Olmstead Essay Research Paper Every common working

Olmstead Essay, Research Paper

Every common working citizen in our nation has a set routine they go through every day, Monday through Friday. Usually in involves getting up around 5:00-8:00 a.m. every morning, fighting the same traffic every morning on the way to work, working for eight hours on basically the same job over and over again, gaingin more and more stress as the day goes on, inturn building our stress levels. Then we clock out, go home and try not to let the misurable day we had at work get us down. We need a balance, or harmony in our lives to keep us going back to work every day and putting up with the life of the city. I beleive we need a down time, or just a time to relax and think. We have places in our communities such as museums, cinemas, health clubs, libraries, etc. to help us achieve that balance. Unfortunately, these places are themselves in and amung the big buildings and busy city. We need a place for us to be able to just step out of character, so to speak, and look at where our life is going. I believe the places that provide us with the essential balance in our lives is city parks.

Ever since the Industrial Revolution, our cities have become a huge collection of large buildings, even bigger factories, and of course the millions of people packed into these factories and buildings. Large American cities have just become an enormous disguisting ball of stress, metal and concrete. Our cities needed parks for, if nothing else, just simply scenery diversity and urban beauty. The parks break up the buildings and provide the city with a healthy, balanced, and cultivated look. Beyond the purpose of landscaping art, city parks controdict our hecktic work lives with a peaceful, beatutiful, and natural appeal.

City parks are also an example of a compromising relationship between urbanism and nature. Since the beginning of European settlements here in America, its citizens have had an agrarian orientation. This agrarian mind set led americans to believe that their task was to develop a way of life in harmony with nature. These american agrarian believed that a life lived close to nature was a wholesome life, but he insisted that the nature we lived with be well mannered and civilized. The agrarian’s love of nature was not in a wilderness forest or nature in the raw, it was in a man-controlled nature. In fact, the wilderness was even consisted a moral and physical wasteland. I believe this, in some sense, still holds true for many americans. We want our presents felt in any situation, especially if it shows power over something, such as nature.

This middle state between the primitive and the urban was used as many 19th. century author’s utopia. Such utopists writers such as Daniel Bond, Leo Marx, and Albert Merrill’s described their utopia as a landscaped, garden-like America. They wrote about lusous pastoral landscapes, beautiful farms, and even two hundred foot wide roads with fountains and gardens in the middle. This idea of a cultivated nature was the popular idea of a modern utopia. On the other hand authors such as Thoreau, Emerson , and William Wordsworth loved the natural wilderness. It was an escape from the menacing cruelty and greed found in the city. I believe the modern day inner city park’s purpose is somewhere between thses two view points.

I beleve city parks provide citizens with a feeling of escape and seclusion. In many of our city parks, you can find a place to sit down and look around you, seeing no sign of tall buildings or busy streets. Also, many parks are designed with a view of the city, over looking from a hill or just a view down a city street. Both views give us a sense of escape, either by totally removing the city or by letting us step back and take a good look at our home towns. I also see the cultivated side of our city parks. Sure, our parks are designed to look like a picturesque natural setting, but the key word is designed. Let’s face it, they are basically large gardens. Many citizens don’t want true nature, for reasons discussed earlier. The wilderness is too far away, its full of annoying bugs, deadly animals, it’s unpredictable, and worst of all, uncontrolled. Our natural fear of the unknown kicks in and we become scared of the dark and yearn for the comfort of our well lit and half paved city park.

This strong critque of city parks stems from my extreme love of the wilderness. I wish our early European-American forfathers had more of a love and respect for nature, much like the Native American ’s poetical love for the land. Native Americans saw nature as more of a life provider instead of the exploitive and controlled view that the Europeans had. But I am a strong supporter of our city parks for reasons already discussed. I believe they are a crucial part of our everyday lives. Even if you are just driving through the parks on your way home, you still get a chance to relax alittle, drive a bit slower and look at all of the people who are out enjoying all of the parks assets.

Throughout my life I have been fortunate enough to be able to travel quite frequently. My father is an avid traveler, which makes it easy for me to just tag along. I’ve beenall over the globe and to many of our cities in the U.S., such larger cities as Boston, New York, San Diego, San Fransisco, Los Angeles, Denver, Detroit, Seatle, Washington D.C., Atlanta, New Orleans, Dallas, Houston, etc. I’ve be