A far green country

Though colonists like Benjamin Franklin and Cadwallader Colden tirelessly strove to bolster British America's cosmopolitan identity, most of the western world still recognized the colonies for their agricultural potential and vast ‘wilderness’. Colonists’ primary importance for the British empire, after all, rested on their ability to produce raw goods far more than their propensity for city building. Inhabitants and outsiders consequently approached the colonies with a diverse – and equally subjective – cache of ideologies, specifically notions of ‘wilderness’, ‘civilization’, ‘nature’ and ‘health’. In classical thought, ‘wilderness’ was the base opposite of ‘civilization’ – according to Englishman Samuel Johnson's seminal Dictionary (1755), wilderness was ‘a tract of solitude and savageness’, while civilization was, quite simply, ‘not wild’. To ‘civilize’, in Johnson's contention, was to ‘reclaim from savageness and brutality; to instruct in the arts of regular life’.Footnote ¹³ For British American colonists, however, the supposed dichotomy between wilderness and savagery blurred by the day. No matter how much colonists asserted their civil cosmopolitanism, they remained surrounded by what they considered ‘savage’ Native Americans and a ‘wild’ backcountry. As historian Richard Bushman recently asserted, ‘a shade of rusticity tinged American life. In the eyes of Europe, the wilderness overhung the most advanced American cities.’ But this was not necessarily a bad thing – it is no coincidence that Benjamin Franklin, perhaps the most urbane and cosmopolitan of all British American colonists, donned a coonskin cap while visiting the French court in the late 1770s. For a growing number of mid-century British American colonists, that very ‘shade of rusticity’ is what might make their cities more healthy and desirable places to live.Footnote ¹⁴

Early modern Britons attempted to place ‘nature’ and ‘health’ within their increasingly muddled notions of wilderness and civilization. As two of the most complicated – yet also connected – concepts in the English mindset, ‘nature’ might benefit as easily as harm one's ‘health’, as human health was considered wholly connected to the natural world in which one's body resided. Europeans believed that travelling to a new climate might have real effects on their bodily and mental health, as in their minds the natural world and climate in a new place could alter the very composition of their bodies. Yet they also believed that, if ‘improved’ through proper methods of construction, order and urbanization, the wild aspects of the natural world might also be utilized for healthful purposes.Footnote ¹⁵

Visitors and residents alike repeatedly displayed such notions, describing the north-eastern seaboard of British North America in terms of its natural wilderness, health and inherent agricultural potential. While travelling through the New York backcountry in the 1750s, for instance, Massachusetts Governor Thomas Pownall could only exclaim, ‘with what an overflowing Joy does the Heart melt, while one views the Banks where rising Farms, new Fields, or flowering Orchards begin to illuminate his Face of Nature; nothing can be more delightful to the Eye, nothing go with more penetrating Sensation to the Heart’.Footnote ¹⁶ Upon touring Pennsylvania, similarly, Englishwoman Susannah Wright expounded upon the colony's natural attractions, remarking that Pennsylvania ‘’Tis certainly the pleasantest Country as can be always Clear Weather & a wholesome air.’ The woods, she continued, were filled with an ‘abundance of sweet shrubs & charming trees with abundance of birds singing’.Footnote ¹⁷ Despite lingering fears of the wilderness, mid-century settlers increasingly viewed America's uncultivated lands such as the Ohio country as brimming with potential: ‘want[ing] nothing but Cultivation to make it a most delightful Country’. By the close of the eighteenth century, one Swiss visitor to the Ohio Country could only assert that the region ‘may. . .be affirmed to be the most healthy, the most pleasant, the most commodious and most fertile spot of earth, known to the European people’. In the minds of most Britons, North America was primarily a bucolic country, offering the possibility of subjective notions like wilderness and health in equal portions. Recognizing this opportunity, colonial leaders attempted to harness the healthy aspects of the natural world while resisting its inherently dangerous features.Footnote ¹⁸

British American cities had long harboured a distinct pastoral identity. Green spaces and features such as trees, orchards, open fields, squares, ornamental flowers, clipped shrubs and suburban mansions remained central concerns for urbanites as they attempted to develop their cities into urban reflections of British American prosperity and order. William Penn, perhaps the most famous of all city builders in North America, developed Philadelphia according to his love of the English country estate more than a desire to equal Europe's metropolises. His original plans for a ‘greene Country Towne’ called for each individual home to boast a sizeable (private) green area, in addition to the city harbouring various other green spaces and wide boulevards. Penn ultimately plotted his ‘Well-Organized and Healthy Town’ to mirror English formal gardens, planning for his city to boast five interconnected squares within a quadripartite grid of streets. Yet Penn did not foresee his city as a hive of pleasure gardens – ever the Quaker pragmatist, Penn contended that his tree-filled ‘squares’ should be devoted to the ‘best recreation’ such as religious assemblies and husbandry rather than the incivility that London's green spaces supposedly encouraged.Footnote ¹⁹ Though New York City's development was not as well planned as Philadelphia's – streets and lots were approved on an ad hoc basis by the Corporation – locals were nevertheless very concerned with retaining a pastoral identity. One New Yorker, for instance, took to his local newspaper to ‘applaud the Corporation for the many new and useful improvements and regulations they have made, and are continually making, whereby the city becomes daily more clean, wholesome, and beautiful’.Footnote ²⁰ Such organizational concerns were based upon health as much as aesthetics and civility, as colonial gentlemen understood their new cities as opportunities to craft healthy, ordered alternatives to the relative crowding, disorder and disease that characterized Old World urban centres.Footnote ²¹

What emerged by the mid-eighteenth century were colonial cities that would have seemed much less congested – and greener – than many of their European counterparts, especially during the summer and spring months. Most of Philadelphia that Penn had previously laid out remained heavily forested and largely undeveloped until after the 1770s when the proprietary lost control of the land. New York City's buildings, meanwhile, remained huddled at the tip of Manhattan Island, punctuated by groves of trees, a fresh-water pond and various pastures, gardens and other green spaces.Footnote ²² Visitors took notice. Upon touring the colonies in 1775, the Scottish gentleman Patrick M'Robert exclaimed that Philadelphia's streets were ‘in many parts agreeably shaded with trees in the summer; under whose shade the inhabitants sit and do business or regale themselves’. The visiting Scot also found that ‘the country round [Philadelphia] is very pleasant and agreeable, finely interspersed with genteel country seats, fields and orchards’. After visiting New York, M'Robert described ‘the woods, country houses, orchards, and fields of Indian corn [surrounding New York City]’ as forming ‘a beautiful prospect’, and, upon entering the heart of New York City, remarked, ‘the situation is extremly pleasant, upon a rising ground from the shore or river on both sides. The city is large, and contains a great many neat buildings.’Footnote ²³ Three years later, a Hessian soldier stationed in New York City could only remark that Americans ‘lived in the lap of the most beneficent Nature before the outbreak of these unhappy disturbances’.Footnote ²⁴ Though visitors and citizens alike noted that British America's most populated cities retained clear physical, topographical and political differences, they also remarked upon at least one over-arching similarity: colonial cities remained considerably enmeshed in their rural surroundings.Footnote ²⁵

The context for British American commercial pleasure gardens

Besides existing in a New World environment often associated with pastoral plenty, the mid-century emergence of commercial pleasure gardens like New York City's Vauxhall and Ranelagh Gardens must be understood within the context of pre-existing urban spaces: specifically nurseries that dispersed seeds, fruits, vegetables and plants to local citizens; private pleasure gardens intended for exclusive leisure and/or self-subsistence; and public commons where urbanites could socialize or, increasingly, get into trouble. Taken together, these three urban spaces reveal colonists’ evolving ideas of how their cities might harness the urban and rural impetuses of British America. These green spaces proved the genesis of the British American commercial pleasure garden.

As private businesses, gardens thrived.Footnote ²⁶ New York City gardener William Pride, for instance, maintained a successful nursery at mid-century from which he distributed a vast variety of seeds and produce across great distances. Situated ‘about a Mile from the City of New-York. . .in the Bowery-Lane’, and ‘containing near 12 acres of land’ (see Figures 3 and 4), Pride's nursery was lauded for its ‘choice Collection of the best Fruit of all Kinds, and. . .a large Nursery of young trees’.Footnote ²⁷ Besides local customers, ship captains bound for the West Indies were especially keen to purchase Pride's valuable stock. Before heading to St Croix in 1762, one captain requested a variety of seeds – ranging from red cabbage to turnips to radish to celery – in addition to ‘Pease, of two or three of the best sort half a Gall. of each’. West Indian plantation owners would have greatly relied on such stock for their subsistence, as practically none of their Old World plants existed in their new surroundings. Local customers also flocked to Pride's nursery. In 1762, one citizen purchased ‘550 Plants and Seeds of Sorts’ for his own private garden, while in 1764, the New York City lawyer, John Tabor Kempe, had Pride inoculate over 600 of his fruit-bearing trees. Though only a small sample of over 100 business transactions that Pride left behind, these instances provide the historian a keen example to glimpse into how urbanites retained real connections to the natural world. Nursery owners like Pride prospered in every major city in America by mid-century.Footnote ²⁸

Figure 3:

J. Montrésor, A Plan of the City of New-York & its Environs. . . (London, 1775), map, retrieved from the Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/item/74692879/ (accessed 31 Dec. 2016).

Figure 4:

Detail from Montrésor, A Plan of the City of New-York & its Environs. . ., map, retrieved from the Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/item/74692879/ (accessed 31 Dec. 2016). Though I am not positive which of these plots was Pride's, records point to one of the above six plots – about a mile from town on Bowery Lane – as belonging to Pride. He died the year this map was created (1766), so his garden would have been featured on it.

Colonists usually cultivated their own private gardens ‘for Use or for Delight’; i.e. for self-subsistence or genteel leisure. Wealthy men who liked to assert a ‘genteel’ identity were especially keen on turning their country houses into self-sufficient ‘kingdoms’ where they held ultimate sway over their surroundings, whether flora, fauna or human. Certain facets of these ‘gentlemen's’ gardens reflected such notions, as they were devoted primarily to producing crops intended for sustenance or medicine and were farmed by unfree or servile labourers. Other plantation gardens, meanwhile, were styled after English country homes’ gardens, with gravel walkways, open landscapes and beautiful tertiaries intended primarily for aesthetic purposes.Footnote ²⁹

Ultimately, such gardens asserted a gentleman's civility and taste, two very important characteristics for a self-conscious elite. Though scholars have often considered urban gardening as almost wholly functional in contrast to more aesthetically determined country gardens, historian Peter Martin recently demonstrated that by the eighteenth century colonial urbanites were crafting their gardens into spaces that would have resembled more picturesque gardens so often associated with plantation gardens (which were, in turn, copies of English country homes). Besides exchanging plants regularly with their compatriots in England, urban and rural dwelling gentlemen were also able to maintain gardens that would have been beautiful to the eye as well as somewhat productive. Thus, while two types of gardens – primarily sustenance-based or pictorial – existed in the mid-century colonies, the two were not necessarily mutually exclusive. Colonial gentlemen, rather, fashioned gardens full of both native and imported plants according to prevailing English notions of open landscaping while also upholding private spaces where their friends would have happily congregated for leisure rather than labour.Footnote ³⁰

Public commons had long served urbanites as green spaces where all could congregate for a diverse set of purposes. Colonial American commons are perhaps just as difficult to define for the modern scholar as they were for colonial contemporaries. One might lump urban greens, fields or squares under the umbrella of the common, but such a definition still would not hold true in every colony. Ultimately, a specific definition of the urban ‘common’ is not as important for this article's purposes as is the idea of the common, which remained firmly tethered to colonists’ attempts at making their cities more communal and green places. Public commons were central in literal and figurative terms: not only were they often bordered by key public institutions like churches, taverns and meetinghouses, but commons were also open to all for a variety of purposes. Depending upon the day and time of year, a visitor to one of these commons might witness a military regiment parading through the green, livestock grazing, a burial (or hanging) taking place, an ad hoc public market, a blistering public speech (or, eventually, an open air sermon) or a group of boys frolicking in sport.Footnote ³¹

As urban populations boomed at mid-century, however, commons increasingly became overcrowded spaces defined (at least in the eyes of leaders) by the impulses of uncivil society. Upon arriving in New York City in 1758, Philadelphian Hannah Callender noted that the city's fields/commons were marked by a ‘Work-house (but it is for lunatics also), and a neat building just finished for a jail’. Seven years earlier, a citizen complained that ‘roystering young men, full of tricks and mischief. . .gambol[ed] in [New York City's] fields’. Philadelphians, meanwhile, complained that their Centre Square commons had become a hive of ‘pleasure, luxury, gaming, and dissipation’. By the second half of the eighteenth century, urbanites realized that they could not look to their commons for an escape from the tumult of the city. These spaces, on the contrary, had become concentrations of such impulses.Footnote ³²

The mass influence of elite cultural trends – specifically wealthy colonists’ desire for a lifestyle that combined the convenience of the city and the perceived leisure of the countryside – were also key stimuli for the emergence of the British American commercial pleasure garden. When Robert Hardie advertised the sale of a ‘commodious Brick House’ in Philadelphia in 1764, he was sure to reference the ‘fine garden to the House, very fit for a Gentleman's Seat, having a fine Prospect of the Country on one Side of the House, and a fine View of the City on the other’.Footnote ³³ By mid-century, however, a booming population who had more expendable funds than ever before necessitated a more diverse leisure sphere in British America's cities. Those masses of urban dwellers who could not afford their own ‘Gentleman's seat’ still craved spaces where they too could have ‘a fine Prospect of the Country. . .and a fine View of the City’. Whether rich or poor, urban colonists demanded public places where they could not only ‘see and be seen’, but also where they might benefit from the ‘greening of the urban landscape’.Footnote ³⁴

London origins, colonial interpretations

As demand for urban leisure spaces exploded at mid-century, nurseries, private gardens and commons no longer satiated many rich and poor urbanites’ urban rural imaginations. Whether intended for business, self-subsistence, leisure or a mixture of all three, commercial and private gardens remained exclusive spaces in the mid-century colonies: not just anyone could visit a gentleman's carefully manicured garden, and nurseries like Pride's were intended only for those with the means to purchase his products. While commons might have eventually evolved into commercial pleasure gardens, furthermore, they had become spaces defined by the lower classes and thus somewhat repugnant to condescending elites. Across the Atlantic Ocean, however, Englishmen had cultivated a different sort of garden over the last hundred years which would satisfy colonists’ sociable tendencies while also maintaining the ‘strengthened. . .balance between urban and plantation gardening’ that colonists had worked hard to realize. Londoners invented this new public leisure space, and they called it the commercial pleasure garden.Footnote ³⁵

Chief among London's commercial pleasure gardens were Vauxhall and Ranelagh. Located on the south bank of the Thames River (see Figure 5), Vauxhall opened its gates in summer 1660. Whether arriving on foot or by a romantic boat ride, Vauxhall offered a diverse set of patrons a staggering array of entertainment and leisure opportunities: orchestras, fireworks, dancing, food, drink, art – all for only one shilling. Crowds in the thousands consisting of prostitutes, apprentices and aristocrats packed into the garden's sprawling acres, surveying rooms painted by the popular London artist William Hogarth, staring up at Roubiliac's statue of Handel, promenading through beautiful grottos, alcoves and squares, and, often, using these same nooks for more carnal purposes. The proprietors of the Ranelagh Garden built off Vauxhall's popularity when they opened their fine venue next to Chelsea Hospital in 1742. Tobias Smollett likened Ranelagh to ‘the enchanted palace of a genie’ in his eighteenth-century novel, Humphry Clinker. ‘Adorned with the most exquisite performance of painting, carving, and gilding, enlightened with a thousand golden lamps’, for Smollett Ranelagh was nothing short of breathtaking. He was not alone. Like Vauxhall, Ranelagh drew a staggering array of ‘People of Fashion’, ranging from ‘the Prince and Princess of Wales, accompanied by several Persons of Distinction’ to Horace Walpole. Yet Ranelagh and Vauxhall evolved into very different spaces by the close of the eighteenth century. Ranelagh seemed to overtake Vauxhall as the most glamorous of the two, boasting an entrance fee of two shillings to Vauxhall's one in an attempt to attract a more genteel crowd. Vauxhall, meanwhile, became more associated with entertainment of the masses and more lewd pursuits. Despite such differences, both commercial pleasure gardens enjoyed considerable success as relatively serene escapes from the dirty, congested ‘monster’ that was London. Depending upon which of the commercial pleasure gardens one chose, he could ‘see and be seen’ among the most current company and fashions, or, just as easily, sneak off into a grotto with a lover. It seemed that everything was available at Vauxhall and Ranelagh, and Londoners could not get enough of it.Footnote ³⁶

Figure 5:

‘Vauxhall Pleasure Garden, London’, detail from ‘A plan of the cities of London and Westminster, and borough of Southwark’, surveyed by J. Rocque and engraved by J. Pine (London, 1746), in J. Howgego (ed.), Printed Maps of London, c. 1533–1850, 2nd edn (Folkestone, 1978), no. 96, used with permission of Motco.

Through a combination of personal and second-hand experience, mid-century colonists were very familiar with the charms of London's pleasure gardens. Although feeling oppressed by ‘the heavy Air of the City’ during his 1754–55 voyage to London, for instance, British American clergyman Edward Winslow ‘was most agreeably surpis'd with the great Elegance of the Place & Company’ at the Vauxhall and Ranelagh Gardens. Writing to his son in 1760, the Annapolis gentleman Charles Carroll also recommended ‘play houses, coffee houses, Renelaghs, Vuxhulls, Routs, Opera. . .must have allotted now & then some hours to these Genteel & necessary Amusements’.Footnote ³⁷ Even as colonists like Winslow and Carroll celebrated the Vauxhall and Ranelagh Gardens, they knew that their local populations simply did not demand commercial pleasure gardens that matched London's in size or scope. Though the itinerant celebrity-preacher George Whitefield's sermons drew crowds in the thousands, it would be hard to match such numbers with the lure of an orchestra or fireworks at a pleasure garden. Nor could purveyors of British American commercial pleasure gardens justify building a 150-foot diameter Rotunda as Ranelagh's owners had in 1742. But they could emulate these spaces as effectively as possible, laying down their own fine gravel paths which wound through an impressive array of squares, grottos, alcoves and vistas, constructing their own buildings intended for food, drink and entertainment, and putting on a string of spectacles. Urban colonists also, importantly, realized that they could use certain distinctive aspects of their surroundings – specifically British America's garden culture, urbanization, specimen exchange networks, demand for leisure spaces and rural identity – to move beyond sheer emulation and craft their own colonial versions of London's commercial pleasure gardens.

New York City's Vauxhall and Ranelagh Gardens

By mid-century, urban swell made stand-alone commercial pleasure gardens more viable as colonists grew disenchanted with certain pitfalls of city life. Though leaders remained devoted to maintaining their cities’ verdant identity and colonial cities generally remained greener and less congested than their Old World counterparts, such population growth had created new sanitation challenges in the colonies’ largest cities. Unbathed bodies slogged through streets muddied by human and animal faeces, animals lay dead in the gutters and tanners and butchers dumped their noisome waste into thoroughfares and rivers. Such developments drove many urban dwellers to romanticize the supposedly ‘healthy’ aspects of the more ‘natural’ countryside in contrast to the enervating effects of their cities.

Residents of the two largest cities in America – New York City and Philadelphia – especially deemed their urban environs as unhealthy after mid-century. As colonists in South Carolina escaped the tropical fevers and suffocating humidity of the backcountry for the zephyrs of Charleston, their northern compatriots often found their cities overwhelming in the summer. Peggy Emlen swore during the summer of 1769 that she might be ‘choaked with the dust’ of Philadelphia if she did not soon escape to the countryside, while the New York City elite Cadwallader Colden somewhat angrily reminded the city's alderman ‘to remove the Nusances’ and drain ‘the stagnating Waters’ from their city's pestilent streets.Footnote ³⁸ Betsy Galloway, finally, was happy to hear that her mother had moved to Philadelphia merchant Robert Morris’ country home in 1778, as she believed ‘that part of the town is more healthy and pleasant than second street’. Genteel Philadelphians and New Yorkers like Emlen, Colden and Galloway increasingly fled their cities to enjoy ‘the happy effects’ of their rural surroundings. Yet the majority of colonists could not afford the monetary and temporal costs of such far-flung, exclusive pursuits, thus necessitating a new sort of urban public space which could satisfy both ordinary and wealthy colonists’ desire for a convenient escape from urban life: this is where commercial pleasure gardens came in.Footnote ³⁹

Although in many ways natural outgrowths of nurseries, private gentlemen's gardens and urban commons/fields, British America's earliest commercial pleasure gardens – especially those in New York City – often emerged from pre-existing commercial, public spaces: specifically urban taverns and, occasionally, mineral spring spas.Footnote ⁴⁰ Ex-English Sergeant Thomas Scurlock, for example, conceived New York City's earliest commercial pleasure garden, ‘Spring Garden’, as a combination garden/tavern in 1740. Like purveyors of the famous Epsom Spa in England, Scurlock hoped to build on the alleged health of mineral waters to attract even more visitors. New York City's most popular commercial pleasure garden (eventually called ‘Vauxhall’ after London's famous venue), moreover, originated as a ‘Mead House’. Though the Philadelphian Hannah Callender found that ‘they have no gardens in or about New York which come up to ours of Philadelphia’ while touring New York City in May 1758, she did enjoy visiting the mead house on the bank of the Hudson River where she found it ‘customary to drink this liquor and eat cakes’.Footnote ⁴¹ It is no surprise that commercial pleasure gardens emanated from popular spaces like spas and taverns. As genteel rural retreats so often associated with health and improvement, an urban mineral spring would be an ideal place to construct a commercial pleasure garden. Urban taverns – the most numerous and popular of all British American urban public spaces – were also natural venues for what might have otherwise been a risky business proposition on its own.Footnote ⁴²

Though other north-eastern cities like Philadelphia and Boston also harboured short-lived commercial pleasure gardens after mid-century which often stemmed from pre-existing taverns, the cities’ religious leaders did everything in their power to stifle the multiplication of such supposedly lewd spaces.Footnote ⁴³ When a group of Philadelphians attempted to create a lottery to raise funds for public baths and pleasure grounds in the city in the 1760s, for instance, local clergy quickly stifled the attempt with a forceful – and effective – letter to their governor. One particularly religious mid-century Bostonian, similarly, considered ‘the prodigious increase in licensed taverns and other Houses licensed to sell spirituous Liquors’ as providing ‘the greatest Reason to fear will be attended with the most unhappy Consequences’.Footnote ⁴⁴ Much of these anxieties were directed toward class relations. Religious detractors in Boston and Philadelphia especially levelled their criticisms of ‘open’ public spaces like commercial pleasure gardens according to notions that such ‘lewd’ spaces would encourage disorder among the ‘lower sorts’. Whether criticizing taverns as spaces where ‘the poorer sort of People’ would congregate and drink while ‘their poor Families are suffering for want of Bread at Home’, un-altered mineral springs as places where ‘Horse-racing, cock-fighting, and boxing-matches, are standing amusements’ or theatres as ‘a Trap to draw in the modest and Innocent to a Love of Theatrical Entertainments’, religious detractors in Boston and Philadelphia made life hard for any businessman who hoped to cultivate such ‘open’ public spaces. Thus, while a smattering of commercial pleasure gardens would ultimately sprout in Philadelphia and Boston, their roots were shallow and easily upturned by various cynics. New York City, meanwhile, embraced such leisure spaces.Footnote ⁴⁵

Such heightened religious opposition to public leisure spaces did not exist in New York City, thus allowing certain enterprising entrepreneurs commercial opportunities that their compatriots in Boston and Philadelphia found harder to enjoy. The colonist William Smith Jr called New York City ‘one of the most social Places on the Continent’ in 1757 while Lewis Hallam Sr – the head of the first professional British theatre company in North America – was happy to act in front of a ‘very crowded assembly’ in New York City in 1754. Hallam's Company hardly found such welcome in Philadelphia. After begging Pennsylvania's governor for permission to act in the Quaker city in 1754, Hallam was only allowed to enter Philadelphia after promising that his limited play run would contain ‘nothing indecent or immoral’ and that he would devote the profits of at least one of his performances to the poor of the city. The travelling actor was never even allowed in Boston.Footnote ⁴⁶ By attaching the earliest commercial pleasure gardens to pre-existing ‘open’ spas and taverns, New York City's businessmen minimized their financial risks while also providing demanding clientele yet another reason to visit their establishment. In quite simple terms, these men built upon an already booming public leisure sector. This is not to say that these proprietors did not face their fair share of difficulties – from financial hardship to seasonal variances to class conflict to revolution, New York City's commercial pleasure gardens would endure several challenges after 1765.

Between 1765 and 1776, New York City harboured the most numerous, highly developed, popular and well-documented commercial pleasure gardens of any north-eastern city: specifically, the ‘Vauxhall’ and ‘Ranelagh’ Gardens. In 1765, noted New York City tavern keeper Samuel Fraunces announced that his Vauxhall commercial pleasure would soon open: ‘Being one of the pleasantest rural Retreats near this City is now opened for the Summer Season. . .[the] New Vaux Hall.’ Fellow tavern keeper John Jones quickly followed suit, opening his own Ranelagh Garden in June 1765 where ‘Ladies and Gentlemen’ could find grand gardens, buildings and other fineries ‘prepared for their Entertainment’. Though relatively short-lived when compared to their London namesakes, Fraunces’ Vauxhall and Owens’ Ranelagh seized upon New York City residents’ rural desires, offering spaces within the confines of the city where colonists could relax in a more ‘natural’ – but still carefully manicured and civilized – setting.Footnote ⁴⁷

With entrance fees between one and three shillings (depending upon the event, place and marketing strategies) and vast grounds which required constant upkeep, New York City's commercial pleasure gardens welcomed colonists from a broad spectrum of urban life. Whether strolling, performing or ploughing, citizens of nearly every class and creed interacted with each other in the vibrant atmosphere of the pleasure garden. And locals were hardly the only patrons – travelling elites, acting troupes and performers also flocked to pleasure gardens as patrons and entertainers alike. Generally barred from enjoying the grounds, furthermore, black slaves and indentured servants laboured to cultivate gardens for free white customers. But purchasing a ticket hardly dissipated well-established notions of hierarchy. As historian Hannah Greig recently demonstrated in the context of London's commercial pleasure gardens, just because a diverse social company entered the same garden did not mean that they intermingled – on the contrary, in Greig's words such spaces ‘expressed and underlined. . .status hierarchies’. With a larger number of ordinary and unfree labourers, a mass base of ordinary colonists with more money than ever, a growing upwardly mobile middle class and a self-conscious elite class, commercial pleasure gardens such as those in New York City would not only have followed – but perhaps even heightened – the London model.Footnote ⁴⁸

Geography proved vital for Ranelagh and Vauxhall's success. Importantly, both commercial pleasure gardens were set on the edge of the city, close enough to be easily accessible but far enough away to retain a somewhat rural character. Ranelagh and Vauxhall were only one quarter of a mile from St Paul's Cathedral and three-quarters of a mile from the bowling green at the southern tip of Manhattan Island. Those urbanites not wealthy enough to purchase or rent a chaise could easily walk to the gardens, while more elite patrons could enjoy a short ride to the gardens. For perspective, a man could attend service at Trinity Church in the morning followed by a drink at the nearby Burns Coffee House (just south of the church by the bowling green) in the afternoon and finish his day with an evening's stroll at Vauxhall or Ranelagh, all with only about a mile of total walking. As the owner of Vauxhall asserted in 1774, the gardens were ‘so contiguous to the city that a moderate walker may, in 15 or 20 minutes, be in any part’ of New York City. ‘No place’, in his estimation, was ‘better calculated for the reception and genteel accommodation of single gentlemen, or gentlemen with their families’ than his commercial pleasure garden.Footnote ⁴⁹

The benefits of Ranelagh's and Vauxhall's location extended beyond distance and accessibility. As demonstrated by Figure 6, the commercial pleasure gardens were situated on raised bluffs, which not only would have made them more accessible to cooling zephyrs, but would have also provided a clear view of the Hudson River. Like Londoners who had easy access to the Thames River from their own Vauxhall commercial pleasure garden, customers of New York City's Vauxhall and Ranelagh commercial pleasure gardens could look out over the North River and enjoy ‘a full prospect of the shipping, as low as the narrows, and a view for many miles up the river; with a very pleasing and extensive prospect of the Jersies, Staten-Island, etc.’. Figure 6 also shows a series of garden-like spaces stretching south from Vauxhall towards Ranelagh, indicating that the commercial pleasure gardens were perhaps visually linked. Ultimately, these gardens were products of their surrounding environment as much as the world within their walls.Footnote ⁵⁰

Figure 6:

‘Detail depicting New York City's Vauxhall and Ranelagh pleasure gardens’, from A Plan of the City and Environs of New York in North America (London, 1776), map, retrieved from the Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/item/2002623929 (accessed 14 Jun. 2016).

The owners of New York City's commercial pleasure gardens strove to create a controlled environment where a diverse company could enjoy the benefits of the natural world. When Erasmus Williams purchased New York City's Vauxhall commercial pleasure garden in summer 1774, he especially advertised the garden's healthful nature. The purveyor proudly announced ‘from its lively, healthy and agreeable situation on the banks of the North-River’, the pleasure garden was ‘extremely healthy from its eminence and dryness of soil, with the most acceptable sea-breezes in the heat of the summer’.Footnote ⁵¹ Urbanites would have been especially receptive to such professions of health, as during the summer their cities often became hot, stinky, humid nests of disease. Many New Yorkers surely harboured the notions of one of their fellow Britons, who asserted in the early 1770s ‘no one will pretend to deny that a Country Air is generally, if not always, more wholesome than the condensed Air of Towns’. The idea of retreating to a clean garden with cool breezes to dry one's brow must have drawn a fair number of health-seeking customers.Footnote ⁵²

Plants, of course, were key to such efforts. Luckily for purveyors of commercial pleasure gardens, North America had no shortage of exotic flora. During the eighteenth century, resident gentlemen scientists such as William Byrd II, and Philadelphia's professional plant hunters John and William Bartram as well as visitors Mark Catesby and Swede Peter Kalm, gathered numerous new botanical specimens. British North America's well-established position in larger webs of global exchange only bolstered the colonies’ already impressive array of plants. Colonial gentlemen interacted in the ‘republic of letters’ to swap plant specimens and seeds with comrades throughout the world, while shopkeepers worked hard to import the most popular plants from England, which were themselves often sourced from far-flung locations. By the second half of the eighteenth century, owners of British American commercial pleasure gardens would have had a staggering variety of plants to choose from.Footnote ⁵³

Unfortunately, little historical evidence remains detailing specific plants that graced New York City's commercial pleasure gardens. The city view of New York City from 1767 (Figures 1 and 2) delineates New York City's Ranelagh Garden with highly detailed trees, shrubs and squared-off plots, while an image from 1776 provides a less-detailed illustration of both Vauxhall and Ranelagh (see Figure 6). Of course, one must approach such maps with caution, as it is quite possible that the artist simply drew what he considered a ‘typical’ garden for the time rather than what was actually there. By the mid-eighteenth century, the Palladian movement of architecture and landscaping had led many British gardeners to transform their manicured landscape ‘from a formal one dominated by straight lines into an asymmetrical, “natural” foil for the measured, formal, and balanced buildings’ often paired with the gardens. Compared with such developments, the above images seem to depict rather old-fashioned gardens defined by order rather than the ‘wilderness’ that gardeners increasingly attempted to introduce into their carefully cultivated plots. Note Rocque's 1746 image of London's Vauxhall commercial pleasure garden (Figure 5): scattered trees dominate the landscape as much as orderly walkways. When not strolling down one of the main thoroughfares, visitors would have meandered through the winding paths that the garden's owners cleared in order to create a ‘natural aesthetic.Footnote ⁵⁴

This is where further records become so valuable. Not only emulating London's pleasure gardens in name, colonial commercial pleasure gardens like New York City's Vauxhall and Ranelagh also followed their London predecessors in offering customers ‘several noble vistas of very tall trees, where the spaces between are filled up with very neat hedges; and within are planted variety of flowers and sweet smelling shrubs’. Samuel Fraunces’ records point to such efforts. When Fraunces sold the gardens in January 1771, for example, he explained that the grounds had ‘36 lots and a half of ground laid out to great advantage in a pleasure and kitchen garden well stocked with fruit and other trees, vegetables, &c’. Though not delineating individual flora species, Fraunces nevertheless alluded to a variety of plants, trees and shrubs in his Vauxhall pleasure garden. The nearby fresh water pond (about 200 yards east of the gardens) would have also been helpful in providing a constant source of water for especially stubborn or foreign plants. While strolling through Vauxhall or Ranelagh Gardens, New Yorkers would have most likely been greeted by a more diverse array of local and foreign (manicured) plants, trees and flowers than many of them had ever seen in one place. A far cry from the crowded, mucky nature of city streets, these verdant promenades would have struck many urban colonists as pristine retreats of natural splendour.Footnote ⁵⁵

Yet, perhaps even more importantly, owners of commercial pleasure gardens had created spaces that could compete visually and ideologically with gentlemen's private gardens. Take New York City gentleman merchant Nicholas Bayard's country house gardens just to the east of Ranelagh, for example.Footnote ⁵⁶ By mid-century, colonial gentlemen like Bayard had transformed their rural private gardens into more English-style spaces, featuring a dizzying array of local and exotic plants, pristine landscaping and buildings such as pavilions, bath houses, spring houses, greenhouses and ornate bridges. Bayard kept 16 separate plots of gardens, accentuated by walkways, trees, shrubs and outbuildings. His own gardens, in fact, mirrored those of nearby Vauxhall and Ranelagh. Yet regular citizens could not visit Bayard's genteel estate. Tickets did not gain one access to such private grounds. Commercial pleasure gardens, however, offered a vast array of urban colonists the chance to stroll similar grounds. Here, they could enjoy ‘Plants and Fruits of. . .every Clime and Kind’ like those in the gardens of Bayard and perhaps reflect upon ‘excellent assortments of flower and garden curiosities’. Commercial pleasure gardens, in short, extended gentlemen's private gardens – both ideologically and physically – to a larger swathe of the urban populace.Footnote ⁵⁷

New York City's commercial pleasure gardens offered customers more than ‘a little romantic rural scene’. In fact, some of their biggest draws were the various exhibits, performances and oddities that purveyors advertised. If the opportunity to stroll through botanical lanes brought colonists to commercial pleasure gardens, many owners must have thought, a spate of new attractions would keep them coming back, and perhaps with friends. It worked on captain of the Royal Navy, William Owen. Shortly after arriving in New York City in July 1768, Owen ‘made a party to Renelagh Gardens’ where there was a bear ‘chained to a ring near the house’. Thinking the creature ‘uncommonly docile and tractable’, Owen ‘took the liberty of taking [the bear] by the ears, which he instantaneously resented by making a snatch and bite at my right leg’. While Owen was lucky enough to escape with a torn stocking, some minor scratches and the mockery of his companions, the captain noted that a few days later the Ranelagh bear killed ‘a Black Boy. . .and was the next minute shot through the head’. Though on the surface a rather sad event off-handedly reported by Owen, the case of the Ranelagh bear provides an important example of how visitors to commercial pleasure gardens felt safer than they might have otherwise when interacting with a creature considered symbolic of the dangers of the ‘wilderness’. It is highly unlikely that Owen would have attempted to take a bear ‘by the ears’ if he came across it in the woods. But this was different. Owen and his comrades felt as if because they were surrounded by well-manicured gardens in a contrived environment, the wild animal that was chained up to the punch house might also be as equally ‘docile and tractable’. They quickly found otherwise.Footnote ⁵⁸

While most attractions at Vauxhall and Ranelagh were not so hazardous, they remained devoted to making colonists feel comfortable – even excited – in such a hybrid environment. New York City's commercial pleasure gardens were especially known for their firework shows between 1767 and 1769. As dazzling displays of pyro-wonder, the fireworks alone would have impressed onlookers as they lit up the night sky, turning the surrounding gardens into illuminated other worlds. The shrubs, flowers and trees that provided shade and colour during the day would have been transformed by the bursts of light into mysterious formations and eerie shadows. Firework shows, in short, added yet another dimension to colonists’ fascination with the wonders of the natural world. Yet owners did not stop there, as the fireworks themselves often depicted objects of the natural world as they burst overhead. In July 1768, the Ranelagh Garden hosted ‘a grand Set of Fire-Works, Divided into Five Acts’, featuring displays that resembled ‘a Flower-Pot’, ‘a beautiful Palm Tree, with a Tornent [sic] of Brilliant Fire’ and ‘a Cistern of Water going out and coming in twelve Times’. Fraunces similarly announced the firing of ‘a magnificent Set of Fire-Works’ at Vauxhall Garden in October 1769. Like the Ranelagh display, Vauxhall's night show featured fireworks that recreated (among other things) ‘a beautiful Garland of Flowers’ and ‘a beautiful [Yew]-Tree illuminated with Green Fires, and adorned with Diamonds, Chinese Fountains, and brilliant Fire on each Side’. Just as Fraunces and Jones utilized fireworks to transform their grounds into even more dynamic spaces, so too did they attempt to recreate their gardens in the sky. The natural world was both illuminated around onlookers and bursting into light above them. It must have been quite the thrill.Footnote ⁵⁹

Like Owen's run-in with the Ranelagh bear, however, such shows were not without their hazards. In his July 1768 advertisement for a firework show at the Ranelagh Garden, Mr Jones ‘humbly requested that no Persons will throw Squibs [small exploding fireworks] in the garden, at least, before the Fire-Works are over’. ‘Besides the Terror [squibs] put the Ladies in’, Jones explained, ‘the Evening's Entertainment might be entirely spoiled by an Accident happening to one of the Pieces.’ Apparently, just such an accident had happened during a previous display, forcing the show to end early. This was not good for business, and Jones had to make sure that from now on ‘ever Thing will be conducted with the utmost Regularity and Decorum’. If one were to transform the natural world into a garden of safety and health, he hardly needed squibs exploding around customers and firework shows exploding on the ground, which would only bring commercial pleasure gardens down to the level of an uncivil common. Since colonial urbanites lived in constant fear of fires, moreover, they would have deemed such accidents absolutely unacceptable. Paying customers hardly expected fires and ‘terror’ in the bucolic confines of the commercial pleasure garden.Footnote ⁶⁰

On the contrary, New Yorkers expected an experience of genteel entertainment in their commercial pleasure gardens. From wax-works ‘representing the Queen of Sheba bringing presents to King Solomon, with a view of his Palace, Court Yard, and Gardens’ to ‘Concert[s] of Vocal and Instrumental Music’, New York City's commercial pleasure gardens offered patrons an array of diversions. Such amusements helped to lure colonists away from other leisure spaces like taverns and playhouses because commercial pleasure gardens offered all the same services in one beautiful location. A visitor could stroll through Vauxhall's or Ranelagh's well-manicured gardens instead of jostling for a seat at the General Wolfe Tavern or the Merchant Coffee House. He or she could also find a pleasant grove of spring flowers to lounge among while watching a play rather than crowd into a packed playhouse so often defined by ‘Riotous Scene[s]’ and uncivil behaviour. Fraunces and Jones knew their competition all too well – both men, after all, also owned taverns – and thus understood the sort of measures necessary to lure the most customers as possible. Ultimately, their gardens remained the main attraction. Other diversions only added to the inherent charm of these rural paradises.Footnote ⁶¹

Revolution comes to Vauxhall and Ranelagh

Though British American commercial pleasure gardens blossomed between 1765 and 1775, these important public spaces could not avoid the relative disorder of the years that historians now so commonly refer to as a time of ‘pre-revolutionary tumult’.Footnote ⁶² Colonists’ ability to utilize public spaces to demonstrate their growing disregard for the authority of local leaders has been well documented by historians.Footnote ⁶³ So too have other scholars asserted that London's commercial pleasure gardens served as central spaces where colonists debated issues of class and social difference.Footnote ⁶⁴ By 1765, however, the disorder of the imperial crisis had real effects on urbanites’ comprehension of their rural–urban existence and, in turn, steadily disintegrated commercial pleasure gardens. As many New Yorkers grew weary of imperial mandates, they increasingly connected certain elite men – and their genteel homes and gardens – with imperial oppression.

On 1 November 1765, for instance, hundreds of angry colonists stormed through New York City to protest the recently instituted Stamp Act. The mob convened in a variety of public spaces before burning Governor Cadwallader Colden's gilded coach and various effigies in front of Fort George. Yet, as a New-York Mercury article made clear, ‘the business of the night [was not] yet. . .concluded’. Energized from their success, the rioters marched one mile north to Major Thomas James’ recently refurbished home, ‘Vaux-Hall’. While Samuel Fraunces had purchased the plot only months earlier with the intention of developing it into a commercial pleasure garden, he had recently relocated to Philadelphia and had subletted the grounds and home to James for three years. With rumours abounding that James had previously declared he would ‘cram the stamp down [colonists’] throats with the point of my sword’, the major made a perfect target for the incensed mob – they burned down his home and much of the surrounding gardens.Footnote ⁶⁵ With shrubs, topiaries and outbuildings in flames, flower beds trampled and an incensed mob running amuck through New York City's various public spaces, the city's dual urban–rural existence must have felt less plausible than ever before.Footnote ⁶⁶

The relative disorder of the late 1760s and early 1770s ultimately took its toll on Vauxhall and Ranelagh. Though Fraunces opened his commercial pleasure garden in 1768 after repairing the extensive damage of the Stamp Act riots (James's burned-over gardens and house would have been ideal for renovation, and some of the plants may well have benefited from the fire), by 1771 he decided to sell the Vauxhall commercial pleasure garden. While the tumult of the imperial crisis surely affected Fraunces’ decision to sell, he was sure to note that it was ‘for no other reason whatever than the proprietor not being able to attend both his houses in the manner he could wish’. Historian Thomas Garrett has also contended that Fraunces realized that the city's regulation efforts were about to necessitate extreme landscaping at Vauxhall that would render its environs far less rural and beautiful than they had been. Fraunces simply got out while he could, and by October 1773 sold the land to the dry goods merchant Erasmus Williams who kept the business running until 1776.Footnote ⁶⁷ Jones, meanwhile, was also experiencing difficulties: his Ranelagh Garden sputtered out of business by March 1769 (probably due to a combination of financial and health issues that plagued Jones) and was parcelled up and auctioned off. One portion of the grounds, interestingly, was sold to eventually harbour the New York City's hospital. Unfortunately, the hospital burned down on 28 February 1775 before it was ‘quite finished’. In retrospect, it was somewhat fortuitous that Jones and Fraunces sold their commercial pleasure gardens before 1775, for their city – and the grounds upon which their commercial pleasure gardens had once stood – were about to be consumed by all-out war.Footnote ⁶⁸

After the first shots of the Revolutionary War were fired in April 1775, New York City and its surrounding environs rather quickly devolved into a garrisoned battlefield. American troops entered New York City in March 1776 and quickly went about turning the city into a garrisoned warzone. Shortly thereafter, one New York City resident found that his city had been transformed into ‘a city of war’. He was quite right. In September 1776, continental forces had burned much of New York City to the ground as they escaped invading British troops. Almost 1,000 homes were reduced to ashes, along with the city's once-dominant Trinity Church. British forces would occupy New York City until the end of the war in 1783.Footnote ⁶⁹

The British military presence combined with the destruction of the city and an influx of fleeing loyalists and continental prisoners of war had real effects on New York City. Visitors to the city during the Revolution remarked upon the city's stenches, crowding and diseased environment more than ever before. When the Englishman Nicholas Cresswell arrived in New York City in June 1777, he was disgusted to find colonists, diseased with ‘the Itch, Pox, Fever, or Flux’, trudging through ‘noisome vapours’ and ‘unwholesome smells’ occasioned by the influx of citizens and troops into the ashen, diseased city. Such wartime conditions necessitated a change for the Vauxhall commercial pleasure garden – recognizing the garden's ready-made environment, British officials took Vauxhall away from poor Erasmus Williams and turned it into a military hospital. A Hessian soldier stationed in New York City named Johnann Conrad Döhla often visited injured friends who were kept in Vauxhall, and duly noted in his personal diary whenever a comrade ‘died. . .in the hospital called Vauxhall in New York’. Though no longer hosting entertainments such as firework and wax shows, the Vauxhall grounds continued to serve as a key venue for those seeking health.Footnote ⁷⁰

By August 1779, New York City's elite ‘gentlemen and ladies’ demanded at least a taste of their previous commercial pleasure garden culture in their burned-out city, and consequently ‘railed in and painted green. . .the walk by the ruins of Trinity Church and its grave-yard’. A Moravian priest living in New York City at the time noted, ‘benches placed there and many lamps fixed in the trees, for gentlemen and ladies to walk and sit there in the evening. A band plays while the commander is present, and a sentry is placed there, that none of the common people may intrude.’ By 1779, elite New Yorkers had apparently joined their brethren in Boston and Philadelphia in their belief that they could not have a truly ‘healthy’ garden environment if their social inferiors were present. They had watched on as the ‘rabble’ had burned Vauxhall to the ground 14 years earlier, and had witnessed ordinary colonists revel as New York City burned around them in September 1776. Such activities had surely influenced New York City's ‘gentlemen and ladies’ in their decision to place a ‘sentry’ at the garden's entrance so ‘that none of the common people could intrude’ on their otherwise controlled and genteel Trinity Church garden. By 1779, elites had – at least temporarily – returned New York City's commercial pleasure gardens to their exclusive roots. Unable to cultivate private pleasure gardens in and around the decimated environs of New York City, these self-conscious elites had to make do with shared pleasure grounds.Footnote ⁷¹

Demonstrating the growing class struggles in Revolutionary America, many New Yorkers found such a show of exclusivity and leisure abhorrent during a period of war. At the same time that so many ‘honest people’ could not procure food and shelter, the city's elites had pompously adapted ‘a house opposite [the Trinity pleasure garden] to accommodate the ladies or officer's women’. A local loyalist teenager damned the site in a poem, hoping that thunder and lightning might wipe it out, while countless others watched from beyond the sentry's post, wondering how such trifles could be pursued in an atmosphere of want and death. The majority of New York City ordinary residents, in short, deemed the commercial pleasure garden a superfluous relic of peace. Their city was a shadow of its former self, rather detached from the countryside and marred by disease, filth and hunger. Their desire for an urban–rural existence would have to be put on hold, at least until the conclusion of the war.Footnote ⁷²

Like their intertwined urban centres, British American commercial pleasure gardens evolved (and, in some cases, devolved) with the ebbs and flows of a global war. Yet the Revolutionary War – at least in the context of American commercial pleasure gardens – should be considered a brief blip in the otherwise steady evolution of British American urbanites’ efforts to harness the advantages of their rural surroundings. Culminations of numerous mid-eighteenth-century British American impetuses – specifically garden culture, urbanization, specimen exchange networks, demand for leisure spaces and a distinct rural identity – commercial pleasure gardens emerged as some of the most important public spaces for understanding how colonists attempted to craft their urban centres into ‘cities in the wilderness’ and, in turn, take advantage of their supposedly ‘natural’, ‘healthy’ surroundings. Colonists’ federal successors would continue their efforts in earnest, rebuilding commercial pleasure gardens from New York City to Charleston, opening their gates to a broad collection of visitors, and further blurring the lines of civilization and wilderness, urban and rural in their quest to realize a new nation.