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      Finding Fellow-Feeling in the City

      On February 25, 1870, Frederick Law Olmsted addressed the American Social Science Association at Boston’s Lowell Institute. As a result of his leadership in the design, construction, and ongoing operation of New York City’s Central Park during the late 1850s and throughout the 1860s, Olmsted had become one of the nation’s most vocal interpreters of urban life. Although he would eventually try to persuade his Bostonian listeners of the civic value of building their own version of Central Park, he began his speech by telling them what they, no doubt, already knew—that the processes of urbanization that had radically reshaped their city would continue to transform the nation’s landscape. Unlike many of his fellow urbanists, Olmsted was only mildly troubled by the “amount of disease and misery and of vice and crime” to be found in cities, assured that “modern Science” would quickly fix these problems. He expressed much more concern for the city’s corrosive effects on the social interactions among its inhabitants. In what may be one of the earliest and most genteel descriptions of road rage, Olmsted explained that when he and those gathered to hear him walked “through the denser part of a town, to merely avoid collision with those we meet and pass upon the sidewalks, we have constantly to watch, to foresee, and to guard against their movements.” Such navigational wariness demanded of urban pedestrians a careful “consideration of [others’] intentions, a calculation of their strength and weakness, which is not so much for their benefit as our own.” On the city’s streets and sidewalks, Olmsted fretted, “our minds are thus brought into close dealings with other minds without any friendly flowing toward them, but rather a drawing from them.” The city’s built environment encouraged those who moved through it to regard each other “in a hard if not always hardening way.” Olmsted despairingly informed those gathered at the Lowell Institute that the mentally and emotionally “restraining and confining conditions” of the city he had just described compelled city dwellers like themselves to “look closely upon others without sympathy.”¹

      Olmsted was simply telling his audience what many had already been saying, and would continue to say, about urban life—that the city dramatically changes the way individuals interact with and feel toward one another. In expressing their deep concerns about the ability of city dwellers to connect with one another in emotionally and socially satisfying ways, Olmsted contributed to an increasingly robust antiurbanist discourse that would pervade American culture for years to come. Antiurbanism in the United States has always had at its core the accusation that city life

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