Report on the New York Botanical Garden

by Olmsted Brothers

On further study, however, two considerations have led us to believe that this is not the best place for such a thing. One is that a center for meetings and exhibitions, both indoor and outdoor, other things being approximately equal, ought to be more conveniently and quickly accessible from rapid transit stations than is the neighborhood of the Lorillard Mansion, and also should have space in its vicinity for small special exhibition gardens and preferably also for special exhibitions under glass, which could be introduced near the Lorillard Mansion only by sacrifice of existing and potential values of another sort of great importance to the Botanical Garden.

The most notable natural feature of the Botanical Garden, perhaps as a matter of botany and certainly as a matter of landscape, is the gorge of the Bronx River with its wild growth of hemlocks and associated plants, its picturesque precipitous slopes and ledges, its sense of remoteness and seclusion from the city and most of the works of man. The Lorillard Mansion and its appendages conspicuously intrude upon this landscape unit in a manner contradictory to its essential character. From the point of view of botanical consistency no less than landscape value these contradictory elements ought to be removed and the entire landscape unit of the gorge, on both sides of the river, gradually restored as nearly to the conditions characteristic of such a gorge in a state of nature as is consistent with making it accessible to and enjoyable by large numbers of people. No artificial structures except such as are necessary to that end should be maintained here and these should be made as inconspicuous as is consistent with efficiency in operation and maintenance. The precise limits of this gorge unit we are not prepared to define positively as yet; but plainly they should include the site of the Mansion itself, the slopes to the north of it (where the small stone stable occurs) up to the height of land on the east, and in the region further south at least far enough eastward from the river to include the whole of the narrow ridge that lies between the river and the Park Department greenhouses.

We believe this consideration alone precludes the rebuilding of any garden house or other such structure on the site of the Lorillard Mansion, whether the matter is looked at from the point of view of a Botanical Garden or that of a public park.

The land which lies to the south of a line drawn through the existing foot-bridge across the gorge and to the east of the service road that hugs the west side of the greenhouse is not quite so intimately associated with the gorge; and, if the natural forest border on the low intervening ridge were restored and widened and made more dense, the outlying area beyond the limits above defined might perhaps have a landscape character quite dissimilar to that of the gorge without impairing the perfection of the latter. But to introduce even in this area a highly elaborate and sophisticated formal development with a garden house of considerable size, would bring two contrasting kinds of things in such close juxtaposition as to make the plan questionably wise.

The second consideration, closely related to the point just made, is that we have found no place on the whole Botanical Garden lands nearly as well adapted as this swale (where the greenhouses are) for the development of such a naturalistic Landscape Garden as we have attempted to describe above; for the development of a landscape characterized by a long stretch of beautifully modelled lawn in association with free-growing trees, flowering shrubs and herbaceous flowering plants; or indeed for the development of an equally long, restful, completely unified and self-contained view of any sort. These also are elements of which there should be at least one admirable example within the Botanical Garden.

Therefore we have sought for other possible sites for a first-rate formal garden in conjunction with a building for exhibitions, meetings and social activities and with other features desirable to associate with such a center. We believe that these things can be provided for in another locality, which upon the whole would be more advantageous for such purposes, and we will discuss it in Part V. For this reason we do not hesitate to recommend the assignment of the Lorillard Mansion area and the area embracing the Park Department greenhouses and the swale south of them nearly to the picnic grove for the purposes of the Landscape Garden above outlined.

PART IV
AUTOMOBILE THROUGH-TRAFFIC

The successive steps in the formation of routes of automobile travel within and through and near Bronx Park, largely controlled as they have been by considerations entirely independent of the Botanical Garden, and the interjection of the Botanical Garden into the area traversed by or affected by these routes, have resulted in a situation quite unprecedented, so far as we know, in any of the important botanical gardens of the world.

Many of these botanical gardens are substantially self-contained, free from intersecting through-routes of vehicular travel, and subject to design and management for botanical garden purposes alone. Most of them, like Kew, have no roads for public vehicular travel within them at all. The Arnold Arboretum, more nearly comparable in size with the New York Botanical Garden than is Kew, but because of its confinement to woody plants presenting less administrative difficulties in controlling public abuse of its collections than is the case where more strictly garden-like elements are involved, has roads open to the public in the daytime, but it is completely closed at night and up to the present time the roads have not been open to automobiles.

In an area the size of the New York Botanical Garden, we believe that automobile roads for circulation within the area are necessary and desirable, although for the public benefit to be derived from the Botanical Garden as such it is extremely desirable, as heretofore indicated, that every possible care should be exercised to minimize the danger and annoyance of frequent crossings at grade of these roads and the main routes of circulation for people on foot.