The Spoils of the Park

We follow the Niagara River back upstream, under the Peace Bridge, to Lake Erie south of Buffalo.  Here is a view of the Niagara River from the Robert Moses Parkway, south of Niagara Falls.

A pumping station on the Parkway.

The head of the Niagara River, at Lake Erie (with a bit of Canada and the Riverwalk zig-zagging into the lake) seen from I-190, just south of the Peace Bridge.

A view of Lake Erie, past the Outer Harbor, from the Skyway, South Buffalo.

Our destination is South Park, the landlocked and diminished version of a grand park Olmsted had designed for the shore of Lake Erie, connecting its waters with those of a lagoon plotted with “islands, savannas, capes and peninsulas” (Civilizing American Cities 139).  So far as Olmsted honors the lake, courses of waterways and associated wetlands, and employs them as a principal resource in his design, he perhaps sees the landscape as the Kahkwa or Seneca did.  (Though maybe with less wildlife.)  The sixth Olmsted park, not far from South Park, called Cazenovia, is built near the original site of the Kahkwa village and Seneca Buffalo Creek Reservation: Mary Jamieson was buried there, a settler captured by the Seneca as a child, who as an adult chose to stay.

In his 1888 proposal for South Park, Olmsted cites the success of Delaware Park, as a model conducive to “a contemplative or musing turn of mind and restful refreshment.”  But, he continues, “those who pass most of their time in monotonous occupations and amid sombre surroundings” tend to seek out “gayety, liveliness, and a slight spirit of adventure.”  Hence, the encroachment of structured activities on park space–”small, feeble, imperfect and desultory interpolations,” according to Olmsted–including museum edifices and zoo complexes.

To meet this desire for adventure, while protecting the North Park, another park of a distinct character should be built in South Buffalo.  “Twenty years hence,” Olmsted asks, “shall Buffalo have one park, of a poor, confused character, or two, each of a good, distinct character?” (132).  Doing so would also give Buffalo another chance to connect with the lake waters–a city which “has no work of art and can have no work of art that will compare” with Lake Erie (132).

Olmsted deploys utilitarian rhetoric at the service of an aesthetic aim: to imagine water taking the place of turf, in the kind of landscape composition he has mastered but is eager to adapt to a watery environment, where park goers enter by boat rather than foot.  (Buffalo has been called Little Venice for its canal system.)  This would be a first: “No example of a realized design of such a character can be pointed to” (141-142).  Olmsted aims to bridge the domestic with the wild, the bounded with the open horizon.  His parks were harbors for possibility.

Olmsted’s Northern designs also shelter memories of the bayou and the “restful, dreamy nature of the South” (164).  Such was the language Olmsted used in 1871–a language not immune to irony, given Olmsted’s extensive travels in the South to report on slavery–when proposing a water park for Chicago’s South Side (now Jackson Park).  These dreams would not mature with Buffalo’s South Park.  Instead, Jackson Park, finally completed in 1892 for the Chicago World Columbian Expo, would first realize a lagoon interface with a Great Lake.  (It was at the Columbia Exposition that Westinghouse exhibited its technological innovations on the path to transmitting alternating current over distance: http://library.buffalo.edu/exhibits/panam/sel/electricity.html)

In the Buffalo South Park proposal, packet boats were to ferry park-goers through islands marked out by windmill-powered lights.

Here are some windmills over Lackawanna, the Steel Winds wind farm.

The boaters would discover “an extended series of interesting passages of scenery.  At intervals there will open long vistas over water under broad leafy canopies . . . verdant grottoes . . . spacious forest glades . . . nurseries for song birds” (140).  The islands would enclose spaces ranging from broad open meadows to secluded picnic spots and migratory bird exclosures.  Olmsted’s plan is unique for balancing water with land, in an imbricated yet simple pattern.

As the design entailed excavating more than half a million yards of land, Buffalo’s park commissioners deemed it too expensive.  Olmsted’s son John and his partners in the Olmsted firm took over the project.  Their 1892 plan outlined a smaller inland park, in the “English deer park” mode, that eventually would include a 21-acre water feature, a conservatory, botanical garden and arboretum.

In Frederick Omsted’s 1888 proposal, he decries “the present railroad evil” and “the barbarity of a great number of deadly grade railroad crossings, within which no provision has yet been made for a single open space” (151, 153).  Ironically, what fuels urban growth also constrains healthy development–the profusion of uncrossable railway lines and their adjacent border vacuums.  Olmsted proposed a counter-system of parkways, which he considered as much the duty of Park Commissioners as the parks themselves:

“parkways are not to be dealt with on the principle that they are local affairs any more than the parks with which they connect.  They are to be laid out primarily even with less regard for the people who are to live in quarters of the city near the park than for those at a distance, because the fatigue and inconvenience of an approach to the park independently of any new ways to it would be of much less consequence to those living near it than to the main body of citizens” (147).

Olmsted argues for the private benefit such a public utility would bring to neighborhoods adjoining the parkways. Such a benefit was cruelly reversed when some of these parkways were turned into high speed thruways–most destructively in the case of the Humboldt Parkway (the “33″), which now separates the Parade from Delaware Park and isolates Buffalo’s east side from its west side, effectively segregating the city’s population.  Olmsted considered the Buffalo parks his “best-planned” system, due to the city’s extensively realized parkways.  Modern “parkways” reverse Olmsted’s intended aim.   The Scajaquada Parkway races through Delaware Park, impairing a large part of the design (including soundscape) and splitting the park in two.

We drive around in circles, past Father Baker’s Basilica (where the stations of the cross are lit in neon), looking for South Park.

The famous Lackawanna Six sent money home from here, drawing the attention of the Ashcroft justice department.  Even the public transportation is virtual.

After finally asking directions of a woman and her granddaughter who give me three tomatoes from their garden, we find the turn into the park, and the botanical gardens.  I used to come here in the winter to sit in the cactus greenhouse.  And to see the orchids.

Drive-through park.

The carriage way in the park plan turned out to be  convenient short-cut, connecting to Tifft Street via Hopkins Road, which was connected to the park in 1940 and has about a third the lights of South Park Avenue.  So this end of the park has traffic.  And Golf.

Clumps of trees casting their shade on virtually “open” greensward.

Swallows

and country views.  (This is in the midst of residential and industrial South Buffalo, between rail yards, scrap yards and brownfields, a few miles north of the Ford Stamping Plant.)

The trees are decidedly less well kept than at Delaware Park.  Dead snags stand at the edge of the water feature, which is lily choked.

The park has a somewhat wild aspect, except for the traffic.  Robin and I talk about geo casing–tracking via time and place stamps.  Also, about how it takes three to bird: a human, a bird, and one other.  On the way out of the park, I photograph a mysterious mailbox, standing in the grass.

South Park is an intact Olmsted (Firm) design surrounded on two sieds by dense, low-income housing in a mixed use neighborhood.  The Buffalo Olmsted Parks Conservancy has put together an impressive master plan, The Buffalo Olmsted Park System: Plan for the 21st Century. In it, the authors note, “Located within a thriving downtown and boasting one of the best-preserved Olmsted water parks in the country, South Park could easily be a model for the restoration of the Buffalo Olmsted Park System and a signature destination in Buffalo” (78).  For this to happen, we need to reconsider Olmsted’s parkway vision, to explore “green” ways to reconnect South Buffalo to the rest of the city.

I came here often, when I lived in Buffalo, but always regretted the use of a private automobile to do so.  As part of Buffalo’s emerging master plan and redevelopment of the Inner Harbor and waterfront, under mayor Byron W. Brown’s administration, the bike paths that run along the Niagara River north into Tonawanda are being connected to South Buffalo, the Tifft Farm Nature Preserve and, hopefully, to South Park.  That will be a big step forward.  Please visit South Park.

No trip to Olmsted’s Buffalo would be complete without a visit to Niagara Falls.  In the 1870s Olmsted (and Calvert Vaux) had marked the head of the Niagara River, and by association all the waters of the Great Lakes, with Front Park.  In the late 1880′s Olmsted and Vaux would influence the landscape where those waters drop over the Niagara Escarpment on their way to Lake Ontario, at a major hydrological and aesthetic power spot, the Goat Island Niagara Reserve.

By 1882, Jacob Schoellkopf’s Hydraulic Power Company (later Niagara Falls Power) had attracted seven mills along the high bank (the top edge of the Niagara Gorge north of the American Falls) all producing power from his hydraulic canal.

[General View of Power Development by the Niagara Falls Hydraulic Power and Manufacturing Company, from The Niagara Falls Electrical Handbook: Being a Guide for Visitors from Abroad Attending the International Electrical Congress, St. Louis, Mo., September, 1904. Niagara Falls, N. Y. : Pub. under the auspices of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, 1904. p. 36. http://library.buffalo.edu/exhibits/panam/sel/electricity.html%5D

In part thanks to Nikola Tesla and his development of an alternating current transmission system, which Westinghouse produced, the power of Niagara Falls reached Buffalo on November 15th, 1896–completing a loop of water and electricity (sent back upstream), the first long distance transmission for commercial purposes.  New industry (including the Lehigh Valley Railroad Company, whose canals and railyards are now the Tifft Preserve) moved to Buffalo: the Steel Belt was underway.  Buffalo soon became the City of Lights, when Niagara Falls power lit up the 1901 Pan-American Exposition.

[http://www.niagarafrontier.com/power.html]

Frederick Church, whose huge painting “Niagara Falls” was first shown in 1857, lectured sometime before 1869 on the Falls’ impending ruin.

As Olmsted’s biographer, Laura Wood Roper, describes it, “mills, flumes, shops, icehouses, signboards, hotels, and fences gradually defaced and crowded the once natural riverbank” and “visitors grew increasingly exasperated by the horde of peddlers, guides, photographers, gatekeepers, hack drivers and assorted sharpers who importuned them at every step” (FLO: A Biography of Frederick Law Olmsted 379).  People paid a fee to look through holes in a fence to see the Falls.

(Man and woman on Canadian side: note development above American Falls.)

In 1864 President Lincoln had signed a bill “withdrawing the Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Big Tree Grove from the public lands and ceding them to California to be held for ‘public use, resort and recreation . . . inalienable for all time’” (Roper 268).  It was the first official recognition by the US of the obligation of a democratic government to preserve natural beauty for the enjoyment of all people, not just for an elite class.

Appointed to the Yosemite Commission, Olmsted drafted and delivered a report in 1865 that articulated the philosophical basis for state and national parks: “For the same reason that the water of rivers should be guarded against private appropriation and the use of it for the purpose of navigation and otherwise protected against obstruction, portions of natural scenery may therefore properly be guarded and cared for by government.  To simply reserve them from monopoly by individuals” is not enough, though.  They also should be “laid open to the use of the body of the people” (Roper 284-285).  Olmsted thus considered magnificent natural scenery a “commons,” equivalent to other natural resources and deserving of the same protection, resources, stewardship and infrastructure for accessibility.

While working on the Buffalo parks, Olmsted would visit the Falls–where in August 1869 he met with the architect Henry Hobbs Richardson, NY State lieutenant governor William Dorsheimer and his colleague Calvert Vaux to discuss what might be done to preserve the scenery.  But it wasn’t until 1878 that the subject was first broached in public, by Lord Dufferin, then Governor General of Canada, in an address to the Ontario Society of Artists (Roper 379).

By 1880 a campaign on the American side had begun, led by Olmsted, for the establishment of a “reservation” to preserve the natural beauty of the Falls and to facilitate access by the public.  The NY State Legislature passed a bill providing for the selection and appropriation of land around the falls in 1883 and a bond bill to finance the purchase of the land in 1885, officially creating the Niagara Reservation (often referred to as the nation’s oldest State Park, though technically Yosemite Valley, under California State control 1864-1906, came first).  Olmsted and Vaux were subsequently employed to prepare a plan for the state reservation, which they presented in 1887.  In their report, they mention the changing public attitude toward natural scenery: a century before, the Falls might have been termed hideous or awful, while sixty years before, they were looked at chiefly as a source of power.  Now their particular weather was sublime.

Calvert and Vaux’s plan to “restore the landscape around Niagara Falls,” including Goat Island, provides “only such constructions as would forward the enjoyment of it” (Roper 397).

In1763, Seneca Indians killed eighty citizens and British soldiers who were transporting material along the Niagara Gorge; the next year to make amends they ceded to the British a four mile wide strip of land along the east side of the Niagara River from Lake Ontario to Lake Erie.  (Thus Buffalo’s Allen Street, which touches the southern end of that grant, marks what Jack Foran has termed a “schizogeographic fault line,” clearly sensible in the displacement of street blocks north and south of Allen.)  John Stedman, one of only two survivors of the Devil’s Hole Massacre, claimed the land and islands above the Falls for himself.  In the 1770s, he raised a herd of goats on the island, “Goat Island.”

From my first visit to the Falls–on a cross-country drive with a gentleman who had offered me a lift to Boston in exchange for early morning driving shifts behind the wheel of his VW camper–I remember the crazy blossoms of the Linden trees (or Basswood), a phenomenon I noticed for the first time there, not the grandeur of the Falls.

The paths and walks at Niagara Reservation–on Goat Island, Luna and Green Islands, with views of Bird, Robinson, Chapin Islands, and their Three Sisters and one Brother–are calculated to draw the walker back from the Falls, to linger in this beauty.  (There is an account of Olmsted leading H.H. Richardson around the woods of Goat Island for a long time, before showing him the Falls.)  The pools, riffles and rapids by Luna just above the Bridal Falls are intimately seductive, without effective barrier.

A terrifying intimacy, when you know where it leads: “the densest region of shade merges its identity into a desperate kiss” (Aragon, Paris Peasant).  Listen, and you will hear the massive ground tone of the Falls, just downstream, offstage.

The design is radically intact, the extent to which it invites “an all-consuming thirst for open air and danger.”  The state cops keep an eye on “people they see standing in the same place for long periods of time or walking about aimlessly, muttering to themselves or looking distraught.”  One study has logged 20-25 suicides a year, and notes that the most popular time is Monday at 4pm  Honeymooners flock to the pools above the Falls in a spirit of contradiction.

When Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated, I was waiting for some dubious tacos in a restaurant in Niagara Falls’ economic drop-out zone.  You may never in your life see a more busted-up town.  The driver of a pickup truck here hit a drunk and dragged his body under the truck all the way to the border.  Here is where Elon Hooker built the ideal workers’ village, on a toxic waste dump.  Here is where the Manhattan Project shipped its dirty steel.  Here is sickness and misery.  Here also is heroism, where Lois Gibbs organized the Love Canal Homeowners Association, nursing her children in front of national television cameras.

Skipping the blight of Niagara Falls, many prefer to focus on Clifton Hill on the Canadian side, its gambling and amusements.

And yet, the Falls is a magnificent spot.  Amidst land scraped bare by retreating glaciers and thrust under the sky, tabula rasa between two Great Lakes, Niagara Falls channels one-fifth the planet’s fresh surface water.  Maybe it’s the ions, static in the gorge that lifts the hair from your skull.

When you think about it, the Canadians played it right.  Lord Dufferin campaigned for a reservation, then backed off, once the US ran with it.  It was only a matter of time before the USA would preserve Goat Island, and erase industry along the gorge, restoring a natural look to the Falls, as seen from the Canadian side.  The Triscuit factory

hides–or hid–behind the tallest trees.

Canadians have framed this view with landscaping of their own, for a doubly green promenade–over which Frankenstein lifts a Clifton Hill cheeseburger, grinning back at the toothless storefronts of Niagara Falls, USA.

The economic gradient feels steep: Canada gets the view, the US builds a bridge to nowhere, for a bit of it.  At the same time, the tourist economy that drops through Niagara Falls (and its casino) makes few stops in Buffalo.

My forbearing and fun host, Robin Brox, drives me to the Falls.  We can’t resist the draw to Terrapin Point beside Horseshoe Falls.  As soon as we are taking it in, we hear frantic shouting: right in front of us appears a man, lunging for his son smiling and leaning from the other side of the barrier.  A boy with Down’s Syndrome, he had been dangling his foot in the water, a few feet upstream from the Falls.  The father’s heart in throat communicates instantly to ours.

Every park has its rangers

and its Mennonites.

Its group of communicants

receiving instruction from the Cave of the Winds.

In a gentler dell, at a wooded bit opposite Crow Island, upstream of Bridal Falls, the watery mirrors caused us to reflect on the mythology in the course of our lives.  Thanatos held our ankles as we contemplated the riffles.

At the Bridal Falls, a marriage.  I hid behind the viewfinder and captured the kiss.

Isabelle and I were married twelve years and two days ago: we actually drove to the Falls for our “honeymoon” (I moved to Buffalo for grad school right after we got hitched in New Mexico) and enjoyed champagne in a plastic ice bucket at the Econolodge.  Little did we know at the time that, five years later, Isabelle would create one of her first large-scale steel pieces, a”Post-Car” for the Buffalo Art on Wheels initiative, to be exhibited in the autumn of 2003 on the State Reservation near Prospect Point.

http://isabellepelissier.com/artwork/1090504_PostCar.html

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At one point, the piece was vandalized and Isabelle had to do some onsite repair work, running an enormous extension cord from the Visitor’s Center.  I accompanied her there and enjoyed watching the flow of couples as they circled round the piece and the guys (typically) did a double take at the sight of Isabelle’s arc flashing.

We missed the statue of Nicola Tesla.

Tesla suffered a peculiar affliction in which blinding flashes of light would appear before his eyes, often accompanied by visions.  In 1926, Tesla commented on the ills of the social subservience of women and the struggle of women toward gender equality, indicating that humanity’s future would be run by “Queen Bees.”  He believed that women would become the dominant sex in the future.

The “American Electrician” gives a description of an early tesla coil wherein a glass battery jar, 15 x 20 cm (6 x 8 in) is wound with 60 to 80 turns of AWG No. 18 B & S magnet wire (0.823 mm²). Into this is slipped a primary consisting of eight to ten turns of AWG No. 6 B & S wire (13.3 mm²) and the whole combination immersed in a vessel containing linseed or mineral oil.

Robin describes a phenomenon she had once seen: “It’s called the reverse waterfall.  Essentially, the shape of the land underneath the surface of this very narrow inland bay.  It’s really deep in the middle, much more shallow on the sides.  So, when the tide changes, the middle surges upward and turns into this churning white water, in the middle of, like, very smooth, placid sort of flow on either side.  Really insane roiling bubbling nastiness.”

Some weeds toss in the winds of the Falls.

As Robin talks to me, the Falls make their own weather.  The weather drifts.  At the heart of power and contradiction a delicate spiral rises turning toward the sky.