Grace and delight

The more successfully a city mingles everyday diversity of uses and users in its streets, the more successfully its people thereby enliven and support well-located parks that can thus give back grace and delight to their neighborhoods instead of vacuity. —Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

American cities have grown enormously over the past two centuries, spurred initially by the industrial revolution and subsequent shifts in social dynamics. During George Washington’s first term, roughly 19 out of every 20 Americans lived rurally. By 1870 that proportion had shrunk to 75 percent. Half a century later saw an even split between urban and rural populations; fast forward to today and four out of five people in the United States reside in an urban area.

Throughout this staggering shift in living patterns, most cities have recognized the importance of setting aside land to keep in the public domain, to be used freely as oases for citizens confined to increasingly crowded environments. Overlaying historical maps from the renowned  Rumsey Collection  on top of modern satellite imagery provides fascinating insights into how cities have demarcated and preserved public spaces over the past two centuries. Use the slider bar in the maps at the beginning of each city's section to instantly leap between history and today.

New York City has long and proudly carried the mantle of the USA's "Premier City," ranking since 1790 as the country's most populated place. It's hard to imagine a time when the Big Apple wasn't an immense, gravitational force, home to millions, "The City That Never Sleeps." Yet this 1836 map from the Rumsey Collection transports us there.

A Manhattan mostly undeveloped above 42nd Street. Broadway truncated at Union Square. Brooklyn and Williamsburg, small, independent entities. Queens, sparsely populated farmland, with only a fledgling settlement around Hallett's Cove (present day Astoria). The Bronx, even more rural and empty.

New York's astounding growth made it all the more critical to maintain a balancing act between commercial and residential development, and much-needed breathing room for its citizens. The Commissioners’ Plan of 1811 was a blueprint for the development of the island beyond what was at the time the northern extent of its settlement, roughly modern Houston Street.

Arrogant in its scope and audacious in the strict orderliness of its grid, even the formulators of the Commissioners’ Plan appreciated that, should their drawing someday come to life, a degree of open space would be necessary for the physical and mental health of the city's inhabitants. To that end, the plan left a number of parcels intentionally empty for public use.

That aspect of the plan was not quite followed to the letter. For instance, a huge swath in Midtown known as “The Parade” was dramatically reduced in size and renamed Madison Square Park. In fact, the only public space laid out in the Commissioners’ Plan that remains today is what was called Manhattan Square; today it’s Theodore Roosevelt Park, and it serves as the grounds for the American Museum of Natural History.

As the city’s population more than quadrupled between 1820 and 1850, blowing past even the most wildly optimistic early-century expectations, it became clear that the existing plethora of small squares and parks would not be sufficient. Civic leaders clamored for a significant green space, and Mayor Fernando Wood pounced on a 750-acre site in the still-pastoral portion of Manhattan above 59th Street.

Meanwhile, an erstwhile journalist named Frederick Law Olmsted had befriended architect Calvert Vaux. When Mayor Wood opened a competition in the late 1850s for the design of the new “Central Park,” the plan submitted by Olmsted and Vaux was declared the winner.

The Olmsted-Vaux “Greensward Plan” turned contemporary thinking about urban public spaces on its head. The plan almost entirely eschewed symmetry and discrete angles, opting for a more naturalistic design, showcased most notably in a labyrinthine, forested grove called “The Ramble.” Furthermore, it deliberately attempted to separate the park from the surrounding city—its only direct vehicular crossings were built below grade, mostly obscured from view for the park’s patrons.

The wild success of Central Park catapulted Olmsted into position as preeminent expert in the field, for which he coined the term “landscape architecture.” He would go on to create some of the continent’s most enduring public spaces, including Prospect Park across the East River in Brooklyn.

Central Park, of course, would achieve iconic status as an example of what can be achieved by setting aside green space in dense urban areas. The  Central Park Conservancy  was founded in 1980 to establish a permanent source of funding, upkeep, and improvements for the park. Its efforts provide a model for how nonprofit organizations can act as stewards for urban parks.

The nation’s capital is unique for the extent to which its urban layout was explicitly designed in advance, according to a plan devised by French engineer Pierre L’Enfant in 1791. The plan called for an orthogonal grid of streets, dissected by diagonal “grand avenues,” and it was executed remarkably faithfully.

L’Enfant envisioned ornamental public spaces befitting a nation's seat of government, beginning with the grandest space of them all, lined with gardens, linking the “President’s House” with the Capitol. This, of course, is what we now know as the National Mall. Two of its most noteworthy landmarks, the Washington Monument and the Smithsonian Castle, were already under construction at the time of the 1851 map and are visible on it.

The National Mall would undergo several transformations during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. First, during the 1850s, architect and horticulturalist Andrew Jackson Downing came up with a plan to extensively landscape the Mall, dividing it into several "grounds" and incorporating a naturalistic feel. The Downing Plan was implemented in the decades following the Civil War.

In the early 1880s the Army Corps of Engineers began to dredge the Potomac River to the west and south of the Mall and used the sediment to eventually reclaim over 600 acres of land, most of which was used to expand the Mall's footprint and create West and East Potomac Parks.

Finally, inspired by the 1893 Chicago World's Fair and the City Beautiful movement—a belief that urban beautification through grandiose architecture and monuments could combat the perception of cities as ugly, overcrowded, and squalid—Senator James McMillan of Michigan led a commission shortly after the turn of the twentieth century to visually improve the historic core of D.C. This effort altered the Mall once again and gave rise to many of the aesthetic elements and surrounding buildings that constitute the setting we know today.

L'Enfant's plan also earmarked smaller public spaces scattered throughout the District. These most frequently occurred at the intersections of two or more of the diagonal "grand avenues," the streets that typically carry the names of states. Happily, many of these circles and squares retain a park-like character to various extents.

In a rarer, more unfortunate example at the opposite end of the land use spectrum, the crossing of Virginia and Maryland Avenues would eventually become the focal point for a mid-20th century urban renewal project. This office complex of brutalist architecture and windswept concrete plazas was ironically named for L'Enfant himself.

San Francisco arose practically overnight as a result of the 1849 California Gold Rush, leapfrogging from a sleepy, hilly village recently wrested from Mexico to a true wild west boomtown. Within 10 years the city could claim over 50,000 residents, with countless more transients passing through at any given time on their way to seek fortunes in the gold and silver fields farther inland. One advantage to emerging later than other major modern cities was that San Francisco could learn from prior best practices, including establishment of public spaces.

San Francisco’s first public space was adopted from its predecessor, the Mexican community of Yerba Buena, which, like many other towns of Hispanic origin, was organized around a central plaza. The plaza would later be renamed Portsmouth Square after the ship that arrived in San Francisco Bay during the Mexican-American War to seize the territory. Today, Portsmouth Square acts as the cultural anchor for the Chinatown neighborhood.

Other public spaces were delineated very early in the city’s growth; to wit, the excerpt below from an 1853 U.S. Coast Survey chart shows two unnamed “Public Squares.” By the 1859 map, the blocks surrounding these squares had still not completely filled in with structures, but within the following decade they would receive titles—Washington Square and Union Square, respectively. Both would go on to become the integral community gathering places that they remain to this day.

As San Francisco swelled in both population and stature in the latter half of the 19th century, it sought to make its mark as a city of significant import. To that end, the mostly rural, unincorporated “Outside Lands” on the windward side of the hills ringing the city effectively offered up a blank canvas for such a point of pride.

Civic leaders watched the establishment of Central Park in New York and demanded a jewel of their own, even going so far as to approach Frederick Law Olmsted to design it. Olmsted, however, scoffed at the notion of slapping down a grand park in the chilly, foggy, damp environment of the Outside Lands, so the task fell to local engineers William Hammond Hall and John McLaren to design and landscape the park.

In Olmsted's defense, the sandy terrain did pose quite a botanical obstacle. Experimenting in a narrow strip of land now known as the Panhandle, Hall and McLaren figured out that planting a certain type of grass seed would stabilize the dunes sufficiently to enable the planting of a diverse selection of flora. With the sand conquered, Hall and McLaren were indeed able to give San Francisco its own Central Park: Golden Gate Park, stretching to the Pacific Ocean.

During the 20th century, San Francisco gained a reputation as a city that likes to go its own way, first as a hotbed of counterculture and more recently as an incubator for technological innovation. These attributes extended to its public spaces, with creative re-use becoming a theme for developing new parks.

Fort Mason, occupying a promontory overlooking the eastern entrance to the Golden Gate, had been managed by the U.S. Army for over a century, its military service spanning from the Civil War to the Korean War. In the 1970s, the National Park Service took over administration of the site, creating a public recreation area. Former barracks are now in use as hostelry, while old shipping terminals have been repurposed for arts exhibitions and education.

San Francisco has also spun tragedy into new public spaces: one of the city’s more recent parks is Patricia’s Green in the Hayes Valley neighborhood. It emerged from the rubble of the elevated Central Freeway, a significant portion of which was demolished after it was badly damaged during the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake.

The map above depicts a Chicago practically on the eve of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. The disastrous conflagration’s silver lining was to give Chicago, already one of the fastest-growing urban centers in the United States, something of a clean slate with which to rebuild itself into a true, modern World City.

The awarding of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition was a massive feather in Chicago’s cap, emphasizing its arrival in the upper echelon of cities. Over the course of six months, more than 27 million visitors descended on the city’s South Side to attend the fair. In anticipation of these crowds, the organizers turned to a 1,000-plus-acre plot that had been allocated as parkland by the Illinois state legislature in 1869 but had yet to be developed much beyond its wild, swampy state. “South Park,” as it was then called, consisted of eastern and western parcels (later named Jackson and Washington Parks, respectively) linked by an appendage known as the Midway Plaisance.

Frederick Law Olmsted was brought in to help design and landscape the Exposition site, which would occupy Jackson Park and the Midway. The result, colloquially known as the “White City,” was the first large-scale expression of the City Beautiful movement.

After the conclusion of the World’s Fair, almost all of the structures that had been built for it were demolished, with the exception of the Palace of Fine Arts that now houses the Museum of Science and Industry. Jackson Park, though, was left with the underpinnings of a fine urban public space, which it has taken advantage of to great effect. As an example, the first public golf course west of the Appalachian Mountains was opened in Jackson Park in 1899 and still operates to this day.

Elsewhere in Chicago, parks developed through aggressive reclamation of Lake Michigan, a natural amenity unrivaled among most inland cities. In Downtown, a ribbon of land between Michigan Avenue and the lakefront was presciently designated “Public Ground” in 1839 during Chicago’s nascent period, giving the city a unique “front yard” effect in what would soon be dubbed Lake Park.

In 1901 the park was renamed in honor of President Grant, followed by several landfill projects that greatly expanded the park's footprint, urged on by influential architect Daniel Burnham in his 1909 Plan of Chicago. A southern extension created room for the Field Museum of Natural History (moved from its previous home at the World’s Fair’s Palace of Fine Arts in 1921), the Adler Planetarium, and Shedd Aquarium. The Adler and Shedd both opened in 1930.

To the north and west of Grant Park were the old Illinois Central railyards. A new park was conceived to cover the tracks (now used by Metra commuter rail) and designed by architectural luminaries including Frank Gehry and Thomas Beeby. Unveiled in 2004, Millennium Park's funky, skeletal Pritzker Pavilion amphitheater and curvaceous, reflective Cloud Gate sculpture—more colloquially known as “The Bean”—lend a distinctly futuristic touch to this historic city.

Following the coast northward, the reclamation of Lake Michigan continued apace. After the Civil War, a series of cemeteries near the eastern terminus of North Avenue were deemed health risks. Upon exhumation of the bodies for relocation, the City Council agreed to bequeath 120 acres of former graveyard to the public. Over nearly a century, Lincoln Park grew to the north for seven miles as well as eastward, into the lake, where reclaimed land was converted into Chicago’s first public beach, which opened in 1895.

The vignettes above represent but a fraction of the stories that have been woven as cities and towns have fostered public spaces that do indeed give "grace and delight" back to their communities. For an example of how this crucial effort continues unabated across the nation, check out this story map celebrating the history, amenities, and stewardship of a beloved park in Philadelphia:

The Casey Trees company has produced a series of stories digging in to the history and landscaping of some of the public spaces around Washington, D.C.:

And, if you're interested in further exploring the use of historic maps to see how a city has evolved throughout its existence, this story taking a closer look at New York City across multiple periods of time is highly recommended: