Dawn Day Biehler: Animating Central Park
Interviewed by Catherine McNeur
Today on Gotham, Catherine McNeur interviews Dawn Day Biehler about her new book, Animating Central Park: A Multispecies History, which traces more than a hundred years in New Yorkers’ relationships with nature and with each other through the lens of Central Park.
What inspired you to start researching the more-than-human history of Central Park?
The project originated ages ago, during my first semester of graduate school when I was taking a seminar class about humans and wildlife. I was learning about the colonial legacy of wildlife conservation in African contexts, and I wondered whether there were similar dynamics in cities in the United States. I chose to investigate Central Park mostly because its architecture and architects heavily influenced other parks across the US. My choice of Central Park was also motivated by my experience growing up in upstate New York. I was concerned about the relationship between New York City and its suburban and rural hinterlands – both the cultural meanings of city and countryside, and how the city exploited more land, water, plant and animal life, and human labor as it grew.
Animating Central Park: A Multispecies History
by Dawn Day Biehler
University of Washington Press
December 2024
When I learned about the city’s destruction of Seneca Village and the displacement of Black and immigrant folks, that confirmed to me that there were important similarities between urban parks in the US and colonial parks in Tanzania, for example, where European conservationists displaced communities that had long lived with wildlife there. And of course Central Park added another layer of landscape change that further erased centuries of Indigenous relationships with animals in Lenapehoking. For example, the area known as McGowan’s Pass had been part of the Wickquasgeck Trail, long used for, among other things, accessing hunting and fishing sites by Munsee peoples. Both Central Park and wilderness parks, from Serengeti to Yellowstone, were created largely by elites who manipulated landscapes in ways that were rooted in European aesthetics and ideas about separation between humans and nature.
While the zoo might be the first place most minds go to when considering the creatures of Central Park, there are other spaces where conflicts took place. The Ramble, for instance, one of my favorite places in the park, stood out as a spot that you repeatedly turn to. Can you speak to what makes landscapes like that rich places to tell stories about New Yorkers of all species?
I also love the Ramble! There are so many layers to it – literally and figuratively. Vaux and Olmsted planned it to evoke a wild landscape, with layers of vegetation, from ground cover to shrubs to canopy, with winding paths that created new vistas at every turn – but they wrote very little about the wild animals that might take advantage of this complex space. Yet as this very manipulated landscape matured in the 1850s and 60s, it also provided a diversity of resources – food, shelter, and water – to migratory and resident birds. Meanwhile, early park patrons, like the art critic Clarence Cook, predicted (approvingly, I should add) that human couples would visit the Ramble’s rustic shelters for romantic moments. Cook was writing in a very heteronormative vein, but queer folks were also among those who claimed this space for social gathering and for romantic trysts. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that queer folks would also want to exist here, but for many decades environmental histories have erased the presence of queer folks in supposedly “natural” areas.
The conflict over sexuality, identity, and landscape in the Ramble came under Robert Moses’s parks administration, which ran from 1934 to 1960. During much of this time, the parks budget was strained to maintain many parts of Central Park, including the Ramble. This coincided with heightened policing of queer people and spaces in New York and elsewhere in the US. In 1955, Moses unveiled a plan to remake the Ramble as a senior citizens’ recreation area; this was billed in part as an effort to reduce “erosion” there and maintain the bird habitat. There certainly was a need to better maintain the soil and the vegetation in the Ramble, but Moses and some others conflated that need for maintenance with campaigns to expel certain people. Birders did an amazing job using their political power to protect the site, and Moses eventually scrapped his plans. Today there are efforts to foreground queer communities in the stories of other rich urban wildlife habitats, like Abney Park Cemetery in London and the Vale in Prospect Park in Brooklyn. These stories are much more about coexistence and community rather than conflict, which I think is a good thing.
Dawn, you are particularly skilled at telling a story where animals take center stage and aren’t simply pawns in human power conflicts. Can you share with readers one of the many ways that non-human animals have actively shaped Central Park?
I don’t mean to troll Frederick Law Olmsted, but one of the best examples comes from goats. Olmsted detested goats for their ability to alter the landscape; in later years he recalled them as an infestation. Goats were a popular domestic animal in this part of the city before the park because they were great at making use of rocky land and producing milk for families. It was probably safer for babies to get milk from the family goats than for families to buy milk from certain cow dairies. Anyway, after the city seized the land for the park, many families who had lived there moved just a few blocks away, and the children continued to herd the goats around the neighborhood. Many made their way into the park, wandering off and browsing on the growing shrubbery that was carefully planned by architects Olmsted and Vaux and planted by the horticulture staff.
We can also think of the many species of birds, including migratory songbirds, who visit the Ramble and the North Woods. Consider the way they altered the sonic environment of the city with their songs. Another example is that of swans and fish, many of which were donated to the park in the early decades. They altered the environment of the park’s lakes and ponds, creating new flows of nutrients and sparking visitors’ interest in the park’s waters with their behaviors.
Animals leave few records behind so I have found that historians who study the lives of animals tend to get pretty scrappy in the archives as they pull these stories together. What was one of your best archival finds as you researched this book?
I could go on at length about the amazing resources I’ve explored at the New York Public Library, the New-York Historical Society, and the Library of Congress, including hundreds of digitized photographs of humans and non-human animals together. I probably spent the most time in the New York City Municipal Archives, and the wonderful archivists there helped me pore over boxes and boxes of Parks Department records. One such box contained the ledger books kept by the Zoological Department under Director William Conklin, who was in that role from about 1870 until the mid 1890s. Administrators knew that animals were a major attraction for New Yorkers to come to the Park, and Conklin and his staff endeavored mightily to make sure there were always lively animals for visitors to see. From the 1870s to the 1890s there is at least one entry each day about something that happened with the animals in the park, written in a scrolling nineteenth century script that strains my training in cursive from grade school. The entries are fairly terse, but reading between those lines are stories about so many lives, human and non-human. Those pages reveal the yearly rhythms of life in the sheepfold – birth of the lambs, nursing, shearing, the sheep auctions. We learn of the many people who donated animals to the menagerie, often under odd circumstances – capturing animals they encountered in the growing city, or giving up pets that they couldn’t keep any more. And even in those terse lines, we get a sense of how worried the zoological staff were about birds who weren’t in cages; there are many entries about swan injuries, and also efforts to capture wild birds to protect them within the menagerie.
What lessons can readers take from these multi-species stories that might benefit urban parks today?
One important lesson is that people of all identities and positions in society are interested in animals in urban spaces, but efforts to support wildlife habitat or animal agriculture in cities are typically very top-down. Dominant people and institutions like city planners and wealthy patrons shaped Central Park’s fauna to recreate their ideals of nature there. But other folks – Black, immigrant, queer, children – also had their own connections to creatures, and they pushed back on the dominant view of nature in important ways. My students and I work with community groups in Baltimore who are trying to manage green space, and they have amazing visions for integrating their own well-being with that of urban wildlife and domesticated animals. I hope that the stories in Animating Central Park can build the case for distributing power more widely in managing urban green spaces.
Another lesson is that, if we truly care about urban animals, we also have to think beyond the city. The people who originally brought animals to Central Park worried about the loss of animal populations elsewhere, but they seemed to think it was kind of inevitable with urbanization, industrialization, and western expansion. They seemed a bit too complacent just preserving a few creatures for city-dwellers to look at. Today, birds and bats and even zoo animals in the city help us feel an immediate connection to the more-than-human world, and I hope that connection inspires us to care about other landscapes that sustain our non-human relations.
Dawn Biehler is author of Pests in the City: Flies, Bedbugs, Cockroaches, and Rats (University of Washington Press, 2013) and Animating Central Park: A Multi-Species History (University of Washington Press, 2024). She is Professor of Geography and Environmental Studies at University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
Catherine McNeur is the award-winning author of Taming Manhattan: Environmental Battles in the Antebellum City (Harvard, 2014) and Mischievous Creatures: The Forgotten Sisters Who Transformed Early American Science (Basic Books, 2023). She is Professor of History at Portland State University in Oregon.