And this past weekend on a lecture walk at
Cedar Hill Cemetery in Hartford (a rural landscape cemetery of the Olmsted
style) I found out that for the past fifteen years or so Mars and I have been
playing golf on an actual Olmsted-designed landscape. This probably doesn’t mean a thing to serious
golfers who travel great distances and pay big bucks to strike the little white
ball on courses architected by names such as Robert Trent Jones, Peter Dye,
Allister MacKenzie, Willie Park Jr., and Donald Ross – but to us for whom a morning on the links is
literally a walk in the park, the Olmsted connection is a really big deal.
Our “home
course” is the Goodwin Park Golf Course in Hartford Connecticut – 27 holes of
grass, trees, sand and water surrounded by a public park in the capitol city of
Connecticut. We normally play on what is
known as the “North Course” (aka the “flat nine”) – “a perfect course for
beginners and those looking for a quick nine.”
Across the
way from the fourth, sixth and eight greens are (respectively): a softball
diamond and a soccer field; a public outdoor swimming pool; and a picnic and
play area with an adjacent basketball court.
The smells of barbecues and the rhythms of Hispanic music – as well as
the sights and sounds of players, fans, joggers, dog walkers, backpack carrying
students, arguing couples, people fishing in the water hazards, and the
occasional fox are as much a part of the course’s ambiance as are the azaleas
at Augusta National, the site of the Masters Tournament (designed and modified
over the years by the above mentioned MacKenzie and Jones and most recently
(1930s) by Perry Maxwell.)
“Our” golf
course takes up about three quarters of Goodwin Park’s 237 acres – but it was
not always so. – as we
learned on our cemetery walk and as the Hartford Courant reported in
“Hartford’s Ring of Parks”:
“All cities
go through phases as they develop from small ports or county hubs. In the
mid-1890s, Hartford went through a phase known as ‘the rain of parks,’ which
fell around the city's periphery. In a span of months — August 1894 to November
1895 — Pope, Elizabeth, Goodwin, Riverside and Keney parks came into existence.
“The
leaders of Hartford knew the potential present and future value of a park
system even in 1894 when the city created a committee to oversee the new park
system.
“’It should
be the aim of the city not to have these parks mere isolated spots of ground
for decorative purposes but a continuous property,’ noted a December 1894
Hartford Courant article, ‘for the benefit of all the people, especially for
those people who are unable to enjoy the large grounds and gardens which those
more fortunate have. They should be for the daily use of the people and no part
of the city should be neglected in the movement.’
“Rev. Dr.
Francis Goodwin, a wealthy amateur botanist and architect, was known as the
father of the Hartford Park System.”
And Rev.
Goodwin talked some of the city’s richest men and biggest landowners into
giving land to the city of Hartford for the public’s use – resulting in Keney
Park (Henry and Walter Keney), Pope Park (Col. Albert Pope), Riverside Park,
Elizabeth Park (Charles M. Pond – wife Elizabeth), and Goodwin Park. In the 1930s Hartford was reputed to have the
largest park acres per capita in America.
Originally
known as South Park and renamed in 1900, the land for Goodwin Park was acquired
via purchase and condemnation proceedings in 1895. The landscape firm of Olmsted, Olmsted and
Eliot were hired to design a “meadow and tree plantation.”
“The park
site, selected by Charles Eliot and John Olmsted of the Olmsted Brothers,
benefitted from its placement outside the city’s dense downtown development and
served as a complement to Cedar Hill Cemetery, across the street, one of
America’s first rural landscape cemeteries from the 1860s designed by Jacob Weidenmann.”
(tclf.org)
Weidenmann was
also the designer of Hartford’s Bushnell Park when Frederick Law Olmsted was
unavailable because he was working on New York’s Central Park.
The Olmsted
Goodwin Park plan showed “a grand meadow framed by tree plantations with
individual trees and small clusters within the meadow space, and a small water
feature. The park was constructed
essentially as designed.” (Hartford.gov)
Evidently
there was enough grassland for a few local clergy to go to the park and hit a
few golf balls around. And like origin
of the sport when the first players hit a pebble around a natural course of sand
dunes, rabbit runs, and tracks on the eastern coast of Scotland in the Kingdom
of Fife, this too became the impetus for one of the first public golf courses
in the country. A planned nine-hole
course was opened in 1907, with another nine added five years later. In 1922 a group of the golfers petitioned the
city of Hartford to charge for playing so that "better attention might be
given to the course." A fee of ten
cents for nine holes was established.
(The cost today of playing the North Course is $9.00 walking for an
unlimited number of holes.)
Mars and I
discovered golf and the Flat Nine at Goodwin about fifteen years ago in
preparation for retirement. She has
said that if it were not for the informal, unpressured atmosphere at “Goodie”
she never would have gotten started. We
have yet to keep score during a round.
Five years later when we stopped working we stumbled upon “public
history” at Wethersfield Historical Society and The Cedar Hill CemeteryFoundation, and realized that there was much more to learn about the past than
dates, wars and presidents – there were, e.g., builders of public recreation
areas and the effect they had on the people who used them.
Frederick
Law Olmsted believed that service to human needs, and not simply the creation
of decoration, should underlie all art. "Service must precede art,"
he declared, "since all turf, trees, flowers, fences, walks, water, paint,
plaster, posts and pillars in or under which there is not a purpose of direct
utility or service are inartistic if not barbarous. … So long as considerations
of utility are neglected or overridden by considerations of ornament, there
will be not true art." (http://www.olmsted.org)
Something I
will try to remember when, with Salsa music reverberating in the background, I
look out at autumn-turning trees in the undulating meadow and prepare for my
next shot.
*****************
BTW: It is commonly
reported that Hartford Superintendent of Parks Everett Pyle who built Triggs
Memorial Golf Course in Providence, R.I. for the above mentioned Donald Ross
was the architect of the current layout at Goodwin Park. But research by Anthony Pioppi indicates that
in 1937 it was in fact “designed by R.J. Ross [not related to Donald Ross], assistant
city engineer who has made golf course architecture an avocation and [was] built
by WPA labor under the supervision of the Parks Department.” Ross also created the second nine holes at
the golf course in Hartford’s Keney Park.
Goodwin Park Golf photos from Google maps.
Further thoughts on Olmsted and Walnut Hill Park.
Goodwin Park Golf photos from Google maps.
Further thoughts on Olmsted and Walnut Hill Park.
No comments:
Post a Comment