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Between Deep and Ephemeral Time: Representations of Geology and

Temporality in Charles Eliot’s Metropolitan Park System, Boston (1892–1893)
a
Anita Berrizbeitia
a
Harvard University, Graduate School of Design
Published online: 03 Mar 2014.

To cite this article: Anita Berrizbeitia (2014) Between Deep and Ephemeral Time: Representations of Geology and Temporality in Charles Eliot’s Metropolitan Park
System, Boston (1892–1893), Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes: An International Quarterly, 34:1, 38-51, DOI: 10.1080/14601176.2013.850295

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 Between deep and ephemeral time: representations of geology and temporality
in Charles Eliot’s Metropolitan Park System, Boston (1892–1893)
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anita berrizbeitia
In Charles Eliot’s (1859–1897) and Sylvester Baxter’s (1850–1927) 1893 plan
for a Metropolitan Park system for Boston we see the radical proposition of a
network of open spaces, of varied sizes and shapes that articulate and connect
the entire territory (figure 1). As Eliot himself argued when he built advocacy
for the project in the Massachusetts legislature, European cities such as Paris
and London had many parks, and other park systems already existed in
American cities. However, two aspects are notable in Eliot and Baxter’s
proposal that distinguish it from its European and American precedents. The
first is the scale of the park system they proposed, which formed a ring of parks
that encircled the city ten miles from its center, tracing the geological edge of
the Boston Basin (figure 2). The second is that, while geology had figured
prominently in the cultivation of picturesque taste for the rugged, the irregular,
and the timeless in landscape by the last decade of the eighteenth century, it
had yet to be engaged explicitly and in broader terms.1 In contrast, Eliot used
geology through its various representations — as language, as modern science,
as physical presence, and as a visual representation of time — to argue for
design, and ultimately to reconceptualize the modern metropolis.
Eliot’s frequent invocation of the scientific basis of his park system proposal
is in part an effort to establish a new identity of landscape architecture by
associating it with the most prominent field of his time. Geology was the
science of modernization for it enabled unprecedented economic growth and
its corollary, urban expansion.2 And if it provided the knowledge for more
efficient access to minerals and fuels, it also offered systemic principles that
could be applied universally, and that explained the hidden aspects of visible
38
reality. In geology Eliot saw a powerful tool to re-imagine the city as what he
and Sylvester Baxter called the federalized metropolis, a city defined by its
geographic limits, rather than its political ones (figure 3).3 Thus, geology
formed the basis for a new and novel form of urbanization.
Eliot was very familiar with the geological structure of the Boston region
before he embarked on a career in landscape architecture. He was a student at
Harvard when, under his father’s leadership as president, the university shifted its
emphasis to the sciences and the professional fields. Geology and physical
geography were an integral part of his education, and he knew well the key
texts by Charles Lyell, Louis Agassiz, Charles Darwin, Joseph Le Conte, and
Nathaniel Shaler.4 In addition to theoretical study, Eliot was trained in fieldwork
and had experienced many of the sites that would eventually comprise the
Metropolitan Park System. Rock and mineral identification, pattern recognition,
mapping, and the ability to make causal connections between geological pro-
cesses and features found on the ground became the foundational skills for his
approach to park planning. However, his understanding of geology was phe-
nomenological as much as it was scientific, as he was equally well trained in the
visual observation of nature. He avidly cultivated the practice of what Henry
David Thoreau called the art of walking, an open-ended ‘sauntering’ about fields
and woods with no other purpose than to become sensitized to different forms
of perception that ‘wildness’ elicits in the human mind, including the soothing
effects of exposure to its myriad manifestations.5
Geology was also prominent in other spheres of cultural production and
especially in the emerging genre of landscape painting in mid-nineteenth-century
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14601176.2013.850295
 geology and temporality in charles eliot’s metropolitan park system
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figure 1. Charles Eliot and Sylvester Baxter, Map of the Metropolitan District of Boston, 1893. Report of the Board of Metropolitan Park Commissioners. Massachusetts. Metropolitan Park
Commission (Boston: Wright & Potter Printing Co., State Printers, 1893). Permission to reuse must be obtained from the rightsholder.

39
 studies in the history of gardens and designed landscapes: berrizbeitia
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figure 2. A. [Augustus] Meisel, William Otis Crosby, and Boston Society of Natural History. Geological Map of Eastern Massachusetts and of Boston and Vicinity. Boston: The Society,
1880. Courtesy Harvard Map Collection. Permission to reuse must be obtained from the rightsholder.

40
 geology and temporality in charles eliot’s metropolitan park system
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figure 3. Sylvester Baxter, Municipal Boundaries in the Neighborhood of Boston in ‘Report
of the Secretary’. Report of the Board of Metropolitan Park Commissioners. Massachusetts.
Metropolitan Park Commission (Boston: Wright & Potter Printing Co., State Printers, 1893),
p. 15. Permission to reuse must be obtained from the rightsholder.
American art, where the display of geological knowledge legitimized native
scenery as subject and object of art. Painters not only studied geology, they
participated in scientific geological expeditions to the American West.6 In
European painting, where the genre of landscape was already more than two
centuries old, geological knowledge provided the base for a more precise repre-
sentation of nature. British writer and art critic John Ruskin, whom Eliot quoted
frequently and who appeared in Eliot’s life in different contexts,7 also invoked
geology as a core science of his time, and geological knowledge as being indis-
pensable for rendering the facts of nature with complete fidelity. In Volume I of
Modern Painters Ruskin wrote extensively about the geological processes that form
the earth and the resulting physical properties of the rocks that rise as mountains, or
that shape the lower elevations of terrain.8 Geology is structure, and it is to the
landscape painter ‘what the naked human body is to the historical [portrait]’.9
In this regard it is interesting to read Ruskin’s critique of Claude Lorraine’s
Il Mulino (1648),10 especially in light of that painter’s putative role in the
emergence of the notion of landscape. Although Ruskin credits Lorraine
with being the first to paint nature for the sake of nature itself (without
allegorical content), with an ability to realize actual sunshine in misty air,
and with evoking like no one else the sky as a three-dimensional airy space,
he faults Claude with not adding to our knowledge of nature. According to
Ruskin, this ‘ideal’ pastoral scene did not make much sense in terms of how a
landscape actually worked: the shepherd had no business to drive his flock so
near the dancers, and the dancers would disrupt the cattle. The Roman soldiers
appeared to be about to attack the musicians, the weir was not made to power
the mill, the banks of the river resembled geological formations of London
instead of the Roman campagna (the place of the scene), the city sat at an
inconvenient distance from the waterside, and the cascades of Tivoli were
absurdly placed next to the chain of the Alps. According to Ruskin, Claude
assembled images in a bricolage-like fashion, with no intention of describing
the congruence between geography, traces of history, and modes of occupa-
tion of the landscape that emerged through time. The painting is full of
mistakes, or, in Ruskin’s words, of falsehoods. Modern painting, he argued,
called for knowledge of those processes that generated perceived phenomena.
It would not be far-fetched to interpret Ruskin’s criticism of Claude as
being grounded in time. Ruskin seems to argue that the painter was more
focused on the atmospheric effects than he was on the spatial-temporal logic of
the ground, a logic that binds topography, resources — such as water — and
human settlement in patterns that are not only discernible, but that also ought
to be understood and represented by the artist. In other words, Ruskin accused
Claude of missing a relational and systemic reading of place. He was not
modern. But how could he be? During Claude’s lifetime (1600–1682) geology
was still the purview of theologians concerned with the question of the origins
of the earth, of what later came to be known as creationism. Geology as a
series of systemic processes ‘with no vestige of a beginning and no prospect of
and end’11 that produce specific conditions on the ground was not understood
as such until well over a century after his death. This new knowledge
demanded greater precision in its representation, and not the generic ‘lumps
of rocks’ that the Old Masters had painted. Furthermore, Ruskin, an artist
himself, insisted that the ideal of landscape was the expression ‘of the specific
— not the individual but the specific — characters of every object … ’12 To
41
 studies in the history of gardens and designed landscapes: berrizbeitia
arrive at the specific, knowledge of the earth as a system was necessary. In the
following passage by Ruskin, geology and the mind of the painter merged:

The geologist distinguishes [between stones], and in distinguishing connects

them. Each becomes different from its fellow, but in differing from, assumes a
relation to its fellow; they are no more each the repetition of the other — they
are parts of a system, and each implies and is connected with the existence of the
rest.13

The comprehension of specific imprints of time through understanding the

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systemic nature of geological processes entails working at the dual levels of

objective cognition and phenomenological perception, an idea Ruskin
received from Locke: ‘This is certain, that whatever alterations are made in
the body, if they reach not the mind, whatever impression are made on the
outward parts, if they are not taken notice of within, there is no perception’14
(figure 4). Similarly, scientific knowledge of the earth’s processes and their
concomitant visual and temporal expressions permeates Eliot’s report to the
Massachusetts Senate and House of Representatives of January 1893. Eliot
presents the geological structure of Boston as a rationale, and as a conceptual
framework for the selection of sites. His writing is didactic, and geology is
offered as a historical narrative that follows a stratigraphical logic.15 He begins figure 4. John Ruskin, Study of Thistle at Crossmount, 1847. Source: www.victorianweb.
describing the rock foundation: org/painting/ruskin/wc/42.html. Accessed 19 June 2013. Permission to reuse must be obtained
from the rightsholder.

The oldest and the hardest of these rocks, besides underlying the whole district,
stand up in two conspicuous though broken ridges, — that which extends from
Waltham to Cape Ann, sometimes called the Wellington Hills, and that which
from the earliest settlement has borne the name of the Blue Hills.16
Then he narrates the formation of the basin:
… the secondary rocks which lie upon the primitive rocks have been worn
down so deep, that the sea has flowed over both and formed Boston bay.17
Glaciation leaves its own traces upon the earlier layers that formed the ground:
Dumped in various sorts of heaps, alike upon the uplifted and the depressed parts
of the rock foundation of the district, lies an enormous quantity of clay, gravel,
and stones of all sizes and kinds, — stuff which the moving ice-sheets of
42
successive glacial periods bore away from northern regions. The largest of
these heaps form very conspicuous objects in the scenery of the district, being
great rounded hills of symmetrical form, such as are numerous in the neighbor-
hood of Chelsea and all about Boston Harbor. … More important are the large
areas in which the glacial material has been worked-over by running waters in
such a way as to produce almost level plains, which, in sharp contrast to the steep
hills, are almost free from bowlders [sic] of large size.18
The multiple references to erosion and uplift in Eliot’s text present a notion of
time that, characteristic of nineteenth-century geology, is both linear and
cyclical. Time as linear, progressing forward, marking events that are irrever-
sible and historical, explained the accumulation of matter on the crust of the
earth, the deep stratigraphy that contained within it the clues to the earth’s age,
to its extinct species, and to its past. Time as cyclical, in contrast, with no
 geology and temporality in charles eliot’s metropolitan park system
beginning or end, is seen in the forces of uplift that recycle the products of
erosion and sedimentation and continually regenerate the earth’s surfaces.
Time, in geological terms, then, can best be expressed as a dichotomy between
linear events that are unique and cyclical processes that repeat over time (and/
or cycles that advance as they turn).19
And finally, Eliot writes about human settlement, the most recent layer
present in this territory:
The creeks were the first roads and the marshes the first hayfields. … The great
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hills of boulder and clay had to be made cultivable; generation after generation
labored with the trees and stones, and at last the rounded hills stood forth as
mounds of green, marked and divided by walls of fieldstones … .20
To this linear structure punctuated by references to long-scale cycles of uplift
and glaciation are added references to shorter time scales of seasonal and daily
cycles, such as the accumulation of rain and snow in the streams and rivers, the
erosive forces of water, the ocean tides that ‘twice every day take … Boston in
its arms’, and the sounds of the sea in the streets of the city.21
In Eliot’s text, time, as an on-going process, is turned into the performative
when he repositions the geological in terms of the urban: Describing the
metropolitan district of Boston as a territory that ‘lies between two wild-
ernesses; on the one hand the untamed heights of the rock-hills, on the
other the untamable sea’,22 Eliot proposes the following: first, to protect the
three rivers (the Charles, the Neponset, and the Mystic) that are the main
drainage ways of the metropolitan area providing flood control; second, to
protect the sea shore assuring public accessibility; third, to protect the tops of
the highest hills for public accessibility and view sheds; fourth, to provide for
an even distribution of large reserves ten miles around the center to serve as
anchors guiding the expansion of the city; fifth, and contrasting in scale, to
include a constellation of small municipal playgrounds and parks. Later, park-
ways and boulevards would be added for connectivity, forming the last layer of
a complex system in which geology and landscape from a regional to a
neighborhood scale served as the structuring element for the city’s consolida-
tion and growth.
In spite of the prevalence of naturalistic images in the report, Boston was
anything but a pristine landscape. Of the three hills that had originally formed
the peninsula where the city was first settled only one remained, the present
Beacon Hill. The Back Bay had been created by filling in the marshes
beginning in the late 1850s, and Eliot himself had worked on the Charles
River basin project, a major transformation of the tidal estuary into a manu-
factured lake.23 Granite quarries studded the region, with more than twenty
quarries in operation at the Blue Hills ‘wilderness’ at the time of the proposal.
It is all the more significant that Eliot positioned geology as the reconstitutive
agent of not only a fragmented but an extensively urbanized territory. This
invocation of geology as direct physical agent for consolidation, amalgamation,
and recuperation (of a continuous ground), parallels the earth’s own restorative
forces in cycles that show ‘no vestige of a beginning no prospect of an end’.
As we read Eliot’s text, it is notable that in spite of the stratigraphical logic he
uses to describe the physical and historical geography of Boston, nothing could be
further from our minds than the stratigraphical column, the sectional diagram that
describes the age of the rocks in a landscape, older at the bottom and younger at
the top. Eliot replaces the visual abstraction of that diagram with a rich text that
describes actions that produce landscape change. Thus we read about dumping,
piling, flooding, scraping, clothing, and swelling. Nouns that describe the effects of
these processes on the materials on the ground — loose debris, heaps of glacial
wreckage, well rubbed rocks, tortuous terrain — give us a vivid description of a
richly varied surface, where older and harder igneous rocks, the younger uncon-
solidated glacial mantel, the even more recent erosive action of rivers, and the
vegetative cover, give a sense of the various ages and time scales that coexist in the
city. Eliot brings together this totality of materials and processes in one synthetic
image when he describes the metropolitan district as ‘a region of marvelously
comingled [my emphasis] waters, marshes, gravel banks and rocks’.24 In other
words, time is a narrative that explains and traces change at various scales in the
landscape, and it is simultaneously formative, performative, and often given
tangible scale through the use of metaphor.
If the perception of time entails the perception of change, then systems of
reference for describing time in spatial and material ways (as opposed to the
abstraction of clocks and calendars) need to be established. Geological change
is rarely perceived during one’s lifetime, with the exception of earthquakes or
other sudden cataclysmic events. Thus, Eliot relies on the individual’s knowl-
edge of geology to help him/her understand the differences in age between,
for example, the granitic Blue Hills and the younger till of the drumlins. Yet
the smaller cycles of temporal change, the seasons, the tides, the erosion,
deposition, temperature, harvest, and urbanization play an equally important
43
 studies in the history of gardens and designed landscapes: berrizbeitia
part in his registration of time. For these Eliot invokes vision (an active and
thinking eye that perceives and identifies difference), memory, and association
as the instruments of the reception of time.25 The objective reality of time,
made manifest through the ongoing formation and transformation of the
landscape and its geology, is offered alongside the subjective experience of
time. This engagement with both the objective and subjective dimensions of
time in the landscape recalls what geographer Denis Cosgrove has called the
‘landscape way of seeing’, by which he means a capacity to sustain ‘an insider’s
apprehension of the land — of nature and the sense of place — together with a
more critical, socially conscious outsider’s perspective’.26
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Geology and its representation in design

New conceptual frameworks require new forms of representation, and Eliot
drew more from geology than only a way of understanding the physical figure 5. Mountains and Rivers, J. H. Colton & Co., 1855. Source: www.davidrumsey.
structure of the region and a strategy to unify its territory. Here I am com. Accessed 19 June 2013. Permission to reuse must be obtained from the rightsholder.
interested in the methodological transfer between geology and planning.
Specifically I want to comment on drawings that although widely used London, and Boston, drawn to the same scale’27 effectively demonstrate
today were not common then, such as the diagram, the scale comparison, that Boston had very few parks compared to Paris and London at the end
and the overlay. Eliot used them as primary methods of representation, and of the nineteenth century. But he went beyond this observation to demon-
supplemented them with photography and perspective views. strate an equally important one, the extent of the park system (figure 6).
Nineteenth-century cartographic representation developed along two dis- Here Eliot was very strategic in the construction of the diagram, for he
tinct directions. One sought increased precision in the measurement and included parks and reservations that were at or beyond city limits.28 Epping
representation of the territory: the closer a map was to physical reality the Forest to the northeast and Windsor Great Park to the southwest formed
better it was deemed to be. The other form of representation was thematic and the ‘bookends’ of the string of parks shown for London. Similarly, St
sought to describe relationships by isolating categories of information, such as Germain and Marly to the west and St Denis and Notre Dame to the
the relative sizes, shapes, and distributions of things, in order to correlate them. east, were parks located at or beyond city limits in Paris. The superposition
Scale comparisons were also used to describe large geographical features and of the scaled grid across all diagrams was strategically important, for it
distances that could not be easily grasped by the eye (figure 5). While the first demonstrated that the proposed limits of the city as determined by its
produced the topographical survey, recognized by Olmsted and Eliot as the geological structure were reasonable, and similar in scale to those of
single most important piece of information for a landscape architect, the European metropolitan centers.
second produced the diagram, which still today is considered the most impor- A similar argument appeared in a diagram produced later and published in
tant representation technique to construct arguments and demonstrate reason- 1896, titled ‘Diagram of Parks and Parkways of the Boston Metropolitan
ing in a project. District’, which shows the park system in the context of the 36 towns, and
Eliot used diagrams and scale comparisons to explain his park system in relation to its distance in miles from the State House. This diagram conveys
proposal to the legislature and the general public. ‘The open spaces of Paris, relationships between park system components (parks, parkways) and places
44
 geology and temporality in charles eliot’s metropolitan park system
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figure 6. Charles Eliot, The Open Spaces of Paris, London, and Boston (1892), drawn to the
same scale. ‘Report of the Landscape Architect’. Report of the Board of Metropolitan Park
Commissioners. Massachusetts. Metropolitan Park Commission (Boston: Wright & Potter
Printing Co., State Printers, 1893). Permission to reuse must be obtained from the rightsholder.
figure 7. Diagram of the Parks & Parkways of the Boston Metropolitan District, 1896.
Courtesy Harvard Map Collection. Permission to reuse must be obtained from the
rightsholder.
(towns), by focusing on their distribution in relationship to the center of the
city (figure 7).
Diagrams and scale comparisons are single-criteria representations. But to
demonstrate his rationale for site selection, Eliot needed to make drawings
that combined information of different kinds. The modern geological map
provided a working method. Martin Rudwick describes how such a map
works:
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 studies in the history of gardens and designed landscapes: berrizbeitia
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figure 8. Frederick Law Olmsted, General Plan of Franklin Park, 1885. Courtesy Harvard
Map Collection. Permission to reuse must be obtained from the rightsholder.
The modern geological map is an attempt to depict on a two-dimensional
surface what cannot in reality be seen at all except in isolated exposures, namely
the outcrops of rocks which are generally concealed by soil and vegetation. The
resultant distributional pattern of outcrops, when combined with the informa-
tion about surface topography which is conveyed by the base map on which the
pattern is superimposed, is then intended to yield a ‘deeper’ meaning (both
literally and metaphorically) about the underlying three dimensional structure of
the rocks. The task of ‘reading’ the map successfully in this way is commonly
assisted by the provision of sections and other diagrams which provide ‘clues’ to
its decipherment. Finally, the three dimensional structure and its interaction with
the present surface topography is intended to act as a starting point for, and
evidence towards, an interpretation that is still deeper in conceptual level by
being causal and temporal in its goal.29
46
figure 9. Topographical Map of West Roxbury Park, 1884. Courtesy Harvard Map
Collection. Permission to reuse must be obtained from the rightsholder.
Distribution and superimposition as a way to reveal causal and temporal
relations in the landscape are the key concepts here. I want to propose that
Eliot used drawings differently. He used them to represent, as the geological
map does, the causal temporal relationships between natural and urban systems.
To bring into greater relief the differences between what Eliot drew and what
a typical landscape architectural plan was at the time, it is useful to compare
Frederick Law Olmsted’s 1885 plan for Franklin Park and the 1884 topographi-
cal survey of that site (figures 8 and 9). Even though geology and topography are
generative in Olmsted’s work, and particularly in the design of this park, it was
never drawn on the final site plan. While early site survey plans show contour
lines and geological structures, the plan instead highlights the composition and
geometry of the paths and vegetation patterns. Topography is indicated by spot
grades rather than contours, and surrounding hydrological and urban structures
are left out of the drawing completely. This omission of site data indicates that
 geology and temporality in charles eliot’s metropolitan park system
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figure 10. Charles S. Sargent, Map of the USA Showing the Character of the Fuel Used in the Different sections of the Settled Portion of the Country. ‘Report on the Forests of North
America’. Department of the Interior Census Office (Washington, Government Printing Office, 1884), p. 489. In this map, forest and coal index the larger underlying geology of the territory.
Permission to reuse must be obtained from the rightsholder.

47
 studies in the history of gardens and designed landscapes: berrizbeitia
the plan is understood to be a drawing that communicates issues of layout and
organization, of composition and proportion without explicitly demonstrating
the causal and temporal manifestations of site conditions in the design.
Drawings illustrating causal and temporal relationships had been used in
the US to juxtapose hydrology and topography with the administrative
grid. A well-known example is John Wesley Powell’s 1890 map of the
American southwest that divided the territory according to drainage basins
thereby demonstrating the arbitrariness of the Jeffersonian grid.30 Other
examples of contemporary maps that describe large-scale phenomena inde-
pendent of the grid are Charles Sprague Sargent’s maps for the Tenth US
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census (figure 10). At an urban scale Horace William Shaler Cleveland’s

1883 map of Minneapolis including a park system that follows the hydro-
logical pattern and not the grid, reveals the emerging sensibility that
prioritizes natural systems over administrative units. In his Park Report
Eliot included plans for the Blue Hills and the Middlesex Fells, both of
which are the result of compiling and overlaying different information at
the same scale (figure 11). The intelligence of this method of drawing
everything together is that it shows both the problem — the municipal
boundary lines that cut across the land in arbitrary places, the uncoordi-
nated development all around — and the instrument to address it, i.e. the
removal of the municipal boundaries to maintain the integrity of the
geological and natural systems. These drawings represent how different
time scales and periods — geological and urban, older and younger —
interact. They render visible processes and conditions that have evolved at
different times and that converge in one place and at one moment, and that
would otherwise be difficult to understand.
For his own map of the metropolitan park system, Eliot used the1891 State
Topographical Survey of Boston and Surrounding Areas as a base map. He drew
different information on separate sheets of tracing-cloth. One layer contained
topographical information, a second the hydrological systems, and a third the
vegetation. Then he laid them one upon the other to make a composite plan. figure 11. Map of the Middlesex Fells Published by the Appalachian Mountain Club 1892.
Charles Eliot, ‘Report of the Landscape Architect’, Report of the Board of Metropolitan Park
Gray sun-prints obtained from the three sheets superimposed in the printing Commissioners. Massachusetts. Metropolitan Park Commission (Boston: Wright & Potter
frame, when mounted on cloth, served very well for all purposes of study. Printing Co., State Printers, 1893). Permission to reuse must be obtained from the rightsholder.
Photo-lithographed in three colors, namely black, blue, and brown, the same
sheets will serve as guide maps for the use of the public and the illustration of Although the overlay method for choosing sites has been particularly common
reports.31 in landscape architectural practice since the 1960s, Eliot seems to have

48
 geology and temporality in charles eliot’s metropolitan park system
pioneered this process. In the late nineteenth century it presented a radical
break from previous design methods and representational techniques.
However, while Eliot pioneered the process in design, he did not invent it.
Geological maps (see figure 2 where the geology is overlaid on the city map)
consisted of overlays of information. Most likely Eliot adapted the overlay
method from the USA Geological Survey (USGS), which had been founded
in 1879 and was using recent developments in cartography such as the contour
line and three-color lithography. The contour line, invented by the French
and widely used in Europe by the mid-nineteenth century, arrived in the US
during the third quarter of the nineteenth century. Unlike hachure, the
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precision afforded by contour lines allowed landform patterns to be read in
figure 12. George H. Davenport, Cascade near Fells Station, Melrose. Report of the
Board of Metropolitan Park Commissioners. Massachusetts. Metropolitan Park Commission
(Boston: Wright & Potter Printing Co., State Printers, 1893), plate 7. Permission to reuse must
be obtained from the rightsholder.
plan view as differentiated yet continuous surfaces, making more potently
visible the relationship between topography and geological processes. Eliot
owned USGS maps, which at that time were presented in a folio format with a
description of the printing process: each map was printed three times, each
time in a different color: black for roads, blue for hydrologic features, brown
for contours, cities or human settlements and structures, black for trails, rail-
roads, boundaries and buildings. To assure accuracy, the maps were pinned
together at the corners so that slippages would not occur, guaranteeing utmost
precision of the overlay. The mapping technique allowed Eliot to present a
new vision to the citizens and the legislature. This vision was no longer based
on political boundaries or on the value of land as primarily real estate. Rather,
by focusing on geology as underlying structure, continuity, connectivity, and
figure 13. William P. Bodwell, Blue Hills over Muddy Pond Woods. Report of the
Board of Metropolitan Park Commissioners. Massachusetts. Metropolitan Park Commission
(Boston: Wright & Potter Printing Co., State Printers, 1893), plate 20. Permission to reuse must
be obtained from the rightsholder.
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 studies in the history of gardens and designed landscapes: berrizbeitia
inter-relatedness became key principles to plan urban expansion. The signifi-
cance of the new representation technique for the emerging field of landscape
architecture was that it provided criteria and methods to select sites that
explained the spatial-temporal logic that connects the ground to the city at a
metropolitan scale.
Yet Eliot did not discard all traditional landscape architectural modes of
representation. In addition to maps and diagrams he used photography and
perspective sketches (figures 12 and 13). In his report on the vegetation of
the forests he also used before-and-after watercolor sketches similar to those
created by Humphrey Repton in his Red Books. In these drawings Eliot
Downloaded by [Harvard Library] at 05:45 18 April 2014
structure previously unknown to the citizens of Boston. Although initially
these perspective sketches appear to be anachronistic, they are, in fact,
charged with social aspirations. They are views of landscapes made publicly
accessible by law for the first time in the Commonwealth’s history, and
they are bound to new concepts of urbanism that merged city and land-
scape. Furthermore, they are projective, as they are less concerned with the
accurate depiction of a specific scene than they are with making visible an
emergent reality, one where the folds and crevices of deep time entangle,
form, invade, and push back on the forces and the spaces of modern
urbanization.

showed the opening of sight lines through the forest that exposed the hills
and valleys beyond.32 These new vistas revealed a time scale and geologic Harvard University Graduate School of Design

1. Jay Appleton, ‘Some thoughts on the Geology of
the Picturesque’, Journal of Garden History, vi/3,
1986, pp. 270–291.
2. For example, the population of the US more than
tripled during the second half of the nineteenth cen-
tury, with the largest numbers of people living in cities.
New York’s population increased more than six-fold,
while Boston’s population quadrupled. In 1850, the
US population was 23 191 876; NYC 515 547 and
Boston 136 881. By 1900, the US Population was 76
212 168, NYC 3 437 202, Boston 560 892 (http://
www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/
twps0027/tab13.txt). Manhattan began its expansion
in 1811, reaching its limit at 155th Street in only five
decades. For an interactive map of the development of
the street grid in Manhattan see ‘How Manhattan’s
Grid Grew’ The New York Times 20 March 2011. By
1910, Metropolitan Boston covered an area of 414
square miles, becoming the fourth largest metropolitan
area in the country. James O’Connell, The Hub’s
Metropolis. Greater Boston’s Development from Railroad
Suburbs to Smart Growth (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2013), p. 5.
notes
3. Settlement occurred in Massachusetts in a piecemeal
way, from the shore inland. Colonists were granted
the right to settle in discreet units of approximately
six square miles. Townships eventually consolidated
as independent political and administrative units that
managed their own territories regardless of adjacen-
cies, shared topographic elements, or drainage pat-
terns. The result was that by the 1850s 36 different
political units had been established, each with their
own independent government, water, fire, and
sewer systems, and most, if not all, lands held in
private hands. When Eliot and Baxter described
the fragmentation of the territory they were essen-
tially referring to a process that accrued over more
than two centuries, that lacked coordination across
boundaries, and that was driven by the interests of
private land ownership. See: Sylvester Baxter,
‘Greater Boston. A Study for a Federalized
Metropolis Comprising the City of Boston and
Surrounding Cities and Towns’, The Boston Herald
(January 1891).
4. For an excellent summary of Charles Eliot’s life see
Keith N. Morgan, ‘Charles Eliot, Landscape
Architect: An Introduction to His Life and Work’,
Arnoldia, Summer 1999, pp. 3–22.
5. Henry David Thoreau (1962), Walking (Bedford:
Applewood Books, 2013). For Eliot’s walking tours
in the environs of Boston see Charles W. Eliot,
Charles Eliot Landscape Architect (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin & Co., 1902), pp. 13–15, and 745.
6. Rebecca Bailey Bedell, The Anatomy of Nature:
Geology and American Landscape Painting: 1825–1875
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).
7. Eliot might have known Ruskin initially through his
father’s first cousin, Charles Eliot Norton, a very
close friend of Ruskin and executor of his estate.
He also read Ruskin as part of his general studies,
and then encountered him again in the context of
landscape architecture through Olmsted.
8. John Ruskin, ‘Of Truth of Earth’ in Modern Painters,
Vol. I, Part II, Section IV (1844), pp. 270–308. On
the relation between geology and ruins in Ruskin’s
thinking see John Dixon Hunt, ‘Pictures,
Picturesque, Places’, Gardens and the Picturesque
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), pp. 171–239.
9. Ibid., p. 270.

50
 geology and temporality in charles eliot’s metropolitan park system
10. Modern Painters, Vol. I, Preface to second edition
(1844), pp. xli–xliii.
11. This is Scottish geologist James Hutton’s famous
phrase, which introduced in 1788 the concept of
deep time, a time scale far larger than the human
imagination can grasp. See Stephen Jay Gould,
Time’s Arrow Time’s Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the
Discovery of Geological Time (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1987).
12. Modern Painters, p. xxix.
13. Ibid., pp. xxxvi–xxxvii.
Downloaded by [Harvard Library] at 05:45 18 April 2014
14. Ibid., p. 51.
15. Charles Eliot, ‘Report of the Landscape Architect’ in
Report of the Board of Metropolitan Park Commissioners
(Boston, MA: January 1893), pp. 82–110.
16. Ibid., p. 83.
17. Ibid., p. 84.
18. Ibid., pp. 84–85.
19. Stephen Jay Gould, Time’s Arrow Time’s Cycle. Myth
and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987).
20. Eliot, op. cit., p. 87.
21. Ibid., p. 90.
22. Ibid., p. 89.
23. For the history of urban transformations in Boston
see Walter Muir Whitehill, Boston. A Topographical
History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1979). Karl Haglund, Inventing the Charles River
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), Nancy S.
Seasholes, Gaining Ground: A History of Landmaking
in Boston (Cambridge, MA:, MIT Press, 2003) and
Alex Krieger and David Cobb (eds), Mapping Boston
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999).
24. Eliot, op. cit., p. 86.
25. See John Dixon Hunt, ‘Sense and Sensibility in the
Landscape Designs of Humphrey Repton’ for a dis-
cussion of how observation, seeing, and thinking are
differentiated in the ideas of Humphrey Repton.
Gardens and the Picturesque (Cambridge, MA: The
MIT Press, 1992), pp. 139–168.
26. Denis E. Cosgrove, ‘Introductory Essay for the
Paperback Edition’ Social Formation and Symbolic
Landscape (1984) (Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1988), p. xi.
27. Eliot, op. cit., p. 82.
28. Ibid., p. 82.
29. Martin J. S. Rudwick, ‘A Visual Language for
Geology’ in History of Science, 14/11976, pp. 149–
195. By the ‘modern geologic map’ Rudwick means
the period between the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries, when standard visual conven-
tions of representation were established and used in
all geologic maps.
30. John Wesley Powell, Arid Region of the USA
Showing Drainage Districts, 1890.
31. Charles W. Eliot, Charles Eliot Landscape Architect
(Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin & Co.,
1903 [1902]), p. 496.
32. Vegetation and Scenery in the Metropolitan Reservations
of Boston (Boston, Lamson, Wolffe & Co., 1898).
The sketches are signed by Arthur Shurcliff.
51