Reciprocal Landscapes

Stories of Material Movements

Jane Hutton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781317569053
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architettura
• Subtopic: Pianificazione urbana e paesaggistica

How are the far-away, invisible landscapes where materials come from related to the highly visible, urban landscapes where those same materials are installed? Reciprocal Landscapes: Stories of Material Movements traces five everyday landscape construction materials – fertilizer, stone, steel, trees, and wood – from seminal public landscapes in New York City, back to where they came from.

Drawing from archival documents, photographs, and field trips, the author brings these two separate landscapes – the material's source and the urban site where the material ended up – together, exploring themes of unequal ecological exchange, labor, and material flows. Each chapter follows a single material's movement: guano from Peru that landed in Central Park in the 1860s, granite from Maine that paved Broadway in the 1890s, structural steel from Pittsburgh that restructured Riverside Park in the 1930s, London plane street trees grown on Rikers Island by incarcerated workers that were planted on Seventh Avenue north of Central Park in the 1950s, and the popular tropical hardwood, ipe, from northern Brazil installed in the High Line in the 2000s.

Reciprocal Landscapes: Stories of Material Movements considers the social, political, and ecological entanglements of material practice, challenging readers to think of materials not as inert products but as continuous with land and the people that shape them, and to reimagine forms of construction in solidarity with people, other species, and landscapes elsewhere.

Chapter 1
Inexhaustible Terrain

Guano from the Chincha Islands, Peru, to Central Park, 1862

Figure 1.1(A) Detail of guano deposit and settlement, Chincha Islands, Peru, 1862

Source: Courtesy of New Bedford Whaling Museum.

Figure 1.1(B) Detail of Sheep Meadow looking southwest, Central Park, circa 1905

Source: Photograph by William Hale Kirk (© William Hale Kirk/Museum of the City of New York).

To a blade of grass, access to nutrients means everything: nitrogen accelerates growth and makes for bright green color, phosphorus builds stronger roots and winter toughness, and potassium stiffens blades to make a sturdier surface. To Frederick Law Olmsted, carefully fertilizing and improving the soils of Central Park was essential to create the sweeping pastoral landscape that it would become famous for. The success of the turf would impact the beauty and success of the park as a whole.¹ “The surface…can hardly be made too fine or too smooth and even,” Olmsted wrote of the grasses in Central Park, “nor can the turf afterwards be kept too free of any plant except the grasses, nor can the grass be kept too short, or be too smoothly rolled.”² Olmsted and Calvert Vaux conceived of Central Park as a pastoral retreat for frazzled New Yorkers alienated from the countryside.³ The park looked like a farm, but it also operated like one. Olmsted experimented with new fertilizers being used in farms at the periphery of the expanding metropolis, including horse manure from street sweepings, “night soil” from Manhattan’s privies, manufactured poudrette, and guano. Of the fertilizers applied to Central Park at the time, guano (desiccated seabird excrement) was the most potent, exotic, and novel. Unlike composted manures and fertilizers incorporating local industrial byproducts, guano was imported from Peru and the South Pacific.

With thousands of miles between them, the Chincha Islands of coastal Peru and Central Park are improbably connected. This chapter follows a trace amount of Peruvian guano applied to the initial soils of Central Park in the early 1860s. While small in volume, this particular fertilizer application reflects guano’s transformative role in farms surrounding New York City and other industrializing metropolises in North America and Europe. As farmers shifted from self-sustaining to industrial models, and substituted more processed and mined fertilizers for the composted animal manures traditionally used, nutrient cycles expanded from the scale of the farm to the urban region to the planet. In the quest to recharge depleted soils in one place, ecological deposits and humans were exploited and exhausted in another. The case of guano in Central Park more broadly reflects the growing metabolic rift of the nineteenth century, as expanding nutrient cycles and enslaved human labor were invisibly, yet directly, linked to the public landscape.

“Nature’s Reciprocity System”

Before long, Olmsted and Vaux argued, Manhattan would be crowded with buildings and noisy, noxious streets.⁴ In their 1857 winning competition entry for the design of Central Park, Olmsted and Vaux stated that a great purpose of the park was to “supply to the hundreds of thousands of tired workers, who have no opportunity to spend their summers in the country, a specimen of God’s handiwork.”⁵ The park had to counteract the damaging forces of rapid urban growth. It wasn’t enough to just introduce plants in the park site; trees in a row or pots of roses could be found in any urban garden. It wasn’t enough to just improve poor air quality, although that was definitely important. By offering natural “scenery,” the design could impact people’s minds and spark their imaginations.⁶

Pastoral scenery could do this best. Olmsted pictured a meadow where shadows on the far ground would produce illusions of variation and distance, and where trees and topography would hide the buildings along the park’s boundaries. Pastoral scenery referred directly to working agricultural landscapes – and the type that many of New York City’s new residents had migrated from. No longer in fields, citizens now worked in factories estranged from the land and its cycles. Visitors experienced the remediating effects of the different environments, but they would also see the park working as a farm. At Central Park’s Dairy, children could get affordable, fresh milk of higher quality than that more commonly available from brewery cows.⁷ The public could watch hay and rye crops growing and watch as workers periodically scythed it down to feed the park’s animals. The Sheep Meadow – the gem of the design’s pastoral landscape – was the park’s most literal agricultural simulacra.

Figure 1.2 Sheep Meadow looking southwest, Central Park, circa 1905

Source: Photograph by William Hale Kirk (© William Hale Kirk/Museum of the City of New York).

Figure 1.3 Robert L. Bracklow, Sheep in Sheep Meadow Central Park, circa 1890–1910, glass negative, 5 in. × 7 in.

Source: Robert L. Bracklow Photograph Collection, 1882–1918 (bulk 1896–1905), nyhs_pr-008_66000_1000, Photography © New York Historical Society.

The Sheep Meadow, originally named the Parade Grounds to satisfy competition requirements for military programming (and intermediately called “The Green”), looked like a real pasture. If the grasses made a pastoral scene, a flock of Southdown sheep activated the agricultural stage from 1864.⁸ Roving collies, protecting the flock from stray dogs, offered a living “object lesson” for kids who otherwise had no exposure to farm life.⁹ Visitors could watch a Parks Department employee lead the flock to the Sheepfold every evening; they could purchase wool at annual auctions held by the Parks Department.¹⁰ Sheep were valued as rural curiosities, but also as trimmers and fertilizers. Sheep graze close to the plant roots, “closer than any lawn mower yet devised,” and produce a short-cropped, tough turf, as one New York Times author noted.¹¹ Their droppings helped the grass grow quickly. While the sheep produced a symbolic image of a farm, their role in the ecological functioning of the soil and grass was part of this image.

As the new contours of Central Park were formed, workers mixed composted horse manure and night soil into the top layers of the soil, distributing it at 300 or 225 cartloads per acre, respectively.¹² Horse and human manures were abundant and cheap, and so they were the primary soil amendments. Manures give plants access to nutrients slowly by changing the quality of the soil; they aggregate soil particles, which makes them spongier and absorptive and provides conditions for microorganisms to thrive. With the help of specialist fungi, bacteria, and other organisms, manures are transformed into the nutrients that plants require.

Guano, in contrast, gives plants more highly concentrated nutrients, immediately, without transforming soil quality or its microbiota. Much more potent than farm animal or human manures, guano was applied at five bushels to the acre, or approximately half a cartload per acre.¹³ Guano, like other highly concentrated fertilizers, was used primarily to accelerate the growth of annual cover crops, which were planted and then turned back into the soil.¹⁴ Perennial grasses such as Red-top grass (Agrostis vulgaris) and English Lawn grass (Agrostis stolonifera) were then sown with white clover in the spring. In the first year of growth, tender perennial grasses needed to be protected, and so annual crops were inter-seeded. In the summer, millet seed was added, as its quick growing stalks could shade the young grasses from the sun. In the fall, rye was sown in to help shield the grasses over the winter.¹⁵

Figure 1.4 Construction activity in Central Park, 1858

Source: Lithograph by George Hayward (Picture Collection, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations).

While the Central Park Annual Reports provide few details on practices as specific as fertilizer application, the Seventh Report goes into detail about a range of fertilizer types used to prepare the soil in different areas of the park. The report describes how guano was applied in the 11.5 acres east of the Old Reservoir (the present-day Great Lawn) and the 2 acres west of it, at 500 pounds per acre. Guano in this case was a mix of one part Peruvian to three parts Baker Island guano (“American” guano from the South Pacific), mixed with eight pounds of salt per 100 pounds of guano.¹⁶ Few other areas receive specific mention about their fertilization, suggesting that these parcels were of particular interest. Across the park, once perennial lawns were established, Park workers cut the grass twice weekly and monitored the changing quality of the turf as it confronted the waves of visitors. “The perfection of such meadow and glade surfaces is found in nature only in the spring, when the turf is still short and growing evenly,” Olmsted...