federal Mitchell-Lama law, which offered tax abatements andother incentives to developers who would build affordable

housing. Additional subsi-dies from federal, state, andcity governments made lowrents and low-interest mort-gages for cooperative unitspossible, ensuring affordabil-ity for residents.1

When the Johnson/Burgeeplan was presented in 1969,it garnered warm reviewsfrom the architectural press.It was praised principally for its “unmodern” modestyof scale, sense of livability,stepped-down buildingheights, and provision ofwater views at the pedestrianlevel as well as from theapartments above.

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Historic preservation as a civic ethos was yet in its infancy, andthe leveling of old neighborhoods and rebuilding of largeareas within cities was still being fostered as a matter of policyat all levels of government. Although Jane Jacobs’s revisionisturban theories had recently begun to inspire opposition to the wholesale, top-down, megaproject reconfiguration ofneighborhoods, this long-ignored part of New York wasalready city-owned and essentially vacant except for the twostill-functioning city hospitals and the remaining historicruins, which were being used by the fire department for train-ing exercises. It was highly unlikely that a community groupor civic watchdog organization would campaign to prevent thede novo reconstruction of Welfare Island. Moreover, New Yorkhad become a city with a chronic housing shortage.

The first notion of a total redesign of Welfare Island datesback to 1961 when a syndicate of developers, including thearchitect Victor Gruen, proposed acquiring it from the city.The consortium planned to erect eight, Gruen-designed, fifty-story slab buildings to be used for housing and related ameni-ties. They unapologetically claimed that the realization of thisradically modern, Le Corbusier-style proposal would “meanunscrambling the melee of flesh and machine [in order tomake] the first twentieth-century city.” This arrogantly utopianprivate-enterprise vision was turned down, but the decision in 1963 to build a new subway tunnel under the East River where the island stands stimulated a host of other proposals.

One idea, which was seriously considered, was to build aschool there for the children of United Nations families. Otherproposals included turning the entire island into a recreation-al park, building a pleasure garden like Copenhagen’s Tivoli,

Former smallpox hospital, Roosevelt

Island, in ruins.

Ruins of former smallpox hospital,

designed by James Renwick, Jr.,

1856.

1 Today these forms of tenant assistance no longer exist except for theoriginal residents of Roosevelt Island. For them rents are stabilized atfigures far below market rate. Most early tenants continue to occupytheir original apartments because of this economic benefit. There is along waiting list of applicants for apartments that are still subsidized.However, many of the apartments in the older buildings are no longerrent-controlled, and the new buildings erected by developers on theisland all bill themselves as offering luxury apartments.

Its attention to mixed use (street-level shops and livingquarters above), sociable population density, and overallhuman scale caused the stylistically versatile Johnson to assert,“This is my Jane Jacobs period.” However, the exhibition’saccompanying catalogue, entitled “The Island Nobody Knows,”promoted the plan with sophisticated similes that wouldappeal to world travelers rather than with the sort of neigh-borhood-oriented terminology used by Jacobs. Its open-ended,colonnaded Arcade was compared to Milan’s Galleria VittorioEmmanuele, while the Harbor’s riverside steps were said toevoke the ghats of the Ganges. A museum goer’s knowledge ofart – Feininger’s photographs, Piranesi’s drawings, Sheeler’spaintings – supplied the imagery used to describe the thrillingviews of Manhattan. By naming the central transportation cor-ridor “Main Street,” however, the architects brought the planback into the realm of small-town America.

The publicity and praise for the Johnson/Burgee planbrought the island’s potential to the attention of the statesmanand diplomat William vanden Heuvel. In his capacity as chair-man of the Four Freedoms Foundation (so named for the fourfreedoms enunciated by President Roosevelt in his State of theUnion address in 1941), vanden Heuvel suggested the place-ment of a New York City Roosevelt memorial on WelfareIsland. At the same time, he put forth the notion that theisland be renamed in Roosevelt’s honor.

The mission of the Four Freedoms Foundation, which waslater incorporated into the Roosevelt Institute, a Hyde Parkand Washington-based organization, is to perpetuate the lega-cy and values of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. When I inter-viewed vanden Heuvel in April 2010, I asked him to tell mewhy Roosevelt was such an important figure to him personally.He said that his admiration goes back to his boyhood when hewas growing up in Rochester, New York, as the son of Dutchimmigrants during the Great Depression. Although an assis-tant attorney general under Robert Kennedy and ambassadorto the United Nations during the Carter administration, hemaintains that “FDR was always for me the greatest president.My brother was in the Civilian Conservation Corps, and my father would take me to torchlight parades. After the presi-dent’s death in 1945, my classmates, who knew how much Iadmired Roosevelt, raised money for me to go to Hyde Parkfor the funeral. I hitchhiked with a Catholic priest, and when I got there I managed to slip in with a group of students who had been invited to attend the ceremony. After the SecretService counted heads and found one extra, I ran over toEleanor Roosevelt and told her I had come all this way, and

she gave me permission tostay.” This was the prelude totheir future friendship. VandenHeuvel remembers, “She was a

formidable force in politics. Later I got to know her well, andin 1960 when I ran for Congress against John Lindsay, she andAdlai Stevenson campaigned for me.”

For vanden Heuvel, getting the island renamed in a legisla-tive document signed in 1973 by Lindsay, who by that time wasnearing the end of his second term as mayor of New York City,was easy. Getting the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorialbuilt proved to be far more difficult. The first obstacle wasKahn’s sudden death from a heart attack in PennsylvaniaStation on March 17, 1974, shortly after his final design for thememorial had been approved; the second was New York City’sfiscal crisis the following year, which put the project on holdindefinitely. But while Kahn’s design languished on the draw-ing boards, the bond-financed Welfare Island DevelopmentCorporation was already realizing the Johnson/Burgee masterplan.

To fill in the plan’s general outlines as rapidly as possible,Logue simultaneously commissioned several prominent prac-titioners to undertake various projects. The former HarvardGraduate School of Design dean Josep Lluís Sert designedboth 1,003-unit Eastwood (510-580 Main Street) and 360-unitWestview (595-625 Main Street). The firm of Johansen &Bhavnani was commissioned to design the island’s two otheroriginal towers: Rivercross (531 Main Street), a Manhattan-fac-ing building, and Island House (555-575 Main Street), whichoverlooks a plaza containing the restored Chapel of the GoodShepherd. (Today this building is used as a multi-denomina-tional church.) The modernist landscape architect Daniel Kiley was given the contract for Blackwell Park, which wouldsurround the preserved historic farmhouse, and LawrenceHalprin was asked to design the main plaza, a large centralactivity space dividing what the plan designated as Northtownand Southtown.

8

Southern end of Roosevelt Island

depicting the future monument by

Louis I. Kahn.

Logue was not above using ruthless tactics, pugnaciousbehavior, and strong language in the interest of getting thingsdone. Armed with the power of eminent domain granted bythe legislation creating UDC, which also allowed him to side-step city building-code review and other time-consuming,city-mandated approval procedures, he was able to get thirty-three thousand units of affordable housing built in sevenyears. When Rockefeller dismissed him from office in 1975, the first residents were already moving in. One challengeremained, however. No matter how agreeable and humane theplan, how praiseworthy the architecture, or how abundantlygreen and recreationally rich with parks, Roosevelt Island hadto be better connected by transportation to the rest of the city.

During its years as a place of quarantine and incarceration,Welfare Island’s inaccessibility except by boat had been anasset. Then in 1916, to improve access for those who wereemployed on the island, two elevators were installed where theQueensboro Bridge crosses overhead; for decades, workers inthe island’s hospitals would take a trolley to the bridge’s mid-way point, where elevators installed in an adjacent structurewould carry them to the island below. In 1955 a lift bridge link-ing the east side of the island with Long Island City in Queenswas constructed, but vehicles from Manhattan had to driveover the Queensboro Bridge and navigate several blocks ofLong Island City in order to reach it. Then, when the plan forthe new town on Roosevelt Island was already underway, anovel solution to the problem of direct Manhattan-RooseveltIsland access was found in the form of an aerial tramway.Constructed alongside the trusses supporting the QueensboroBridge, this unique feature within the New York City trans-portation system allows residents and visitors to spend three-and-a-half exhilarating minutes in a gondola arcing to a height of three hundred feet above the riverbefore landing at the tram station on the island. Finally, in 1989, the MetropolitanTransportation Authority was able to com-plete the F-line subway station on RooseveltIsland a hundred yards north of the tram,thereby providing a single mode of trans-portation linking the island with bothQueens and Manhattan.

To get an insider’s perspective on RooseveltIsland’s storied past, as well as a sense of whatit is like to live there now, I went to see Judith Berdy, the head of the Roosevelt IslandHistorical Society. Berdy has been a residentsince 1977, only two years after the first thirty-

four middle-income tenants moved onto the island. Her apart-ment on the seventeenth floor of 531 Main Street is a sunny,one-room studio looking across the East River toward Queens.The Historical Society archives, consisting of newspaper clip-pings, letters, documents, old photographs, brochures, books,ephemera – anything that bears on the island’s past up to thepresent day – are housed here. As the unofficial keeper of thetown’s history, Berdy continues to collect whatever materialsrelated to Roosevelt Island she can find. They now fill plasticsleeves in around 130 white, spine-labeled, three-ring binders,which occupy a series of six-foot-tall cupboards and wallshelves in the apartment. Her dining table is a work surfacecovered with items she is arranging according to subject mat-ter in yet more notebooks. “The whole thing is a giant jigsawpuzzle,” she exclaimed. “I just love putting it all together.”

I asked Berdy how she is able to keep continually findingnew items. She said, “Many people have memories of the placethat they want to share. They find me through word of mouthor on the Internet. Some send me reports, some send stories,some send old snapshots. Often these are doctors who weredoing their internships or residencies at Coler or GoldwaterHospital or nurses who lived in the dormitories on the island.The two hospitals – now merged into one that is designated arehabilitation center for the disabled – were designed to pro-vide care for the chronically ill, so I sometimes hear frompatients who stayed on the island for long periods of time.Besides Coler and Goldwater there was City Hospital before itmoved to Elmhurst in the fifties and Metropolitan Hospitalbefore it relocated to First Avenue and 97th Street. I get letters,newspaper clippings, and old photographs from many of thedoctors and nurses who worked in all four of these hospitals,and sometimes their descendants get in touch with me

as well.” To encourage suchcontributions to her ever-growing Roosevelt Islandmemory bank, Berdy runsadvertisements in the NewEngland Journal of Medicine.She says that she gets aresponse at least every cou-ple of months from thatsource.

As we talked, Berdy pointed to a photograph of the1786–1804 Blackwell House, one of six remaining landmarksamong the ninety abandoned buildings that I’d encounteredwhile wandering around the island in the 1960s; the othershad all been bulldozed in readying the island for the newtown. “Here is where the head doctor lived,” she said. Anotherphotograph captured a group of nurses in front of their dor-mitory, and a third featured a row of pleasant Victorian cot-tages with front porches; these were where the senior staffmembers lived.

A social historian of the island, Berdy has trained herself to be its architectural historian as well. And her knowledge doesn’t stop with the medical facilities that were once set in agloomy but picturesque landscape of weeds, wildflowers, andspectral ruins; she is also an expert on the modern town thatreplaced them. She has a sound knowledge of city planningand period building styles as well as strong opinions about thepros and cons of the structures and landscapes of the island.The hefty tome New York 1960: Architecture and UrbanismBetween the Second World War and the Bicentennial by Robert A.M. Stern, Thomas Mellins, and David Fishman is within easyreach on her bookshelf and she can practically recite by heartthe chapter on Roosevelt Island detailing the various stages ofthe island’s transformation from mid-twentieth-century visionto twenty-first century reality. She was recently able to obtainan old trolley entrance kiosk from the line that used to runacross the Queensboro Bridge – a charming structure built ofornamental cast iron and ceramic tile – and have it moved tothe island. This period relic, which has been restored to itsoriginal appearance, now serves as a visitor center.

Berdy gave the kind of back-and-forth wrist rotation thatmeans “sort of but not quite” when I inquired how much of what we are looking at from her window is the fulfillmentof the Johnson/Burgee plan and how much has been wroughtby others. Inevitably the plan’s realization was here and therecompromised by cost and other factors, and by decisions that have been made over the years by the WIDC’s successorentity, the Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation (RIOC). But the overall appearance – buildings of varying heights, car-free roads, a Main Street spine, a waterfront promenade,and openings between building blocks to permit numerouswater views – is generally in keeping with the original scheme.Since land was reserved for this purpose from the beginning,the new luxury towers on sites that RIOC has leased to devel-opers in the past few years in order to sustain its budget formaintaining the island’s public spaces, roads, and basic infra-

9

Judith Berdy, Roosevelt Island

historian.

structure can still be considered part of the intended imple-mentation of the town plan.

With some outspoken reservations – she calls sixties-stylearchitecture in the then-fashionable idiom called brutalism,“cementotecture, all rather bleak and gray” – Berdy praises theoriginal structures, adding that “it really doesn’t matter that itis ugly outside because inside it is so nice. If the apartmentsare small, they have wonderful views and are filled with sun-light. The buildings themselves occupy a generous amount ofsquare footage when you factor in the large lobby spaces andtheir surrounding grounds. This kind of open landscapearound the buildings would be impossible in the city whereevery square foot of real estate is too valuable to leave open.”Describing the layout of her own apartment, she says, “Lookhow they paid so much attention to detail here.” Then, ofcourse, there is the matter of rent. “Where else,” Berdy askedme rhetorically, “am I going to find an apartment under athousand dollars a month?”

I asked her about the island as a whole and what it was liketo live there. “Well, first of all, it is an island, which has itsadvantages and disadvantages,” she replied. “It’s peaceful andquiet, which is nice, but it has none of the liveliness of the cityand practically no stores. It really is its own little world, and ina sense you feel cut off. Even though it is just a short subwayor tram ride into Manhattan, if you work off the island youdon’t feel like coming home, changing clothes, turningaround, and going back.”

When I remarked on the somewhat desultory appearance ofMain Street with its many empty shop windows, Berdy said,“We have never been successful in keeping stores; there is notenough traffic. We are a town of fourteen thousand, but yousee very few people walking up and down Main Street duringthe week. Except for the hospital workers, no one works on theisland. We have a deli, a dry cleaner, a bank, a hairdresser, avideo store, and a public library – that’s about all. There usedto be a fish store, a bakery, and a liquor store, but they all wentout of business.”

RIOC leases these ground-floor venues, and building man-agement companies maintain the residential stories. Residentslike Berdy have an activist role in just about everything elsethat goes on. “We’re really a tight-knit community, and someof us have been here thirty years or more, so if you add up thetime four people sitting in a room have been here it is 120years! Naturally we have a say in what happens on the island.”The boundaries of Community Board 8 encompass the island,

providing one forum, and there are committees of variouskinds. Berdy engages with the RIOC administration on a widerange of cultural and service issues, from the opening of thehistoric Blackwell House as a museum to the maintenance ofroadways, parks, and the promenade. There is a residents’association to voice the same concerns, but she has chosen notto affiliate with it formally, allowing that, “I’d rather be anexpediter at large. As a simple gadfly I can get more done.”

While Berdy has been focused on the island’s past, Williamvanden Heuvel and the architectural aficionados who havelong dreamed of seeing the realization of Kahn’s final workhave persisted in promoting the FDR Memorial as part of theisland’s future. The project has been beset with many frustra-tions. In 1986, for example, the state revoked the six milliondollars earmarked for the memorial after its own financial col-lapse. In 1998, vanden Heuvel and other board members of the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute had to fight todefeat a plan to construct a twenty-four-story Marriott hotelon the site reserved for the memorial.

To meet these and other challenges along the way, vandenHeuvel has used his political and diplomatic skills to goodadvantage. In 1980 he obtained a grant from the NationalEndowment for the Humanities to make an educational filmnarrated by Orson Welles showing FDR’s importance inAmerican history. (Now on CD, this has remained a promo-tional tool for fundraising over the course of three decades.)The following year vandenHeuvel was instrumental ingetting Senator PatrickMoynihan to reintroduce abill in the Congress “toestablish a national memori-al. . . on the [RooseveltIsland] site according to theplans prepared by the late,preeminent American archi-tect, Louis I. Kahn.” With thecompletion of workingdrawings according toKahn’s original plan by thearchitectural firm ofMitchell/Giurgola in 1985,

New York governor Mario Cuomo established a bipartisancommission to assess the desirability of moving forward withwhat would eventually become a $50 million project. Its affir-mative decision left vanden Heuvel and the board of theFranklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute with the task of rais-ing this sum from a combination of public and privatesources.

As a fundraiser vanden Heuvel has had two strings in hisbow. One is Roosevelt’s popularity with people like himselfwho still see the president’s accomplishments as cornerstonesof twentieth-century American democracy. The other is Kahn’sreputation as a twentieth-century genius. Thanks to philan-thropists Arthur Ross, Jane Gregory Rubin, Shelby White, andothers, most notably Fred Eychaner, the founder of AlphawoodCorporation in Chicago, the Franklin and Eleanor RooseveltInstitute is only $15 million away from its $50 million cam-paign goal. This spring it was possible, finally, to break groundfor the monument on Roosevelt Island – thirty-six years afterKahn’s design was approved.

To oversee the public outreach needed to achieve the finalconstruction budget and an endowment for the memorial’songoing maintenance, and also to administer the day-to-daymeetings involved with the project as it goes into construc-tion, vanden Heuvel asked Sally Minard, the former head of anadvertising and marketing communications firm and a promi-nent Democratic party fundraiser, to serve as pro bono presi-dent and CEO of a corporation called the Franklin D.

Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park, LLC. GinaPollara, an architect, serves under Minard asits paid executive director.

Pollara came to her job equipped with adeep understanding of the planned memori-al, having organized “Coming to Light,” a 2005 exhibition at the Cooper Union for theAdvancement of Science and Art in whichKahn’s notes and sketches for the projectwere displayed. The model built for the exhi-bition, now in Pollara’s office, shows Kahn’sconcept as a thorough integration of land-scape, sculpture, and architecture. Kahn spokeof the design as a room and a garden. Theconjunction in Kahn’s sentence is important.His FDR memorial is not a room in a garden,but rather a garden and a room as its focalpoint, the culmination of a monumental axis.The garden is essentially a long triangulartapis vert defined by two allées of little-leaf

10

Gina Pollara displaying model of

Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Memorial.

linden trees (Tilia cordata).This tapering plane of lawnslopes downward as it iscompressed inward, creatinga foreshortened view of thegranite-walled, roofless cube that is the “room” at the southernmost end of the island.

This forced perspectivewill carry the eye toward a large-scale bronze bust setwithin a niche in the northwall of the roofless chamber.Wide openings between this freestanding granite slab and the rest of the wall giveentry to a temple-like space –Kahn’s “room.” Once insidethe room, turning one-hun-dred-and-eighty degrees to face the opposite side of the stonebackdrop for the bust, one will find a monumental full-length sculpture of the president. The room will have onlythree sides and will be therefore entirely open on the south.This absence of wall provides a thrilling view of the Manhat-tan skyline, which includes the gleaming glass slab of theUnited Nations on the shore of the East River. In this wayKahn’s design makes the city itself the visual apotheosis of thegrand controlling axis. By focusing the eye first on the bust of FDR at the end of his central axis and then dissolving itsterminus into the scenic panorama on the opposite shore,Kahn has performed a feat not unlike that of the Greeks, whosited their temples in relation to spectacular natural formswithin their mountainous landscape.

Kahn’s imagination was indeed fertilized by his love ofClassical ruins, and although completely modern in his archi-tectural approach, he never abandoned the principles of sym-metry and geometrical order derived from his education inthe Beaux-Arts neoclassical tradition. But the model of theFDR Memorial shows something else besides a sensibilityattuned to Greek temple architecture. The part that is a gardenrecalls the brilliant spatial geometries of André Le Nôtre,

Louis XIV’s royal gardener and the father of French seven-teenth-century landscape design. Kahn’s landscape is especial-ly reminiscent of that of Vaux-le-Vicomte. There Le Nôtre,equipped with a thorough understanding of geometrical prin-ciples recently expounded by Descartes, created optical illu-sions through the manipulation of ground-plane grades. Thushis gardens are not comprehended in a glance; the eye at first traverses their geometrical axes with uninterrupted ease;the visitor on foot then discovers ingenious shifts in perspec-tive and previously concealed parts with delighted surprise. In addition, the quiet dissolution of an axis as it approachesthe garden’s ambiguously defined border produces a sense of unbounded infinitude that parallels the Cartesian Theory of Space.

The monument sits only a few feet above the riprap2 stabi-lizing the crisply linear shoreline. To gain the elevation neededfor the allée-embraced lawn to slope downwards toward thetip of the island, excavated fill has been mounded and thengraded in the manner of one of Le Nôtre’s earthen terraces. Todramatize the ascent to the twelve-foot-high northern end of the garden, Kahn designed a monumental set of stairs.Climbing them will offer a sense of imposing arrival – some-thing akin to the sensation of ascending the broad steps ofMichelangelo’s Campidoglio in Rome or those of the LincolnMemorial in Washington, DC.

But there is another way toapproach the memorial room,and it provides an equally

intriguing example of grade manipulation for experientialpurposes. Below the triangular lawn are granite-paved prome-nades next to the water’s edge. Here on the periphery of thesite Kahn uses the same cool mathematical approach to subtlyinfluence the visitor’s experience as he has along the progres-sion of its central axis. Only now, instead of sloping down, thegrade has been manipulated so that it slopes gently upward asthe visitor approaches the southern tip of the island. Thismeans that the granite-block revetments on the sides of theelevated lawn above appear to taper as the downward- andupward-slanting grades converge at the level of the room.“Look,” Pollara points out, “You start at one end feeling smallas you walk along the flank of the raised lawn, but then as therevetment seems to dwindle down you sense that you are get-ting increasingly taller and on a more equal footing as youapproach Roosevelt.” Like the stone blocks at LawrenceHalprin’s FDR Memorial on the Mall in Washington, D.C., thegranite blocks of the revetment will be inscribed with signifi-cant quotations from Roosevelt’s speeches.

Kahn did not live to see the word minimalism becomecommon parlance for architects or modern architecture clas-sified as a historical style called modernism. But surmisinghow he might have designed the FDR Memorial today were healive is irrelevant. Unlike Philip Johnson, whose keen sense ofshifting trends and malleability as an architect propelled himto appropriate postmodernism and give a nod to several otherplanning and design ideologies, Kahn is sui generis. Thedesign he created for the FDR Memorial is couched in a time-less idiom. Like all memorials, the ultimate test of this presi-dential monument will rest in the realm of emotion. Will itinspire reverence for Roosevelt and appreciation of Kahn’sarchitectural genius? Will it become a place of visitation, edu-cation, and homage? These questions can only be answeredafter it has been unveiled and visited by people.

Berdy is lukewarm on the subject of the FDR Memorial. “Weused to be able to walk down to that end of the island andenjoy the wild atmosphere without anything obstructing thefabulous views,” she laments. “There was all this wild vegeta-

11

Aerial view of Roosevelt Island

looking north.

2 The riprap will be underwater when the tide flows up the estuarineriver, bringing Kahn’s room into even closer proximity to the swift-moving currents.

tion, and now, like the rest of the island, everything is gettingso tidy. There is nothing mysterious left to make you wonderwho used to be here.”

Indeed the landmarks on the island have lost the evocativeghostliness they had when it was still called Welfare. The cutstone salvaged when City Hospital was torn down has beenrecycled and is now a retaining wall in what will be a new parkjust north of Four Freedoms Park. It will be an attractive land-scape offering recreational opportunities, but these will comeat the expense of the sense of adventure that this part of theisland formerly provided. James Renwick’s Smallpox Hospital,which occupies part of the site for the new park, has recentlybeen “stabilized.” Now exposed scaffolding holds up its pic-turesquely moldering walls. The building will be incorporatedinto the park and, if funds become available, it may somedaybe turned into a small museum. The Strecker Laboratory near-by, where bottled organs from autopsies were stored, is nowthe fenced off premises of a New York City Transit Authoritypower-conversion station. At the other end of the island, luxu-ry apartments have been annexed to the Octagon, the greatdomed space that was left when the wings of the old InsaneAsylum were demolished. Thus, whereas on Ellis Island theghosts of the past are memorialized and “interpreted” by theNational Park Service, here they have been exorcized by themetamorphosis of Welfare Island into Roosevelt Island.

When I told Berdy that I wanted to speak to someone whocould provide me with a firsthand, old timer’s comparison ofthe island in its before-and-after-new-town incarnations, sheput me in touch with Nancy Mirandoli Brown, who lives at 540Main Street. Brown was one of the first patients at GoldwaterHospital to be “mainstreamed” into an apartment, a year afterthe first building was ready for occupancy in 1975. When Iwent to see her in her cozy, houseplant-filled home, she toldme that although she found the island’s former atmosphererather romantic, there was a real sense of desolation. Backthen she would go on excursions around the island with otherpatients, but the dirt roads were hard to navigate in a wheel-chair and of course most of those with disabilities could notexplore the ruins but only look at them from the outside.

“I like it much better now,” she said, “especially the prome-nade. Once the park and the memorial at the southern end arefinished, you’ll be able to go around the entire perimeter ofthe island. There are at least forty or fifty – maybe more – peo-ple like me in wheelchairs, and we like to just sit for hours by

the water enjoying the sun and the views of the city, so I knowI am going to like being down there.”

Brown is a quadriplegic, and her life story stands in starkcontrast to the many incidents of scandal, corruption, bureau-cratic ineptitude, and patient abuse that have marred the repu-tations of New York City’s welfare, education, and healthsystems. It is, in fact, a testament to the humane liberalismthat once made the city a cynosure in the area of government-funded social services.

“I missed the Salk vaccine by two years and got polio whenI was seven,” she told me. Being a victim of a severe form ofthis disease, her chest muscles as well as her arms and legswere affected, creating a chronic difficulty with her breathing.When first hospitalized, she was placed in an iron lung. Afterbeing weaned from this artificial respiration apparatus, shewas able to go home to the Mirandoli’s walk-up apartment inGreenwich Village where she received home schooling from avisiting teacher, eventually earning her diploma fromWashington Irving High School. Before she was strong enoughto walk with crutches, two or three times a week her mothercarried her down the four flights of stairs so she could go tothe movies or the park. But whenever she had trouble breath-ing she would go to Goldwater Hospital because it was theonly hospital in the city system that had a ward that dealtexclusively with this problem.

“That’s where I met my future husband, Tom Brown, whoalso had polio,” she said. Once they were married, Nancy, whowas still an outpatient, asked if she could move into the hospi-tal and live there full-time with him. After a year they weregiven a private room with a bathroom, and for eleven yearsthey stayed in the hospital. As soon as the new RooseveltIsland apartments, some of which were designated for handi-capped residents, became available, the couple applied for one.

Because of her dysfunctional lungs, a large rectangular boxis attached to the back of Brown’s wheelchair and extendingfrom it is a flexible hose with a mouthpiece from which shedraws air day and night. When she says, “I don’t cook,” it is notthat she doesn’t have an interest in good food but because shelacks use of her arms and hands. Until a few years ago she wasable to stand, but because of the long-term degenerative effectsof polio, her leg muscles are now weakened to the point where

she is completely wheelchair-bound. Since she must be cookedfor, fed, dressed, washed, assisted in the bathroom, and put tobed by a helper, she needs home care attendants around theclock seven days a week. In addition, they help her do herdeskwork, writing letters, answering e-mail, and paying bills;they also perform a host of other chores such as grocery shop-ping and watering the lush greenery that dominates one sideof her living room.

One would think that such physical dependence would leadto psychological depression. Yet Brown feels herself in controlof a full and happy life. Instead of simply accepting caregiverssent by the city, she and others in her building got permissionto set up their own publically supported, independently direct-ed agency called Concepts of Independence. This allows her torecruit and interview the five attendants who care for her intwelve-hour shifts as well as the housekeeper who comes twicea week. Photographs of her nieces and nephews fill one wall.They come to see her regularly, and two or three times a yearshe makes the necessary arrangements to take a special busthat runs between New York City and Pennsylvania where shevisits her brother and his wife for a few days. At home, herschedule is a full one. She goes to mass in the Catholic churchon the island four times a week. She belongs to the RooseveltIsland Garden Club and is assigned a plot where she growstomatoes, zucchini, string beans, and cucumbers with thehands of her attendants doing the planting and weeding (“Ilike flowers, but being Italian, I have to have a vegetable gar-den,” she says). She is an active member of the RooseveltIsland Disabled Association, an independent organization thatorganizes picnics and other kinds of get-togethers on theisland and arranges frequent trips to museums, restaurants,and parks. Their bus, which holds around ten people, four orfive of whom are in wheelchairs, takes her shopping at suchplaces as Wal-Mart and Trader Joe’s.

The Roosevelt Island Disabled Association’s most recenttrip was to Hyde Park. The motivation behind the visit to theformer president’s home and National Historic Site was thegroup’s intention to have a slightly larger-than-life-size, bronzesculpture of Roosevelt in a wheelchair become part of thememorial. The architects who endorse the Kahn design in itscurrent form are not in favor of adding another sculpture –especially one that depicts Roosevelt as a paraplegic, a condi-tion he took great pains to hide. As may be imagined, Brownand other members of the Roosevelt Island DisabledAssociation are proponents of a second monument. Sheexplained, “Since the official memorial will just have a bust of

12

Roosevelt and a statue of him standing up, we think it isimportant to have another one that shows that his legs wereparalyzed by polio, particularly since there are so many of uson the island who have similar disabilities.” Fortunately, acompromise has been reached, and there will be a sculpture ofRoosevelt in a wheelchair in the new park a few feet north of the entrance to Four Freedoms Park. Brown told me, “We’restill in the talking stage and deciding which artist to choose. I think it would be nice to have a little girl in bronze lookingup at him.”

I realize that Brown is, in fact, a great deal more challengedthan Roosevelt was when I unthinkingly try to shake her handas I am leaving. He could sign the acts that made the New Deala reality, but the hand I try to grasp is completely limp. I amstruck with the sobering thought that, were I in her place, Icould not have held a pen to take notes for this essay. It alsostrikes me with special force how different Brown’s life wouldbe without the amenities of Roosevelt Island and the ability topartake of daily life rather than live within the confines of aninstitution. “I love this place,” she says. “It is a little oasis inthe middle of the big city with a warm community atmos-phere. Here everybody knows everybody. People go out of theirway to be helpful. When the blackout occurred one of myneighbors went to the garage and unhooked the battery of hiscar and brought it up the stairway all the way to my apartment

13

the pleasant marine smell of the seaweed clinging to the rocky riprap below the promenade. Then I walked through theplaza to the opposite side of the island. From that vantagepoint I saw the tall chimneys of Con Edison sending plumesof steam into the sky. In this quiet space with its campus-likeatmosphere and lack of urban tempo you are more aware than anywhere else that the city is a vast machine, a miracle of engineering.

Roosevelt Island is itself a miracle of engineering. Its lackof noise is not just the absence of the hubbub of ordinarystreet life. Garbage removal by an underground system ofpneumatic pipes means that there are no large black bags con-taining trash mounded along street curbs and no big sanita-tion trucks blocking traffic as they follow their collectionroutes. Indeed, there is no traffic to block: Motorgate, Kallman& McKinnell’s multistory, thousand-car garage may be a cav-ernous warehouse for cars, but its presence at the end of thebridge on the eastern side of the island means there are noautomobiles parked on the streets and no yawning mouths ofindividual garages at the bases of residential buildings else-where. The free electric bus that serves as an alternative modeof transportation emits no motor noise or carbon dioxide as itplies back and forth between the tram station and the Octogonat the north end of the island. A special security force patrolsthe island and crime is virtually nonexistent.

But the appropriateness of the island’s renaming in honorof Roosevelt resides more in the successful implementation ofcertain humane goals than in Wordsworthian intimations ofthe urban Sublime and the realization of utopian planningideals derived from twentieth-century, new-town planners.Although its social services and housing benefits have beendiminished in recent years by state budget cuts, they are stillthe island’s underpinnings. Today when urban renewal is indisrepute, it is good to remember that its motive force interms of decent and affordable shelter was one pillar ofRoosevelt’s freedom from want. Moreover, free-market conser-vatives would do well to observe the degree to which govern-ment-granted security has given Nancy Brown as nearlynormal a life as possible along with an uncompromised senseof personal dignity. That is surely an example of freedom fromfear. In such ways both the island’s name and the memorial-under-construction are tributes to Roosevelt’s vision and poli-cies. In a nation running amok in its determined pursuit ofconsumer capitalism, this landscape as monument and monu-mental landscape as memorial are salutary reminders of atime of honorable commitment to the values and standards ofAmerican democracy. – Elizabeth Barlow Rogers

on the tenth floor because he was concerned that my respira-tor would stop working.”

If one is looking at Roosevelt Island from the outside as alandscape historian and urban critic, it is easy to say that theplace is too divorced from the rest of the city and too much ofa government-run community to have the kind of diversityand vibrancy that make New York such a dynamic and inter-esting place to live. The homogeneity of the single-periodarchitecture, relieved here and there by the few isolated his-toric structures that have been preserved or “stabilized,” andthe ubiquity of the island’s red-and-white graphics provide thekind of strictly controlled good taste that makes you long forthe serendipity of a more diverse and surprising streetscape.The concrete building material of the early structures hasgrown even more dreary looking over time. There is no admix-ture of brownstone with Beaux-Arts, no grit to contrast withsleek, no eccentric private enterprise to leaven brand-nameswank, and indeed no swank to contrast with ordinary.

But Roosevelt Island’s so-near-yet-so-far quality has itsadvantages. When you emerge from the tram or subway andwalk along the promenade you observe the city from a uniquevantage point. This quiet observation deck provides the neces-sary physical and psychological distance to experience NewYork City in the way Wordsworth, standing in the morning

light on Westminster Bridge,once saw London as “a sightso touching in its majesty.”When I stood there recentlyrecalling his great sonnetand enjoying the awe-inspir-ing urban prospect acrossthe river of the residentialtowers near the FDR Drive(the highway’s name yetanother memorial to thepresident), I became aware ofthe quietness. Besides con-ferring on the city an aura ofsublimity, the atmosphere ofunwonted stillness attunedmy senses to what was closeat hand. A freight bargemoved upriver with the estu-arine current. I breathed

Roosevelt Island promenade.

Lednice-Valtice: A Monumental Liechtenstein Landscape with-in the Prague-Vienna Greenway

The fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989 revealed to awider world one of the most amazing historic cul-tural landscapes in existence – the vast Lednice-Valtice estate in Southern Moravia, created andmaintained by the Liechtenstein dynasty for over

five hundred years. The estate included a wide variety of cul-tural treasures: not only two zameks, or manor houses, datingfrom the late Renaissance, but also elaborate gardens, numer-ous follies, and some two hundred square kilometers of fieldsand woodland. The detailed archival records and library hold-ings accumulated during the Liechtenstein’s lengthy tenure onthe estate were also extremely valuable. At the same time, theseabundant resources represented an enormous financial andtactical challenge. In fact, when Lednice-Valtice was discoveredby international heritage-protection advocates and organiza-tions in 1991, the conservation of this remarkable culturalreserve was by no means certain.

The Palava Hills, and the rolling lands adjacent to them onwhich Lednice-Valtice is situated, have witnessed millennia ofhuman history. Dramatic evidence of this was discovered dur-ing archaeological excavations in 1925 in the form of a figurinecalled the Venus of Dolní Vestonice – one of the oldest ceram-ics in the world, dating to c. 27,000 BCE. Scholars now believethat some of Europe’s first agrarian communities were locatedhere. At the crossroads of Central Europe, the region alsobecame a center of trade. Its rich limestone soils and semi-Mediterranean climate proved a seductive lure for theRomans, who established fortifications and planted vineyardshere during the reign of Marcus Aurelius. A local viniculturecontinues today.

It was these rich agricultural lands that initially attractedthe first Liechtensteins in the fourteenth century, and eachgeneration attempted to cultivate and improve upon the fami-ly’s original holdings. The next five centuries entailed the care-ful assembly and development of the estate, which comprisedthe Valtice and Lednice zameks, their finely designed orna-mental gardens and landscapes, and their vast surroundingagricultural reserves. From the late-eighteenth century, thelands between and around the castles were connected withroad and trail systems that were embellished with a series ofimpressive garden follies. As high members of the HabsburgCourt, the Liechtensteins were ever alert to the most fashion-able artistic, architectural, and landscape concepts of the dayand they employed the best professionals to execute their

wishes, including the Habsburg court architects JohannBernhard Fischer von Erlach, Joseph Hardtmuth, and GeorgWingelmüller, and equally prominent artists, artisans, garden-ers, and estate managers.

Conceived on a very grand scale, the agricultural manage-ment of the estate was planned with as much care as its archi-tectural and artistic features. The integration of culture andnature was held as an ideal by the Liechtensteins from theearly eighteenth century onward, and the library at Lednicecontains an impressive array of European sources on architec-tural and landscape design. Among the most remarkableaspects of the larger estate were the water management systemat Lednice, aquaculture in the form of fourteenth-century fishponds, a five-kilometer-long alleé of horse-chestnut trees onthe straight road that connects the two zameks, and a stand offast-growing hickory trees brought from the region ofPhiladelphia, Pennsylvania, in the early nineteenth century, asevidenced in correspondence between Prince Johann I JosephLiechtenstein and the American botanist William Bartram.

Also evident in the historical record is the crucial role thathorses played in the history of the landscape. The Liechten-stein family became involved with horse breeding in the 1600sand are believed to have participated a century later in theproduction of some of the famous Royal Lippizaners in theirEisgrub stables near Lednice. Among the grandest buildingson the estate are the stables at both zameks; the Lednice stable – designed by Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach –

was described by the prominent art historian Hans Sedlmayeras a “palace for horses.”

The architectural development of the estate reached itszenith in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the eigh-teenth century selected improvements were made to thefaçades at Valtice in the neoclassical style, and in the late 1840sthe baroque façades and interiors of Lednice were extensivelyand imaginatively modernized in the neo-Gothic taste. It wasalso at this time that Lednice’s magnificent glass conservatorywas added.

Corresponding improvements were made to the landscapethroughout this period, with each component conceived as apart of a larger, harmonious design. To give just one example,the Minaret Folly is carefully aligned not only with the centralportals of Lednice but also with the Valtice zamek some fivekilometers to the south.

All this came to an abrupt halt at the end of the SecondWorld War. The Liechtenstein family, primarily based inAustria and Moravia, had allied themselves with the Germansin the Sudetenland accord. When the liberated Czechoslovakgovernment regained authority in 1945, Franz Josef II and hisfamily were evicted from Lednice-Valtice. The subsequent newCommunist government recognized the estate’s artistic signifi-cance and distinctive landscape and opened it to the public,but its upkeep gradually declined; over the ensuing half centu-ry many of the art collections were dispersed or relocated. Bythe late 1980s, measures to maintain and protect the zameks

and their surrounding grounds had come to anear standstill.

But if various aspects of Lednice-Valticefell into disrepair, the estate was also sparedthe intense modernization and developmentthat was taking place throughout Europe. TheSoviet Union considered the territories alongthe boundaries of the Iron Curtain a high-security zone; as a result, this ancient agrarianlandscape and the communities within itwere frozen in time due to the strategicaspects of their location. In Bohemia, some ofthe fields were only converted to modernagribusinesses in the 1980s, and in much ofMoravia fields were still being scythed byhand in 1990.

At the time of the rediscovery of theLednice-Valtice castles by various heritage-protection organizations two years later, how-ever, some of the estate’s most picturesque

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Antique car show, Valtice Chateau

forecourt, May 2010.

lands were about to be boughtby an American developer for a

golf and recreation facility, due to the region’s proximity toVienna. Lednice-Valtice was not alone in its dilemma.Hundreds of other national monuments were also in peril asthe young Czech Republic – faced with multiple challengesand limited financial resources – struggled to rebuild itself asa democratic nation. In this period of transition to a free-mar-ket economy, all kinds of possible new paradigms were consid-ered for operating historically and culturally significant sites.At Lednice-Valtice alone, ideas ranged from continuing busi-ness as usual to establishing a not-for-profit, heritage-sitedevelopment corporation that would lease the estate for, say,fifty or one hundred years with the goal of restoring it andmaking it once more a self-sustaining operation. Importantly,the most viable proposals all suggested approaching the futureof Lednice-Valtice in a holistic and integrated manner thatwould include all possible stakeholders. There was also a par-allel effort underway, initiated by several Czechoslovak andCzechoslovak-Americans, to develop agritourism as a means ofpreserving the unique landscape of the Czech region as amodel of sustainability.

Conducting planning charrettes (results-oriented planningsymposia) for both zameks in 1993 and 1994 turned out to be aparticularly effective and efficient method of ferreting out thehistory of the estate and brainstorming solutions to its variousconservation challenges. These symposia, sponsored by the

World Monuments Fund, were important in forging consen-sus, articulating specific conservation projects, and – perhapsmost significantly – envisioning possibilities for conservingthe estate through economically sustainable means. Onenotion was to develop the extensive upper floors of the stablesof both zameks into guest accommodations based on theBritish models of self-catering apartments; another was toestablish cultural programs at each zamek that celebrated vari-ous aspects of their history, such as continuing the ValticeBaroque Music Festival that had been introduced a few yearsearlier or featuring horse and horticultural projects at Lednice.This mode of heritage-conservation planning boosted interestin and knowledge of the estate and brought forward new con-servation constituencies.

Gradually a broad coalition of local, national, and interna-tional heritage and conservation agencies and interest groupstook shape to stabilize the estate. Among the proudest accom-plishments of the international efforts at Lednice-Valtice wereseveral summer training courses for Czech and American stu-dents of landscape and architecture conservation, subsidizedby the Samuel H. Kress Foundation. In 1993 and 1994, internsfrom the University of Pennsylvania, Cornell University, andthe University of Litomysl lived at a neighboring farmsteadand offered their services to the estate for free.

In 1996, Lednice-Valtice was listed as a UNESCO WorldHeritage Site, and that same year its follies were placed on theWorld Monuments Fund’s Watch List of Endangered Sites,which helped draw attention and support for several timelyconservation efforts. Since then, the Baroque chapel at Valtice,the Rendezvous Folly, and the magnificent conservatory adjacent to Lednice have all been restored. In May 2010 a long-planned project to restore the stables of Lednice with princi-pal funding from the European Union was announced. It ishoped that this will include a reconstruction of what was onceits central sculptural feature: a horse bath.

But these monuments, however remarkable in and of them-selves, are only a part of the restoration challenges at Lednice-Valtice. Actions to protect the landscape in recent years haveincluded surveys of plant materials and cultivation patterns,research on the water-supply systems serving Lednice’sEnglish Picturesque and formal French gardens, restoration ofview corridors, and restoration and reactivation of riding andwalking trails in the region. An extremely important locally-based initiative has been the reopening of the Gregor MendelHorticultural School at Lednice, which was originally estab-lished in 1524. This school hosted a competition in 2008 for anew garden on the estate. The result was the ecofriendly TireeChemlar Herb Garden, planted in the former kitchen-garden

area of the Valtice zamek and inaugurated last May. Thisaward-winning new garden is one of a series of amenities andimprovements to Valtice that will help contribute to thatzamek’s sustainability by underscoring its significant heritage.The sixteenth-century Codex Liechtenstein, the most compre-hensive botanical archive of its era, was created and preservedwithin this zamek’s walls.

While these heritage-protection measures for the Lednice-Valtice estate were getting under way, an even larger conserva-tion-oriented program called Czech Greenways was launched.This not-for-profit organization began by interpreting andrestoring the historic paths and roadways on the Lednice-Valtice property. Its founders then decided to create a Prague-Vienna Greenway, so that tourists could walk from onecountry to the next. Using the Hudson River Greenway as amodel, they selected the best pathways between the region’sformer security-zone towns and linked them together, like astring of beads, creating a continuous trail between the twofamous cities. This trail stimulates the local economy by draw-ing tourists to the area while simultaneously providing astrong argument for preserving these precious landscapes andcommunities. When linked with similar systems that wereinspired by the Prague-Vienna Greenway, a network of trailscan be seen to cover most of Central Europe. The linksbetween these interdependent trail systems can be found onwww.greenways.pl/en/gws-network-in-central-eastern-europe.

Numerous aspects of the history of Lednice-Valtice are yetto be investigated, and the estate’s archives could keep histori-ans and researchers busy for years. But for those who havebecome increasingly intimate with the former Liechtensteinholdings, the process has been a continual discovery ofsuperbly conceived and executed art, architecture, and land-scape design. Miraculously the elements of the inspired plansurvived the twentieth century, resulting in a rare and remark-ably intact example of an ancient European estate – a monu-ment that protects the heritage of the past while serving as aneducational and recreational resource for the future. Althoughmany challenges still lie ahead, Lednice-Valtice has alreadyserved as an exemplar and call to action for the conservationof other sites in the region. Thanks to the hard work andcooperative efforts of local, national, and international cultur-al-heritage conservation interests, and the valuable experiencesgained and shared over the last two decades, future genera-tions will be able to enjoy this place for the ecological and cul-tural marvel it is. – John H. Stubbs and Stefan Yarabek

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Lednice Chateau.

Place Marker:

Theodore Roosevelt and the Native American Patrimony

Ahundred-foot-tall weathered pyramid near St.Louis, Missouri. An effigy mound in the shape of aserpent on a ridge overlooking the Brush CreekValley in Ohio. Dwellings hewn out of cliff facesand kivas – circular pit chambers – built into the

earth in Colorado and New Mexico. These astonishing monu-ments predate European occupation of North America. Theystand as mute reminders of the large-scale civilizations thatflourished all across what is now the United States centuriesbefore the first Spaniards arrived on the Georgia coast and theEnglish reached Massachusetts and Virginia. In the soil-richsoutheastern and central regions of the country these monu-ments take the form of great earthen mounds or totemic ani-mal forms. In the arid Southwest, on the other hand, many ofthe enduring remains of Native American places were built ofdressed masonry quarried from local rock.

The original purposes of these impressive earthworks andstone constructions remain obscure. We do not even know thenames given these monuments in the landscape by those whobuilt them. Ignored in American history books, which for gen-erations taught that the first settlers encountered a “virgin”continent, only in recent years have archaeologists begun torecognize them as fortresses, places of worship, ceremonialgrounds, and gathering places for trade and other purposes.But their visual impact is as powerful as it is mysterious: evenwithout the benefit of metal tools, the Indians built big. Forthis reason it is all the more sobering that many of these mon-uments have vanished from the landscape as well as from thenational consciousness. Were it not for Theodore Roosevelt’sdecision to assume the role of presidential “Place Marker,”many of the remains of what were once large, Native Americancities, villages, and ritual centers would no longer survive.

Roosevelt was an unlikely savior. Unapologetically hostiletoward Native Americans throughout his time in office, this“wilderness warrior” strongly identified with the mythology ofthe Western frontier, which cast the Indian as the settler’s natural enemy. Only much later did his attitudes toward someof the Western tribes soften. At the same time, however,

Roosevelt’s affinity with the Western landscape led him to akeen appreciation of its geological splendors and scientificwonders, including its numerous Native American ruins. Hewas determined to see that they were protected in the sameway that the recently established national parks were beingprotected – as preserves within the federal domain.

It is true that Roosevelt viewed these places as geologicaland archeological curiosities rather than as sites sacrosanct toliving Native Americans and only later came to appreciate theirethnic significance. Nevertheless, it was through his decisiveaction that they became part of the tangible patrimony of theirdescendants. Acting with alacrity to short-circuit the cumber-some congressional bureaucracy and protect the sites fromexplorers and amateur archaeologists, he sought the right toclassify these remarkable discoveries as national monuments, aprerogative he achieved through the passage of the AntiquitiesAct in 1906. The act states that the president of the UnitedStates is authorized “to declare by public proclamation historiclandmarks, historic and prehistoric structures, and otherobjects of historic or scientific interest that are situated uponthe lands owned or controlled by the Government of theUnited States to be national monuments.” These words put thepower of the presidency squarely behind the protection ofancient monumental architecture on federal land, along withthe works of art buried within them.

Since a stroke of the pen was all that the president requiredto designate a piece of federal property a national monument,within the space of two years Roosevelt had named eighteen.Prominent among these were El Morro, a cliff in New Mexicoincised with Native American petroglyphs and inscriptions ofseventeenth-century explorers, and Chaco Canyon, the greatAncestral Puebloan ritual center in New Mexico. Roosevelteven managed to have the Grand Canyon designated a nation-al monument because it was a very large “object of scientificinterest.”

All of the national monuments created by Roosevelt were inthe West, a landscape of prominent rock formations, mesas,and canyons. An entirely different type of monumental land-scape existed in the temperate Midwest and South. There,enormous workforces carrying baskets of dirt and mud hadbuilt huge earthworks even more impressive than those beingcreated today by certain artists with the aid of large-scalemachinery. These huge forms were so astonishing that con-temporary viewers, biased by racism, ascribed their origin toOld World builders such as the Egyptians. Monumental bytheir very size and presence in the landscape, many had pyra-

midal configurations and cosmological alignments similar tothose of the Mayan ruins of Meso-America. As early as 1815,Ephraim George Squier and Edwin Hamilton Davis hadobserved and recorded their mathematically precise dimen-sions and orientation to the movements of the sun and moonin Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley, a SmithsonianInstitution-sponsored publication. Squier and Davis alsorecorded the size and appearance of the Great Serpent Mound,a 1,370-foot-long serpent built on an Ohio plateau by the FortAncient culture around 1070 CE. Other equally astonishingmound configurations were later found elsewhere. In EffigyMounds National Monument, north of Marquette, Iowa, thereare 206 mounds in all, 31 of which are in the shape of bearsand birds. Most were built between 700 and 1100 CE.

Unfortunately, many of these monuments were far morevulnerable to human interference than those of the West. In

1862, almost a half-centurybefore the legislation creatingthe Antiquities Act was intro-

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Theodore Roosevelt Monument by

James Earle Fraser, 1940.

duced in Congress, the Homestead Act had accelerated theconversion of federally owned lands from prairie to farmland.The Anglo-American buyers of the fractional sections of sur-veyed lands sold by the government saw the mounds merely asimpediments to cultivation and urban settlement. Even afterthe link between the mound builders and extant tribes in theUnited States was made by the Bureau of Ethnology in itsTwelfth Annual Report (1890–1891), the sites frequently sufferedthe same depredations from amateur archaeologists and arti-fact hunters as their Western counterparts. And although manyof these national monuments were eventually put under theaegis of the National Park Service after its creation in 1916, theagency’s official sanctions were not sufficiently enforceable tostop the monuments’ destruction; 90 percent of them hadvanished by 1948.

Monuments have meanings that change over time. Somethat were once revered no longer compel attention andrespect, whereas changing values cause others to acquire newsignificance. Gradually over the last half-century the PlymouthRock colonial creation story has faded and Native Americanmonuments have come to be seen as patrimony rather thanalien curiosities. In recent years the U.S. government, spurredto action by tribal lawsuits, has accorded Native Americans theright to repossess some of their ancient lands, along with cer-tain sacred artifacts that the government and institutionallysponsored archaeologists had sent to natural-history museumsfor the purposes of research and ethnological display. Luckily,protection of the immovable sacred elements of these sites –mesas, springs, mountains – has made possible the perpetua-tion of certain religious practices that foster a consciousnessof tribal myth, history, and identity. The preservation of suchsacred sites has become especially meaningful to modern-dayNative Americans seeking to maintain a link with their ances-tral cultures in the face of pressure from government support-ed energy companies directed toward the exploitation ofnatural resources on their reservations.

Against this ever-shifting historical backdrop it is interest-ing to consider the recent history of a very different sort ofmonument from the ones given protection under theAntiquities Act of 1906 – the 1940 bronze equestrian statue ofRoosevelt by James Earle Fraser (1876–1953) in front of theAmerican Museum of Natural History in New York City. Amounted Roosevelt, son of one of the founders of the muse-um, is flanked by two men on foot: an African American and a

Native American. All three figures appear to be moving for-ward in concert as they gaze toward Central Park. Some findthis sculpture particularly beautiful – indeed, New York City’sfinest equestrian monument after Augustus Saint-Gaudens’sSherman Monument at Grand Army Plaza – whereas othersmaintain that it projects a patronizing Anglo-American atti-tude toward other races. Out of political concern with regardto this sensitive issue, the deterioration of this prominentwork has gone unchecked, notwithstanding the Arts Commis-sion’s approval of its restoration in 2003. The statue has not been removed from its granite base in front of the CentralPark West entrance to the museum, but until now it hasremained in a kind of moral purgatory, its bronze surfacestreaked, soiled, and corroded from exposure to the long-termeffects of atmospheric pollution and acid rain.

To make the case for conserving the statue we need to firstweigh the following propositions. The rapacious conquest ofthis continent and the subjugation of its original inhabitantsalong with the institution of slavery are the two greatestblights on American history. At the same time, most of us rec-ognize that the preservation of cultural patrimony by one’sown people or others is a clear good, and America has beenmoving in the direction of a more just society during the half-century since the Roosevelt statue was erected. Indeed, thesculptor’s intention when the work was commissioned was toproject an image of unity rather than one of racism and strife: an embodiment of a new attitude embracing a nonxeno-phobic appreciation of other cultures. Now, ninety years after Roosevelt’s death, the Museum of Natural History hasundertaken the restoration of its façade, and the cleaning andrepatination of the president’s statue will be part of this multi-million-dollar project. Working with conservation experts in the Department of Parks, museum officials plan to see thatthe sculpture regains its original appearance. Perhaps themoment has come to give a brighter shine to the monumentof the president whose efforts as a place marker began the salvation of Native American monuments – evidence of pre-European occupation of the American landscape – andprevented their heedless erasure. – Elizabeth Barlow Rogers

The author thanks David Hurst Thomas, curator of anthropology atthe American Museum of Natural History, for his helpful reading ofthis essay. She also thanks Frances H. Kennedy, editor and principalcontributor of American Indian Places (Houghton Mifflin, 2008) forproviding some of the background information on Native Americanmonuments upon which this article is based. In addition, she is grate-ful to Commissioner Adrian Benepe and Jonathan Kuhn of the NewYork City Parks Department for their helpful information regardingthe future restoration of the Theodore Roosevelt Monument.

Books

Naked City: The Death andLife of Authentic UrbanPlacesBy Sharon ZukinNew York: Oxford UniversityPress, 2010

When the littlewine shopappeared in thestorefrontacross the streetfrom my apart-ment inGreenpoint, Iwas worried.Was this trendynew installationhere for me?Was I the oneexpected tocoolly browsethe custom-built woodenshelves for the perfect bottle?I imagined an elfin entrepre-neur trying to anticipate mylocal shopping desires, fever-ishly pulling the levers ofurban change behind a cur-tain of once-derelict façades.But I did not welcome thischange to my neighborhood,a working-class Polish andLatino enclave. The wineshop seemed to both adver-tise my presence there andforce me to confront what Iwas reluctant to admit: thispatch at the northern end ofBrooklyn was absorbingmore and more of the edu-cated, professional, wine-

buying classes with a tastefor quaint, well-appointedlittle shops. . . and I wasimplicated in that process.

The sociologist and socialcritic Sharon Zukin wouldimmediately recognize that

Greenpointwas in themidst of thepervasiveurban processcommonlyknown as gen-trification.Zukin has dis-tinguishedherself as anacute observerof the evolvingNew York sceneby insisting

that culture must be viewedalongside capital as a motiveforce in urban (re)develop-ment. It’s not enough just tofollow the money. We mustconsider, too, the culturalaspirations and consump-tion patterns that driveurban transformations. InLoft Living: Culture andCapital in Urban Change(Johns Hopkins, 1982), Zukintraced the emergence ofSoHo as a posh residentialaddress for affluent people –newcomers inspired by the

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artists who had appropriatedloft spaces abandoned by ashrinking manufacturingsector. In The Cultures ofCities (Blackwell, 1995), a col-lection of essays on subjectsranging from restaurants tothe museum industry, Zukinsharpened her critique ofmonied interests who appro-priate art and culture toremake a city. Now, in NakedCity: The Death and Life ofAuthentic Urban Places, Zukinpins her analysis of urbanchange on the craving forauthenticity – a magical quali-ty that includes architecturalcharm, unique retailing, eth-nic flavor, and other talis-mans of local character andcommunity.

And therein lies the rub.As upwardly mobile seekers(or “cultural migrants,” asshe calls them) descend onneighborhoods in a greedyquest for authenticity, Zukinargues that they unwittinglyerode the very qualities thatmade these places interest-ing or desirable in the firstplace. Gentrifiers consumeauthenticity at its ownexpense. At the scale of theretail environment, the spi-ral begins when “artists andgentrifiers move into oldimmigrant areas, praisingthe working-class bars andtake-out joints but over-whelming them with new

cafés and boutiques, whichare soon followed by brand-name chain stores.” Zukinallows that the middle stagemay yield a tolerant, cos-mopolitan urban mix – aswine shops and whimsicalboutiques mingle with bode-gas and dollar stores – yet itis a fragile balance anddifficult to protect. As gen-trifiers arrive, rents rise toaccommodate what the mar-ket will bear. Both longtimeresidents and business estab-lishments are displaced ifthey cannot keep pace. Andthough sophisticated cultur-al migrants may not likechain stores, eventually theseare the only sellers who canafford a place in the newneighborhood.

Naked City is organizedaround six New York stories.Each chapter leads with avignette from Zukin’s ownforay into a particular neigh-borhood or public space.Then the author launchesinto an historical narrative ofthe economic, political, andcultural crucible in whichthe neighborhood or spacehas been formed. Zukincrashes an underground artsparty in Williamsburg,Brooklyn, where gritty hasbecome cool. She sips cap-puccino in a trendy café inHarlem, where new busi-nesses emphasize local rootsand trade on the neighbor-hood’s cultural heritage. Sheescorts a group of Japanesecollege students through

Astor Place and the EastVillage, where the expensiveboutiques on East NinthStreet are “both elegant andderelict, hippie and yuppie,distinctive and diverse.” InUnion Square, the bustlingGreenmarket feels democrat-ic even though it is spon-sored by a private BusinessImprovement District (BID).At the Red Hook ball fieldsin Brooklyn, Zukin browsesthe Latino food carts, com-menting on how a sponta-neous local tradition becamea destination. And, finally,she examines the strugglesof community gardens inEast New York and elsewhereto survive in an atmosphereof intense real estate specu-lation.

Zukin is especially inter-ested in the way the mediafeeds our obsession with“locavore” food culture andits relationship to placemaking. She scrolls throughfoodie blogs like Chow-hound to show how mediaoutlets chart new, gastro-nomical geographies ofauthenticity. Local food –fresh produce from regionalfarms sold at the Green-market, Salvadoran pupusasfrom Red Hook food carts,or homegrown veggies raisedin a community garden –underscores Zukin’s theme

of terroir and the contestedterrain of authenticity. In the case of community gardens, “the specific formthis authenticity takes haschanged over time, as thegardens shifted from a grass-roots social movement chal-lenging the state to anembodiment of ethnic iden-tity, then an expression ofsecular cultural identity intune with gentrifiers’ values,and finally a form of urbanfood production consistentwith the tastes of middle-class locavores and strategiesfor sustainable develop-ment.”

Zukin’s subtitle, The Deathand Life of Authentic UrbanPlaces, nods to Jane Jacobs’sclassic 1961 study of urbancharacter. Jacobs’s inversionof “life” and “death” implieda hopeful renaissance forcities plundered by urbanrenewal. But Zukin mighthave returned to the moreconventional construction tosignal her pessimisticappraisal of the currenturban scene. The city, sheinsists, has become a“smooth, sleek, more expen-sive replica of its formerself.” Jacobs herself mustbear some of the responsi-bility, Zukin argues, becauseshe possessed the “gen-trifier’s aesthetic apprecia-tion of urban authenticity.”Indeed, it should come as nosurprise that precisely theneighborhoods that Jacobsand her fellow activistsworked so hard to preserve

from the wrecking ball arenow among the most exclu-sive and affluent parts of thecity. The landscape ofauthenticity – nineteenth-century brownstones, littleshops, and cobblestonestreets – is too easilydivorced from the complexsocial world it hosted.

Jane Jacobs was amongthe first to recognize thecharming aspects of authen-ticity when more powerfulpeople sought to bury themin favor of banal monumen-tality. Yet the recognition ofauthenticity is generally bornof privilege, for it requiresthe detached, discerning per-spective of the connoisseur.During the earliest stages ofgentrification you must havethe vision to perceive, andthus gravitate toward,authenticity. After that, youjust need a little money andthe ability to follow direc-tions, as the frontiersmenwith cultural capital give wayto sophisticated yuppies.Eventually, if you don’tfigure it out for yourself, youcan rely on New YorkMagazine to steer you towardthe next hip location. By thistime, though, the neighbor-hood has already been dis-covered and ratcheted up tothe next round of economicdevelopment, driven by corporations like Barnes &

Noble and Whole Foods.Soon it will be derided asoverexposed by the New YorkObserver. In other words,“authenticity,” once recog-nized, becomes a powerfulmode of urban development,setting into motion, as Zukinpersuasively argues, theforces that will destroy it.Because the irony of authen-ticity is that it is guileless. Itis not, in fact, for sale on themarket, because it does not,finally, reside only in thelocal buildings and store-fronts but also in the peoplewho live and work in them.

Zukin creates an alarmingvision of a New York leechedof vitality and variety: “thecity’s historic diversity ofuses, local specializations,small stores, and cheek-by-jowl checkerboard of richpeople, poor people, andpeople broadly in the middlehas been submerged by atidal wave of new luxuryapartments and chainstores.” Although she admitsthat authenticity is not an apriori condition, she delightsin pointing her finger at allthe dupes, arrivistes, andphonies who are unwittinglycolluding in the destructionof the city’s soul: shedescribes the IKEA ferryshoppers in Red Hook mov-ing toward the big blue andyellow box “with a sense ofpurpose, like astronautstransferring from a spaceshuttle to the mother ship.”This wry, breezy style is part

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did not want to be associatedwith the embourgeoisementof my neighborhood, eventhough I knew I was a part ofit. My disingenuous boycottended when I gave in to theconvenience of picking up abottle of wine not twentyyards from my home, andover the course of a year Icame to the know the ownerof the store, her dog, andseveral other regulars. Oneof these, a local artist, con-tributed a large, whimsicalchalk mural across the shop’sback wall. On Fridayevenings, the shop hostedwine tastings. Local distribu-tors uncorked bottle afterbottle, carefully explainingthe provenance of each,while an affable employeerefilled platters of high-grade cheeses and thinlysliced prosciutto. I sharedknowing looks with a fewother familiar strangers fromthe neighborhood as weobserved the Friday nightcrowd. These urban explor-ers were visiting to see whatGreenpoint was “all about”and lap up its “authentic”charms. Although a recentarrival myself, I still regard-ed these people as touristswho could not appreciate thegritty quirks of the place Icalled home. Sharon Zukinwould understand exactlyhow I felt. – Elihu Rubin

The Collected Writings ofBeatrix Farrand: AmericanLandscape Gardener,1872–1959Edited by Carmen PearsonUniversity Press of NewEngland, 2009

Beatrix Farrand: PrivateGardens, Public Landscapes By Judith B. Tankard The Monacelli Press, 2009

Unlike many ofher contempo-raries, BeatrixJones Farrand(1872–1959), nowconsidered oneof the foremostlandscapedesigners of hergeneration,never wrote abook. As archi-tect/landscapearchitect RobertW. Patterson,her friend and frequent col-laborator of her later years,observed in his obituary trib-ute, “She wrote less so thatshe could do more.” Insteadshe chose a different way tomake a permanent contribu-tion to her profession. In1939 Farrand and her hus-band, Max, formed the ReefPoint Gardens Corporation:a horticultural study centerat her family home in BarHarbor, on Mount DesertIsland, in Maine. Farrandalso assembled a large col-

of the book’s appeal but alsoa sign of the intellectualimprecision of her approach.At times the author’s lamentfor a time when local com-munities organized “againstwealth and power” instead of for the right to a well-frothed cappuccino is acer-bic and to the point. But atother moments Zukin seemssimply nostalgic – not for abetter New York, but for herNew York, the city she discov-ered and made her own.Anyone who remembers thevitality and variety of Harlemtwenty or thirty years agolongs for a more complicat-ed telling of this story.

The author would bemore convincing if she hadspent a little time acknowl-edging not only the benefitsthat come with gentrifica-tion – neighborhood safety,rehabilitated housing stock –but also the difficulty of controlling it; many govern-ment interventions in urbanplanning and growth arelater judged as failures.Zukin suggests “new formsof public-private stewardshipthat give residents, workers,and small business owners,as well as buildings and dis-tricts, a right to put downroots and remain in place,”but says next to nothingabout the present landscape

of rent control and stabiliza-tion in New York, or how wewould get from where we areto where she would like us tobe.

Moreover, is it also possi-ble that the city is moreresilient, more complicated,than Zukin allows? It con-stantly regenerates newsocial spaces of authentic,hybrid communities, even ifthey evade prying eyes. Awalk today from GreenwichVillage to Wall Street – orfrom Astoria to JacksonHeights – still takes youthrough a number of ethnicenclaves and a tremendouslymixed set of communities.Even within the mostupscale environments thereremain informal and con-tested spaces. NeverthelessZukin is underscoring a cen-tral and brutal urban para-dox. Gentrifiers are peoplewho love cities for theirdiversity. And yet theirarrival triggers a processwhereby the older, poorergroups that produced neigh-borhood authenticity areforced to leave.

It’s hard to see yourneighborhood change beforeyour eyes and easy to resentnewcomers and media out-lets for overexposing the lit-tle place you discovered onyour own. We want the gateto come down just after ourown arrival, to preserve whatwe found before it isdestroyed. When the wineshop appeared, my first reac-tion was juvenile: boycott. I

lection of archival and edu-cational materials to be usedby students of landscapedesign at Reef Point, andpublished bulletins on theorganization’s projects anddevelopment.

Unfortunately BarHarbor’s tax base was severe-ly eroded, first by the GreatDepression and then by adisastrous fire in 1947, whichdestroyed the homes of

many of the town’s wealthysummer residents. As aresult, Reef Point Gardenswas denied tax-exempt sta-tus. Recognizing that thefoundation now had littlechance for survival, Farrandchose to dissolve it. She alsomade the radical decision todestroy the house at ReefPoint and its gardens, realiz-ing that later owners wouldbe unlikely to maintain them

to her standards. In addition,she decided to donate herprofessional papers, consist-ing primarily of plans andphotographs, to the Univer-sity of California at Berkeley.For many years thesearchives were stored off-siteand were difficult of access,discouraging most scholars;with little new research,Farrand’s formerly stellarreputation went into a par-

tial eclipse. Inthe early1980s, howev-er, paperspresented intwo Farrandsymposiawere pub-lished, usher-ing in arevival ofscholarshipon this lead-ing Americanlandscape

designer, research that wasalso fuelled by a growinginterest in the lives andcareers of women profes-sionals.

The recent collection ofFarrand writings edited byCarmen Pearson follows avolume published in 1997 bythe Island Foundation in BarHarbor, in which the ReefPoint Gardens Bulletins werereprinted in facsimile withan introduction by PaulaDeitz. Farrand had published

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the original Bulletins, whichincluded articles written byher as well as by several ofher associates at Reef Point,at irregular intervals between1946 and 1955. Althoughthere is an overlap of fiveessays, Farrand afficionadoswill want both the Deitz andPearson volumes in theirlibraries.

An especially valuable fea-ture of the Pearson collec-tion is its inclusion of thefull text of the neophytelandscape designer’s 1893– 1895 “Book of Gardening,”which has never before beenpublished. This was a hand-written diary the author kept while visiting Europewith her mother; the title,her own, seems a misnomer,since Beatrix was not thengardening or giving adviceon gardening herself. A closecomparison with CharlesPlatt’s book on Italian gar-dens (1894) and with ItalianVillas and Their Gardens(1905) by Edith Wharton,Farrand’s aunt, could atsome point be revealingsince they visited many ofthe same places.

Another interesting itemincluded in Pearson’s book isan article Farrand wrote on landscape gardening for a book entitled Vocations for the Trained Woman:Opportunities Other Than

Teaching, which appeared in1910. Here she somewhatsternly lays out a demandingcourse of study for aspiringwomen landscape designers.This immediately raises thequestion: where had she her-self learned these skills, andwho were her teachers?Farrand never took formalcourses of any kind butreceived all of her education,from the elementary levelon, from tutors. We knowthat Charles SpragueSargent, director of theArnold Arboretum, providedinstructors for her in plantidentification and horticul-ture from the ranks of hisstaff. Her tutors in civil engi-neering, a key component oflandscape design, wererecruited from ColumbiaUniversity, but here again wehave no names. For thesereasons and many others, aFarrand study of the scopeand caliber of JudithTankard’s book has beenneeded for a long time.

Farrand was her own firstbiographer. In 1956, at theage of 84, she wrote a third-person narrative of her lifethat was published after herdeath in the last issue of theReef Point Gardens Bulletin.

With characteristic verbaleconomy, she summed upher nearly sixty-year careerin less than three printedpages, mentioning by nameonly a few of her more thantwo hundred clients. Shelisted her honors, revealingthat in 1899, only three yearsinto her profession, she hadfelt unworthy of beingnamed a charter member ofthe American Society ofLandscape Architects. A life-long Episcopalian, Farrandended her brief memoir witha phrase from the RomanCatholic requiem mass: “Luxperpetua luceat eis,” append-ing to it only the word“FINIS.”

Five months after herdeath from heart disease onFebruary 27, 1959, two per-ceptive and affectionate rem-iniscences of Farrand werepublished in Landscape Archi-tecture Quarterly. The first,written by Patterson, wascalled “Beatrix Farrand, 1872-1959: An Appreciation of aGreat Landscape Gardener.”Patterson’s article is invalu-able because, of the manypeople who worked closelywith Farrand, either in heroffice or as a consultant, hewas the only one who hasdescribed her working habitsin detail.

The second article, “AnAttempted Evocation of aPersonality,” was written byFarrand’s most important

client, Mildred Bliss ofDumbarton Oaks in Wash-ington, DC. Bliss, who hadbeen very close to Farrand,recalled her profound sensi-tivity to music, her finevoice, and her ultimate deci-sion to become a landscapegardener rather than asinger. She also describedFarrand’s perfectionism, heralmost obsessive attention to detail, and her insistenceon working with her clientsas codesigners rather than as passive recipients of her own ideas. The followingyear Bliss gathered togetherPatterson’s article, her ownappreciation, an article byLanning Roper on Dumbar-ton Oaks, and a list ofFarrand’s work and had thecompilation privately print-ed, using the same title asthat of Patterson’s article.Almost a quarter of a centurywould pass before compara-ble attention was againfocused on Farrand’s life andcareer.

In the 1960s and well intothe 1970s, the cultural cli-mate in America was inimi-cal to renewed appreciationof Farrand or, indeed, anylandscape designer who spe-cialized in private gardens.Instead, in the era of Earth

Days and enthusiasm for allthings environmental, openspace, especially “green”open space, was hailed uni-versally as a blessing. At firstthere was little awarenessthat this precious space,rather than simply being“leftover” land, had some-times been designed byhuman beings. Then camethe realization that CentralPark in New York City andmany of the nation’s otherurban parks had beendesigned by Frederick LawOlmsted Sr. This was thedawn of the “OlmstedRenaissance,” a welcomedevelopment but one with ashadowy underside: parkswere “good” because theywere not only open to thepublic but belonged to thepublic. By contrast, privategardens were seen as elitistbecause they belonged toindividuals – wealthy indi-viduals.

Interest in Farrand laydormant during this period,although her professionallibrary, plans, photographs,herbarium, and print collec-tion were safely stored atBerkeley, along with theplans of Gertrude Jekyll thatshe had purchased and theplans, photographs, press-clipping albums, and slidesleft to her for Reef Point byher contemporary MaryRutherfurd Jay. It is impor-

tant to remember that thepurpose of her gift was toaid aspiring landscape archi-tects in their own designstudies. Almost certainlyFarrand would be astonishedif she knew that historianswere now using the collec-tion to study her own lifeand career.

Contrary to Farrand’swishes, however, her booksand prints and Jay’s glassslides (the latter copied onto35mm) were not kept togeth-er but were instead absorbedinto the library of Berkeley’sCollege of EnvironmentalDesign. Unfortunately publicuniversities are chronicallyunderfunded and specializedarchival collections are rarelya priority. Because the Jekyll,Farrand, and Jay plans, alongwith the library’s impressiveholdings of California architectural drawings, hadno full-time curator untilrecently, they were not readi-ly accessible to historians. In fact, few people knew theywere there.

In the 1970s, however, arenewed interest in historicprivate gardens arose, andmodern scholarly investiga-tion of Farrand waslaunched, appropriately by a

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Berkeley student. In 1976,Marlene Salon wrote herMLA thesis on Farrand,which she followed a yearlater with an article inLandscape Architecture enti-tled “Beatrix Jones Farrand:Gilt-Edged Gardens.” In 1980Eleanor M. McPeck pub-lished an article on Farrandin the fourth volume ofNotable American Women Vol.IV (Harvard University Press)and Diane K. McGuire edit-ed and published BeatrixFarrand’s Plant Book for Dum-barton Oaks (DumbartonOaks), and in 1985 Sagapresspublished another com-pendium of essays, BeatrixFarrand’s American Land-scapes: Her Gardens andCampuses, with contributionsby McPeck, McGuire, andDiana Balmori. In the sameyear, a major symposium onFarrand, the first fitting trib-ute to her in many years, washeld at Dumbarton Oaks; itsproceedings, with essays byleading scholars, were pub-lished in 1982 (DumbartonOaks).

Interest in Farrand andher accomplishments hascontinued to grow. In 1995Viking published a mono-graph by British gardenwriter Jane Brown entitledBeatrix: The Gardening Life ofBeatrix Jones Farrand, a workmarred by sweeping asser-tions with little basis in factand inadequate research on

these shores. For more thana decade, a new book onFarrand has been badlyneeded, both to give a morecomplete picture of thelandscape architect and as ascholarly corrective to theBrown book. Judith Tankardhas bravely taken on the task.

Rigorous scholarly studyof Farrand is not an easyundertaking, but Tankard iswell suited to the job. Theauthor of six previous books,including monographs onJekyll and on Farrand’sAmerican contemporaryEllen Biddle Shipman, herresearch is exhaustive andher writing is clear and illu-minating. She has thorough-ly traced Farrand’s career,discussing all of her mostimportant projects, and herbook is fully illustrated withplans and period, black-and-white illustrations. There arealso contemporary colorviews, some by leading archi-tectural and landscape pho-tographer Richard Cheek. Anappendix in the form of agazetteer lists Farrand’s com-missions.

Perhaps the most remark-able of Farrand’s early com-missions was Crosswicks, the Mr. and Mrs. Clement B. Newbold property in

Jenkintown, Pennsylvania,which she worked onbetween 1900 and 1916.1 Themain feature of Crosswickswas a large walled gardenwith a central rose paneldivided into two dozen beds,flanked by perennial gardensand surrounded by a multi-plicity of shrubs and vines.Tankard discusses Cross-wicks well and illustrates itwith three stunning water-color renderings – a plan, a perspective, and a sheet ofwall elevations – as well as two 1910 photographs. Itis fortunate that the visualrecord is good – there arenumerous additional pho-tographs at Berkeley – sincethe 75-room, Georgian-revival house at Crosswicks,an early Guy Lowell commis-sion, burned down in the

women’s nervous disordersand who was the brother-in-law of John LambertCadwalader, her mother’sfirst cousin and the mostsignificant male presence inFarrand’s life before hermarriage; her father hadabandoned his family whenshe was in her teens.Mitchell was also a summerresident of Bar Harbor, andit is obvious from an articlein the Pearson collectionthat Farrand not only knewhim but was fond of him.His draconian treatment of“nervous” women (and, morerarely, men), which includeda ban on nearly all activity,whether practical or intellec-tual, is described inCharlotte Perkins Gilman’schilling autobiographical

late 1940s. It had been stand-ing empty for over 20 yearsand the gardens had longsince vanished.2

Although Farrand wasrelated to Clement Newboldthrough her paternal grand-mother, she developed a par-ticularly close relationshipwith his wife, Mary. Over the course of the Crosswicksproject, they discoveredmany common interests:both, for example, weresingers, and in Farrand’swords, “we grew to love eachother as well as two womencan.”3 In 1905, a few monthsafter having her third child,Clement Jr., Mary Newbolddied unexpectedly, leavingFarrand in a state of nervouscollapse that lasted for fourmonths, three of them spentin bed.4 The bed rest mayhave been prescribed by SilasWeir Mitchell, a Philadelphiadoctor who specialized in

story “The Yellow Wallpaper”(1892). Farrand, of course, not only recovered fully butalso developed the hardyphysique that she deemedessential for women land-scape gardeners.

In 1914 Farrand designeda charming enclosed gardenat Bellefield, the Newboldhouse in Hyde Park, NewYork, for Thomas Newbold(1886–1939), a New York statesenator and a distant cousinof Clement Newbold.5 Shelaid out this garden, whichwas located directly off thedining room, in three sec-tions of diminishing width,creating a false perspectivethat made the garden as a whole appear longer than it actually was. The sectionnearest the house was sur-rounded by a stone wall andthe other two were enclosedby hemlock hedges.

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1 There has been much confu-sion about the starting date ofthe Crosswicks project. In thelist of Farrand commissions atthe back of the Sagapress book,its inclusive dates are given as 1891–1916. The compiler ofthe list would have known that the Berkeley file forCrosswicks included an engi-neering drawing labeled“Profiles of Proposed Drive,”dated November 11, 1891, whichis not by Farrand. Yet ClementB. Newbold did not buy theninety-acre Satterthwaite farm,which he developed into

Crosswicks, until 1897, the sameyear that he married MaryDickinson Scott. Farrand’s firstdesign project was actuallyChiltern, the Edgar Scott prop-erty in Bar Harbor, which shebegan in 1896. She selected thesite with the architect AlexanderWadsworth Longfellow andworked on it intermittently foryears. Scott was the brother ofMary Scott Newbold.

2 www.commentarymagazine.com/viewarticle.cfm/the-battle-of-abington-township.

3 (Beatrix Jones), undated auto-graph letter, Reef Point GardensCollection, College of Environ-mental Design Archives, Univer-sity of California, Berkeley.Although there is no salutation,this letter must have been writ-ten to Max Farrand, because sherefers to herself as “your ‘girl’.”The date is probably spring or summer of 1913 (not 1911, asTankard indicates), as theFarrands only met about a yearbefore their marriage, whichtook place on December 17, 1913.In this letter, Beatrix describestwelve of her early projects, all begun by the probable date of this letter, and seems to beplanning a tour of her gardensfor Max.

4 The exact date of Clement B.Newbold, Jr.’s birth (January 17,1905) is given in Rash’s SurnameIndex (www.pennock.ws/surnames/fam/fam42434.html).His mother Mary Scott Newbolddied on May 2, 1905 after anappendectomy (obituary note,New York Times, May 3, 1905, p. 9.

5 Limited biographical informa-tion on Thomas JeffersonNewbold may be found at www.familysearch.org/eng/default.asp.

Bellefield directly abutsSpringwood, now The Homeof Franklin D. RooseveltNational Historic Site, andthe narrow end of the gar-den comes right up againstthe property line. Luckily,the Newbold and Rooseveltfamilies were friends, and a Newbold daughter playedas a child with the futurepresident.

In 1975, Bellefield waspurchased by the NationalPark Service to serve asadministrative headquartersfor the Roosevelt andVanderbilt National HistoricSites. Park Service historiansstudied the house, part ofwhich goes back to the late1790s, but were unaware thatthe garden was historicallysignificant. Its plantingsdeclined, and by 1991, when Ifirst saw the Bellefield gar-den, little was left excepttowering hemlock hedgesand a few straggling peoniesin the planting beds. A fewyears later, it was discoveredby a local garden club and byKatherine H. Kerin, a gradu-ate student in landscapearchitecture from Cornell,who made it the subject of her master’s thesis. TheBeatrix Farrand GardenAssociation was formed andundertook the restoration of the Bellefield garden.Unfortunately, there were no

planting plans among the setfrom Berkeley, and survivingfamily photographs were toorecent to be relied upon asevidence of Farrand’s origi-nal choices. The GardenAssociation decided toreplant the Bellefield gardenwith the same plant materi-als that Farrand had used ina garden further down theHudson in Garrison, NewYork. While this is a ques-tionable preservation prac-tice, the garden today lookssplendid, as can be seen inthe color photographs cho-sen by Tankard – especiallyone taken from a third-floorwindow.

One of Farrand’s mostdistinguished midcareerprojects, undertaken at aboutthe same period as Belle-field, was Elmhurst (latercalled Apple Green) in OldWestbury, on Long Island.Farrand designed the gardenfor Mrs. Willard D. Straight(Dorothy Payne Whitney)between 1914 and 1932; thehouse had recently beenremodeled by Delano &Aldrich. The most strikingfeature of the landscape wasa Chinese garden thatreflected the Straights’extended honeymoon in thatcountry and their continuinginterest in its culture. Tank-ard includes a watercolorplan and perspective of thegarden. Farrand would havecontracted with professionaldelineators to produce these

exhibition-quality render-ings, but we do not know theartists’ names. Similarly, thedraftspeople in her office,unlike those in the Olmstedfirm, did not initial the plansthey prepared, although weknow the names of some ofher later assistants.

Dorothy Straight wasanother client with whomFarrand developed a closefriendship. After WillardStraight died in the flu pan-demic of 1918, Dorothy married a Yorkshireman,Leonard K. Elmhirst, movedwith him to England, anddeveloped the grounds ofDartington Hall in Devon,again with Farrand’s help.The Straight garden in OldWestbury was subdivided in1951, but Dartington Hallsurvives.

Two other major Farrandgardens that have recentlybeen restored are the rosegarden at the New YorkBotanical Garden (1915–1916)and the garden at the Hill-Stead in Farmington,Connecticut, which shedesigned for Theodate PopeRiddle about 1920. In bothgardens, Farrand’s intendedplantings have beeninstalled, although there isno evidence, photographic orotherwise, that her planting

plans for either place wereever implemented in herlifetime.

Tankard’s book includes achapter on Farrand’s collegelandscapes, building on thesolid foundation offered byDiana Balmori in an essay inthe Sagapress book. Tankardalso ably discusses Farrand’snumerous gardens onMount Desert Island, devot-ing a chapter to The Eyrie,the John D. Jr. and AbigailRockefeller garden in SealHarbor, which she workedon for almost a quarter of a century (1926–1950) andwhich is extant and occa-sionally open to the public.Farrand’s last garden, her own Garland Farm inBar Harbor (1955-1959) – adiminutive space comparedwith The Eyrie and most of Farrand’s other gardens –is discussed in Tankard’sfinal chapter.

Dumbarton Oaks inWashington, D.C., perhapsthe best loved and most vis-ited of Farrand’s gardens, is the subject of one ofTankard’s best chapters. Thehistory of the DumbartonOaks landscape is also thestory of one of the mostcomplete collaborationsbetween landscape designerand client in the known his-tory of the profession – thisin spite of the fact that theclients, Mildred and RobertWoods Bliss, were living out-

side North America duringthe first eleven years of theproject. Anticipating theirspring and summer stays inthis country and Bliss’s even-tual retirement from hisdiplomatic career, theybought a somewhat rundownproperty in the Georgetownsection of Washington in1921 and proceeded to totallyreshape it over the next sev-eral years. In 1940 theydonated the house, its collec-tions of Byzantine and pre-Columbian art, and itsformal gardens (sixteen-plusacres) to Harvard University,and its naturalistic garden(twenty-seven acres) to theNational Park Service.

As the letters betweenFarrand and Mildred Bliss inthe archives of DumbartonOaks reveal, the womenbecame intimate friends.Bliss, the more extraverted of the two, was probablyresponsible, at least initially,for the informal tone of the correspondence, whichtheir husbands were drawninto through affectionateexchanges between “MilRob”and “MaxTrix.” AlthoughTankard cites this corre-spondence, she rarely quotesit, apparently feeling that itis adequately dealt with inSusan Tamulevich’sDumbarton Oaks: Landscape

Into Art, also published byMonacelli Press (2001).

Today, we are in the midstof what might almost becalled a Farrand renaissance.Under the leadership ofPatrick Chassé, the BeatrixFarrand Society has beenformed, adopting once againsome of the goals of the ReefPoint Gardens Corporationthat were abandoned somany years before. A numberof Farrand’s projects havebeen restored, including herfinal Bar Harbor home,Garland Farm.

2009 also saw the publica-tion of two books (bothreviewed in the last issue ofSite/Lines) that helped placeFarrand in the context ofother women landscape gar-deners/architects. These were Thaïsa Way’s UnboundedPractice: Women andLandscape Architecture in theEarly Twentieth Century(University of Virginia Press)and my Long IslandLandscapes and the WomenWho Designed Them (W. W.Norton). It appears to havebeen a fortuitous coinci-dence that these, as well asthe Tankard monograph andthe Pearson collection, allappeared during the fiftiethanniversary of Farrand’sdeath.

May eternal light contin-ue to shine on the memoryof one of America’s finestlandscape designers! – Cynthia Zaitzevsky

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Tour

Historic Gardens fromVienna to Prague May 14–27, 2011

Historic parks and gardensfamed for their innovationand grandeur flourished inthe ancient lands of the for-mer Hapsburg empire – inparticular those that are nowpart of Austria and the CzechRepublic. They offered notonly the pleasures of the eyebut also a rich tradition ofcarefully documented horti-cultural and agriculturaltechniques. Despite disrup-tions in ownership and landmanagement in the regionduring much of the twenti-eth century, many of theselandscapes and gardens havebeen renovated using state-of-the art restoration andconservation techniques.

A custom-planned,expert-guided, nine-daystudy tour organized by theFoundation for LandscapeStudies and the Friends ofthe Czech Greenway willexamine historic landscapes

and gardens and naturaltreasures in Vienna andPrague and at key locationsin between. En route, tourleader Stefan Yarabek, a land-scape architect who has beenactive in the development ofthe Czech Greenway as wellas a greenway along theHudson River, will discussthe area’s gardens, land-scapes, and land manage-ment techniques, past andpresent. Key sites to be visit-ed include three UNESCOWorld Heritage Sites; thenew Tiree Chmelar HerbGarden and the Folly of theThree Graces in the Lednice-Valtice Area CulturalLandscape; Podyji NationalPark and nearby VranovCastle; a UNESCO Biospherereserve; the walled medievaltown of Trebo; the Renais-

sance town of Tel; and thebaroque theater and gardenwith its Neptune fountain atCesky Krumlov on the mean-dering Vltava River. Therewill also be visits to the royal gardens of Vienna andPrague as well as Vienna’strendsetting sustainable gar-den projects. We will benefitfrom special access to severalsites not normally open totourists, and local andnational experts will receiveus at each stop.

The itinerary has severaloptional features, includingopportunities to bicycle orhike amid the spectacularscenery of the Czech Green-way corridor. Throughoutthe tour, we will enjoy deli-cious regional cuisine andlocal wines. For more information and a detaileditinerary, please contact elizabethbarlowrogers@gmail.com.

Contributors

Elihu Rubin, Ph.D., is anarchitectural historian, cityplanner, and documentaryfilmmaker. Since 2007 he hasserved as the Daniel RoseVisiting Assistant Professorof Urbanism at the YaleSchool of Architecture. Hereceived a doctorate in architecture and a master’sin city planning from theUniversity of California,Berkeley, and a bachelor ofarts from Yale. His docu-mentary films include OnBroadway: A New HavenStreetscape and Rudolph andRenewal.

John H. Stubbs is vice presi-dent for field projects at theWorld Monuments Fundand has served as adjunctassociate professor of his-toric preservation in theGraduate School ofArchitecture, Planning, andPreservation at ColumbiaUniversity since 1990. He ischairman of the JamesMarston Fitch CharitableFoundation, which supportsinnovative research inAmerican architecturalpreservation and has pub-lished Time Honored, AGlobal View of ArchitecturalConservation (Wiley, 2009).

David Sloane, Ph.D., is a pro-fessor in the School ofPolicy, Planning, and Devel-opment at the University of Southern California. He isthe author of The Last Great Necessity: Cemeteries inAmerican History (1991) and My Kind of Cemetery:Everyone Deserves to BeRemembered (forthcoming,2012), as well as numerousscholarly articles. Dr. Sloaneconducts research on cultur-al landscapes, urban socialpolicy, and the intersectionof urban planning and com-munity health.

Stefan Yarabek is a landscapearchitect, environmentalplanner and advocate, andowner of Hudson & PacificDesigns, Inc. He is Congress-man Maurice Hinchey’s rep-resentative to the HudsonValley National Heritage Areaand serves on the LandscapeCouncil for Manitoga andthe Greater Hudson HeritageBoard. He has employed hisdesign and advocacy skills tothe formation and develop-ment of the Czech Greenwaysince its inception and continues to serve on theBoard of Friends of CzechGreenways.

Cynthia Zaitzevsky, Ph.D.(Harvard, Fine Arts), is a his-torian of architecture andlandscape architecture. Fortwenty-two years, she taught courses on historicAmerican parks and gardensat the Radcliffe SeminarsLandscape Design Program,now part of the BostonArchitectural College. Herbooks include TheArchitecture of William RalphEmerson, 1833-1917 (Fogg Art Museum, 1969), FrederickLaw Olmsted and the BostonPark System (HarvardUniversity Press, 1982), andLong Island Landscapes andthe Women Who DesignedThem (W.W. Norton, 2009).She has also written the site-history sections of severalcultural-landscape reportsfor the National Park Service,among them one for theVanderbilt Mansion NationalHistoric Site in Hyde Park,New York (1992).

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Tiree Chmelar Herb Garden dedica-

tion, May 2010, Valtice Chateau.

Volume vi, Number iFall 2010

Publisher:Foundation for Landscape Studies

Board of Directors:Vincent BuonannoKenneth I. HelphandRobin KarsonNancy NewcombLaurie OlinTherese O’MalleyJohn A. PintoReuben M. RaineyFrederic Rich, ChairmanElizabeth Barlow RogersMargaret Sullivan

Editor: Elizabeth Barlow Rogers

Associate Editor: Alice Truax

Assistant Editor: Margaret Sullivan

Copy Editor:Margaret Oppenheimer

Designer: Skeggs Design

Contributors:Elihu RubinDavid SloaneJohn H. StubbsStefan YarabekCynthia Zaitzevsky

For more information about theFoundation for Landscape Studies, visit www.foundationfor landscapestudies.org., or contact elizabethbarlowrogers@gmail.com

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