On her September 19 MassLive.com podcast, Northampton Mayor Clare Higgins assured citizens that the city would not lose Pulaski Park when the new Hilton hotel was built. “That park is protected under state law as parkland, and we would have to go to the Legislature and ask to take it out of parkland,” the mayor said. “I would never make that request.”
The point the mayor seems to be missing, however, is that while the park itself may be protected from development, placing a multi-million dollar hotel at its edge will effectively turn this public space into one that serves the private business interests of its new neighbor. And thus, despite whatever the city’s new Pulaski Park Redesign Committee comes up with, the park will be no more.
Frederick Law Olmsted, a Connecticut River Valley native, designed the campuses for Smith College, Amherst College and Mt. Holyoke College, as well as the Amherst town common. He is considered to be the father of American park design. While the comments below refer to his New York masterpiece, Central Park, they reflect his overall philosophy toward the function and purpose of public parks. Northampton city planners would do well to heed his advice before our public officials spend a lot of time and money figuring out how to beautify the hotel’s new front entrance when they think they’re saving the park.
“The Park is a ground appropriated and arranged for the enjoyment of all the classes that inhabit a great city, and the design has been so to plan and arrange it that the visitor may immediately on entering be led… to divest himself of the thoughts and reflections that attend upon city business life, and to give himself up to an hour of undisturbed recreation.
“Whatever in such a scheme properly aids in the transition of the mental operations from business to pleasure or recreation is valuable.
“The Park is visited by millions—citizens and strangers; the natural beauties of the landscape, of tree, shrub, and flower… changing with the varying seasons, afford more satisfaction to a larger number of people than any other use to which the acres could be devoted.”
— Frederick Law Olmsted, Sr., Central Park Commission, 13th Annual Report, 1869
“Having become the resort of large assemblages of people, the Park is considered too advantageous a field for advertising to be neglected by those who would force their wants or wares upon the public attention at every turn. The regulations on this subject have been enforced thoroughly, and these practices are thus far kept in abeyance. … A catalogue of applications to use the lawns, the trees, the roads, the walks… for purposes entirely foreign to the objects of the Park, and utterly incompatible with its preservation, would give some idea of the ease with which the Park could be overrun if these applications met with favor.”
—FLO, Central Park Commission, 7th Annual Report, 1863
“Twice in the history of this park, after enormous expenditures had been made upon it with the stated purpose of excluding urban and securing rural scenery, this purpose has been distinctly and publicly repudiated…. [W]hen the trees of the park were yet saplings, and its designed rural scenery wholly undeveloped, the suggestion that the most central and important position upon it should be given to a public building was received with no apparent disfavor, and one of the Commissioners of the Park declared that any ground the promoters of the undertaking might desire would be gladly assigned to it. Fortunately, because of hard times, the scheme fell through. Ten years later, a monumental building [a hotel] was actually given a site upon the park, but it was one in which the structure would not interfere with any extended view, or be seen from a distance, and even this concession did not pass without much remonstrance. When the next scheme… was disclosed, though coupled with many most attractive incidental propositions, skillfully presented, and supported by eminent citizens, so much popular indignation was soon manifested that in response to petitions a bill was rapidly advanced in the legislature to make it illegal for the Commissioners to entertain the proposition, and would have passed had not the head of the movement publicly and apologetically announced the abandonment of the idea.”
—FLO writing about his experiences managing Central Park to Massachusetts park commissioners from “Notes on the Plan of Franklin Park,” Boston, 1886
“The very ‘reason for being’ of the Park is the importance to the city’s prosperity of offering to its population, as it enlarges and becomes more cramped for room, opportunity of the pleasurable and soothing relief from building, without going too far from its … centre. What else than this purpose justifies the reservation from commercial enterprise … of good building-land right in the line of the greatest demand? Building can be brought within the business of the Park proper only as it will aid escape from buildings. Where building for other purposes begins, there the Park ends.”
—FLO, From his booklet advocating funding for preservation of Central Park, “The Spoils of the Park,” 1882
All quotations taken from Forty Years of Landscape Architecture: Central Park by Frederick Law Olmsted, Sr., edited by Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. and Theodora Kimball ( MIT Press).
Editing and Panoramas by Mark Roessler
