Edward Eigen —

The New York Times reports that Jeanne Gang, a MacArthur Fellow, was chosen as the architect of a planned $325 million, six-story addition to the American Museum of Natural History because she designs “on a human scale” and has demonstrated “an acute sensitivity and sensibility about the relationship of nature to the built environment in an urban setting.”^{1 2} That conspicuously unavailing assessment of Gang’s relevant competencies comes from the museum’s president, Ellen V. Futter. Considering the museum’s vast collection of gall wasps (Cynipidae), donated by Alfred Charles Kinsey, among its countless other treasures—from Henry Fairfield Osborn’s fossil-horse skeletons to Roy Waldo Miner’s enchanting sea worm “window group” in the Darwin hall, modeled on Great Harbor of Woods Hole, Massachusetts—why should the human scale prevail as the measure of all things? It is not the purpose here to dwell on Gang’s acute sensibility and sensitivity, though that distinction in itself is one difficult to sustain in current architectural discourse. Indeed, what a great service would be done for our field if she could even provisionally define, separate, and/or unite the exhausted categories of the “built” and the “natural,” especially in an urban environment, indeed one such as New York City with its iconic parallelogram-girded rus at its notional middle. We will presently return to the introduction of gates to its immured greensward. Instead, for now, let’s talk about ecology; everyone seems to be doing so.

The Times article focuses on questions of human social ecologies—the potential, or rather inevitable, impact of the museum’s expansion on its communally cherished perimeter space, the green(ish) sliver of “wooded grounds” (as per the museum’s website), known as Theodore Roosevelt Park, that surrounds the “sprawling hodgepodge of a complex.” Named for the ardent big-game hunter and conservationist, the park is by no means verdant and untouched. As recently as 2003, the Nobel Monument—Roosevelt won the prize (for peace) in 1906, the first American to do so—was erected in the path of the proposed Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation.³ The truncated obelisk, a monolith of red Swedish granite, is a decidedly post-glacial erratic worthy of inclusion alongside the awesome, pockmarked, approximately 68,000-pound Ahnighito (Inuit for “tent”) meteor, from Savissivik, Greenland, in the museum’s Hall of Meteorites. Like the American Samoan tribes visited by the cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead, to whom a green in the northwest portion of the park is dedicated, Upper West Siders possess distinct mores and are known particularly for their “fierce development battles.” That said, the article misrepresents the facts relating to one such battle enjoined by the so-called baby-carriage brigade, the 1956 fight over the Adventure Playground at West 67th Street in Central Park, which “the city’s ‘master builder,’ Robert Moses, had wanted to turn into a new parking lot for Tavern on the Green.”⁴

The adventure playground emerged from a subsequent struggle, which took place in 1967. As reported in the Times, “it all began when angry mothers complained that their youngsters were getting hurt in a playground in Central Park, just north of the Tavern on the Green.”⁵ In his speech, under a steady rain, at the opening of the Richard Dattner designed playscape, Joseph Lauder explained that he and his wife, the patron Estée Lauder, had been influenced by the English expert Lady Allen of Hurtwood. “After World War II, European youngsters set the pace themselves,” Mr. Lauder said, “by using bomb-ravaged city areas for play and debris for imaginative construction.” Dattner replaced swings and seesaws, with their frames embedded in abrasive asphalt, with slides that land on filtered sand. Other parts of the playground were covered with “stabilized gravel,” a mixture of sand and pebbles, “which does not turn to mud when it rains or to dust when it doesn’t.” The elements had been mastered and the potential for hurt minimized if not altogether removed. In other quarters of the park the terror of the jungle gym persisted, as vividly dramatized in Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), when a bloody playground misadventure is replayed in the courtroom as evidence of a devoted but distracted father’s custodial failure. But what the events of 1967 chiefly signify is a change in surface, a re-grounding of the social contract, or more generally and essentially the question of succession—how one habitat, one ecosystem, so to speak, replaces another.

What the concerned mothers were up in arms about was the unaffording urban amenity of what they called “a Robert Moses Depression Playground.” The earlier struggle of 1956, the “Battle of Central Park,” involved a plan to construct a new parking lot for the Tavern on the Green restaurant behind a fenced-in playground on a knoll off Central Park West.⁶ The wooded, rocky area had long been used as an “unofficial play space" to supplement a “regular playground” on West 68th Street.⁷ His ambitions thwarted by the grassroots resistance of the Upper West Siders, Moses uncharacteristically relented and as a concession constructed the Tots Playground. Whether the playground was a better use of space than a parking lot is not the matter here. Tavern on the Green is as good a socio-biological indicator as any of what belongs and what does not in the ever-evolving inhabited reality of Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux’s Greensward Plan. The “picturesque popular restaurant,” which originally promised “popular prices,”⁸ has long occupied the former sheepfold built with Tammany patronage by Jacob Wrey Mould in 1870 to house the pedigree Southdown sheep that grazed on what is now known as the Sheep Meadow, and their Irish-born shepherd. According to one newspaper account, James “Long Jim” Conway “entered the Park Department when the Central Park was in process of development. The present fine reservation was then made up of farms, homes for squatters and vacant lots. There was a negro cemetery on the western side of the upper section.”⁹ Not merely a cemetery, Seneca Village, as it was known, was a stable and sizable community that supported and was supported by two African Methodist churches.¹⁰ In 1934, long after these landowners, along with other Irish and German immigrants, were expelled to create the people’s park Moses moved the sheep to Prospect Park in Brooklyn. Conway’s replacement—he had retired in 1913 after fifty-four years of service—was assigned to duties in the lion house in the Central Park Zoo, part of the “modernization” plan carried out by Moses with the cooperation of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Civil Works Administration.

While it was not a part of the Greensward Plan, the sheepfold was viewed by some not as an encroachment in the park—Olmsted and Vaux were constantly fending off proposals for supposed improvements including memorials, monuments, skating rinks, bandstands, speedways—but rather as an obdurate and ornate remnant of superseded planning principles. In his assertive design proposal for the gateways of the southern entrances to the Central Park, the École des Beaux-Arts–trained architect (the first American to be so distinguished) Richard Morris Hunt called for expressive means and forms of meaning “more significant and suggestive than landscape gardening—than trees and flowers and stretches of greensward.” The popular will—indeed the refined sensibility and sensitivity—that led to the erection of the Johann von Schiller Monument, dedicated in December 1859, and a proposal for a sculpture of William Shakespeare (erected in 1872 on a pedestal designed by Mould), made it unreasonable to hope or assume that the park would always remain “a sylvan retreat fit for shepherds and their flocks.”¹¹ Hunt’s view prevailed, as is evident in his own design for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, now enveloped by a sprawling hodgepodge of subsequent park-space-consuming additions.

To establish some basis for determining what should or should not take place at the American Museum of Natural History, at least in terms of its expansion plans, might well require reviewing the map that appeared in the Tenth Annual Report of the Board of Commissioners of Central Park (1867). Drawn by Vaux and Olmsted, it describes the laying out of the museum’s future grounds, west of Eighth Avenue, or what was then known as Manhattan Square. The site, then a rocky wilderness, was to be connected to the park by an archway just south of Hunter’s Gate. But to the extent that history provides a compass in such a discussion, and wishing to return to the theme of ecology, it was what was taking place within the museum, beginning in the 1940s, not so long after the sheep had gone from Central Park, that might tell us something about the current state of green, and what it is we are saying when it comes around, as inevitably it does, to questions of ecology. How did architectural discourse lose its sap?

Let us briefly consider the following editorial note that accompanied the reluctantly received contribution made by Frank Edwin Egler to the Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America (ESA), under the title “‘Physics Envy’ in Ecology” (1986). We will return in a moment to Egler’s comments about “Instant Ecology, in Academia,” and other banes—e.g., Apocynum androsaemifolium (spreading dogbane), about which see Warren G. Kenfield, The Wild Gardener in the Wild Landscape: The Art of Naturalistic Landscaping, 1966—that had invaded the deceptively verdant green of college campuses.¹² The note reads in full:

At the author’s request, the following article by Dr. Frank Egler has been published exactly as he desired in terms of publication, spacing, grammatical usage, etc. Dr. Egler has his own unique, changing style, which he has been espousing for some time (see The Nature of Vegetation, Its Management and Mismanagement, 1977, published by Aton Forest in cooperation with Connecticut Conservation Association). I am publishing it in this form, rather than rejecting it outright, to provide members with his perceived views of the problems with the field of ecology. Readers should not infer that (1) Allen Press [the ESA’s publisher] is not doing a good job of proofing, (2) anybody can write any way they want to, (3), the Bulletin has no more standards, or (4) all of the above. We are deferring, for this one time, to one of long standing in the field.—Ed ¹³

Evidently Egler had not carefully read (or more likely disdainfully ignored) the advice offered by Washington State University plant ecologist Richard N. Mack in a preceding issue of the Bulletin. A specialist in plant invaders including Bromus tectorum (cheatgrass), and seemingly not excluding flowery and/or thorny prose, Mack extoled the “wonderfully self-illustrative sentence,” a rare specimen of its kind, found in the instructions issued to authors for Ecology and Ecological Monographs: “Write with precision, clarity, and economy.”¹⁴ Mack’s essay, neatly titled, as per editorial diktat, “Writing with Precision, Clarity, and Economy,” advances a forgivably banal strain of Strunkian intolerance toward uncommon or unnecessary usage, when (good) writing is understood first, foremost, and perhaps exclusively to be a matter of “economy of expression.” That Egler’s discussion of “physics envy” (manifesting itself as a rhetorical mode of self-assured and undoubtedly self-deceiving scientism) appeared in print by virtue of his “long” as opposed to high standing in the field is itself a “wonderfully self-illustrative” example of the importance of word choice.

Mack’s essay was the first in a planned series under the heading “Voices of Experience” meant to transmit the collective wisdom acquired by the Board of Editors whilst reviewing, revising, and, when warranted, rejecting manuscripts submitted to Ecology and Ecological Monographs. Here is that wisdom in condensed, alliterative, and internally rhyming form: Do not find “tongues in trees, books in the running brooks.” According to the ESA’s long-serving managing editor, Lee Miller, these little sermons in stones semantic parsimony were a “recipe for learning an immense amount about ecology and the work of ecologists.”¹⁵ Miller was a keen student of the “landscape of science publishing,” which no doubt explains his readiness to consider in the same breath ecology and ecologists, the edaphic and the “anthropic” features of ecological discourse itself.¹⁶ And this is what makes Egler’s presumed fallacies so pathetic—his sorry-grateful acceptance of the marginal authorial/eco-ethological niche set aside for him by his peers.

How did Egler come to be editorially banished to the Forest of Arden Aton Forest, where he went on to self-publish his most extravagant insights in mimeographed editions? Egler noted that the 1986 date of “‘Physics Envy’ in Ecology” coincided with the fiftieth anniversary of his being “crowned” (as opposed to laureated) with a Ph.D. by Yale University. The substance of his dissertation was published as “Berkshire Plateau Vegetation, Massachusetts” in none other than Ecological Monographs.¹⁷ In the intervening years he closely observed the “interesting progression and degression [sic] in the field empirically embraced by the publications of the Ecological Society of America.” The passing scenery might indeed have been interesting, but it was also dismaying. What Egler witnessed was the emergence of a scientific-academic-bureaucratic “establishment,” and what he perceived on college campuses to be a “sense of frustration, of intellectual imprisonment—as animals in a small zoo, or assembly-line workers in a factory, or mere technicians in the control room of an out-of-control nuclear power plant.”¹⁸ Egler planned to address these decidedly degressive tendencies in a book based “primarily on psycho-sociological and anthropological view-points, with the title ‘The Eco-logical Establishment, 1935–1985.’” The book did not appear, but Egler had committed himself fully to becoming a student of his fellow ecologists and their institutional perches, in such titles as “How to Get Out a Book, Easily, and Acquire a Library of Reprints, Free” (1976), and “Birth of the Collective Author” (1981).¹⁹

If, in fact, it is pervasive ecologism and the greening of architecture that threatens discourse, then let us turn our attention to Egler’s investigation of the use of the “tongue-twist[ing]” compounds (2,4-D[ichlorophenoxyacetic acid], 2,4,5-T[richlorophenoxyacetic acid]), to control unwanted vegetation. Beginning in 1952, Egler collaborated with the noted wetlands ecologist William A. Niering on a study of a community of Viburnum lentago (nannyberry) in central hardwoods in Fairfield County, Connecticut—one of a large group of similar field studies sponsored by the American Museum of Natural History’s Committee for Chemical Brush Control Recommendations for Rightofways, of which Egler was the chairman. Egler joined the American Museum’s Department of Conservation and General Ecology soon after publishing his initial findings on the use of “modern herbicides” for plant-community management. When he began his research on selective spraying in the winter of 1945–46, Egler later recalled, he located but one reference to its effects on a few woody species. But from then on, he wrote with truly stunning tone-deafness, “the activity has mushroomed like an exploding atom bomb.”²⁰ Selective spraying was not only a tool of vegetation management but also a research instrument for Egler to test his models of relay and initial floristics.

The present author professes no competence to judge the outcome of this still ongoing debate concerning post-Clementsian theories of succession, nor what it might say about the succession of theories themselves. What can be immediately grasped, however, is the profound redistribution of real and cognitive geographies implied by Egler’s definition of rights-of-way, one that fatally threatens the consoling pastoral (eclogical [sic]) notion of a middle landscape. He writes:

Most people are only subconsciously aware of roadsides and rights-of-way. To them the world consists of cities, with their industrial and residential areas and of “country,” with forests and grasslands and croplands. But gradually a new type of acreage is becoming manifest in our national economy—narrow strips that we cannot get away from. They hem us in on every automobile and train ride. They are with us even when we stay at home, for our telephone service involves the rights-of-way of toll lines as well as roadside distribution lines, and each electrical appliance we use involves mammoth transmission lines, as well as those for local distribution. Roadways, railways, and utility lines are thus lacing our country with superposed patterns of ever-increasing complexity.²¹

Landscape urbanism? Landscape infrastructure? The right-of-way is not invasive; it is pervasive. It is the fence and what lies beyond and within it. It is in our homes and what connects us to one another. This is the field we occupy and the one that landscape architecture as currently understood will of necessity be occupied with.

Read in one particular way, Niering and Egler’s report on Viburnum lentago is oddly consistent with Mack’s tenets of economy and efficiency. The shrub’s high wildlife and ornamental value “improves public relations,” while its stability (resistance to forest invasion) results in a “maintenance cost in this instance of $0.00 for 25 years.”²² It does a lot for a little, and makes a good show of doing it. What it could not resist or survive, however, was indiscriminate blanket spraying. The management of rights-of-way, Niering and Egler explain, “has been exploited by chemical manufacturers and spraying contractors, whose practices are not always in harmony with ecological knowledge.” Niering pursued this matter further at the 1955 annual meeting of the Northeastern Weed Science Society, though his paper was a muted afterthought to Raymond McMahon’s address on the “public acceptance of chemical control of roadside vegetation.”²³ That year, McMahon Brothers, a Binghamton, New York-based weed and brush control company, sprayed 40,562 miles of roadside in New England, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.²⁴ “Endless grassy roadsides,” Raymond McMahon proclaimed, provided a “billboard” as long as the highway system itself advertising sound public management practices.²⁵ The unlikely source for McMahon’s ideas of what the public was likely to accept, or rather what it deserved, was the humanistic nineteenth-century essayist William Hazlitt: “There is not a more mean, stupid, dastardly, pitiful, selfish, spiteful, envious, ungrateful animal than the PUBLIC.”²⁶

Ever the student of Cowlesian autecology, Egler reserved this spiteful, envious role for corporate rather than democratic creatures, specifically E.I. du Pont de Nemours and Company and The Dow Chemical Corporation. As for advertisements, Dow distributed an instructional film promoting the use of 2-4-D (one of the two ingredients of Agent Orange), the title card of which set out its simple moral narrative: “Bill of Indictment: People vs. Weeds.” It was a “witness for nature,” Rachel Carson, who testified on behalf of the public regarding the hazard posed to people not by weeds but by the chemicals used to kill them.²⁷ Carson sought Egler’s advice as she composed Silent Spring, her powerful jeremiad on the wide, spreading danger of pesticide use, betokened by the absence of birdsong. It was also during their exchange of letters that she discovered that Egler was one and the same as Warren G. Kenfield, the author of the pamphlet “The Art of Naturalistic Landscape,” which first elaborated the aesthetic and managerial principles of selective spraying.

By this time Egler had been dismissed from the American Museum after the Dow Chemical Company exerted pressure on its director, and the Conservation Department was disbanded soon thereafter.²⁸ Having made an honorable retreat to Aton Forest, Egler was particularly sensitive to Carson’s dismissive treatment by scientists who were “unable to reach the general public on such issues, unable to write in terms the public can understand, devoid of literary ability, and probably jealous of the success of Silent Spring.” The attacks on Carson were not confined to the “establishment.” In a 1964 article for BioScience, Egler once again took up arms against the McMahon Brothers. “Pesticides in Our Ecosystem” investigated “knowledge flow” between and among the social units of the human ecosystem,” in which Egler believed spraying contractors were heedless commercial despoilers.²⁹ Egler ruefully recounted the McMahon Brothers’ highly publicized attempt to discredit Carson by challenging her to a “roadside spraying contest.” Interpret that as you may.

The corresponding toll on Egler’s professional reputation was exacted by the Entomological Society of America, which was heavily subsidized by the McMahon Brothers’ corporate chemical suppliers. The censure reads as follows:

Resolution No. 5. whereas, The Membership of the Entomological Society of America includes a great body of biological and physical scientists intimately concerned with research on or related to pesticides,

and whereas, A large number of our fine universities and colleges are engaged in and support research on or related to pesticides, and

whereas, The article entitled “Pesticides in our Ecosystem: Communication II” by Frank E. Egler, published by the American Institute of Biological Sciences in the November 1964 issue of BioScience, Volume 14, Number 11, contained a number of unsubstantiated, unwarranted, and slanderous statements that insult all scientists and most universities engaged in research on or related to pesticides, by repeatedly impugning their motives, their honesty, and their scientific and intellectual integrity, now therefore

be it resolved, that the Entomological Society of America strongly protests the lax editorial policy of the American Institute of Biological Sciences that permits, in a journal dedicated to the advancement of biological sciences, the publication of such a vicious attack on our universities and on a great number of dedicated biologists and scientists in related fields... ³⁰

Egler’s delightfully noncompliant response to all this was his (or his literary alter ego Warren G. Kenfield’s) unruly treaties on the “herbicide-sculptured landscape.”

I have written elsewhere about the kind of fieldwork that is required to understand architecture’s specific place in sculpture’s expanded field.³¹ That discussion diverged from seminal articles (of faith) such as Robert Smithson’s “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic” in order to consider Clayton, the former Childs Frick estate in Roslyn, Long Island, that is now home to the Nassau County Museum of Art and its exquisite sculpture park. Originally the property of Edith Cooper Bryce, whose son-in-law was the pioneering conservationist Gifford Pinchot, the sprawling grounds include broad lawns, open fields, wooded groves, winding roadways, and formal gardens. On a nearby hillside was a picturesque guesthouse, renamed by Frick “Leftover Cottage,” that was once part of Cedarmere, the neighboring estate, landscape by Olmsted, that had belonged to William Cullen Bryant. The interpretive allure of Clayton was Millstone, situated in a pinetum, built in 1937 as Frick’s private laboratory.

Having shared with Henry Fairfield Osborn his interest in mammalian paleontology, the then president of the American Museum of Natural History arranged for Frick to participate in excavation in the Badlands of Bautista Creek and San Timoteo Cañon. Following the death of his father, Henry Clay Frick, in 1919, he was elected a museum trustee and placed on its finance committee. Frick’s devotion to the museum culminated with his endowment of the Childs Frick Building, erected within an internal courtyard. Invisible from the street, the featureless, accidentally sculptural boxlike structure housed laboratories and collections, extending the museum’s research mission inward (within urban space) and downward through “horizons” of time. Evidence of extinction was its proper object of study.

The point of this final and oblique (as opposed to acute) glimpse into the museum’s institutional history is not to suggest, at least not explicitly, that any future additions to the natural/built environment of its urban setting should be invisible. Rather it is to prompt some further consideration of what terms are useful to discuss building in a world in which all that remains is the margins, and there is no room for error. I hope and fear that Egler was on to something with this. Our field seems to suffer from a certain weakness for ecologism that passes for knowledge, a sort of ecological envy where the ecologists once suffered from physics envy. Part of the reason for this is that all persons of conscience now confront the same question: “Are the green fields gone?” There is still much more to know about the intersecting and bounding worlds of rights-of-way. A field guide is wanted, along with a guide to usage.