Chances are you live on a block somewhere. You might live on a ranch or farm, or in a rustic cabin on a lake or on some other so-called “rural route” (do they still call them rural routes?) but most of us live in cities and suburbs full of buildings with numbers, sitting in a grid of some sort that is made up of blocks. Some blocks lack much distinction – this can be especially true in many suburbs – but in the city there can be big changes from one block to the next. In older cities many blocks have a very distinctive character as well as a history, and almost all are in a state of constant change as the city passes through eras of shifting economic fortunes, for which the code word in good times tends to be “gentrification.”
Our block is distinctive in that it only stretches between two streets, so when you say “Iffley Road” you can only mean our block, at least in the city of Boston (though part of our block’s history is that it’s evidently named after a street in Cambridge, England, whereupon sat Iffley Road Stadium where Roger Bannister broke the four-minute mile barrier in 1954 and how about that?). Iffley Road has been a topic in a number of these posts, and here we go again.
At the bottom of Iffley Road lies busy Washington Street, a major though narrow thoroughfare that was long semi-industrial, with car lots and repair shops and gas stations and laundromats and such, along with some housing that was consequently inexpensive. Much of this has been transformed into big apartment buildings, one of which was built on the corner of Iffley about 10 years ago, on the site of the former Economy Plumbing Supply and Ron’s Gas Station. We miss the friendly atmosphere of Economy, where we’d buy faucets and such. It was a place run by trade guys to cater to trade guys (i.e., professional plumbers) and they no doubt found us amateurs amusing. Ron died in a motorcycle accident many years ago, though subsequent owners kept the name, perhaps out of respect for the poor guy. The used car lot has survived; it helps a lot if you speak Spanish in case you’re pondering a purchase there.
But this tale shall tell the story at the top of the street, where lies the largest tract of parkland in Boston, one that dates back to the nineteenth century: Frederick Law Olmsted’s Franklin Park. If you’ve never heard of the man, let’s just say his name is revered amongst landscape architects, he having designed NYC’s Central Park along with many many other green urban places around the country. Central, Franklin, and Prospect Park in Brooklyn are considered his “masterpieces,” though unlike the usual work of art you’d find in a gallery or museum, these are living city landscapes, and as such are subject to the vagaries of a city’s politics and economic fortunes. Olmsted and his design firm that later included his sons had their hand in a staggering number of parks across the country, possibly one near you. Some have no doubt seen better fates than others, but there’s little doubt Franklin Park peaked quite a while ago and has seen fairly steady decline since shortly after its completion in the 1880s. When our house was built in 1915, much of the original park no doubt still remained. When we bought our house in 1984, this was anything but the case.
Before going much further, it’s important to clarify a few things. It’s probably safe to say we’ve all grown up with parks. If nothing else, a park is where a town puts its playgrounds and public athletic fields and swimming pools. The library in my home town was adjacent to a park. A park tends to have paths and trees and benches, where infants get rolled around in strollers and people walk their dogs and elderly sit to feed pigeons or just watch the world go by, or in the case of our neighborhood, play dominoes. At night parks are where all kinds of mysterious activities take place, about which many are fearful, and they tell their children to stay away or they’re asking for trouble. This might be good advice, unless you’re drawn to the unknown and thrill at possible risk and danger, as do any number of adolescents, one of whom might have been you at one time, and don’t you miss those days? Hey, you survived!
If you live in a small or medium-sized town and look up the history of its park or parks, you may not find much, or at most some story about how local government determined some year that an available piece of land be obtained “for the public good,” which tends to mean for the purposes mentioned above. This is especially true if the park sprang up in the 20th century or later, by which time having a park in one’s town was an obvious choice, especially if local real estate interests were behind it (i.e., some parcel of land was not especially valuable). Don’t we all agree that parks are an unquestionable asset? Even if we never bother with them ourselves?
This was not always so obvious. The fact is, outdoor public spaces first became important in the 19th century, when the industrial age cranked up big time and people, many of them immigrants from far away, were flocking to big cities seeking opportunity. Cities were getting more and more crowded and governments started to see the need to protect and promote public health. “Public health” is widely defined and can be achieved in many ways, starting with things like sewers and clean housing and medical care, but offering fresh air and a pleasant landscape and a bit of serenity are also right up there.
What you got was the public parks “movement,” and Freddy O turned out to be the right man with the right ambition and the right talent at the right time, or something like that. His trajectory towards this was anything but straightforward: a rich kid from Connecticut who never quite made it to Yale, whose father helped him follow his ambition to farm, where he showed talent and achieved some degree of success. It was a matter of chance that one of his tutors in his late adolescence was a civil engineer, and another bit of serendipity that he took a walking tour of England with his brother in 1850. It was there he was thoroughly charmed by the English countryside, and happened to do a tour of Birkenhead, a planned park in a suburb of Liverpool, a huge and gloomy textile city (and also a hotbed of support for the American Confederacy, as it meant cheap cotton that fit right in with their business plan). Frederick published his journals from that trip, and in reference to Birkenhead wrote “in democratic America there was nothing to be thought of as comparable with this People’s Garden.” He gushed about the varying surface of the land, the winding paths, the variety of shrubs and flowers and the construction of bridges, carriage roads and the drainage system. If it wasn’t an epiphany it was something close.
By the mid-1850s Olmsted was in his mid-thirties without a clear direction in life. So was it destiny that he was living in NYC and the city was looking for somebody to be superintendent of their new Central Park project? That one of the project’s commissioners knew Frederick and suggest he apply? That F knew William Cullen Bryant and Washington Irving, two prominent literary figures, who among others signed his petition? However the decision was made, Frederick Law Olmsted got the job and the rest, or at least much of it, is history, none of which will be covered here except for what applies to the story at the top of our hill.
Boston’s original “park” had long been Boston Common, which dates to the city’s beginnings, and the adjacent Public Garden, the first botanical garden in the United States, which was completed in the 1860s. About ten years after that, park mania had taken over the city, which culminated in the 1875 Park Act and a grand scheme to create the most comprehensive park system in the United States. Olmsted, who’d hit a home run with Central Park on his first try as a landscape architect, a profession that previously hadn’t really existed as such, had already consulted with Boston park commissioners, on an informal basis, on a number of various projects that would comprise the “Emerald Necklace.” These would include Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum, which adjoined the Franklin Park parcel, as well as Jamaica Pond, the next “link” on the way downtown.
But from the beginning, Franklin Park was to be the largest and most important park in the system. Even though it was a number of miles from the center of the city, this was the late 1870s and horse-drawn streetcars as well as the railroad made it readily accessible to the public. And who was that public? In Olmsted’s view, as well as that of the parks movement in general, it was all those city dwellers living and working in a busy crowded environment, divorced from nature, badly in need of some kind of escape from the pressures of daily living, if only for awhile. What could be better for their mental health than an escape offered by a nearby countryside that offered the peace and serenity of nature, at a time before one could just jump in a car and leave the city far behind? A place where groups of people could gather for events and group play, on a larger scale than what was possible in the many smaller parks that made up the Emerald Necklace.
Olmsted was a man of vision, and his landscape offered different ways of achieving it. A large part of Franklin Park contained what was known as The Country Park, which offered passive recreation and quiet enjoyment of scenery, with serenity the byword. As Fred specified, the beauty of the park “should be the beauty of the fields, the meadow, the prairie, of the green pastures, and the still waters. What we want to gain is tranquillity, and rest to the mind.” To this end “nothing shall be built, nothing set up, nothing planted as a decorative feature; nothing for the gratification of curiosity.” Look at the pictures of what is called The Meadow, which lies at the lower left in the General Plan. Did he nail it? There’s nothing more tranquil than a flock of sheep in a meadow, wouldn’t you say?
The other section of the Country Park is called The Wilderness, which is just that, though please remember you’re still in the city of Boston. It really is a fairly large dense forest of trees and undergrowth, with trails and open spaces with picnic tables, and a wonderful collection of glacial boulder “erratics” comprised of Roxbury conglomerate, a form of puddingstone. Puddingstone is exactly that: when you look close, it’s all little rocks and solidified ancient goo, and it’s Franklin Park’s major geologic feature, a reminder of glacial times that have long passed.
Then there’s The Playstead, the section just up the hill from our house, which Olmsted had designated as a place for “athletic recreation and education of the city’s schoolboys,” though the vision dictated that these be “receptive recreation,” “social” and “unexertive” as opposed to organized competitive activity. Are you getting a picture yet of how clear and very specific Olmsted’s vision was as to how this was all supposed to work? Are you starting to suspect how the future might play out with such plans? The Playstead also included a large pavilion on a hill known as The Overlook, a gathering place that was protected from the weather though still open, perhaps so Mom could yell at Johnny down below to be less exertive.
The final element of this grand scheme was to be a majestic half-mile promenade lined with elms known as The Greeting, for those seeking community and social connection (perhaps after they’d had enough of seeking solace in nature?). It was to be a place for large gatherings with a restaurant, a concert venue, playgrounds and even some zoo exhibits. In some ways it was the main draw of the park for attracting large numbers of people. Franklin Park was planned to offer something for everyone, a “masterpiece” designed by one of the original masters of landscape architecture. What could possibly go wrong?
Fast forward about 80 years, when the local real estate market was reflecting the beginning of good times, after decades of Boston’s slow economic decline. The price of housing was on the rise, though when we looked for a house in JP, the prices were much higher on the west side towards Jamaica Pond than on the east side, which abutted the park.
The old “other side of the tracks” cliché literally applied, as JP is split by active rail lines, whereby the west side was white and prosperous whereas the east was mixed racially, lower income, and decidedly more “gritty,” as some (especially real estate people) might say it. The adjoining neighborhoods to the east of the park were almost exclusively Black, many living at various levels of poverty, a consequence of “white flight” during the 50s and 60s that was so common in U.S. cities.
The city overall had changed a great deal since the day the park had opened; a hundred years is a very long time and a city park, especially one of over 500 acres, is going to reflect those changes. It was probably a miracle Franklin Park still existed, at all. We’d never been there at the time we bought our house, though we knew the park contained the city zoo and a golf course. It also had an unfortunate high speed commuter road down the middle, Circuit Drive, something F L could not have foreseen when he designed it as a “carriageway.”
We knew nothing of the history of the place. All we knew was that it was right up there at the end of our street, and we were (almost) fearless in our explorations, walking and biking in the warm months and skiing when it snowed, tending to do more of the latter. A golf course is a wonderful place to cross-country ski, as was The Wilderness, and in winter we pretty much had the place to ourselves. I will never forget skiing in The Wilderness and coming across an owl, almost too small to be real, on a snowy branch about ten feet off the ground. It never flew away as I got really close, which I later discovered is not unusual for a northern saw-whet owl, a bird about which I knew nothing at the time. The few I’ve seen since then have all been deliberately caught in nets.
Then there were the ruins! It was like coming upon remnants of an ancient civilization, forlorn yet serene and of course mysterious, spread throughout the park. The stadium right at the top of our street was at least something familiar, except that this one was in a state of total decay, and it was somewhat of a shock to hear cheering when the holiday season came around, as a few football games were actually played there. There were other signs of life as the year went by, a few big cross-country running meets, a place for which the varied terrain and paths were ideal. And then there was August, which turned out to be festival season, first the Puerto Rican, then the Dominican, then the Caribbean, when the park as well as our entire neighborhood truly came alive. It was a great thing, though the noise and the traffic jams were unbelievable and a bit of a headache as the hours passed by and the honking never ceased.
So, what of Frederick Olmsted’s earnest and clearly defined original vision? Almost from the beginning – and very predictably – urban politics and economics took their toll, not to mention the will of the people. The Greeting never got built as intended, remained open space for awhile with no restaurant or concert venue, and over time the zoo exhibits morphed into a full-blown zoological garden, that today has become the pride of the city, with a few bumps along the way. The meadows of the expansive Country Park, replete with flocks of grazing sheep at one point, saw informal use by golfers probably from the day the park opened, and evidently those fellows had clout, as it officially opened as a city golf course in 1896, the second public golf course in the United States. So much for an undisturbed pastorale landscape, though doesn’t a golf course aspire to be exactly that, in its way? Just keep your distance and admire it from afar, or wear a helmet. Or ski on it when it’s covered with snow! But watch out for that bitter northwest wind, which can get nasty come January.
In 1954 a large parcel on the southwest corner of the park was commandeered by the state Department of Public Health for a gigantic eyesore of a hospital. Given F.L.’s dedication to improving the public’s mental health, the Lemuel Shattuck’s psychiatric unit certainly shared the same mission, in its way, and maybe he would have reluctantly approved. One wonders if patients were taken for walks along Scarborough Pond on nice days. The state is actually currently in the process of closing the place, tearing it down (which will be a very very big deal – anybody have a need for a few million used bricks?) and replacing it with a somewhat smaller facility. Would you be surprised to hear that there is a fervent group of folks demanding the land be restored as parkland, in an attempt to claw back a little bit of Olmsted’s vision?
A similar and much noisier public controversy now engulfs the George Robert White Schoolboy Stadium, a fixture in the immediate Iffley Road neighborhood since the year I was born. In some ways that is a mighty long time, though Franklin Park had been a thing for sixty years already by the time it was built, which is no time at all in the grand scheme of the universe. In most ways the stadium’s story has nothing to do with Frederick Law Olmsted, neither his vision nor his work, though it is clear he was all about improving the quality of life of people in cities everywhere. It’s possible he might’ve been open to all the various changes to his original plans, the better to achieve those goals. He certainly knew how cities evolved, and that his creations were all subject to the changes evolution brings about. You don’t mess with the Mona Lisa, but a masterpiece of a public park is something very different, indeed.
