I wanted to make the most of the dying light. It was mid-March and the first warm day of the year, but the leafy foliage had not yet arrived—a strategic disadvantage. I entered the park, crossed into the more wooded section, and scaled the derelict staircase that leads to what official maps label “Sullivan Hill,” though no one calls it that. Despite the open sight lines, I bet on the sunshine to draw the more adventurous—reckless, I guess—like myself.
On the hill, I meandered around the trails, antennae up. I passed a circle of men talking and smoking weed. Were they here for the same thing? Probably. Almost everyone up here is. A few stood alone against trees, flicking lighters or phone screens. As I brushed past, they looked up with indifference. Further along, a woman walked a small terrier. She glanced up, and her eyes widened. I smiled at her, trying to assure her that, in this forest of men, she was safe, but it didn’t comfort. She scooped up the dog and got out.
After a while, I stationed myself against the railing that blocks the top of the stairs. The bare branches allowed me to see the runners and cyclists on the East Drive below. I began to doubt whether the day would see any action—a funny word for what, in my experience, is mostly waiting. Still, in a city with a premium on movement, curious things happen to those who stand still, and, sure enough, someone soon scrambled up the dusty ridge, not bothering to use the stairs. I watched him as he brushed the dirt from his gray sweatpants. He was freeballing.
I recognized him. We’d played before, I think.
He walked over, and I said hi. Then we settled into silence, listening to the sounds of the park—the cries of peacocks from the zoo, which sound eerily like children yelling hellllp, hellllp; the relaxed but frequent gibber of bird chatter; the dry rustle of creatures bounding from bush to branch. After a while, he began rubbing the front of his sweatpants.
I watched him. He looked over at me. “You want to fuck around?”
Ways of Searching
Since 2012, I’ve lived at the edge of Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, in one apartment or another, and when the time and temp and temper suit me, I walk there to cruise for sex. While the sun still shines and when I need it, the park is there, full of sheltering trees and men searching, like me, for impersonal intimacy with someone they only just met or barely know. The encounters are fleeting, as are some of the relationships. Others endure for years with men I see semi-regularly but never at the depth of companion or lover. We’re closer to co-conspirators. Some of their names I know, even some of their professions—marketing consultants, visual artists, construction workers. But most I know nothing about, beyond our brief time together in the park.
In a city with a premium on movement, curious things happen to those who stand still.
Public sex happens all over this city. By “public,” I don’t just mean spaces owned by the state. I mean “socially public,” places where we make contact with those outside our homes, whether or not we pay to enter. I’ve had sex in locker rooms, saunas, steam rooms, train cars, train station bathrooms, mall bathrooms, dressing rooms, gay bars, libraries, adult video stores, porn theaters, and, if memory serves, at least one construction site. Some places announce themselves as queer: The Eagle, Fire Island. Other, de facto hetero spaces can be made queer: the steam room of a Y, the bathroom at Yankee Stadium. Gay historian George Chauncey goes so far as to claim that “there is no queer space; there are only spaces used by queers or put to queer use.” All queer space is made, and by different methods, but some court more surprise, more danger than others.
The word cruising has come to describe queer sex between the previously unacquainted in every place I listed—almost anywhere outside the bedroom, really. But I wouldn’t call getting fucked in the bathroom stall of The Eagle “cruising,” not really. I’d call it “fun.” To me, cruising is most useful when it describes a sexual pursuit that perverts the dominant or commonplace use of a space for queer connection. Within the hostility of the default world, it carves out a space within a space, a temporary channel through which one can find others.
Today, this ability is visualizable as never before with Sniffies, a geolocation-based online platform “for the curious” looking to meet for sex. Unlike Grindr, which discloses someone’s proximity but not in which direction, Sniffies maps individual profiles within a certain radius onto the city grid in real time, and it also crowdsources information and safety tips on active cruising locations. (Basically, it’s Yelp for fucking.) Both Grindr and Sniffies offer perfectly suitable free versions of their apps for anyone with a smartphone, and, at the same time, access to medication that prevents or treats STIs has never been wider (though it’s still not available or affordable for all). In short, it has never been easier, safer, and more time-efficient to fuck a stranger. As Leo Herrera points out in his excellent handbook (analog) Cruising, “We are in a sexual revolution”—to which he deviously adds, “act accordingly.”
You might think that all of these technologies would render “analog” cruising obsolete. In fact, in 2019, I endured a lecture by a prominent queer academic who suggested just that. Using photographs from Alvin Baltrop, the academic summoned the rich world of 1970s cruising along Manhattan’s dilapidated Hudson River piers. This, he emphasized, should inspire our model for a future ethics. Then, in a nonsensical turn, he blamed Grindr for the fact that “all of those worlds are gone . . . and completely emptied of all of their counter-capitalist meaning,” as he put it—even though, twenty-five years before smartphones, the state used the arrival of AIDS to justify its homophobic crackdown on public sex cultures in the name of “safety.” (The same rhetoric has never proven as salient for heterosexuals.) By the end, the academic admitted to never having used Grindr at all. “Who needs the ethnography,” he concluded.
Strangely, the assumption that cruising is dead runs freely among our elders, many of whom, I suspect, conflate their own decline in cruising with a decline in the culture at large. Among academics this assumption is a virtual affliction. The claim that cruising is a bygone pursuit could only be made by someone who studies it exclusively as an artifact of history or literature—as it so often and sadly is—and not as a living practice.
True, the West Side piers are gone, replaced by family-friendly driving ranges and billionaire-financed “parks,” but cruising simply adapted, as it did after the city shuttered the bathhouses and porno theaters, as it has always done. With or without an app, cruising is, I assure you, thriving and as horny as ever. What I think the academic may have been getting at, and which I do share concern about, is that by using apps for sex we become subs to the algorithm. If it has never been easier to cruise, it has also never been easier, while cruising, to filter out whole demographics. (How are we so certain of what we don’t want, I wonder?) And if we don’t exclude whole categories consciously, we might do it unconsciously. In all cases, part of this is done for us on the backend, a process few users can really claim to understand. All before we meet anyone in person.
As cruising grounds, public parks are particular in that you never know who you’ll find. They neither claim to be queer nor demand the exchange of money to use them, a quality they share with, say, mall bathrooms. They also force an encounter with what we’ve brainlessly labeled “nature.” The public park, then, presents a potential opportunity to play with what we deem “natural” for public and for private, to not only identify privately as gay but to act publicly on our desires—and among consenting adults, to state it explicitly. But for all the cruising lit published in the past decades, some of it excellent—Samuel R. Delany’s 1999 elegy for Midtown’s porn theaters remains the lodestar—very few focus on parks, with the exception of Mark McCann’s recent Park Cruising: What Happens When We Wander Off the Path. While McCann’s book presents a number of interesting ideas around consent, safety, and legal retribution in the context of Canada’s city parks, there’s much more to explore about how cruising changes an urban green space.
I sometimes hear cruising defined as “seeing,” as “a way of looking,” but I find this misleading. A prolonged glance is only the first step in a complex process of what I would more accurately call “searching.” The look, the seeing, the being seen—they’re simply techniques in a wider art of searching.
For what, though?
Desire Lines
Irish poet Thomas Moore didn’t have to search beyond his native Ireland to find the Kashmir region of South Asia. His imagination would serve as research enough. “Who has not heard of the Vale of Cashmere, / With its roses the brightest that earth ever gave,” he wrote in 1812, part of a book-length “orientalist romance” he stitched from hearsay without ever setting foot there.
Around here, “The Vale of Cashmere” refers to a hidden grove where, some seventeen thousand years ago, the melting of the Laurentide ice sheet formed a natural depression in the ground—a “glacial kettle”—at what would become, in 1865, the northeast corner of Prospect Park. Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, the park’s storied designers, had envisioned this hollow as a children’s garden with a pool for toy boats, so hidden that “no visitor will enter it except by special intention.”
In the 1890s, a redesign scrapped the playground and turned the pool into a beaux arts fountain flush with flowering trees. Olmsted and Vaux fought the change, which clashed with their original aesthetic. The brilliance of an Olmsted and Vaux creation is its near-total artificiality without ever seeming so, no less of an idealization of nature than Moore’s poem of Kashmir but one with grand hopes of integration with, not separation from, the budding world. The new name was picked from Moore’s verse by Grace Chapin, the wife of Brooklyn’s then-mayor, who must have sought to invoke the exotic, even the opulent.
By the 1970s, the Vale of Cashmere, like much of the park and the city beyond it, had fallen into disrepair—its pond dried, its flowerbed overgrown, its stone balustrade broken. In this same period, the Vale gained a reputation as a cruising ground, likely invited by the deterioration, if not the exotic name. Cruising, “an illicit appropriative occupation of the city’s derelict spaces,” as scholar Fiona Anderson defines it, “was itself a means of preserving them as noncommercial spaces and places for queer association.” Cruising has this unique ability: to see the social good in urban ground long after the city disinvests in it, deems it ugly or unsafe, and to extend that ground’s power to connect people, often from widely different backgrounds, without turning it into a machine for profit. But I’d expand Anderson’s definition to the present tense and include new development, too, the polished and video-surveilled corners of the city—the mall bathrooms of Hudson Yards, the stairwells of the Time Warner Center—not just ruins.
Unfortunately, the Vale’s reputation also drew those who wanted to harm or criminalize gay men. It’s difficult to come by exact statistics, in part because when the mostly black, mostly discreet cruisers were brutalized in the 1970s and 1980s, they rarely reported it through official channels. But in 1978, New York magazine ran a cover story about the Vale’s sister site, the Ramble in Central Park, where, at night, gay men had been assaulted by young white teenagers and off-duty cops. Instead of targeting the men sporting baseball bats, police tended to address the situation, if at all, by arresting gay men or issuing them citations for lewd behavior or “sodomy” (then a crime in a number of states). In turn, gay activists fought for less predatory policing, claiming rightly that cruisers were not a danger to non-cruisers and even made painstaking efforts to conceal themselves. (Those who conflated the occasional park flasher or rapist with “cruisers” gave weak evidence that they were one and the same.) The frequency of queer bashings in the park dropped, more or less, along with violent crime in general, through the 1990s. And while arrests are still made, they’re far less frequent than they used to be. The days of surveillance sting operations and plainclothes patrollers seem to have passed, at least for now.
Sex still happens in the Vale, I hear, but mostly at night. This comes to me secondhand, though, since I’m not much into darkness. I like to see who’s there. During the day, the Vale provides a discreet place for many men, not all of whom identify as “gay,” to meet in the shade and talk. This continues a long tradition of men meeting each other in city parks not just for sex but companionship. In his history of twentieth-century gay New York, Chauncey identifies one park cruiser who, in an interview, described feeling “an electrifying realization . . . and a reassuring one, for it persuaded him that he had discovered and become part of a vast secret world, with its own territories and codes, whose existence would ensure he never felt isolated again.” Like the Ramble, the Vale also serves as a premier bird-watching destination, so the “special intention” with which visitors enter isn’t always queer. I’ve watched one man light another’s joint while, six feet away, an avid birder, his back to the flirtation, steadied a zoom lens on a tripod. Something about that left me euphoric. Everyone was getting what they wanted. Everyone, including me, looking for rare, colorful birds.
But most of the cruising in the park has moved elsewhere, pushed by a “restoration” campaign that began in 2017. I’ve witnessed this migration personally. For years, a downed oak lay across the top of nearby Redoubt Hill, just across from the Rose Garden. With my back against the trunk, the jays squawking in the branch overhead, it was a perfect place to wait, smoke a cigarette, and watch for anyone who jogged up the hill. It blocked a space on the other side enclosed by thick bushes, so neatly demarcated that it felt like a wooded room, albeit one littered with condoms.
At the height of its use, I passed through here multiple times a week and, inevitably, connected with someone. You could sit on the tree and let someone blow you while you watched for cops. But one leafbare spring, after a lonely winter, I ambled up the hill and stared at the alien landscape before me: the trunk was gone, and nothing looked the same. The Prospect Park Alliance, the organization that oversees the park, had uprooted new growth and cleared out some of the bramble. It all looked bulldozed. I couldn’t even make out the foot paths we’d once scuffed into the dirt. Four years later, they tore open a new entrance directly across from the Vale with the stated intention of widening “accessibility” to eastside communities. But in truth, the entrance opens onto a desolate, truck-heavy stretch of Flatbush, and it doesn’t appear to be any more ADA-compliant. Every time I’ve walked through the Vale since, it’s been deserted.
An even bigger restoration is on the horizon. Granted $40 million in 2021 by the administration of former mayor Bill de Blasio, the park wants to make “the area safer and more accessible” as well as “more functional, comfortable and welcoming”—though none of the published outreach they conducted in the surrounding communities explicitly considered a queer perspective. The preliminary design, which was released and approved last year, will raze the Rose Garden; thin overgrowth to expose the view; throw up a tacky, two-story pavilion overlooking a “picknicking lawn”; install a “children’s nature play area” (as if, elsewhere, nature were unfit for children); and construct public restrooms and water fountains. Noticeably, the proposal indicates the “Children’s Pool” will be restored in order to “bring back historic details while improving the environment,” a way of rebranding the area as family friendly. The design was met with vocal criticism from both landscape architects and queer historians, one of whom called for the PPA to “conduct immediate outreach with [queer] communities.” Another pointed out the long history of “family” rhetoric as a coded way to exclude queers. The plan is slated for completion in 2026.
Olmsted, if he were alive, would surely have picked his beard clean in anger. I, too, hate the proposal. Besides alienating queers, it looks ugly, a waste of rare funds. At the same time, I find the criticism amusing. How could you possibly “conduct immediate outreach” with a community founded on strict discretion? Likewise, attempting to preserve, as landmark, a site that is by nature mobile and transitory feels like institutionalizing a practice whose core tactic is evading institutions. What the critics seem to miss is that cruising has moved to the Midwood.
It’s helpful to think of the cruising grounds of Prospect Park not as fixed, finite spots but as circuitous walks in which the circuits themselves wander. When one path is exposed or destroyed, the circuit adapts, reroutes. Deviation is integral to the act. In fact, unsanctioned park trails formed by the many feet that have deviated from a path are called “desire lines.” In cruising, the deviation from the trail is not always toward a desired point. The line itself is the point, and a stroll gives you an alibi: you’re just passing through, like anyone else. The walk allows you to take in whomever you pass from many angles. Do you really want to stop for him? Do you feel safe stopping for him?
The flexibility of cruising is part of its endurance, not only in Prospect Park but through time. Over the decades, the precise gestures may have shifted, but cruising has always worked through slight violations in public decorum among unacquainted men—staring three seconds too long, walking a little too slowly, standing a little too close—in order to read a reaction. There is no archive of cruising apart from cruising as a practice, one which is learned by doing and, by doing, is taught to the novitiate.
Despite the proposed restoration, I’m not worried, unlike some of my elders, about the future of cruising. Attempts to eradicate it through legislation or policing have, at times, ruined lives, usually those already more vulnerable. It’s why, after an encounter in the woods, we say to each other—sometimes the only words said to each other—“Be safe.” And yet cruising has not disappeared.
All that risk—why? Sometimes I wonder if the risk is why, if, in seeing a path different from the sanctioned, I take it. To drain authority from the authorized, perhaps, to stretch my capacity for intimacy, to have a little fun that harms no one, or to connect to a cultural practice sustained by my predecessors who felt, like me at times, alone.
Romantic Gestures
Cruising is easy to romanticize. Take, for instance, Alex Espinoza’s description in his 2019 book, Cruising: An Intimate History of a Radical Pastime: “Cruising has provided a safe outlet for sexual exploration. It is devoid of the power dynamics that plague heterosexual interactions and exists outside of traditional hierarchies. True cruising allows people to set the terms of their desire and both leave satisfied. It is founded on equality.” I agree that cruising is no more dangerous than hooking up at home, where the curtain of privacy can facilitate violence. But opening yourself up to strangers—to being robbed, stabbed, arrested, or dismissed—is never “safe.” Even more confusing is Espinoza’s insistence that cruising is divorced from “power dynamics” and “founded on equality.” I would argue the opposite: it’s fraught with power dynamics, especially between classes, a quality of interaction that makes it a rare form of intimacy in our highly stratified republic. Class conflict is often quelled not through the equitable distribution of resources but through calcification of the hierarchy.
Within the hostility of the default world, cruising carves out a space within a space, a temporary channel through which one can find others.
Or take Aaron Betsky, who writes in Queer Space: Architecture and Same-Sex Desire that cruising is “centered on middle-class white men,” and yet somehow “wipes out, at least for a moment, class distinctions.” Cruising has never centered on middle-class white men, though the literary accounts of it certainly have. Again, the distinction is crucial. By focusing on long passages from Marcel Proust and John Rechy as well as the architectural design of drawing rooms and bathhouses, it’s Betsky, not the act, that centers middle-class white men. The demographics of every space are different, but most of the men I’ve encountered cruising in Prospect Park are working-class Afro-Caribbean. As for the other claim, only a succession of popper huffs could momentarily obliterate class. To experience some frictionless frot across race and class difference feels to me like the real fantasy, an error of believing your own experience to be everyone else’s.
I agree with Delany that cruising presents an unparalleled opportunity for what he calls “interclass contact,” which works both ways, not just in the favor of middle-class white men feeling culturally enriched. And “contact” need not be reconciliation. It’s hard to measure what exactly is exchanged, but something is. This is, according to urban anthropologist Setha Low, one of the key social goods of public space: “living with difference.” The clientele of most urban, commercial infrastructure—the bars, the baths, the gyms—are self-selecting, which can encourage a kind of sameness, even beyond sexuality. A large, public park that borders a wide range of social worlds is different. In the park, difference isn’t smoothed over or, God forbid, wiped out; it’s heightened.
At times, I feel the tension between worlds—the caution against being fetishized, the fear of being assaulted, the assumptions about attraction, the differences in language, even. And, very often, the bridging of those worlds can offer immense joy. Never is difference absent from my mind, though, especially when I heard from one Trinidadian partner that he feels invisible to most white cruisers. I’m reminded that difference is not a barrier against, but endemic to, our sharing of space and pleasure. Many of us understand this intellectually, but it’s another thing entirely to feel these differences in your body—a tight chest, a racing heart, a buckled knee—as you negotiate without language whether or how to touch someone, to be touched by someone.
I’m called to the woods of Prospect Park again and again because they demand I surrender executive control—some of it, at least—over whom I pursue as well as our overall safety. This distinguishes analog cruising from its other varieties, and it can have profound social consequences, in part by scrambling what we think we know about living queerly. It’s also, I think, closer to reality than the inflated promise of power and safety found in gay bars, on sex apps. Because the bars and apps profit—and rarely pay that profit forward—by forming narrow enclaves that divide us from the wider world in the name of pursuing our own desires comfortably. But getting off comfortably isn’t exactly the end goal, and neither is validating what we already think we know about ourselves.
Personally, I’ve rarely felt more pleasure than when I’m surprised by someone whose intimacies I couldn’t anticipate; when, by exchanging a form of ecstasy in a public park, we share the risk of arrest. In the explicitly gay commercial space, I feel I owe nothing, aside from the bar tab. There, the strings of community are held together by the puppeteers of business, whose spaces reflect identical notions of what it means to be gay. In the park, I’ve learned just how thrilling it can feel to go off-script, to place my life in the hands of someone I’ve just met, to come to know every turn of a wooded ridge as I would a lover’s body—which is to say, to come to know as a lover the park itself.
I don’t care about transgression for its own sake. I worry that queer and trans life has survived the violent campaign against us mostly by either assimilation or quarantine, neither of which feels particularly freeing. Confining gay sex to the realm of the home or else to spaces explicitly advertised as queer effectively erases it from the public eye, which can then choose not to look at a culture that challenges its received ideas about sexuality and gender. Cruising demands that we not just construct a mirror world but kick the whole normative culture off its axis, which is part of why it’s so dangerous to those who want us dead. It forces us to confront, not just through thinking but through the way we act in public space, whether we really know what is true or decent or good. To continue inventing a queer way of life might yet trigger profound transformations in our society. But we need the public infrastructure to do so.
We can create our own spaces of pleasure on our own negotiated terms, against the forces that ghettoize impersonal intimacies into prefab basement parties with outrageous cover prices. What’s more, all of this—the privatization of sexuality, the regulation of what’s natural, the availability of non-commercial green space for gathering—concerns not just queers but everyone.
Happy Hunting Grounds
Sometime in July 2021, I was sitting in my office on my laptop, checking emails. By “my office,” I mean a canvas hammock strung between two perfectly distanced trees in the thick of the Midwood, a spot I frequent almost every day in the summer. It’s fenced in on three sides and difficult to reach from the paths. Occasionally someone passes through, but it’s rare.
Cruising has this unique ability: to see the social good in urban ground long after the city disinvests in it, deems it ugly or unsafe, and to extend that ground’s power to connect people.
This was one of those rare days. From behind, I heard the steady crunch of footsteps, and I turned to see a man awkwardly lifting a leg over the fence. He nodded at me, and I nodded back but turned away, communicating that I wasn’t interested. Still, he came around the hammock and stood in front of me. I kept typing, not looking up and feeling increasingly annoyed that he wasn’t taking the hint. This happens sometimes (though less often than you’d think), and when it does, it feels tedious.
He asked me my name, and I told him, for some reason. He told me his. And then, to my surprise, he launched into a reverie on the park. I thought, at first, that I should call it—pack up and go—but as I listened, I felt drawn against my will.
He began recounting his experience of fucking in the park. (“Sex is best in the bushes.”) He told me about his near run-ins with the cops at night. (“They haven’t got me yet!”) He told me that he was Haitian—the country’s president had just been assassinated the week before—and recounted his experience, after the 2010 earthquake, of cruising in a Port-au-Prince refugee camp. (“It was hard. It was terrible. But there were also guys leaving the tents to go fucking in the bushes.”)
“Here, I’m rich,” he said. He hesitated. “I mean, not really, but everyone in New York is because we have the park.” He looked around. “It’s not like it used to be. But it’s here. You have your home, you have your wife, your girlfriend, your boyfriend, your partner, whatever.” He said the last word with an almost exasperated sweep of his arm. “But no one knows what goes on there. You know each other so well. It gets so lonely in there. That’s why we have the park. We need it. We need to come here.”
He talked—preached, really—for what felt like half an hour. Finally, his sermon came to a close: “You sit here in your hammock, and you enjoy nature, but also we create nature. Someone created this for you.” I thought he was talking about God—maybe he was—but then I remembered that, yes, actually, someone long ago created this for me.
In their initial 1866 letter to the Brooklyn Park commissioners, Olmsted and Vaux described their vision of what would become Prospect Park. The document is curious to a contemporary reader for a number of reasons. For one, the letter defines park—what Olmsted calls a “public pleasure ground”—at considerable length. Apparently, the development and history of the idea would not have been obvious to the park commissioners. In truth, what Olmsted and Vaux were doing, first in the letter and then on a boggy plot of land in Brooklyn, was redefining what a park is and does.
In medieval Europe, the “park” was a royal hunting grounds, where “beasts of the chase were most happy” by means of a “range of well-watered dale-land, broken by open groves and dotted with spreading trees, undulating in surface, but not rugged.” Hunting parties—what they call “gay parties of pleasure”—would gather in the royal tract for sport. In the ensuing centuries, with the ascendancy of the middle class, the arrival of bourgeois democracies, and the industrialization of Europe and North America, the idea of public parks as a space in which the voting class could experience their own pleasures emerged. In providing an ideal space for men to cruise for sex, then, the park retains some trace of its pre-democratic purpose. We hunt and are hunted there.
But what makes a ground pleasurable? Surely it depends on the person. Remarkably, Olmsted and Vaux claim that a park can and should provide a particular pleasure, “common, constant and universal” to all. It’s this: “a sense of enlarged freedom.” The topographical design of the park—its groves of trees, its rolling meadows, its formidable lake—should grant inhabitants “the general impression of undefined limit.” Through landscape design, Olmsted and Vaux would instill in park-goers a feeling of boundlessness. The aim was not to grant an “authentic” or “natural” experience—whatever those might mean in this or any context—but, in fact, quite the opposite. Because whether or not the designers stated it explicitly, they worked under the philosophy that humankind is never apart from nature but cocreator of it. It’s only a small step further to say that, in cocreating space, we decide how to use it.
But the designers ultimately differed in their aims. Vaux wanted art for art’s sake. Olmsted had a more political purpose in mind. Park historian M. M. Graff, in her indelible history of Prospect Park, explains further:
Olmsted was motivated by democratic ideals, claiming that exposure to a beautiful, orderly park where firm discipline was maintained would instill corresponding virtues in the largely uninstructed masses who visited it. His experiment was successful as long as large numbers of park keepers enforced the rules, preventing abuse of the lawns or unthinkable vandalism like picking a flower or breaking a branch. The keepers were so diligent in directing visitors to stay on the paths that they were nicknamed “sparrow cops” on the assumption that they would arrest a sparrow if it dared set foot on the lawn.
Reading the latter description gives me pause. Democracy enforced by authoritarian tactics is hardly an ideal democracy, even on the scale of a nearly six-hundred-acre park.
What’s more, in the 1866 letter, Olmsted and Vaux state that pleasure is not for its own sake. It’s for the social reproduction of labor: “Without recuperation and recreation of force, the power of each individual to labor wisely and honestly is soon lost, and that, without the recuperation of force, the power of each individual to add to the wealth of the community is, as a necessary consequence, also soon lost.” The following year, Marx would publish the first volume of Capital, which describes in rich detail this process and the capitalist system’s need to reproduce itself.
This disturbs me. The park exists for pleasure, it’s true. But pleasure, under our system, is always co-opted for profit. And yet I do believe in the park, that it can foster that real sense of enlarged freedom—spatially, psychically—and that cruising, beyond my or others’ individual encounters, can remind us that the number-crunching, marketing-spackled world, where relationships are based on monetary transactions, isn’t all there is. There are others, vast networks that we can call up and disappear in a moment.
In a way, the work of Olmsted and Vaux is still unfinished. The “common,” the “sense of enlarged freedom” that they once envisioned may not yet be here, but it is still possible.