Put A Squirrel On It

Decorating the city

My great, great-grandfather was an ironworker from Hungary. In the late 1800’s he moved to New York City and worked in a metal foundry in midtown Manhattan (back when such things existed in Manhattan). At some point, he either bought out or inherited the workshop which became Grand Central Iron Works, making grates, railings, manhole covers, and other metal goods. A relative of mine did some digging to see if they could find records of this shop, and ended up finding the blog of a man who obsessively catalogs the various manhole covers in NYC, including ones made by Grand Central Iron Works.

Stars, little geometric patterns, swirls, and natural motifs abound. None of these elevate to fine design, but, I was tickled that any attempt at decoration was made for something so un-glamorous. My great-grandfather was a skilled artisan. Several pieces of his ironwork have been passed down through the family including a sinuous lamp with wrought iron leaves and rose petals. It’s not hard to imagine that workers would apply their artistry to their quotidian commissions.

I was reminded of the manhole covers because I recently noticed this small iron squirrel sitting on a weather vane in my local playground.

I’ve lived next to this playground for years and pass it almost every day but I’d never noticed this. If you keep your eyes open around NYC parks you’ll see a menagerie of iron critters.

Parks have a lot of good metalwork such as benches, gates, and lamps. The New York City Parks Department actually employs its own blacksmiths… and they’re hiring! 120k a year is a pretty dam good salary too.

Larry Hagberg, a Queens native, was a Parks Dept’s blacksmith for years. Larry worked out of the department metal shop in Central Park repairing tools, fixing swings, making basketball hoops, and mending fences. While nothing he did was meant to be explicitly decorative, similar to the anonymous manhole crafters he added artistic touches because he wanted to. In an interview from 2014 he talked about a fence he was repairing for a Midtown park. “It's a nice street, so I figured I'd make something like this, so when you look at the fence it doesn't look like a bunch of iron bars.” Larry ended up forging the bars into carefully wound curls. You can see him holding one in the below picture. I’m sure this was a lot of work to make.

Decorating the city is no one’s job. We expect a certain amount of beauty from architects but their scope is limited to buildings that make up only a portion of the cityscape. Benches, fences, sidewalks, bus shelters, and other bits add up to the complete picture. Making all this stuff is generally the domain of city agencies since streets and parks are public property. For example, the New York City Department of Transportation is responsible for most of the city’s benches. Benches may have nothing to do with transportation, but since the DOT has jurisdiction over roads and sidewalks it ends up being the primary installer and maintainer of “street furniture.” It even creates most of the city’s pedestrian plazas. Making all this stuff look nice is probably last on any Mayor’s to-do list. And yet, the overwhelmed bureaucracies that run most cities somehow manage to produce beautiful things. Partially this is the initiative of individual employees like Larry, but sometimes it’s built into the process.

As you may have gathered, Parks departments are a great example of this. As a city agency devoted to well-being and leisure, they probably have more leeway to make nice things. The iron animals I suddenly noticed were probably the result of Henry Stern, NYC’s Parks Commissioner during the 80’s and 90’s. Stern was an eccentric. He once held a funeral for a dead tree in an attempt to get tree vandalism declared a felony, “arborcide” he called it. Stern was also obsessed with animals, sometimes leading group tours to look at gargoyles, statues, and creatures hidden in the city’s architecture. At some point, he issued a department-wide rule. New playgrounds had to include animals. Sometimes this was pawprints in the concrete, sometimes it was a $20,000 bronze coyote. Most often, it was concrete and fiberglass animal statues meant to be played on.

Hundreds of these animals were put into playgrounds during the 90’s, and millions of kids have played on them. Curbed wrote an entertaining account of their (sometimes ridiculous) history. Many are aging out of usefulness, and the Parks Dept has started to move them to a“Home for retired playground animals” in Queens. One anteater remains wandering around the playground of my local public school, still in service.

Believe it or not, beautification and decoration used to be one of the driving forces in progressive planning. The City Beautiful movement that flourished in the late 1800’s and early twentieth is a prime example. Frederik Law Olmsted, the landscape architect who designed park systems in New York and Boston, and inspired similar systems around the world, is probably the movement’s founding theorist along with the architect Daniel Burnham. To Olmsted, parks were “lungs” in the congested and often unhealthy city, a positive force for health that also created civic spirit and improved social harmony. The writer William H. Wilson described the movement’s core ideal as “the ability of uplifted, enlightened citizens to work through their private destinies harmoniously amidst scenes of surpassing public beauty.” It can be easy to lose sight of the radicalness of many of these ideas, that nature could (or should) exist inside the city, that parks should be public as opposed to the private gardens of Europe, and that particular focus should be paid to the qualities of buildings that many citizens use — train stations, courts, libraries, etc. City Beautiful reformers pushed cities to bury their powerlines, make concessions for public art, upgrade benches and drinking fountains, and invest in large and richly decorated libraries, courthouses, and civic centers.

Even at the time, many thought beautification was a luxurious expense considering things like poverty, sanitation, and the millions of other issues facing cities at the turn of the century. At the very first American urban planning conference held in 1909, housing reformer Benjamin March decried the focus of planners and architects on parks and grand civic buildings: “The poor can only occasionally afford to escape their squalid, confining surroundings to view the architectural perfection and the aesthetic delights of remote improvements.” A growing number of specialists in urban engineering, housing, and economics thought it was ridiculous that something as subjective as beauty should be the driving force behind planning when measurable and tangible factors could inform a plan. Marxist writers criticized beautification as a tool of capitalism, a way to make spaces safer and more attractive to consumption, and more easily controlled by elites.

There is truth in all these critiques. $20,000 on a bronze coyote in a park is a waste of city money. Any bench is better than a beautiful bench. And yet, in many ways, the movement was a success, partially because the grand plans of Olmstead and company for parks and squares were built to varying degrees (and I would say, stood the test of time quite well), but mainly because the idea that the city should be beautiful ended up being popular with people and infecting many average citizens in a way ideas about zoning and economic policy never will. While the movement’s grandest examples were the work of trained professionals, the avenues for citizen involvement were many— block associations, beautification societies, and park foundations can all trace their roots back to City Beautiful.

Beauty is subjective but that doesn’t make it elite. All humans have what Herbert Gans calls “aesthetic urges,” and desire beautiful surroundings even if the definition is personal. In some ways, conversations about what a beautiful city is are one of the more accessible ways planners can engage with the public. Recently, in an attempt to revise the labyrinth of environmental impact reviews that happen before a project can receive planning permission, a municipal panel proposed cutting out an analysis of a project’s impact on neighborhood character as part of the process. The irony is that if you actually read most of the public comments on an environmental review half of what people complain about is neighborhood character. The project is ugly! I don’t like the bench they used! It’s out of sync with how I want my neighborhood to look! I think planners have a tendency to dismiss these types of comments as people not engaging with the “true” nature of a project — the number of housing units it creates, its economic impact, etc. But the truth is most people won’t live or work in the new project…they’ll look at it. (For the planners reading this, to be clear, I firmly agree that neighborhood character analysis belongs outside the scope of EIS)

I’m inspired by people like Larry Hagberg and Henry Stern who used their positions to add a little bit of beauty where they could. I’m worried that when they finally retire my local playground anteater to Queens nothing will replace it, not just because our Mayor is cutting the Parks department budget for dubious reasons, but because we don’t think we need things like this. To say that aesthetics should be the driving force behind our plans is wrong, but the City Beautiful movement was reaching for something that I think is still worth reaching for, what Wilson describes as an ideal of “dignified, cooperative citizens of whatever station or calling moving through scenes suffused with beauty… a glorious ideal, incapable of realization but eternally beckoning.”