Volume 47, Number 1 · January 20, 2000
Sunday in the Park with Fred
By Andrew Delbanco
A Clearing in the Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the Nineteenth Century
by Witold Rybczynski
Scribner, 479 pp., $28.00
In the 1850s, much of New York City was still a place where one could experience something like country darkness and quiet. Above what is now called 'midtown,' stretches of the Hudson and East River shores of Manhattan were thickly wooded, with a few houses built on large tracts of privately owned land. The plan to lay out the city according to a grid of numbered streets, adopted in 1811, was still mainly an idea inscribed on maps; and so the topography of New York remained visible—hills, valleys, and outcroppings of rock that have been hidden or eliminated in today's paved metropolis, where east-west vistas are glimpsed from the street only at block-long intervals or from high-floor windows.
Review, 4887 words
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