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The Genius of the Place
- Abstract
Cities are the places to be for those who crave wealth, renown, intellectual companionship, choice food and drink, splendid art, high conviviality, sex any way you like it: the richest possibilities shimmer before your eyes as you walk down the street. But you also learn to keep your eyes to yourself much of the time, and to stay out of other people’s way; at some time or other, loneliness, fear, and desolation afflict nearly every city dweller, gorgeous or homely, sultan or serf. And for many, it’s a short step up from hell pretty much all the time. Cities represent the summits of civilization, yet they are also swamplands of barbarism.
Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903), the grandmaster of American landscape architecture, felt all the pains of city living and made it his vocation to relieve them as much as possible. The balm he applied was the beauty of nature, hard to come by in the urban streets of his day, where roaming pigs ate the garbage flung into the gutters, where houses were packed so tightly together that middle-class people starved for light and air, and where the lower classes lived in unspeakable tenements deemed more than suitable for such wretched refuse as they. Olmsted worked to make cities less grim and forbidding. He designed public parks that were among the finest features of civilization that American cities could boast of.
About the Author
Algis Valiunas, a regular contributor, last wrote for us about Ralph Waldo Emerson (September 2010).
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