What I find particularly galling is the (selectively published)
effusive praise for the final result, as though every rational person would
of COURSE agree that, see, despite all your bitching and fears, it turned out
to be GORGEOUS. Personally, and I hope this is a view widely held, ANI has
not only damaged, if not destroyed, the capacity of the park to serve as a
"nature" place, but also its purely aesthetic qualities.
I daresay the goal of landscape architects such as Olmstead was to create the
wondrous illusion of a pastoral setting in an urban environment, as a respite
from the unrelieved visual jumble of any heavily populated area (no matter
how charming the town). I always marveled at how wonderfully well this
objective had been realized in Audubon; the golf course was never "in your
face." My husband and I constantly remarked on how extraordinary it was that
the golf course and golfing activity was so unobtrusive; you had such
wonderful unobscured vistas of what appeared to be virtually pristine
"countryside." I thought, God, what a miracle to have the best of both
worlds - what a tour de force.
Now, on the contrary, we find the thing to be hideous. Despite the crowing
flacks with their benighted sense of what's attractive, to real nature
lovers, the effect is completely unnatural and unsettling. The beautiful
pastoral vistas have now become a surreal phony landscape - the neon green
pimply terrain is NOT our local terrain, and looks grotesquely out of place
and unnatural. Not only THAT, but the golfing activity has become infinitely
more visible; now to anyone walking, it has become a vaguely threatening
busy-busy presence. You have the sense of all this activity, balls flying,
carts racing around - much more a feeling of things potentially coming at
you. The whole sense of serenity and the former miraculous low-key
juxtaposition of the golfing activity with the other park activities is gone.
I just finished a book put out by the Yale Press called Redesigning the
American Lawn, advocating changing the predominant American
lawn/right-of-way/park/golf-course style from a so-called monoculture,
heavily herbicided & pesticided "Industrial Lawn" to a more environmentally
sensitive "Freedom Lawn," consisting of diverse plant species, still mowed to
look like grass, (if grass is what seems to make Americans so happy -the
ideal of course, for most green spaces, would be larger native plants which
are ever more endangered and much better hosts to the "creatures.") I've
thought ruefully, so many times since this debacle, how sad & ironic that the
ANI, which should theoretically be at the forefront of serious environmental
concern and change, has basically converted all those acres from what
essentially WAS a freedom lawn to a horrible industrial lawn.
In closing, I just want to reiterate how much I resent the papers only
printing the views of those who find it so "beautiful," as though they speak
for everyone, when to any REAL nature lover, the park is now infinitely less
attractive, if not an out-and-out eysore, and I mean from a purely aesthetic
sense. I guess all any of us can do is go around like the Ancient Mariner,
grabbing people by the arm and trying to convert them to a more enlightened
view!
Sincerely and futilely,
Chris Hightower
New Orleans
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