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invoke decorous contemplation of nature, in the manner of Bryant’s poems. In addition to spectatorship of civilizing scenery, the plan encouraged genteel pastimes such as skating and boating and was particularly attentive to the needs of ladies. The park was to be a sanctuary, a retreat from the city’s competitiveness and congestion akin to the bourgeois-home-asdomestic-refuge, a place to set aside at least temporarily the “habit of mind, cultivated in commercial life, of judging values by the market estimate.” For all this sniping at the marketplace, Olmsted, in particular, stressed that Central Park would “greatly accelerate the occupation of the adjoining land,” pleasing wealthy Fifth Avenue landowners, and increase tax revenues, a claim calculated to warm the hearts of city officials.

The Greensward Plan was far less welcoming to the working classes. It banned not only their conventional recreations but their republican political culture. Olmsted and Vaux forbade martial displays, civic processions, and public oratory. The Mall was reserved for promenades: silent and apolitical encounters. Nor, for all the emphasis on the virtue of interclass mixing, was there much of it. Transport was neatly segregated: the middle class moved through the park space by carriage and horse, the working class on foot.

Central Park, New York, “a picturesque guide through the whole Park showing all the improvements up to June 1865.” (Map Division. The New York Public Library. Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations)

Olmsted also took patrician anxieties about potential plebeian rambunctiousness to heart. “A large part of the people of New York are ignorant of a park, properly socalled,” he wrote. “They need to be trained to the proper use of it.” Doubting that the park’s deep structure would sufficiently discipline the unruly, Olmsted established regulations that, in marked contrast to the laissez-faire streets of the city, soon blanketed the park terrain with 125 varieties of directive and injunctive signs and posters. He also instituted park police—“keepers”—who would “respectfully aid an offender toward a better understanding of what is due to others, as one gentleman might manage to guide another.”

For the time being, an apparatus to enforce proper canons of behavior was hardly necessary. The nascent park was too far north of the Bowery, and public transport too expensive, for it to attract many laborers apart from those busy constructing it. But the design and regulatory structure reassured the elite that it would in time become a gathering ground for the civilized. The value of surrounding property skyrocketed accordingly: by 1860 assessed values had risen by two-thirds of their 1856 levels.

This complacency was in fact misplaced. Working-class citizens would soon be contesting Greensward notions of proper usage. However, to the degree that Central Park did for the moment remain an upper-class playground, it represented yet another defeat for the larger reform project. Once again a cultural enterprise designed to mitigate the divisiveness of metropolitan life had served only to exacerbate it.

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Feme Decovert

New York in the 1840s and 1850s was an intensely homosocial city. Men clubbed, ate, drank, rioted, whored, paraded, and politicked together, clustered together in boardinghouses and boards of directors, even slept together. Whitman spent much of his time in the company of handsome young workingmen, occasionally bringing them home for the evening, and whether or not he and they engaged in sexual intimacies, other men certainly did.

New York provided many opportunities for same-sex encounters. Vast numbers of men lived outside traditional families in all-male boardinghouses. Casual acquaintances could be struck up in bathhouses near the Broadway hotels, at bohemian bars like Pfaff’s, in theaters, aboard ships, along wharves, while strolling in parks, and in church (in 1846 two men who had met in a house of worship lived together for three months in a boardinghouse, engaging in nightly “carnal intercourse”). Passing