The Origins of an Independent Park Police

Central Park's policing arrangements attracted concern long before the grounds opened to the public. Writing in 1853 for a committee that petitioned the state legislature to locate the park at its current site, future park board president James Cooley wrote that Europe's parks had successfully attracted visitors from all walks of life because their cities all “have a police force sufficiently strong to keep these great and desirable accessories to city life and comfort in good order.” The reputation of his local police, where concern about discipline and political patronage had recently sparked a major reorganization of the 8-year-old force, led Cooley to wonder:

Cooley looked forward to a time when New York would develop “a more stringent and effective police.”Footnote ¹⁹ In the meantime, complaints about partisanship and incompetence among the municipal police multiplied, and infighting broke out within its board.Footnote ²⁰ In that context, the interim managers of the undeveloped parkland elected not to rely on the existing municipal police to safeguard it. Instead, in June, 1856, they created their own force, setting nineteen men to work wearing the same uniforms as the city police (except for caps labeled “C.P.P.”) and charging them with preventing theft and destruction of park property.Footnote ²¹ A year later, the newly established Board of Commissioners of Central Park (BCCP) directed the captain of this makeshift force to explore “the establishment of a proper police force.” The Metropolitan Police board refused to pay for a special park detail, but it agreed to deputize twenty-two “park keepers” of the commissioners' choosing, paid for by the BCCP and overseen by the as-yet-unfilled position of park superintendent.Footnote ²² The keepers force was soon staffed with men who had worked as foremen and mechanics at the park rather than men who had experience with the municipal police.Footnote ²³ In that way, a separate park police force was born, sufficiently independent from the city police to develop a distinctive approach to its work.

Olmsted learned about the superintendent's job during a chance meeting at a Connecticut inn, where he sat down for tea with a friend who had just been appointed to the BCCP, and from this first conversation he understood that one of the job's major responsibilities involved oversight of the park police. Olmsted had even fewer qualifications for that task than the rest of the superintendent's job, but he was a creative résumé writer. “I have visited and examined as a student most of the large parks of Europe,” he told the board in his application letter, “and while thus engaged have given special attention to police details.”Footnote ²⁴ His literary connections, along with his experience managing farm plantings and studying European parks for an 1852 travelogue, apparently got him the job. He began work in September, 1857.

Design and construction immediately dominated Olmsted's attention—within a month he had prepared a study of tree plantings and a plan for draining the site, during the winter and spring he worked furiously with architect Calvert Vaux on a landscape design plan, and over the course of his first 2 years he built and managed a workforce of more than 3,000 landscape and construction workers for what became the largest public works project in the nation—but he had police business to deal with as well.Footnote ²⁵ Some of it was generic personnel management. In February, 1858, the Board finally authorized the new park keeper's force under Olmsted's direction, disbanding the makeshift force that had reported to a Metropolitan Police inspector. After an extended debate, the board gave Olmsted the authority to make all personnel appointments, rejecting an alternative that would have allowed each commissioner to appoint two keepers. Instead the commissioners pressed their patronage claims on Olmsted. “I am just informed that you have made some 12 or 14 new appointments for the Police and have paid no attention to my request relative to the man recommended by Mr. D,” one angrily wrote to him. “I once saved your head. I doubt whether, I in doing so served the interest of the Park.” Olmsted complained that these demands crowded out more important work.Footnote ²⁶

Nevertheless, his management of the keepers' force eventually brought him in contact with the substantive business of park policing—with the distinctive problems of order posed by Central Park and the challenges the police faced in resolving them—and with what little expertise was available about this specialized task at the time.Footnote ²⁷ As he and the board drafted Central Park's earliest regulations, they collected model ordinances from the great parks in Europe, and Olmsted consulted with several police officials in European cities on a BCCP-financed trip in the fall of 1859.Footnote ²⁸ His most notable contact was Sir Richard Mayne, one of the founding commissioners of the London Metropolitan Police (the Met). Olmsted reported to his board on the “very detailed information” he received from his meetings with Mayne, with the Met's director of recruits, and with the head of the police division patrolling London's parks. Years later, when critics challenged his management of the park police, Olmsted cited his credentials:

From Mayne, Olmsted would have heard lectures on the need for discipline and impersonal demeanor among the park keepers. To reassure a skeptical British public, Mayne insisted that the police serve as “models of restraint and politeness.” He issued orders against rudeness, forbade unnecessary conversations at work, demanded quiet in the station houses, and established strict military discipline and respect for the command hierarchy, backing these rules up with a zero-tolerance approach towards violations. Olmsted's park police incorporated all of these tactics.Footnote ³⁰

The Park as a Shared Space

In spite of this influence, the most distinctive feature of Olmsted's vision for the park police was its rejection of one of Mayne's key commitments. Like the historians who eventually told their story, early police reformers such as Mayne viewed the city as a place where traditional controls on predatory crime had frayed. That view led them to adopt a model of policing that emphasized deterrence, in which the main task of the police was to restrain malice by threatening the malicious with punishment. To do that, they hoped to establish a well-coordinated and pervasive force of officers who would deter crime through their visibility and systematic surveillance of the city.Footnote ³¹

Olmsted rejected this deterrence model explicitly, insisting that “the occasional sight of a man who is simply distinguished from men in general by a badge and some peculiarities of clothing is going to check misuse of the park very little.” He calculated that each keeper often had responsibility for thousands of visitors and 50 acres of labyrinthine park land, and concluded that most visitors would escape surveillance most of the time. If they really were inclined to malice, then the task of policing them would be hopeless. Along the way, the deterrence approach would corrode the social atmosphere he hoped the park would provide: “The value of a ramble in the park would be destroyed … if at every turn a visitor were to be made to feel himself superintended in all his conduct like a lunatic by his keeper, or a child by its nurse.”Footnote ³²

The deterrence model failed because it focused on the wrong threat to the park environment: it aimed to control the malice of an urban jungle, not the carelessness and ignorance that posed the main dangers to an urban park. Olmsted drew this contrast most sharply when he resumed command of the park police in 1872 after a long hiatus.Footnote ³³ Two years earlier, New York's short-lived Tammany government had taken control of the park board and restructured the park police extensively, doubling their numbers, making them a centerpiece of political patronage, and revising their basic orientation to their jobs. Olmsted complained that Tammany's reorganization had failed to recognize how the keepers' mission differed from that of the municipal police: “The force was re-formed with the evident assumption that the service to which it was to be adapted differed … in no way essentially from that aimed to be secured in the organization and training of the ordinary street police of the city.” From that premise, the Tammany board had installed a long-time Metropolitan Police captain with no park experience as commander, renamed the keepers force the “park police,” and armed the officers with clubs. Olmsted criticized these changes sharply:

The park police had a different task: “On the park,” he wrote, “there are no stores of private property, no walls or doors to be guarded, and respectable women and well nurtured children are much more tempted to the class of acts which it is the chief business of the park police to prevent than rogues or ruffians.”

The idea that visitors typically misbehaved “through an inadequate appreciation of the harm” inflicted by their actions was the foundation of Olmsted's philosophy. He elaborated on it in his most detailed General Order to the keepers, using damage to the park's plantings to illustrate:

These examples involving the park's physical environment illustrated Olmsted's main idea in a straightforward way, but they were only illustrations; he insisted that the same idea applied to the park's social environment. “There is the same explanation often to be made even for people who carry themselves rudely in the Park, disputing loudly with one another, using threatening, profane or obscene language, crowding others off the walks, excluding others unnecessarily from seats, and so on. It is not with the intention of troubling others that they do these things but in most cases from sheer unmindfulness that others are being unpleasantly affected by them.”Footnote ³⁵

One reason visitors failed to appreciate the harm their actions caused, Olmsted believed, was their lack of familiarity with the demands of this kind of shared environment. Superficially, Central Park resembled the countryside, but because it was used each day by thousands rather than a few, the effects of every action were amplified. One month after he became superintendent, Olmsted advised the commissioners: “Visitors to the park should be led to feel as soon as possible that wide distinction exists between it and the general suburban country, in which it is the prevalent impression of a certain class that all trees, shrubs, fruit, and flowers, are common property.” Whatever the merits of that view in the countryside, it would be disastrous for an urban park.Footnote ³⁶ Fifteen years later, he wrote again to the board: “It requires some little reflection to understand that nearly all that is agreeable and refreshing at present on the Central Park would speedily disappear if practices, harmless elsewhere, were to be continued in it; if the multitude of visitors were to move through it, for example, as freely and inconsiderately as visitors at a watering place are allowed to move through the neighboring woods and fields.”Footnote ³⁷ A rural park in the midst of a major city had no precedent, and if New Yorkers treated it like the commons or country forest it resembled they would destroy it.

It was not an abstract worry. At the time the park commission was formed, uptown Manhattan was a semirural environment dotted with hog pens and other nuisances recently driven from lower Manhattan, and many residents collected firewood and grew crops to live at least partly off the sparsely occupied land. These had been perfectly legitimate activities in the past, but park officials worried early on about the damage they might do to the park if they continued in a space used each day by thousands. A major impetus for creating the original park police detail was to prevent damage to the property's natural landscape—the New York Daily Times announced its arrival with a dare: “Now if anybody wants to cut down fine trees without a license on the park grounds, let him come on”—and one of its earliest actions was to arrest a man for gathering rocks to sell as paving stones.Footnote ³⁸ A year later, the newly established park board acted quickly to evict leftover tenants who kept farm animals and gave them free range on the park land, “destroying the trees and otherwise injuring the public property in our charge.”Footnote ³⁹ Park officials also worried about uptown residents who used the park land as a dumping ground and nearby farmers who put their cows, goats, pigs, and even geese out to pasture on the park—“using it as a commons, and doing great injury”—and they moved quickly to wall the property off and establish a pound for untended animals.Footnote ⁴⁰

New threats to the park's physical environment arose after it officially opened to visitors. Olmsted received reports that visitors were helping themselves to flower bulbs and birds' nests, wearing down the turf in heavily traveled areas, spitting tobacco, leaving rubbish on the walkways, and carving their initials into park benches and buildings.Footnote ⁴¹ Early news reports about enforcement seem to bear out his diagnosis of these problems, filled as they are with stories of visitors who expressed surprise when told they were doing something wrong: a young man who “thought he did no harm to pluck a modest garland for his ladie love,” foreign tourists who could not read the park's signs and “did not understand the harm of picking flowers,” and visitors feeding the park's celebrated swans who insisted that they were unaware of the harm it might do (the city of Hamburg had sent a dozen swans to the park as a goodwill gesture, but nine soon died because of their diet).Footnote ⁴² Commenting on a report of Olmsted's that detailed the damage that careless use could do to the park, the New York Times lamented the common association of wooded areas such as the park “with the idea of perfect liberty—of free climbing, bough smashing, and every other species of rustic saturnalia.” A woods shared by “thousands” demanded a different kind of care than woods visited by a few: “Nature in the neighborhood of large towns needs rules and regulations to enable her to do herself justice, just as certainly as in the country she does better without them.”Footnote ⁴³

The Designed Park

Central Park was not really a “natural” environment in any familiar sense. It was a thoroughly constructed environment: the result of a massive investment of time, money, and labor to transform a hostile and rocky piece of land into something more pastoral. Its outlines had been drawn by Olmsted and Vaux's Greensward plan, which the Board of Commissioners selected over thirty-two competitors in an 1857 design competition.

Olmsted repeatedly insisted that the Greensward plan should guide not just the park's construction and planting but also the regulation of park usage. At times this claim bordered on fanatical. He described the park as his perfect diorama: “Every foot of the Park's surface, every tree and bush, as well as, every arch, roadway and walk has been fixed where it is with a purpose, and upon its being so used that it may continue to serve that purpose to the best advantage, and upon its not being otherwise used, depends its value.”Footnote ⁴⁴ The users were part of the diorama—plastic figurines he intended to arrange just so to complete his work of art. “Does the work which has thus far been done accomplish my design?” he asked the board rhetorically in an aborted resignation letter during his first stint as Superintendent. “No more than stretching the canvas and chalking a few outlines, realizes the painter's. Why, the work has been thus far wholly & entirely with dead, inert materials. My picture is all alive—its very essence is life, human & vegetable.”Footnote ⁴⁵ In Olmsted's mind, his “art” encompassed choreography of the visitors themselves.

This megalomaniacal language masked a more mundane point about the relationship between design and regulation. Many design choices relied on expectations about how the relevant design features would be used, and ignoring those expectations would make the original choices pointless. Immediately before the hyperbolic claim that “every foot of the Park's surface … has been fixed where it is with a purpose,” Olmsted illustrated what he meant by “misuse” of the park:

The proper way to use the bridle roads was to ride horses on them, not walk or drive carriages; otherwise the expense invested to create them would be pointless, and the investment would never had been made but for an expectation that this scheme of use would be enforced. In this way, past choices about the kind of environment the parks department would construct imposed future constraints on the kind of behavior that was appropriate there.

Individual park visitors did not always appreciate this logic, even in the relatively clear-cut case of the park's trail system. Olmsted recounted an example in an early report to the board. “A private carriage containing a gentleman and ladies was observed driving through the narrow walks of the finished ground north of the pond, the wheels often running upon the borders and putting the trees and shrubbery recently planted in much peril. A policeman hastened to remonstrate with the gentleman, who replied, angrily, that the park belonged to the public, and he should drive where he pleased in it, at the same time threatening to obtain the dismissal of the policeman if he continued to stand in his way.”Footnote ⁴⁷ It was an extreme case, but it echoed in many other controversies and complaints about park policing. The idea that there was a “proper” way of using the park inevitably invited resistance.

Olmsted gave a similar account of the notorious restrictions on walking on the grass. “Rock has been removed, drains laid, deep soil formed and fine, short greensward gradually established upon the soil in order to secure that particular form of gratification which may be produced by a rich color and texture of turf,” he explained. “Under certain conditions, the turf may be trodden upon without injury, but if walking upon it were generally allowed, the particular object for which much labor during many years has been thus expended would be wholly lost.” The design also included areas with “a luxurious growth of ferns and wild flowers in association with rocks and other adjoining objects” designed to “delight” those who came across them, but because trampling through the ferns or picking the flowers would destroy this carefully crafted scene, park officials instructed the keepers to prevent it.Footnote ⁴⁸

These were not trivial examples. Until the Tammany board took over park management in 1870, approximately half of park arrests were for traffic infractions, and another substantial share were for damage to the plantings.Footnote ⁴⁹ In each case, talk of “proper behavior” in the park did not refer to a desire to elevate visitors culturally but to an attempt to vindicate expensive design choices that local officials had made by selecting the Greensward plan. “To justify the design of the park and the vast outlay which the city has made to carry out that design,” Olmsted maintained, “a certain class of requirements must be met upon it for which no provision is made, unless through the expenditure designated ‘For Police’.”Footnote ⁵⁰ The design of park rules and police was an extension of, and a necessary accompaniment to, the physical design; all of those elements had to be adopted as an interconnected package.

Venturing beyond the mundane examples of the bridle road and park plantings, Olmsted also described a vaguer and more general design principle relevant to the park rules. He repeatedly claimed that the park was designed to provide city residents with a convivial respite from the fear and strife that dominated the streets and business life, helping them to overcome their suspicion and antagonism and rediscover a community of interest.Footnote ⁵¹ Less ambitiously, the park simply provided “relief from the confinement in the city.”Footnote ⁵² The Greensward plan tried to create that kind of environment partly by emphasizing large fields of grass surrounded by thick plantings that would insulate the space from the city. The plan's most unique and ambitious feature was its provision to submerge the four required crosstown roads beneath the park's surface. Because the roads had to be open to the same traffic as any other road in the city—to “coal carts and butchers' carts, dust carts and dung carts”—Olmsted and Vaux worried that they would become “crowded thoroughfares, having nothing in common with the park proper, but everything at variance with those agreeable sentiments which we should wish the park to inspire,” and they could easily destroy any sense of the park as an oasis: “Eight times in a single circuit of the park will they oblige a pleasure drive or stroll to encounter a turbid stream of coarse traffic.”Footnote ⁵³ The expensive plan to submerge the roads aimed to avoid that.

All of these physical features aimed to create a “character of quiet seclusion” (complete, Olmsted declared earnestly, with the “the twittering of birds and such other rural charms as would help to the general result of simple, quiet, tranquilizing, and refreshing recreation”), but once again they could not achieve that aim alone. To reinforce them, park officials adopted several rules of behavior, including regulations restricting commercial vehicles, peddling, noise, and “threatening, abusive, insulting, or indecent language” in the park.Footnote ⁵⁴ Failing to enforce those rules would mean squandering the investment that local officials had made (for better or worse) to build the type of space outlined in the Greensward plan: an elaborate pastoral respite from the urban realm that contrasted sharply with other submissions the board of commissioners had rejected, such as those that envisioned something more like an amusement park and those that aimed at something less romantic but more economical.Footnote ⁵⁵

Olmsted believed that such decline had already begun during Tammany's reign, which had turned the keepers into a replica of the municipal police, ignoring efforts to protect the unique features of the park. “[They] perform the same duties as the city police so far as there is occasion for them in the park, quite as faithfully in manner as the street police,” he wrote in an abandoned draft from 1872. “Beyond this—for the other class of duties—the keeping of the park—they are almost worthless. They hate them; they consider them beneath their notice as policemen.”Footnote ⁵⁶ The following year he repeated the concern publicly, complaining to the board that the keepers force had been “definitely transformed into a ‘Police’ and assimilated as closely as possible in all respects to the ordinary street police of the city.” If the change stuck, there would be no reason for a separate park police force at all: “If it is so, I can see no justification for the present imperium in imperio which exists on the park in respect to the matter of the police. There would be obvious advantages in the Department's abandoning the maintenance of any distinctive force and allowing the Police Commission to take its appropriate responsibility in this respect in regard to the parks as well as other portions of the city.”Footnote ⁵⁷

This neglect of park keeping in favor of more conventional police work threatened the park with failure. Struggling for control of the keepers, Olmsted explained what he thought was at stake to his board:

A year later, he repeated the bleak thought that “the undertaking to provide a rural recreation ground upon such a site in the midst of a city like this” may have been “a mistake.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Unless a commitment to the kind of policing he advocated could be restored, “a new park will have to be made upon the ruins of that hitherto designed, adapted to recreation of a less refined character, and in which there shall be little to lose through mere carelessness and rudeness.”Footnote ⁶⁰

Two months after he delivered his impassioned speech to the board, Olmsted was stripped of his authority over the keepers. Officially, the board wanted to relieve him of ancillary duties so that he could focus on landscape design. The real catalyst seemed to be the keepers' outcry against the exhausting patrol routine he demanded from them, which Olmsted himself compared to the duty expected from Union soldiers during the Civil War. (He defended it as a “temporary expedient” designed to reinstitute discipline in a force made lazy by patronage.Footnote ⁶¹) His reputation must also have suffered from the fact that his first assignment upon resuming oversight of the keepers in 1872 was to cut the force in half.

Whatever the reason for the board's decision, Olmsted fought it bitterly. With only a police captain to oversee them, he worried, the keepers “would be confirmed in habits of slighting, if not regarding with contempt, those parts of their duty by which they should be distinguished from an ordinary street police.”Footnote ⁶² Over the next year, he began to receive reports that fueled these fears. His head gardener complained at length that the park police stood by indifferent while visitors trampled the plantings and made off with trimmings and birds' nests, treating these violations of park rules as beneath their notice.Footnote ⁶³ It was in this context that Olmsted warned the board about the dangers threatening Central Park's “quiet seclusion.”

After he read Olmsted's remarks in the City Record late in the summer of 1874, police Captain Henry Koster wrote to the board to object to several of the facts his former boss had used to make his case, and to register a broader dissent about the way Olmsted understood the keepers' goals. Calling Olmsted's account of the park's purposes “poetical” and “filled with sentiment,” Koster complained that “disappointment naturally follows when a realization of visionary ideas are expected in actual human affairs.” He went on to imply that the far-reaching tasks Olmsted expected from the keepers exceeded their proper law enforcement role, which had to reflect “reasonable expectations” about visitor behavior.Footnote ⁶⁴ Olmsted viewed these remarks as an official acknowledgement that the force had abandoned its park-keeping mission, and he seemed to be setting a trap when he asked Koster to clarify:

Koster confirmed this interpretation 3 days later, and Olmsted pounced. By rejecting the “sentimental,” “poetical,” and “visionary” purposes attributed to the park, Olmsted claimed, Koster had meant to criticize him but had implicitly criticized the park commissioners themselves. They were the ones who had selected the Greensward plan on behalf of the public and assumed stewardship for it. In the process Koster had shown “pity and contempt” for exactly what made Central Park distinctive:

In Olmsted's eyes, Koster's remarks confirmed his worries that the park police force was drifting away from its distinctive mission toward a more conventional form of police work; the remarks had “significance,” he stressed, “as to his understanding of what is to be expected of his force.”Footnote ⁶⁶

The conflict made vivid not just Olmsted's high aspirations for the park but also the connection he saw between design and policing. He believed “from the start” that the ambitious design he and Vaux had submitted required a particular standard of behavior in the park, and if the keepers retreated from that standard—if they stopped educating visitors about “misuse” of the park to focus only on offenses that would have attracted police attention elsewhere—then the design would be a dead letter; the fragile environment it envisioned could not withstand such a laissez faire philosophy of policing. A few weeks later, Olmsted insisted to the board that Koster's remarks afforded “the clearest evidence either that the Board has repudiated the original design of the park, which I do not believe, or that its keepers force is not adapted to that design and is practically causing it to {be} set aside in favor of one radically different.”Footnote ⁶⁷

I have recounted the conflict with Koster mainly to clarify Olmsted's philosophy of park regulation, but the episode may also suggest the reasons why that philosophy never took permanent root. Olmsted himself believed that despite some surface disagreements about particular rules, the public and its political representatives did not really object to the main regulations he was asking the keepers to enforce. In his letters to the park board, Olmsted tried to show that the standards Koster rejected were precisely those the commissioners embraced. Apparently they agreed. They suspended Koster as captain of the park keepers 4 days later.Footnote ⁶⁸ It was not, moreover, just the Republican board that Olmsted had worked with for so many years that agreed with him. In practice, the Tammany Democrats did not dissent in any significant way from the substance of the behavioral standards the keepers were supposed to enforce. When Tammany took control of park governance, its commissioners adopted a new set of ordinances that incorporated all the major provisions of the old park rules: no defacing trees, no walking on the grass except areas designated “commons,” no selling or posting advertisements, no playing musical instruments without permission, no holding group events, no “obscene” or “insulting” language or behavior, and no merchants' carts, among other restrictions. The main innovation in the new ordinances was to add a blanket rule empowering park police to eject undesirable visitors.Footnote ⁶⁹ At the same time, the board revised the regulations for the park police, but the new regulations focused almost entirely on administrative matters such as pay and sick leave; they said little about the substance of police work, excepting a blanket statement that park police should “be vigilant in preserving order” on park property.Footnote ⁷⁰

Why, then, did the park police come to resist the distinctive park keeping work that Olmsted stressed? Olmsted himself believed that they did so not because of any policy decision by park officials or the public but because of the growing influence of police occupational culture. “It is impossible,” he complained in 1872, “to get men when denominated police men and dressed and paid and regarded by the public as policemen to trouble themselves with other duties than those of police men.”Footnote ⁷¹ It was not that municipal police officials deliberately imposed any particular view of what real police work involved on the park police; as an organization, the municipal force apparently left park policing to the keepers.Footnote ⁷² Over time, however, key personnel from the Metropolitan Police found their way onto the keepers force, and they presumably brought their assumptions about police work with them. In December 1870, the new Tammany board assigned command of the park keepers to Nathaniel Mills, a long-time captain of the Metropolitan Police's Broadway squad; and as his second-in-command, it appointed Robert P. Schofield, who had worked alongside Mills as a Metropolitan Police Sergeant in the Eighth Precinct.Footnote ⁷³ (Recall that at its inception, the keepers force had been staffed with former mechanics and foremen from the park, not former policemen.) Olmsted's concerns about police culture began 2 years later.Footnote ⁷⁴

A Tyranny of Design?

Olmsted's claim that design set the agenda for policing may seem to establish a tyranny of design; the park was made for the people, a critic might complain, not the people for the park. Olmsted's first and simplest response to this charge was that it was the people—as represented by the political system established to serve them, warts and all—who chose the design in the first place, and that in choosing it they simultaneously endorsed the measures necessary to protect it. When he implored the board that he and Vaux “saw from the beginning that the danger of failure lay chiefly in the liability of misunderstanding, misuse and misappropriation of these elements of the design by the public,” he added: “The Commissioners adopting the plan were distinctly warned of this. I myself stated to them, in full board, that I should be unwilling to take any responsibility in respect to the Park unless assured that I would be allowed to exact a degree of faithfulness, activity and discipline in the keepers' force that would be extraordinary in any service of the city.”Footnote ⁷⁵ It may be a legitimate criticism that the choice of plan was not democratic in the first place—perhaps the expensive investment in bridle trails was just a romantic project of elites who unfairly crowded others out of the decision making—but once a legitimate public decision about the kind of park New York should have does get made, the policing corollaries of that decision would make their demands felt. The idea of democracy applied to complex projects that unfold over time inevitably encounters a dilemma, as collective investments made at one point in time constrain future choices in ways that could easily seem undemocratic.

Olmsted's second response to the tyranny of design charge represented his attempt to grapple with that dilemma. In his view, the connection between design and policing worked both ways. Design choices required a suitable form of policing, but the realities of policing also put limits on design. If a design ideal required either superhuman police work or a level of intrusion that visitors would not tolerate, then it had to be rejected. In “Public Parks and the Enlargement of Towns,” for example, Olmsted argued that although he admired the wild and rugged landscapes called “picturesque” on aesthetic grounds, they were an inappropriate model for urban parks partly because such terrain made it too hard to guard against “opportunities and temptations to shabbiness, disorder, indecorum, and indecency.”Footnote ⁷⁶ His mid-1870s despair that Central Park may have been “a mistake from the beginning” considered whether the same diagnosis applied to rural landscapes. At a more detailed level, specific design choices had to be made with an eye to their regulatory implications; a designer ought to create an environment that made it as easy as possible for people to obey the rules. For example, Olmsted and Vaux tried to locate rocks and plantings so that “it need be little, if any, inconvenience for visitors to avoid walking on them,” and they incurred considerable expense to lay out the walkways and horse and carriage drives to minimize intermodal conflicts.Footnote ⁷⁷ In these respects, decisions about design goals and policing related to each other dialectically: Some design goals could not be achieved without appropriate policing, but constraints on policing also set limits to the design purposes a park could realistically serve.

The evolution of the park's infamous “keep of the grass” rules can serve to illustrate this reciprocal relationship between design and policing. Access to the park's lawns was a contentious issue from the beginning. Early on, the board rejected most applications for baseball teams and other organized sports to practice and play games on park lawns (although it apparently allowed “occasional match games”), reasoning that the demand was overwhelming. With “the constant play of a great number of cricket and ball clubs,” the board wrote, “the lawns would be rendered unsightly before one season passed.” That, in turn, would undermine an important purpose of the park: “The Park has attractions to those that visit it, merely as a picture… Whatever defaces or injures this picture makes it less attractive to the great mass of visitors, and should, for the general good, be excluded.” Although the city clearly needed more sports fields, smaller neighborhood parks would suit that purpose better; Central Park served a different function that would be undermined by intensive use of the turf. The board gave a similar justification for restrictions on individual access to the park's lawns, which have attracted more mockery over the years than any other park rule.Footnote ⁷⁸

Olmsted himself felt torn on this topic. He believed strongly that large expanses of well-kept green fields were an essential ingredient of the Greensward plan, but he worried that park visitors would chafe against strict constraints. “I do not like at all to have published a positive interdict upon all grassed ground,” he wrote in the fall of 1860 to Park Comptroller Andrew Green, who had emerged as the staunchest advocate for severe restrictions. “Judging from my own feelings, as well as my observations of the public, nothing would be more unpopular.”Footnote ⁷⁹

Given that reality, Olmsted tried to refine his designs to make them more resistant to the kinds of usage that police could not reasonably prevent, but the task proved more challenging than he expected. In Prospect Park he and Vaux had designed the Long Meadow to maximize public access, using the hardiest grasses on extensively drained ground and then leaving it open to the public without restrictions, but he eventually concluded that the experiment had failed. He summarized his conclusions in a letter to New York Times Publisher George Jones, whose paper had repeatedly criticized park officials for their overzealous enforcement of turf protections. “The rules about not walking on the grass are now enforced so rigidly that sending children to the park is rather a punishment for them than a treat,” the Times had complained in 1875. “Policemen hunt them about as if they were little criminals who were ‘wanted’ at headquarters.”Footnote ⁸⁰ Olmsted wrote privately to Jones to defend the police, citing his experiment in the Long Meadow and other evidence he had accumulated over years of park work: “The manifest results of each experiment are in my judgment not simply unfavorable but absolutely disastrous to the hope that the turf of the Central Park can ever be made use of by the public more unrestrictedly than it has been. I know that this opinion strikes almost all who have not given special study to the matter as preposterous.”Footnote ⁸¹ The same year, Olmsted considered how parts of the park might be redesigned to mitigate the worst damage visitors were inflicting on the turf—for example, by widening walkways in the most crowded areas, where visitors were especially likely to step off the path onto the grass—but he lamented that the Parks Department lacked the funds for such projects in the midst of an economic depression.Footnote ⁸²

In the meantime, Olmsted tried to find a middle ground between a draconian embargo and ruinous laissez-faire. The regulations he proposed prohibited walking on the grass except in designated “commons,” which could be introduced or withdrawn as turf conditions warranted (a common sign asked visitors to stay off the grass “for the present”).Footnote ⁸³ The following summer Olmsted watched the park's largest crowd to date at a concert near the terrace, and the park keepers found it impossible to keep them off the grass. “I think they did no harm and it would be well now to put the sign of a ‘common’ there and on the ‘green,’” he concluded. At approximately the same time, Green (who paid the maintenance bills) wrote to Olmsted complaining about damage to the lawn nearby, and recommended keeping the public off the area.Footnote ⁸⁴ Through such trial and error, park officials searched haphazardly for the right balance between protecting the landscape and maximizing visitors' freedom.

Once again, these examples from the regulation of the park's physical environment provide the simplest illustrations of Olmsted's main idea, but once again the same considerations arose for the park's social environment. A case in point involved the rules governing park concessions. To establish the park as an oasis from the commercial city, the board early on passed an ordinance that banned peddlers, and it repeatedly directed Olmsted to crack down on unauthorized vendors.Footnote ⁸⁵ At the same time, park officials established a limited commercial realm through a tightly regulated system of authorized refreshment stands and other concessions, such as boat and skate rentals, in order to meet visitors' needs (and, presumably, to raise revenue). At the outset the Commissioners seemed conservative, calling for “strict rules … as to what shall not and what not be sold”; they presumably had alcohol in mind.Footnote ⁸⁶ Olmsted eventually advised a more liberal course, worrying that an outright ban on alcohol would leave visitors to bring their own or visit the surrounding taverns, “where they will meet with temptations to intoxication, and be withdrawn temporarily from restraining influences which will act upon them while on the Park.”Footnote ⁸⁷ Instead, he proposed a system of licensed vendors for alcohol sales on the park, with detailed conditions enforced by park police, citing the successful experience of Aston Park in England as precedent.Footnote ⁸⁸ (Once the park concessions opened, the park police repeatedly shut down noncompliant vendors.Footnote ⁸⁹) An environment completely free of commerce would be impractical, but rigorous enforcement of less extreme regulations would advance this aspect of the Greensward plan's vision well enough.

The Educative Model of Policing

Olmsted believed that the two features of the park environment I have been describing—the fact that it was both a shared space and a designed space—gave a distinctive shape to the park police's job. It was not always obvious to most park users how their own seemingly harmless actions might combine with others' to damage the park environment noticeably, particularly how they might undermine the design goals that had motivated the public to create the park in the first place.Footnote ⁹⁰ The mission of the park police, therefore, was fundamentally instructional: It was “to aid, instruct and restrain honest but often inconsiderate visitors in their use of the Park—that of arresting criminals being incidental to this.”

By contrast, Olmsted stressed repeatedly, the mission was not to ambush devious sneaks to punish them. He urged the keepers not to try to “surprise visitors” or “play the detective,” and he implored them to use their arrest authority “with extreme caution”; mainly as a last resort when visitors had defied their informal authority. Instead, a keeper who found a visitor violating the rules should strive “to respectfully aid him toward a better understanding of what is due to others, as one gentleman might manage to aid another who was a stranger to him.” Any arrest a keeper did make would be reviewed by his commanding officer, who would scrutinize the reasons for it along with the manner of implementing it.Footnote ⁹¹ Throughout their first decade, the entire force made fewer than ten arrests per month.Footnote ⁹²

In this respect, Olmsted actively discouraged the use of formal legal intervention through arrest and prosecution to enforce the behavioral standards he considered essential to the park environment. In part, this approach seemed to reflect his belief that punitive sanctions were an inappropriate response to wrongdoing that was “more frequently the result of thoughtlessness than of willful design to do injury.” He repeatedly called such misbehavior “venial,” suggesting that its fairly trivial moral character called for a restrained response. He also (and perhaps for that reason) worried that heavy-handed enforcement might backfire. If park keepers approached each rule-breaker “as a watchdog might accost a sneak-thief, growling, and with a look of seizing hold of him,” the visitor's attitude towards park authorities might turn defiant. “Let the keeper consider,” Olmsted warned, “whether a desire will not grow with this visitor to take care of himself when he is in his Park, and no thanks to anybody; whether a disposition to try conclusions with the whole force of keepers, to see whether they shall prevent him from going where he likes and behaving as he pleases, will not be established in his mind.” By contrast, if the keepers treated wayward visitors with “considerateness and courtesy,” they could inspire a cooperative spirit that would motivate them to regulate themselves. Olmsted grandly speculated that “every park-keeper would distinctly represent the general, permanent and legal interests which [each visitor] possessed, in common with all other citizens, in the park, in distinction from the momentary, selfish, illegal, individual interests which alone can be served through its misuse,” and that the “mere sight” of a keeper might remind many visitors of the consideration they owed to others. When visitors broke the park rules out of ignorance and the keepers brought the problem to these visitors' attention, they would accept instructions willingly: “So far from being felt as a personal affront, [they] would be received with all respect and cheerfully complied with.”Footnote ⁹³

The keepers' educational role involved more than simply posting signs and admonishing individual park visitors, teaching them the formal rules contained in park ordinances one by one.Footnote ⁹⁴ To achieve their instructional mission, the park police had to strategically employ a range of tactics to influence everyone's tacit sense of appropriate behavior. To explain what he had in mind, Olmsted imagined a man walking on a street to a theater, church, or funeral, “smoking or engaged in a warm debate and talking loudly with his friend.” When he reached his destination, the man would not wait for the police to admonish him before he put out his pipe and lowered his voice. “He would be led by the silent and unconscious influence of others present to regard the custom and proprieties of the occasion and the place.” Olmsted wanted the keepers to install this kind of unconscious custom in Central Park, to establish the “proprieties of the occasion and place” in this new kind of public space. By doing that they would regulate behavior more effectively than direct surveillance and rule enforcement: “The force of custom would act, out of the keeper's sight, in resistance to the misuse of the Park.”Footnote ⁹⁵

As his reference to “the silent and unconscious influence of others” indicates, Olmsted thought visitors would take their cues about acceptable behavior from observing others. For that reason, the keepers had to intervene strategically and consistently against the violations of park rules that had the most value as precedents, particularly the first violation of a rule, which might draw others along as followers. That view underpinned his earlier insistence that park officials should impress visitors with the park environment's distinctive nature “as soon as possible,” before it became “thronged with crowds of unmanageable multitudes of visitors.” If the keepers could establish clear norms from the outset, they would perpetuate themselves to some degree.

Conversely, unchecked misbehavior might spiral out of control. Shortly after he returned to park management in 1872, he complained that inconsistent enforcement had undermined the old respect for park rules:

As park norms eroded, police found themselves overrun. “The number of persons plainly disregarding the common requirements is sometimes so great,” Olmsted lamented, “that the keepers are forced to abandon their duty, except with reference to aggravated cases, and chiefly of such a class of disorders as would call for the police outside of the park.”Footnote ⁹⁶ As less serious violations became common, any enforcement the keepers could muster came to seem capricious and bred resentment.Footnote ⁹⁷ In these ways the keepers lost control of their distinctive task.

Two organizational factors exacerbated these challenges. First, Olmsted believed, the Tammany board's patronage appointments had increased the size but eroded the quality of the force, making discipline among the keepers uneven. (Shortly after he returned to the park, Olmsted discharged half the keepers at Andrew Green's insistence; many had been identified by their recently reappointed captain as incompetent, and others had been deemed by their surgeon to be physically unfit.) It was a bad bargain, he thought, because lazy and incompetent keepers undermined the authority of the rest. Each time one of them ignored a small violation of the rules, he helped convince visitors that the rule was a dead letter, making the more dutiful keepers seem capricious when they tried to enforce it.Footnote ⁹⁸ Such inconsistency made it hard to deliberately establish any set of tacit behavioral norms at all.

Second, the number of visitors varied dramatically depending upon the weather, the day of the week, and scheduled events. To cope with that challenge, Olmsted created a reserve force of maintenance workers and gardeners who could temporarily serve as park keepers when the need arose.Footnote ⁹⁹ It is telling that this arrangement attracted more criticism from Tammany officials than any other feature of Olmsted's approach to park keeping. Perhaps the patronage-hungry Tammany machine simply wanted access to more positions on the park police force, but overtly, its supporters argued that temporarily pressing manual labors into service led to bad policing. One ridiculed the temporary officers as “a class of ‘mongrel’ officials—half sweepers, half keepers,” insisting that the public would never allow this kind of arrangement in the municipal police.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Already in the 1870s, some sense of the police as having a distinct professional identity shaped judgments about the park police function in a visceral way. For Olmsted, by contrast, it did not take a full-time, armed police officer to perform the educational tasks at the heart of park keeping; he had already come to the conclusion that full-time officers often found such work “beneath them.” A few years later, distressed about the condition of the park's lawns, he proposed a resolution requiring all park employees to “civilly advise, caution or remonstrate with” anyone who walked on the turf against the rules. If the wayward visitor refused, the employee should contact a park keeper to make an arrest.Footnote ¹⁰¹

Education and Coercion

If education lay at the core of Olmsted's preferred approach to park keeping, he recognized that it could not function successfully by itself. In its unqualified form, the educative approach to park keeping made optimistic assumptions about the park visitors' motivations. It assumed that park visitors would usually defer to the prevailing standards of behavior that the park police had cultivated, and to the keepers' reminders when they proved necessary, without any need for coercion. Olmsted thought the park's early experience demonstrated that this approach could work, maintaining that “a lawless habit was rare among visitors” during its first decade and that “the admonitions of the keepers were generally received in good spirit and willingly heeded.”Footnote ¹⁰² He recognized, however, that park visitors would sometimes prove more intransigent and require a different response. “While the great mass readily recognize the propriety of reasonable rules and yield to them a cheerful acquiescence,” an early annual report noted, “our community is not entirely free from individuals of that peculiar temperament that chafes against the restraints necessary to insure general gratification,” or even, “like a school-boy,” take “peculiar satisfaction in evading a rule.”Footnote ¹⁰³ From the beginning, Olmsted distinguished between “thoughtless” or “careless” park visitors, on the one hand, and those who were “evil-disposed” or “wanton,” on the other, and he accepted that conventional police work emphasizing surveillance and arrest made sense for the latter. (When the park's skating pond first opened, one of the keepers' duties was to watch the crowd for pickpockets.Footnote ¹⁰⁴) In cases in which persuasion failed, the keepers had to fall back on coercion.

The state legislature had built that recourse into the enabling legislation for Central Park, granting the commissioners the authority to pass ordinances “as they may deem necessary for the regulation, use, and government of said Park,” empowering the park keepers to enforce them by making arrests, and making violations punishable by as much as a $50 fine or 30 days in jail.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Park officials recognized that magistrates and the public might contest this authority if they invoked it carelessly: “It is essential that these [ordinances] should be carefully drawn and thoroughly discussed,” the Board insisted; “otherwise, constant collisions with the wrong doer will arise, and the power of the Board will be lost, by failures on the part of the Courts to punish offenders, on the pretext that the ordinances are indefinite and illegal.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Olmsted instructed the keepers' sergeants to carefully review any arrests their officers made before forwarding them to a magistrate.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

The courts generally did sanction the offenders the park police brought them, albeit lightly. During the years when park documents report consistent data on punishments (1863–69), exactly half of the offenders brought before a magistrate received fines (invariably under $10), and another 11% received some sort of confinement (typically less than 10 days). The rest—somewhat more than one third—were “discharged with a reprimand.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Thus even the carefully screened “last resort” cases the park keepers and their supervisors brought before the police court magistrates received light punishment.

That fact underlines the basic challenge Olmsted struggled with as he developed his philosophy of park policing. If the keepers took aggressive action against the kinds of offenses that posed the most distinctive threat to the park environment, they risked undermining the fragile authority that park officials had been granted. How should they handle offenses that did not even warrant a $5 fine or harsh words from a magistrate but that, left unchecked and multiplied by thousands, might cumulatively corrode the unique environment that New York had invested so much to create? The conception of park police as educators provided Olmsted's answer to that question: It directed the keepers to cultivate the tactics of persuasion and instruction on the park grounds before resorting to blunter forms of legal authority in the courtroom.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ As regulatory concern in the crowded and fragile urban environment expanded its scope to a wider range of less culpable behavior, the tools of regulation had to expand as well.

By contrast, Olmsted implied, the more conventional approach to park keeping he struggled against lacked the tools to handle the park's distinctive regulatory challenges. Under the guidance of a one-time Metropolitan Police commander such as Nathaniel Mills, the park police were simultaneously too lax in outright ignoring many venial violations and too aggressive in the response they made to the violations they did detect. “Gradually the force has assumed the character of an ordinary street police,” Olmsted complained. “Its members have lost pride and interest, and consequently use less skill and tact, in their special park-duties, and, perhaps unavoidably, appeals are made more and more to fear of punishment as a means of maintaining order.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ Thus arrests surged in the early 1870s at the very same moment that many park rules were becoming dead letters.Footnote ¹¹¹ The combination was not paradoxical. By overemphasizing their coercive powers at the expense of educational tools, the park police restricted the range of offenses they could reasonably tackle.