Engineered Landscapes

This article, a long description of the creation of Jones Beach, got me thinking about how much of the landscape around us is artificial. Even though the beach at Jones Beach is natural, there’s a lot of buried infrastructure and roads that are it usable, in addition to the iconic structures (the water tower and the bath houses) that are visible evidence of design.

Jones Beach got me thinking about Coney Island, Floyd Bennet Field, and Orchard Beach, all places where the natural landscape was greatly altered by landfill. Obviously there were shores where southern Brooklyn faces the Atlantic and Jamaica Bay and where the east Bronx meets the Long Island Sound, but they looked nothing like they do now.

When the Manhattan street grid was built, hills were cut down and low points graded up to even out the island’s topography. The photo above shows how Fifth Avenue cut into Mount Morris in Harlem.

There’s a seemingly endless supply of these stories. Flushing Meadows Park was a swamp turned garbage dump before the 1939-40 World’s Fair converted it to a park. Central Park’s topography is largely artificial, constructed in the mid-nineteenth century. Foley Square was the Collect Pond.

The common factor in all of these changes is that they were designed. Landfill is only stable if it’s contained and compacted properly. Changing grades only makes sense if the new grade is accessible to the vehicles that will have to ride over it. A swamp turned park will only be successful if the springs and streams that made it wet are controlled so that it stays dry. These artificial landscapes are engineered as much as the big buildings in the city and have cumulatively just as much effect on the image of the city. But because the landscape just lies there being unobtrusively useful, the designs aren’t much noticed.