The lagoon and islands offered a wooded retreat set aside from the rest of the fair. Frederick Law Olmsted, who created this seemingly natural landscape out of tidal mud flats, intended it to be the only area of the fair without significant buildings. Surrounded by a lagoon and covered with bushes, flowers, and trees, the islands lent a much needed shade to visitors in the scorching heat of a Chicago summer. Olmsted took care to create a naturalistic appearance for these artificial islands, recommending to the fair’s board of directors that,
as far as it is possible, the lagoon must be made to look like a natural bayou. … Its low, sterile shores must be given a rich affluent and picturesque aspect, in striking contrast alike with the present ground, the expanse of the Great Lake, the margins of the basin in the central court, and the canals yet to be formed.4
A representation of nature that was both picturesque and naturalistic, the wooded islands offered a contrast to both the sterile muddy shores of Lake Michigan and the spectacular white-stuccoed architecture of the Columbian Exposition. They were not a minor element in the fair. In fact, as the chief architect Daniel Burnham later acknowledged, the lagoon and islands were the only original feature in the whole design.5 The question we explore here is what this small area of unbuilt land represented, and how it was meant to work on the visitors to Chicago, in the minds of its designers.
Not surprisingly, photographers quickly understood that the islands represented virgin nature, or wilderness. Charles Dudley Arnold, the official photographer of the fair, took advantage of the striking contrast between the wooded islands and its surrounding buildings by using the island as a foreground for a majestic architecture beyond – as if the ‘white city’ were emerging from the wilderness. We see similar strategies used by contemporary painters like Charles Caryl Coleman in his ‘The Afterglow in the Lagoon’ (see Figure 8.1). In the field of journalism, Hamilton Gibson of Scribner’s Magazine took his readers botanizing in the wooded islands. ‘A few more steps’, he says, ‘and the ripples gleam through the branches before us, and we emerge at the water’s edge beneath a tangle of willows. . . . This haphazard chaos. . . disarms all suspicion of artificial planting.’6
|
8.1 ‘The Afterglow in the Lagoon’, Charles Caryl Coleman, 1893 |
The social functions of nature
Olmsted had long seen nature as an antidote to the evils of civilization and argued that parks were important instruments in social reform, offering nineteenth-century urban populations a respite from, and welcome contrast to, an intensely urban existence. As the first person consulted by the fair organizers about the design of the exposition site, Olmsted became one of the three key designers for the exposition, joining the chief architects Burnham & Root and the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens in this effort. And because the Chicago Exposition was to be the last major commission of a lifetime of work, Olmsted’s design for the Chicago fair exemplified his belief in the importance of nature to modern society – in the form of both urban parks and preserved wilderness sites.
As a social reformer, Olmsted believed that nature played an important role in the creation of a stable society. Christine Boyer reminds us:
The back to nature movement, which spread across the urban mentality of the late nineteenth century, valued woodlands and meadows for their spiritual impact; they were places of simple virtues and pleasures on the edge of urban disquietudes and troubles. Andrew Jackson Downing, F. L. Olmsted and Charles Eliot Norton, Jr., were among those promoters of landscape design and urban parks who believed a civilization of cities would not survive if it was cut off from nature. Nature not only held the power to uplift, it also had the power to instill in men the best ideals from America’s rural democratic past.7
Nineteenth-century advocates of parks believed that ‘foul air prompts to vice, and oxygen to virtue’, as they argued for the introduction of trees and parks, fresh air and light to the darkest and most congested areas of the city.8 Reformers stressed that working-class children needed vigorous play to develop a wholesome moral and ethical life. And Chicago was the site for the first public urban playground in the country, opened on a vacant lot the year of the exhibition, in a project managed by Jane Addams’ Settlement House. Municipal governments saw that the establishment of parks reinforced their position as democratic institutions, while business interests accepted that municipally funded parks in poor neighbourhoods were a minor concession to the reproduction and education of the labour pool. In wealthy neighbourhoods, they had the advantage of increasing the value of adjacent properties. As a result, turn-of-the-century Chicago saw the planning and construction of an entire ring of small parks.9 For Olmsted then, the scenic beauty of the wooded isle was not only an aesthetic decision to serve as a visual counterpoint to the white city, it served a larger social function.
There are two kinds of parks, Olmsted explained to his clients: parks for strolling, picnicking, and other moderately active leisure pursuits; and parks for contemplation which, though smaller in size, offered temporary relief from the busy streets of the city. His landscape design for the Columbian Exposition served both of these aims, with its boulevards and terraces for active tourism and the islands in the centre of the lagoon to provide a quiet and wooded retreat from the crowds. While the labouring classes were meant to picnic on the lakeshore or stroll past the sideshows of the Midway Plaisance, it was expected that middle – and upper-class visitors would promenade along the Court of Honour and enjoy the gondolas in the lagoon. For both groups, the wooded islands were intended to offer a relief from the noise and crowds of the fair.