Catherine Seavitt Nordenson, “The Miasmist: George E. Waring, Jr. and Landscapes of Public Health”

good evening everyone thank you for joining us i'm anita varespecia professor and chair of the department of landscape architecture and i'm very pleased to welcome you tonight to a lecture by catherine steven nortenson before we begin a quick reminder that catherine will respond to questions after she has finished her lecture but please feel free to submit your questions into the queue at any time by using the q a button at the bottom of your zoom window we also have live captioning available for this event that you can enable by clicking the closed caption button at the bottom of your screen finally i want to invite you to join us tomorrow march 12th at pm for mayors imagining the just city a symposium featuring the seven inaugural mayor's institute on city design just city mayoral fellows they will discuss how to tackle racial injustices in each of their cities through planning and design interventions and on tuesday march 23rd at 7 30 pm editors mark lee and florencia rodriguez will reveal harvard design magazine number 48 america coming together for a discussion with a panel of contributors please check our website for more information on these and other events i am very pleased to welcome catherine steven northenson tonight as an architect and landscape architect she has crafted a career trajectory in which practice scholarly work design research advocacy and teaching are closely intertwined for the past decade and a half she has explored the intersection of landscape environment and politics leading a conversation that raises the fundamental question of the role of design in society responding to the catastrophic failure of the levees in new orleans during hurricane katrina in 2005 catherine was an early advocate of the use of soft infrastructure those liminal dynamic and ecological structures that make cities adaptable to sea level rise and large storm events in advocating for the replacement of hard protected barriers with soft ones catherine and her collaborators key northern sun and adam yarinsky made the argument that heart barriers present not only greater risk for those areas not protected but that these would exacerbate conditions of environmental injustice in cities affected by large-scale storm events such as new orleans and the new york metropolitan area out of this research came several important publications on the water palisade bay published in 2010 with an accompanying exhibition at the venice biennale was a study of the bathymetry of the new york harbor a history of its transformation over centuries of human intervention and a series of design speculations about its future this work was the basis of the museum of modern arts 2010 rising currents a series of workshops and exhibitions have demonstrated the power of design and visualization in catalyzing public debate around climate change waterproofing new york of 2016 co-edited with denise hoffman brandt is an interdisciplinary collection of essays and projects that explore the impact of large storms in the city's infrastructure and structures of coastal resilience of 2018 brought together academics and practitioners to address reconstruction efforts after hurricane sandy in addition to these books catherine has published numerous articles in journals and anthologies one of my favorites is a 2013 essay in art forum co-authored with gene nortenson titled river's edge climate change and risk assessment that makes the case for the importance of design as a translator of data and i quote art and design can mediate between the statistical abstractions of risk and its material and cultural effects they can also reimagine risks influence on how we build and inhabit our cities or go about our daily lives we need an art and design of risk to bring the science of risk back to reality end quote while all of this research and advocacy efforts on climate adaptation is taking place catherine advanced a long-standing a long-term research project on the political work of roberto woodley marks between 1967 and 1974 served as counselor to brazil's military regime in the federal council of culture in her 2018 book depositions roberto burley marks and the public landscapes under dictatorship she addresses the confluence of politics developmentalism and environmental protection in brazil her groundbreaking research reveals how the turn from democracy to a conservative neo-liberal dictatorship marked a shift in berlin mark's career from design to environmental advocacy in the face of unregulated developmental pressures although this research explores conditions in another geography political context and historical time i see an underlying commitment in her work to investigating the broader issue of how design engages those consequential matters that affect us all tonight we will hear about her current research on yet another timely topic how concerns for public health shaped the future of cities and their public landscapes and infrastructure during the second half of the 19th century through an examination of the work of sanitary engineer george e wiring junior welcome to the gsd catherine it is wonderful that you are with us tonight i passed the the screen on to you great thank you so much anita what a wonderful introduction it's great to be here the gsd um and i just thank you so much for all of your support over these years i think we have a fellow love of roberto burleigh marks and all things south american so i thank you so much for all of those those kind words i also should acknowledge that this work is being funded by the graham foundation as well as a grant from the foundation for landscape studies it's the subject of a new book that i'll be working on with my editor robert devins at the university of texas press the miasmas georgie waring jr and landscapes of public health a little bit about george e waring he's a marginal figure so i'll give a very brief introduction about one of his most important works in 1867 he published an influential manual entitled draining for profit draining for health reflecting three obsessions of the gilded age wealth health and miasma waring appointed by frederick law olmsted as superintendent of drainage for new york central park supported the long-held miasma theory insisting that the source of disease was connected to the environment and spread through the air as a poisonous vapor emerging through rotting organic matter or damp soil by the 1880s the new contagionist theory of the germ was gaining support in europe yet waring remained a lifelong miasmist in the united states he applied his technical knowledge of farm drainage to an urban theory of public sanitation beginning with the 1858 drainage plan for central park continuing as a set with sanitation studies from met for memphis and culminating as the commissioner of department of street cleaning in new york city followed by a brief tour of cuba this was a mechanistic battle against miasma that sought to modify the climate and therefore and thereby improve public health through a significant transformation of the urban landscape though waring conducted his work on scientifically unsound precepts his conclusions were unexpectedly successful given the miasma's interest in urban disease transfer particularly the spread of cholera and yellow fever waring's emphasis on the sanitation of the physical environment and the reduction of standing water which in turn destroyed the habitat of mosquito larvae led him to fail brilliantly he's an important but unsung hero of urban environmental history and of course we know that conditions such as health have constantly transformed our landscapes and think of the cholera epidemics which uh really were instrumental in producing central park in new york so reading that introduction i i think back to how i first started on this work about a couple of years ago particularly through some society of architectural historian panels and i always thought this was kind of really interesting idea of a brilliant failure that there was a great mind somehow incorrect in thinking that disease was in the air and that in fact the disease was adjourned like the disease couldn't be emanating from the earth as a miasmic vapor as you see in this image uh rising from the streets of london but in fact maybe he was right and i think that what's given me pause over the last year is this idea that in fact it is in the air there is a way of kind of thinking about the atmosphere and breath that is something that is about health and i like to refer to this incredible manifesto the maintenance manifesto of 1969 by mural lederman eucalyst and her statement about the maintenance or the art of maintenance and how critical this is when we think about health as well she says of course letter b two basic systems development and maintenance the sour ball of every revolution who's going to pick up the garbage on monday morning this was a kind of question that waring was concerned with here's another image of later menu kelly's with i may make maintenance art one hour every day from 1976 in which she worked with essential workers to make art in their work as maintenance here we see hartford wash 1973 in which she scrubs the steps and the walk in front of the anthonym in hartford this has resonance with waring's work and in fact meryl told me she believes that wearing is the first performance artist in fact and his work with new york city street cleaning was a performance of maintenance in fact to the extent that lavish parades were held in which the sanitation workers in the department of street cleaning would parade up fifth avenue dressed in white duck cotton uniforms being visible during the day here's some of the horse carts which would pick up refuse and garbage from around the city merrill implemented a similar uh performance with the department of new york city department of sanitation in 1977 called touch sanitation in which she personally went out into the streets of new york on every beat of every sanitation route and shook hands with 8500 sanitation workers saying to each one thank you for keeping new york alive this handshake ritual is very reminiscent in some ways of this idea that visibility and performance are much more than just performative acts but in fact active and alive the last image here the social mirror is a mirrored garbage truck which she paraded in the new york city art parade with creative time in 1983 which was concluded with a ceremonial sweep with these same street brushes which were developed by wearing for his department of street cleaning and she continues to do work of maintenance art choreography and testing these lines i think which are so pertinent today these questions of gender labor and the environment and how they intersect so how did waring become this performative and performing artist as a sanitation engineer he's born in 1833 and his first position in fact is a job with the incredible printer and journalist horace greeley so greely is actually a gentleman farmer he's working in new york at the press of course with the newspaper but here's his prince press corps but he's also purchased a small property up in chapaqua new york and part of that property is a boggy area low grove area which he wants to develop as a farm so he hires the young george waring just 20 years old at that time who's just completed a book about farming so he sees this young man as the farm manager who might be able to bring this land to a state of farmability the book from 1953 by waring is entitled the elements of agriculture a book for young farmers um first printed in 1953 but then revised in 1980 or sorry 1886 1868 and 1885. the first section is about the plant and we see that waring's interests are not about disease or maintenance but really about the question of farming so he begins in this very interesting place of scientific farming um he states to understand the plant one must actually break it down into its atmospheric and molecular parts so he writes that part which burns away during combustion which we will call atmospheric matter because it was derived by the plant from the air the ashes which remain we will call earthy matter because they were derived from the soil the atmospheric matter has become air and it was originally obtained from air the earthy matter has become earth and was obtained from the soil so we see here these two concerns of earth and air as elements that have an interchange the other important thing and this is part of the reason why greeley was so interested in working with waring was his notion of mechanical cultivation and within this chapter in this farming manual a chapter entitled advantages of under draining which is a tiling or draining mechanically the soil to reduce water and he states the two great rules of mechanical cultivation are thorough under draining deep and frequent disturbance of the soil and these are illustrations which come from his later draining for profit draining for health but are appearing in his reprints of this book um the clay pipes which he uses as part of this draining technique knit technique and the trenches that he develops in which the pipes are laid and this is the field at where at the greely farm which was drained and tiled by wearing he also insists on this turning of the earth and plowing so you can see the steel plow here and then the improved noxus horsehole here as well and these do appear in period photographs this is 1855 harris horace greeley with a ladder in the woods and at his concrete barn with the steel plow this image is suspected that the man the likely person in the image here is indeed george waring and you can see in the in the kind of shadows on the upper left uh greely's house in the woods built in 1854. greeley of course had a run for the presidency um did not win but he did start to engage the public space of his forest as part of his campaign this is him shortly before the end of his life he actually wrote for the hera for the new york tribune a newspaper column called what i know of farming practical agriculture and that was compiled into a book in 1870 in which he actually starts to speak about this interest in draining that he's played out on his farm and recommends wearing within his book as well i shall not attempt to give instructions in dream making but i urge every novice in the art to procure wearings or some other work on the subject and study it carefully then if you can obtain at a fair price of services of an experienced drainer hire him to supervise the work the book that um where begins wearing some kind of writing career he writes over eight to ten books during his prolific career is essentially looking again at this question of farming so we don't see much about disease but there's this one note that occurs towards the end of the book one very important though not strictly agricultural of thorough drainage is its removal of certain local diseases peculiar to the vicinity of marshy or low moist soils the health reports in several places in england show that where fever and og was once common it has almost entirely disappeared since the general use of underdrains in those localities so we hear a little bit about this question of health which will become the subject of his next most important text draining for profit and draining for health in which he lays out plans about how to implement a series of tile drains um drawn perpendicularly to the slope these are laid in in this fishbone or herringbone pattern as you see on the right here and direct that water subgrade to the source of the stream and he even includes illustrations of the the tools used to trench the ditches in which the the pipes will be laid in 1857 waring moves to new york city and is hired by egbert vealey to work as a sanitary engineer for the new project of central park and this is a pretty important shift he moves in fact to the farmhouse of george of frederick law olmsted um on staten island so in fact he meets olmsted through family friends is in and is a larger at his far larger at his farm um but olmsted has not yet begun working for the park so in fact waring is there before him working directly with egbert feely this is the act the senate and assembly of the state of new york central park act of 1857 which sets aside a described area of land which shall become the central park and here in very early 1836 um topographic map of the the middle section of manhattan where you can see a faint orange sepia outline indicating the land that would become the central park really is a surveyor general egbert veli trained at west point and in this image you can see that he's in his military costume he hires waring to execute a drainage survey with him um this is probably his most well-known map it's the sanitary and topographic map of the city and island of new york 1865 which has those three colors of marsh meadow and made land the maidland being those fringes of brown around the lower part of manhattan this detail shows you the area that will become central park and the lowlands of the new reservoir but he also goes through a very precise study and survey of that territory of the central park as described in the act and this is the first critical critically and carefully constructed survey and every building here that's colored in red will be destroyed for the clearing of the park territory as public park which of course we know seneca village was one of those settlements within the footprint described as the central park of the freed black community that was founded in 1825. um vieli then updates this map and creates what he proposes to be a good plan for the park um so you can see the survey on the top the receiving reservoir exists within the space already that's being set aside this is 1856 and at the same time veli draws a proposal for a public park with the meandering lanes and gardens within when you look at this comparison you can see again veli's surveyed i have a detail here at the new reservoir the old reservoir and seneca village and then the translation into this image of a park-like space and of course we see the erasure of all of the pre-existing buildings and then he goes on with george waring so this is the first collaborative work that they do to begin a drainage plan for the park to start thinking about how to bring water out of the marshy areas of the park as delineated by veli this is in 1856 57. the commissioners however find this a rather appalling image and and call for a competition to design a new park for the space that's been set aside vieli enters this competition with his same drawing entry number 28 and we see many entries with various degrees of whimsy this is john rinks entry number four with topiary galore egbert veli sorry this is this is mislabeled this is i'm sorry george waring's um entry in fact he also creates an entry the art the handmaid of nature entry number 29 and calvert vox in frederick law olmsted with the greensboro plan for central park entry number 33. this is the selected park plan and so these two men will go on to become the the implementers of this design for the greensboro plan at the central park olmsted fires veli from the park commission and hires uh waring as his sanitary engineer and in this photograph taken at willowdale arch in the scent in central park in 1862 we see six men all of whom are part of this kind of co-creation of the park who are andrew haswell-green who's the comptroller george waring is the second from the left then we see albert vox the architect ignatz anton pilat chief gardener i'm jacob raymould the designer who does much of the ornamental stone work for the park fret and frederick wall olmstead of course the landscape architect and park superintendent we often hear mostly about vox and olmstead these these are the other kind of additional design thinkers and builders of the park as well the miasma question is a very interesting one and of course um olmsted was a miasmist it can be claimed as was veli and of course i believe this is how waring comes to understand this question of disease and damp soil so the creation of the park and the necessity for draining the park was very much framed within this context of disease suppression and a place for public health and we see a very explicitly stated within draining for profit draining for health the approach that waring now is making in terms of a connection between health wetland and miasma and in the statement for this commissioner's report the first annual report of the board of commissioners in 1859 this is written the thorough drainage of the park below the old reservoir is nearly completed the drive is for the most part graded not only within the same area but also extending to the north above the new reservoir portions of the drive intended as samples have been constructed in different methods with their superstructure in order to test the relative cost and efficiency of each the ride for equestrians is in progress several miles of the walks are graded drained and graveled and in a condition for use so this is a report describing the work of the drainage system on this lower park part of central park that's been completed up to the end of the year in 1858 and this is waring's plan of the drainage that he now designs for the greensward plan again looking at the existing natural courses of waterways within the park and then bringing water through these these um tiled tube systems of ceramic tubes laid into the ground as they had been done at horace greeley's farm here you can see this main in black the main drain to the upper left of this drawing and if you look back to the survey of veli you can see the existing the pre-existing stream which essentially that main pipe is beginning is echoing and draining to the pond at the bottom left of the image in the southeastern corner of the park and here another detail of that same flow path where you start to see every one of those red herringbone structures which are the tubes that are now buried below the park creating this mechanistic movement of water to the low points and draining of the grounds complete with incredible details of sluice gates and mechanisms for raising and lowering and controlling the levels of the pond and the lake within central park as well this is this loose skate at the southernmost pond of course then the civil war comes 1861 so shortly after the the work for the park has been um thoroughly commenced um olmsted is appointed general secretary of the united states sanitary commission um treating a commission appointed by lincoln in which he treats upwards he and his commission treat upwards as 8 000 sick and wounded soldiers so he's the general secretary so the third dot down um in the commission these are field hospitals for the civil war throughout the the nation likewise waring is drawn into the civil war as well as major um he's listed on this uh per the order of the three three soldiers at the bottom right of the image to join um garibaldi guard he's actually sent to saint louis missouri and he is their commander of the fourth missouri calvary regiment from february 16 1862 through november 1865. and this is where he attains the title of colonel this is a sheep music piece for his bugle march of his uh fremont hussar's bugle march for his mustard calvary shortly after the war um he moves back to the east coast to rhode island and that's where he writes draining for profit draining for health really a compendium of everything he's been working toward since the time at greeley's farm and through central park this question of drainage and health being brought to the fore in 1878 waring is sent to memphis tennessee to investigate the aftermath of the yellow fever epidemic um which has killed massive numbers of the population and in fact he looks at this question of drainage again now layering in the narrative of sewage as well at the city scale so he's moved from the large park from the farm to a large park and now to the scale of the city and we see here just the images of these mississippi riverboats um at the landing in memphis um interestingly of course because there's no knowledge of how yellow fever is transmitted the fact that there's in fact a vector the mosquito which has been moving up and down the mississippi from the south is not known so though he goes through a whole series of analyses and draining creating a new sewage map and drainage plan for the city of memphis this does alleviate some of the standing water which has been the habitat of those mosquitoes but he does not connect the mosquito and the disease at this time so again miasma is still the narrative and the germ theory and the question of vector has not yet been discovered he publishes his plan and there's uh the sewage of memphis and in a large uh another text which he writes sewerage and land drainage so again we start to see an expansion beyond merely the drainage of land for um reducing water in marshy areas but also this question of sewerage and control of the sewage systems of cities he writes most importantly the health question take care of the death rate and the death rate will take care of itself returning to new york in 1895 through 1897 he's appointed commissioner of the new york city department of street cleaning and it is a new reformist mayor william lafayette strong who appoints both george waring as commissioner of the department of street cleaning but also theodore roosevelt as commissioner of the police department so the two are both commissioners at the same moment under the same mayorship this period of time within new york's street cleaning agency produces yet another book this one street cleaning and the disposal of a city's wastes methods and results and the effect upon public health public morals and municipal prosperity george waring again like has begun to start to layer in another narrative and this one is morality so again this question of the sanitary city um filth disease and morals have become entwined these are well-known images of the streets both before and after waring's appointment as commissioner and you can see the mounds of trash then completely cleaned through his methods which are really the kind of uh narrative of bringing a militaristic approach to the crew of sanitation workers for the city that are dubbed the white wings decked out in white cotton duck uh uniforms and we see some white wings with the horse cart sweeping and with the new handheld hand cart for sweeping curbs as well snow removal was another task of the white wings as it still is today for the department of sanitation but it was really the performative aspect of this notion of the removal and the maintenance of the streets where waring is really at his finest he creates um such uniformity and beauty in these identically dressed force of workers at the same time he takes them with his equestrian steed as well from his military days uh he leads the parade on horseback often organizing parades with over thousands of men along fifth avenue celebrating that triumph of sanitation so indeed the performance artist of wearing plays out very explicitly in these images of the parading of the force of white wings and of course some of his tasks in fact that he he layers into not only the cleaning of garbage but also the separation of waste and reduction and recycling starts to really begin at its its nascents with wearing as commissioner the final coda to his his varied career is in 1898 when he's invited by president mckinley to examine the situation of sanitation in the streets of havana and he proposes the department of public cleansing and i think this quote which is from his draft sanitary report upon his return to new york from havana is very telling he writes the poison of yellow fever is ponderable it clings to low levels and usually follows the lines of greatest humidity like malaria it is more active or at least more to be feared by night than by day the danger from it in any quarter of an infected locality depends on the presence primarily of filth secondarily of dampness and it increases in direct proportion to the confinement and stagnation of the air so again we hear this notion of the air as the source of disease here is the uh cuba under spanish rule of course the spanish-american war very short-lived in 1898 obtained that that island nation as an annex to the united states it's part of this greater empire and we see waring again here he's the first person in the front row on this arch once again standing on an arch with a number of men in this effort to rethink a problem or create a solution to a health crisis as he had done so many decades earlier here's the entrance to havana harbor and he's actually back with his police commissioner theodore roosevelt is there leading the rough riders in the spanish-american war in 1898 and again part of this ambitious expansionism of the u.s in 1898 the celebratory english image of the eagle spreading its wings across these island nations which have been claimed over the past 100 years as this expansionist territory of the united states cuba is just one of a series of imperial and ambitious claims made by the us on the rest of the globe here you see in this map very interestingly the line of yellow fever and the mapping of disease in this territory so you can see the the source as waring would claim in his draft report of yellow fever came from the soils of cuba the issue with the the issue of yellow fever of course in havana and in cuba in general now as part of the nation of the united states uh is that in fact more lives of soldiers were being claimed by yellow fever than by any kind of um casualty at war so this is why waring is called to examine the situation because of the ambition of the u.s to start looking at cuba as another place for profit not unlike looking at a farm for profit but this in this case it's looking at exploiting this new colonial enterprise and maintaining the health of those who will be there to deploy that labor so part of this mission to cuba is in fact to bring health and sanitation to those streets in parallel in fact at the same time as waring's visit robert porter goes as well to cuba to look at this idea of the industries that might be developed on the island um and how the united states might profit from these and we see in these images from that period the same streets that waring was examining as part of his report um on the situation in cuba of course sugar cane is a major industry here and we can see again in some of these images again of the same time as waring's visit um of the process of extraction and movement of cane in a massive mess of ways for extracting sugar cane and syrup however after a two-week study uh in which waring outlines a series of plans to develop a department of street cleaning for havana he contracts in fact from a mosquito bite unbeknownst to him yellow fever himself and he sails back to new york falls ill the day he returns and dies on the second day of his return in new york he's buried in a metal casket in fact actually on this crematorium island swinburne island at the time which was a quarantine zone for those who had what was thought to be transmissible even after death with yellow fever so he's actually taken out by the very thing that he had denied all along the fact that it was not um a miasmic cause so it's interesting to reflect now like on this question of the miasmist and simply really just two years after his death uh walter reed announces that he has discovered in fact the source of yellow fever he writes in 1901 it has been permitted to me in my assistance to lift the impenetrable veil that has surrounded the causation of this most dreadful pest of humanity and to put it on a rational and scientific basis the prayer that has been mine for 20 or more years that i might be permitted in some way or some time to do something to alleviate human suffering has been answered and this is major walter reed in 1900 but i think there still remains this question of the air which is another element the connection of the atmosphere and the earth that we're wearing so poetically describes in his first book on farming remains part of our our public health concern and indeed the mosquito as well so these streets within havana according to this draft report which is drafted in fact on the boat on waring's return to new york will eventually it will be adopted by havana and you can see in 1901 these images after waring's death where indeed the street cleaners of new york city have been replicated in havana as well so the maintenance art and the sweeping continues in this active maintenance and performance and performativity uh remain some of the most interesting contributions of george e waring jr thank you okay thank you catherine so much wonderful story i can't wait to see how this all develops when when the book comes out um so we we have questions i believe already lining up um and uh and i so i will get to it from maureen marlowe how durable were the tiles wearing used for drainage at the greeley farm and at central park they're ceramic that's a good question maureen thanks for asking in fact i know maureen through her work with the olmsted farm on staten island um it's it's a very interesting question the only way to find the answer is to dig them up to see if they're still intact or if they've become clogged it's it's quite interesting in central park as well it's the same technique with ceramic tile and some areas the park knows in fact the conservancy and new york city parks understand that there has been a change to the um the condition of the tiles and the efficacy because wetlands are forming so essentially there are probably some areas where those ceramic tiles have either crushed or have been clogged so i don't know if there's any way other than to excavate to determine what the condition of undertale draining is if khan is asking when is your book due out oh my gosh i'm not sure if my editor's in the audience but we're working for a spring 2022 or fall 2022 release okay uh anxiously awaiting no pressure elisa silva asks the fact that yellow fever was transmitted through a mosquito bite was known in other parts of the caribbean in guadalupe island and in venezuela because louis daniel bobert we discovered it in 1838 and presented it at the french academy of sciences how is it possible that waring knew nothing of this even 60 years later yes so well walter reed does not he's not the sole discoverer of this connection between yellow fever and mosquito the mosquito bite and in fact there's a very i believe it's fit carlos finlay is a very important scientist who's cuban in fact who comes up with this mosquito theory many decades before walters walter reads conclusive evidence so it's another example of science and superiority aligning where one party is not believing the scholarship of another and so i think there is this very interesting moment um it's it's with the overlap of the germ theory and miasma as well so there were deniers uh in both cases of how disease was transmitted it's very um it's you know science is a is a very you know human and squishy thing and i think there's a lot of um ways of thinking about science which are completely weighted and fraught with biases and i think part of the reason finlay's argument and his evidence was never recognized at all of the scientific conferences and medical conferences he attended was because he was cuban he was not [Music] born in the united states or had not studied at the institutions within the u.s or europe and that makes them blind to the sort of fact that all of the caribbean basin is cultivating sugarcane which grows in marshes exactly the map coincides with with the extraction exactly um all right jay wilbur forest what do you know about waring's descendants if any well he was married and there was one daughter it's kind of a funny story um i found a little bit about his wife but very little about the offspring there's a daughter um but the there's a very funny story he was cremated on swinburne and uh because of the condition of you know the fact he had been infected uh with yellow fever but there's these very funny i don't know you know what level to see them as uh true or not but there are a number of journal uh newspaper um articles that talk about the ashes of george waring now his wife left for italy and never came to pick them up and then someone threw them out and actually used the mug to just you know as a you know to drink beer essentially so there's a very funny you know maybe apocryphal uh but it was i think there was just one descendant and i'm not sure it's a great question i'll have to dig in to see what became of her but there's uh apparently um an interesting relationship barry bergdahl great lecture catherine how verse do you think wiring was in the hydraulics that were part of contemporary european parks such as the work of alfond in paris great question hi barry um i think this is a good good question because i don't think his water works were [Music] that demonstrative let's say so it's a really good question because so much of the gravity-fed fountains and that technology um was developed in europe he did study european farming techniques as did olmsted but i don't know that he knew or was interested in the performance of water which is a very interesting question given his interest in performance in general like it doesn't i don't think there's ever an example where he allows water to be displayed in that kind of celebratory way that you would see in a fountain and i don't think that he had much role in the fountains even within central park i think he really was looking at this idea of drainage as something that was really shunting the water away as opposed to displaying it um michael king asks um you mentioned that merle leatherman eucalyst referred to waring as the first performance artist this sounds reminiscent of robert smithson's highlighting olmsted and saying um sid was the first earthwork artist why do you think these artists are highlighting such 19th century figures and what drew you to wiring wow that's like a multi-part question michael thank you i mean i think there is there is this incredible um the fantastic the dialectic landscape um essay by robert smithson in which he really does posit that that this landscape architect is the first earth artist because he's moving earth and he's placed you know he's really thought about how the earth can be shaped i always think about that tunnel on on 79th street in the traverse where there's a live rock tunnel that is blasted through and in fact you see him actually sculpting the earth for passage subterranean passage um that's interesting question so why were these 19th century i think that you know there's a really fascinating connection i think between it's fascinating to think that both ukuleles and and um smithson are looking back to these performers in some ways and that really speaks a little bit to the performative nature of the work at that time maybe i mean i think this notion of sculpture and land is really pretty fascinating what was the third part of the question anita sorry michael sure um what drew you to wearing what drew me to wearing yes absolutely i really am very curious about marginal figures and i think i see in wearing i mean interestingly and maybe this could be argued but i see burleigh marks also as a kind of marginal figure um in a greater sea of of um the modern period uh which is one of the reasons i was attracted to him but i think for wearing what's fascinating about him is first of all he was alongside so many important political figures in the 19th century and often you know dispatched by presidents to all of these locations around the country and the world really if you think of the caribbean basin as well uh it's interesting to think about how someone like that sees the other things going on around them and that's why i think those who are marginalized often offer a very interesting read on historic events that we don't always get from the kind of more well-known figures so i think that's really the the main reason why the interest in wearing but i think another layered one is this question of the commissioners and being a new yorker and you know active at city college there's a long history at city college to produce commissioners and i think his role in looking at this kind of historical lineage of the various commissioners and various public agencies is a very fascinating narrative as well so thank you for that question i'm going to jump in well with my own question because it's somewhat related to a few that have been asked so when olmsted writes public parks and the enlargement of towns he you know he seems to describe in a way that this kind of um duality on the one hand he he's bringing sort of the experience of nature into the city on the other one he wants to he's modernizing the city and one of the signifiers for this is the way he talks about getting rid of mud so mud which is you know in all sort of the roads of not only of uh outside of the city in the countryside is a problem uh also of course havana is not paved um and um and it's it's curious that that the surface is the thing that becomes modernized but the atmosphere in a way isn't meaning the trees the forest the experience um and did did waring talk about mud also as he's trying to drain did he talk about it in in any way in terms of uh wanting to modernize uh the city i'm trying to think if there's explicit yes definitely in his first farming book it's all about soil i mean there's a whole treatise on the plant and then on the soil and so that is that thing where he's looking at the connection between earth and sky or earth and atmosphere specifically um what one thing that wearing really comes out with and this is with the the cuban recommendations for havana is what you see is in fact this love for asphaltum which has really just been developed and this idea that you could seal the surface so one of his one of his seven recommendations for havana is to apply us baltom as he calls it or asphalt surfaces as this continuous surface of waterproof material which seals the mud so it seems weirdly counterintuitive because of course he's been working with this notion of drainage which is implying porosity or that the earth is absorptive and water may pass through it and then be shunted at another at a lower elevation to obtain that dryness or the lack of mud i don't remember i have to look it's a good question i wonder if there's explicit references to mud in the urban realm that he makes but he's certainly understanding soil from a farmer's perspective and i think he maintains with him that farmer's perspective throughout his career though he shifts again much more toward thinking about um questions of sewage and health right so he's he's kind of moving towards this phenomena that's el but i think what's what was really surprising to me was that recommendation for asphalt which then of course would shunt the water away somewhere else and that notion that you can't absorb uh when you seal the mud under a layer of bitumen but it but it also makes the the surface of the city as even in the streets uh smooth and clean and comforting and comfortable and you can sweep it which of course you cannot sweep mud right anyways just just a thought of um i thought it made me wonder whether he had spoken clearly about this okay um let's see uh dr nina i cannot see the rest of your last name i'm so sorry um did warren ever explicitly disagree with developing germ theories yes he states very strongly and uh vehemently his rejection of the germ theory well after its acceptance and by 1880 it was pretty much understood and accepted in europe but he continued to argue against it i think because of you know one could speculate why but i think he really was a believer in um that mechanistic operations on the ground could actually uh that those were actually proving um to produce better health and he argues that his memphis plan of course solved the problem of yellow fever so in his mind he's also trying he's trotting this plan around to other cities you should use my memphis separated sewer system so he's also a salesman to some degree so he's got to be behind his um his claim that it has to do with the emanations from the ground and that this is the way to cure that so i think he has to be even if deep inside he may not believe it he has to be forward um in presenting himself as a champion of the miasma theory lisa thompson says hi from memphis and asks the city has benefited from the early separation of the storm sewer and the sanitary sewer systems developed by warring as a follow-up to the first question over time there has been deterioration of those early yes over time there has been deterioration of those early ceramic types yeah that's that's good to hear but i think what's very um what's telling here and i think thank you lisa it's great to have someone from memphis here um there's a separated system and of course in new york and chicago all of our 19th century cities most have a combined system so waring was arguing for separation of uh sanitary um sewage and storm sewage so he produced to separate a separated system that was not now that could not have this kind of outfall problem that we have now it's pretty interesting um but has its issues of course um okay does climate variability affect drainage conditions in central park there are i mean it's a very it is mechanical there are some interesting narratives i mean think of there's a couple things that come to mind with that question first of all is freezing right so the the uh recommendations that we see in horus greely one of the things he states very directly is that um the out the reason these are buried is to stay below the frost line and that the outfall should also be below the frost line because otherwise you have issues with your outfall so there's that notion of cold but i think the more interesting climatic condition is that of rainfall and within central park there's a very controlled lake and pond level so both the lake and the pond can be mechanically drained to some degree in order to accommodate rainfall so interestingly because these are low points um both the l the lake at the southern part of the ramble and the pond at the south southeastern corner of the park both are drained in anticipation of heavy rainfall by parks staff in order to accommodate the influx of more rainfall so that the the whole system is not overwhelmed so there is a kind of controlling um that is done through the system of drains within the park so there's the ability to kind of both hold and hold in reserve as a as a kind of detention mechanism um within the lakes i hope that might answer the question but i think that the bigger question is really that one of rainfall in terms of thinking about how climate uh transformations are going to be much more impactful moving forward increased and hotter and wetter days is the real impact here and jacob asks what was done with the water after it was collected uh is i think this is um the water is being really sheeted along so the i'll answer that maybe specifically as to uh within central park so the waters is being sent to these low points but then it outfalls into the city sewer system so it goes into the storm sewers from the low points of the park so it actually doesn't stay within the park um specific it's never fully managed by the park itself it actually outfalls when it reaches a certain elevation of water out to the sewage system and then out to to the east river daniel toner asks can you say more about what was in central park beforehand and what was erased yeah i think that there were a number you can see on that actually the municipal archives of the city of new york has that first survey made in 1857 by um egbert vealey and there he's actually drawing and read every structure which exists in the park at that time so that survey was really a survey of all of the built structures within the perimeter of the land which was being set apart by by the central park act as public land um so the red is telling it's probably it means demo right so all of everything that's in red on that plan will be demolished um seneca village certainly that was one of the kind of clusters of owned homes um on that kind of central western side of the park but there was also mount st vincent there was a [Music] large complex of buildings in the northeastern corner of the park as well and then you see houses throughout the entire park there's actually a little scattering of structures throughout so there was quite i mean it was still farm land in general around that area at the time um certainly not anything like we have now but all of those structures were demolition demoed by the um the unveiling of the park and the creation of central park okay um a question from our own dean sarah whiting what a terrific talk on such an amazing topic katherine thank you my question concerns expertise can you speak to the expertise that waring brought to this world of health-driven landscape engineering design and how expertise plays out today this generalism seems to be something that you share but that is not reflected i would argue in professional practice today wow yeah so expertise i mean i think certainly what waring brought hi sarah thank you for that that question is great i think the um this is interesting so this question of um what does he bring he he learned everything he could about farming and i think this was from a very early age um so his books are prolific and and very um detailed he's really struggling with this question of scientific farming he sees himself as a scientific farmer who has expertise indeed in ideas of terrain ground plants and manure how to use manure fertilizer right so he's looking at these all these layers of how it's like early earth sciences in a way of how to understand um the earth and the climate and the atmosphere so there's this really deep study as he moves through this kind of series of you can think about him as moving through these books or as this series of chapters in a way of his own life and i think often we see this in these late 19th century figures the disruption of the war and so so many of these men who are taking these kind of roles and then shifting their roles as disrupted by that period of the civil war which produces other kinds of expertise i believe but it also creates these these ruptures i think and it's interesting to think that each rupture and when he's moving from place to place something new enters in and he tries to dig in again with this sort of desire to understand how everything works and so in some ways his expertise is really that um that drive whatever it might be to find these ways of narratives that work for the solutionism that he's proposing right which is fraught so there's not always in fact many of his solutions have very um unintended unintended but real and serious consequences as well but i think that his kind of moving from place to place from job to job in a way um and the situations in which he finds himself allows him to shift from not only only looking at the question of agriculture in the plant but then beginning to look at questions of health and hygiene and then to ongoing questions which start to get very explicitly played out from the department of sanitation or the department of street cleaning as it was called at that time to cuba where it starts to address questions of race class and morality and so i think we see um some infection of this kind of pure earth science with some of the um the morals of the day in fact and and that starts to layer in as well in not always a good way was warring a colonialist if so did he think that drainage would help further u.s colonial intentions in the caribbean and the philippines yeah he didn't work in the philippines but of course that's the same period of expansionism 1898 i think that all farmers in some ways are colonialists and that there there is a kind of settling that's happening there and a transformation of land use from one thing to another so i think uh definitely i i would say i don't know that he um it's interesting to think where his politics would have been in all the american uh support of the spanish american war was very strong um and i think that the his parody in some ways with robert porter who was there looking at industrial cuba i would have to say yes he was on board with this mission that he had been um given right by rutherf rutherford to go and see um how to improve the condition on the ground for these white settlers who didn't have a kind of history of an immune system that had been you know primed with with mosquito bites from childhood and and so therefore less more likely to become ill with yellow fever i mean this was really what was causing all of the uh the illnesses with the with the white soldiers who were not from the region but i think he must have been you know he just lost his job again so you know once one mayor goes down strong was at the end of his mayorship that was the end of his term as commissioner so he needed to find work and he saw i believe a way to model another kind of street cleaning department for cuba so of course his livelihood was going to depend on the success of that project and i think the fundamental mission of the project was to think about how to be create profit again training for health and profit uh in this case profit from the exploitation of whatever the industries of cuba could and were right and how those had been exploited in the past of course is known but so yeah i guess he was part of that american imperial colonialist moment all right and then one last uh question slash comment from fadi massoud hello from toronto great lecture super fascinating work and incredibly relevant parallel to a world that links public health discourse to the role of the shared public urban surface right away especially in an era of increased flooding vulnerability and a global pandemic so many excellent lessons to be learned especially for landscape architects and planners everywhere it's true it's interesting because this project's been going on for a couple of years pre it was pre pandemic it's a pre-pandemic project and everything we look at now goes we have to put on our pandemic lenses and think about everything again um which i think is very uh it's a it's an interesting time to rethink wearing for sure because he's really um at this moment where he's looking at the public landscape as something that is very much about um supporting health and that he sees a way to think make things more hygienic and he believes it's in the air right he thinks disease is in the air and so there's this hyper clean thing that you see even in his portraits seated with the gloves in this very fastidious way he was probably a neat freak right he probably had you know filth issues and i think that there's something kind of parallel happening now where you know our relationship with microbes has become completely if we were just starting to get along uh everyone's really kind of thinking about another way of dealing or masking and filtering filtering our contact with the air and the atmosphere and so i think there's there's some kind of questions which are certainly in the air and that are um very much powerful now at this moment that this will be an interesting way to kind of look at history through a different lens and think about how we might look forward as well okay and then one last question from lisa thompson can you comment on waring's contribution to the development of standards and practices for the design of urban drain systems especially in the u.s with smaller step down pipe sizes compared with european approaches at the time using larger pipe size such as in paris etc well i can't speak to that with great expertise but i think it is interesting the small size of the pipes that were deployed in this drainage uh the field drainage that wearing was doing and then transfers to the park um there are a few larger i think those black lines that you see on his drainage plan for central park are some some are 24 inch pipes but i think they're generally very very small and it was seen as this kind of um uh you know it's quite a minimal structure and even his separated sewage systems again in memphis uh were very small diameter pipes and so it's an interesting question that i'll look further into but um it's a question about sizing and um efficacy and flushing as well right i think that's where the problem with the smaller pipes starts to be you know problematic is the the question of clog and flush all right well thank you so much catherine this was a wonderful talk we i think many people will look forward to the publication of of your book thank you to the audience also for all your wonderful questions and i want to also thank matt page and kat from the communications office this is our last event of the year it's been a wonderful year thank you for your help and for making everything so smooth in such a challenging moment so good night everyone and we'll see you soon you

Channel: Harvard GSD

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Id: tImJLmO94eE

Length: 72min 5sec (4325 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 14 2021