Like many other nineteenth-century urbanists, Olmsted articulated his particular misgivings about the social side effects of urban life through the language and logic of sympathy. By the mid-nineteenth century, the concept of sympathy had become for most Americans the social ideal against which they evaluated nearly every type of interaction and relationship. Closely informed by the writings of Scottish moral philosophers such as Adam Smith, Archibald Alison, and Hugh Blair, the U.S. culture of sympathy had taken shape since colonial times in a wide variety of political, religious, educational, and cultural settings. To invoke the concept of sympathy during this time period was to draw on a wide range of cultural sources and intellectual traditions, but perhaps none of these influenced the formation of sentimental culture in the United States more powerfully than Smith’s foundational explication of sympathy in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). Smith famously characterized sympathy as the imaginative process through which an individual acquires a “fellow-feeling” for another being. Because “we have no immediate experience of what other men feel,” Smith explained, “we can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected, but by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the like situation.” Through the use of their “imagination,” individuals “enter as it were” into another’s body and, in so doing, “become in some measure the same person with him, and thence form some idea of his sensations, and even feel something which, though weaker in degree, is not altogether unlike them.” While Smith was quick to admit that the most one could hope to achieve through an “imaginary change of situation” is a feeling “analogous” to that experienced by the object of one’s sympathy, not an exact replica, he nevertheless suggested that the emotional connection between individuals generated through this “extremely imperfect” and emotionally imprecise process qualified as “fellow-feeling.”3
Since the publication of Smith’s seminal account of sympathy’s affective operations, the term has been used to signify both the process by which individuals acquire a fellow-feeling for others and the emotional product of that process. Teasing apart the sympathetic process from its affective outcome helps clarify the complexion of the particular paradigms through which Olmsted and other nineteenth-century urbanists appraised urban life. These urban intellectuals worried that the early industrial city—with its influx of migrants and immigrants, the cultural instability and economic volatility that attended this in-migration, and its still relatively compact urban form—fundamentally interfered with the sympathetic process by discouraging urbanites from imagining themselves in the situations of those around them. Olmsted, in particular, worried that the built environment that molded Boston’s public realm in 1870—an environment that was still shaped primarily by the need of residents to reach their daily destinations on foot—prevented those it sheltered from inhabiting the sympathetic imagination.4 Given the perpetually crowded sidewalks on which urbanites most frequently encountered one another in public, they were more likely to “guard against” the “movements” of other pedestrians than form some idea of their sensations; instead of engaging “with other minds” in a way that would extend a “friendly flowing toward them,” city dwellers would inwardly experience a “hardening” of their feelings for their fellow urbanites. Furthermore, Olmsted reasoned that, even if pedestrians wanted to imagine themselves in another’s situation, they would have difficulty doing so because they typically had “no experience of anything in common” with those they encountered on the city’s overcrowded sidewalks. In short, Olmsted argued that the early industrial city undermined the ability of its inhabitants to make the sympathetic leap across the increasingly wide social, economic, and cultural chasms that separated them from one another.5
If nineteenth-century urbanists were concerned about the opportunities for individuals to participate in the sympathetic process while navigating the early industrial city’s public sphere, they were perhaps even more anxious about the ability of city residents to acquire the specific brand of fellow-feelings privileged by their culture—affections that might, according to Elizabeth Barnes, be said to fall under the category of “familial feeling.”6 For many of Olmsted’s contemporaries, a fellow-feeling could only qualify as a sympathetic feeling if it were qualitatively similar to the emotions that one might have for a family member or close friend: love, intimacy, brotherhood, sisterhood. Many nineteenth-century writers insisted that sympathetic emotions would enable individuals to experience social relationships as if they were familial ones. But in place of the familial feelings on which Olmsted and others felt strong social relationships and healthy communities should be built, Olmsted perceived that urbanites felt “vigilance, wariness, and activity” toward those they encountered on the city’s streets.7 His distress that individuals who encountered one another in the early industrial city’s public spaces would inevitably “look closely upon others without sympathy” echoes the concerns shared by many of his fellow urbanists about the inability of those inhabiting the industrial city to acquire familial feelings for one another. City observers would continue to rest their cases against urban life on the claim that sympathy was hard to come by in the city.
Like many urbanists who would follow Olmsted, his diagnosis of the city’s social shortcomings drove him to modify its built environment. His particular understanding of the process by which individuals acquire fellow-feelings and his expectations of the relational forms that those affections ought to assume motivated him to create public urban spaces in which city dwellers would be more likely to attain fellow-feelings for one another than they were on walking the city’s congested streets. Olmsted responded to what he perceived to be the impossibility of experiencing sympathy in the city by designing and constructing urban parks. He intended his parks to “completely shut out the city” and, in so doing, to provide their users with spaces where “they may stroll for an hour, seeing, hearing, and feeling nothing of the bustle and jar of the streets.” By providing urbanites with a “broad, open space of clean greensward” in which they could walk without having to “guard against” others’ movements and smaller nooks into which they could “bivouac at frequent intervals … without discommoding one another,” Olmsted’s parks gave urbanites opportunities to participate in the sympathetic process and establish familial feelings for one another.8 Although his parks operated within the public realm, Olmsted designed them to behave almost as if they were private domestic spaces that allowed city dwellers to place themselves in another’s situation. Unlike the smaller parks and public squares that punctuated the antebellum city and that provided places for what Mary P. Ryan describes as “informal, casual, largely unplanned social interaction,” Olmsted’s great parks promised users a more carefully managed and intimate social experience.9 Olmsted explained to the American Social Science Association that he intended his parks to reproduce the social atmosphere of the home by giving “play to faculties such as may be dormant in business or on the promenade”—faculties and feelings that facilitated the “close relation of family life, the association of children, of mothers, of lovers, of those who may be lovers.” He wanted to create public spaces that would “stimulate and keep alive the more tender sympathies.” The scores of urban parks Olmsted designed throughout the country expressed his powerful desires to help city dwellers achieve the intimate and tender relationships that he and his culture valued most.10
Olmsted’s evaluation of the interactions among urbanites in the city’s public spaces and his subsequent efforts to reshape the city’s built environment model a pattern of thinking about and acting within the city that other urban intellectuals would pursue in the coming years—a pattern that this book will trace over the course of the century following Olmsted’s speech to the American Social Science Association. In Olmsted’s wake, a long line of religious leaders, novelists, playwrights, journalists, social scientists, community activists, municipal and federal politicians, city planners, and others worried in their own particular ways about the ability of city dwellers to attain fellow-feelings for one another. While subsequent urbanists