CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

_FOR THE PARKS_

It is one of the amazing things about a sculptor that the more work he does and the more recognition he gets, the more his friends demand that he stick to his proper business. And it is probably just as amazing that the sculptor doesn’t want to and seldom does. Somebody, commenting on the varied activities and interests of Gutzon Borglum, quoted a bit of apt philosophy: “I am a man; nothing human is alien to me,” which was Borglum’s estimate of the situation, all right. The constant urge to Art was something, he thought, that made his friends seem normal.

He might have been an aviator had his reflexes been faster at the time the Wright brothers made their test flights at Kittyhawk. His studio at Stamford was big enough to be a fine air laboratory, and for years it was cluttered with an odd assortment of things that were going to make flying better ... and quicker, and cheaper, and easier and safer.

Gutzon was one of the observers of Orville Wright’s first sustained flight at Fort Myers when the inventors were trying to prove the value of their plane to the United States Army. He saw “a little mechanism that looked like the wreck of a covered wagon” travel around a half-mile course for sixty-seven minutes. Then, after an enthusiastic greeting to the pilot, he and Orville, Colonel Bromwell, Captain Squier and Lieutenant Selfridge rode into town aboard a streetcar. As a representative of the Aeronautical Society of America, he saw the collapse of the plane the next day and the tragic death of Lieutenant Selfridge.

Still he went on. He became acquainted with Alexander Klemin and his wind tunnel. He was greatly interested in Major Ocker’s development of blind flying. He invented an airplane brake which, with modifications, was the type used in the Second World War.

In a speech before the Aeronautical Society at the Astor Hotel in New York early in 1904 he outlined his plans for a “cylindrical type of machine with the engine in the pointed nose directly behind the propeller and winglike fins to steady the flight.” He demonstrated what he meant with two little models that flew gracefully over the audience. He said:

Consider the bird struggling with the power of a water freshet. The model for the aeroplane should not be the bird, but the fish. The only fish that can move in stormy water is the trout, and the trout, I am convinced, gives us an unbeatable design for an airship.

There is something in that speech to remind one of Cellini’s departures from art, and the activities of Da Vinci when he was looking most clearly at the patterns of a future life. But his friends weren’t impressed. Mrs. William Brown Meloney of the _Herald-Tribune_ and _This Week_ magazine, with whom he carried on a ceaseless correspondence, gave him a sharp rebuke and told him that art needed him more than the airplane business. And he sent her this prompt answer:

Dear Missy: You regret as many of my friends do that I am not eternally astride a ton of clay, constantly modeling. On the other hand, the insistent application of a man’s mind or his body to one activity creates lopsidedness.

I was hardly out of my teens before I discovered that it was only men of varied interest in life, men of varied capacities, whose minds survived middle age....

I mean the sort of men who can turn from the study of an orchid to the building of a fortress, to mending a sewer, to designing a fleet, to colonizing a continent.

Gutzon spoke a lot. He liked public speaking and he was good at it. Any good cause was his cause, and, inasmuch as he never seemed to be looking for any personal reward from his public fighting, he made a lot of friends in unexpected places.

He loved children and he was disturbed by New York’s lack of room for them. He remembered his own childhood--so much of it in the fresh, open air--and he campaigned vigorously for playgrounds or parks or unplanned pieces of the outdoors that would give them a chance to stretch their legs. He began to write on such subjects for the newspapers and spent most of his days in wordy controversy. He wrote largely on political subjects and was rated among the country’s foremost essayists on the subject of world peace. His peace article, “An Essay on Economic Boycott,” was one of twelve selected from 20,000 for publication in the book “Ways to Peace.” It was widely reported in the newspapers, widely discussed, and carried abroad by President Wilson when he went to make his futile treaty of Versailles.

The park controversies pleased Gutzon for two reasons. He thought they might bring about a little better living for the children. And they might promote a general love for flowers--bring a new generation into the open air and give it a consciousness of nature. He loved growing things--green trees, soft grass and the smell of aromatic shrubs. He never forgot his chase to capture the moon in Fremont.

In his early life he wished to be a horticulturist. Years afterward he found at the door of his New York studio an opportunity to practice his green thumb and at the same time to put his play-spot theories into practical development. In 1907 he was invited to join the board of directors and serve on the executive committee of the Metropolitan Parks Association which became the Parks and Playgrounds Association of the City of New York. His membership was one of his special interests for twenty years. He was appointed chairman of a subcommittee which later became an independent body looking after the affairs of Central Park.

Gutzon was highly pleased with his work as permanent chairman. Forty years had passed since the country’s two pioneer landscape artists had made one of the most famous parks in the world from some rocks and a swamp in the middle of Manhattan Island. They had brought in hundreds of tons of soil and thousands of rare trees and shrubs. They had laid out driveways for carriages and winding paths for pedestrians. They had provided lakes and playgrounds for children. In 1907 Samuel Parsons, the landscape architect under Mayor Green, was begging uselessly for better park equipment and a new watering system. The sculptor felt that he had been cast in the right role. An appropriation of $100,000 for improving the water system was passed that year.

The sculptor gathered the curses of the old school of artists when he joined the parks association to keep the Academy of Design from putting up a building in Bryant Park. He won a taxpayer’s suit against the city in 1911 to prevent the slovenly extension of Riverside Drive in the Washington Heights region. In 1918, in a similar action, he prevented the building of an unsightly pumping station in Morningside Park. And routine park business, outside of the courts, amused him continuously because it was so full of trouble.

In 1910 Mayor Hylan appointed Charles Stover, who had worked under the direction of the park association, his Commissioner of Parks. Stover promptly turned the park into a playground, principally by digging swimming pools and wading puddles wherever there was room for them. He came into direct opposition with Parsons the landscape architect. They quarreled. The commissioner held up the architect’s salary on the ground that he was absent from his office too much.

Gutzon entered the fight with a letter to the New York _Sun_, pointing out that the new commissioner had “not rotted enough manure to fertilize a ten-acre lot, nor mustered enough courage to contract for a single manure pit.” He reminded his readers that “Last year a $100,000 high pressure water system remained absolutely idle for the lack of a little hose, and $100,000 worth of property was allowed to go to ruin.” He arrayed himself against a movement to impeach Stover and put his own report on the needs of the park before the Board of Estimate and Apportionment. With him on the committee was a fine array of talent--Jacob Schiff, Francis Lynder Stetson, William J. Gibson, George W. Perkins, Charles L. Burmeister and some others. They got a respectful hearing.

The sculptor submitted with his report sixty samples of Central Park soil that had been analyzed by the U. S. Department of Agriculture. The budget committee gave him hearty approval and allotted enough funds to save the park.

During the years Gutzon served on its board of directors, many important questions were discussed by the Parks Association, such as what to do with the old Arsenal building, what about additions to the Metropolitan Museum, what about monuments and statues, what about Riverside Park and the New York Central Railroad tracts. He deplored the usual attitude of the Association which in its zeal to “save the park” objected to almost every new proposal, regardless of merit. He took most of his indignation to the newspapers.

In 1922 he fought for the request of the National Sculpture Society to hold an open-air exhibition near the Metropolitan Museum, although he was not a member of the society. The Association opposed him. He declared in the New York _Times_:

The charm of Central Park lies in the development of its original, natural contours. The National Sculpture Society should be allowed an area of fifty to one hundred acres and there place their exhibit to suit the natural conditions, precisely as they would place it if it were permanently located. I feel certain if some such plan is inaugurated, it will be successful....

And he took an active part in the city’s big stir about the proposed development of Riverside Park in connection with the New York Central’s right of way along the Hudson River front. It was part of his plan that “The park from the Drive, with its river glimpses, should be the most tempting in Manhattan, and every walk into it should possess a separate individual interest.” And so in February 1917 he wrote to Mayor Mitchell.

The First World War put a stop to many of the plans of the park designers. Mayor Mitchell went into a training camp in Florida and was killed in an airplane crash. Gutzon resigned from the Association in 1922, but he listened to the plea of George Gordon Battle, the president, and reconsidered. He remained active for many years.

One of Gutzon’s last appearances in New York was in 1939 at a dinner party given by “Missy” Meloney. Present were the new Park Commissioner Robert Moses, and Mayor Fiorello La Guardia. He was surprised to see them and obviously pleased.

“I’ve been anxious to see you fellows,” he said as he sat down. “I’ve been wanting to tell you about my new plan for the development of Central Park.... Now what I’ve had in mind is this----”