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In 1804 John Stevens III (1749-1838) began his 30-year effort to transform a portion of his wooded, 700-acre Hoboken property into a romantic, quasi-public rural retreat, called the "Elysian Fields." This was one of the earliest parks in the United States to be developed in the English landscape garden style. For half a century, until the opening of Central Park in the early 1860s, the Hoboken park was legendary as one of the most popular outdoor recreation places in the New York metropolitan area.
Stevens' grand scheme started with the laying out of "The New City of Hoboken," from which he operated a ferry across the Hudson River to Manhattan. He developed the 100-acre park in order to generate traffic on his ferries and to promote interest in his planned town. The venture flourished; by the 1830s, property sales were brisk, and Stevens' ferries transported 20,000 passengers a day to his Elysium on summer weekends.
Stevens foreshadowed Andrew Jackson Downing's park editorials in The Horticulturist by two decades. In 1824, Stevens wrote: "The park has a tendency to civilize and refine the manners of all classes ... where nature and art contribute largely to the embellishment of every scene." Twenty-four years later, in 1848, Downing paraphrased Stevens' ideas: "...by establishing refined public parks, you would soften and humanize the rude and enlighten the ignorant ... [amidst] their lawns, fine trees, shady walks and beautiful shrubs and flowers ... all classes of society, [may] partake of the same pleasures...." Frederick Law Olmsted, in turn, paraphrased Downing and Stevens in his description of Liverpool's Birkenhead Park, in his Walks and Talks of an American Farmer in England, written in 1850 and published in 1852: "Five minutes of admiration, and a few more spent in studying the manner in which art had been employed to obtain from nature so much beauty, and I was ready to admit that in democratic America there was nothing to be thought of as comparable to this People's Garden."1 Just a few months later, Olmsted read Downing's essay, "The New York Park," in The Horticulturist (August 1851), inspiring him to dedicate his career to the belief that public parks had the potential to remove the social barriers between the classes.2
This essay,...