Aerial View of Formal Gardens on a River Peninsula, American South, 1950s

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Aerial View of Formal Gardens on a River Peninsula, American South, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Aerial View of Formal Gardens on a River Peninsula, American South, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-ECE21E

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Someone with access to a light aircraft in the 1950s pointed a camera straight down at what appears to be a municipally maintained formal garden occupying a narrow peninsula between two arms of a broad Southern river, the kind of civic horticultural project that postwar American cities undertook to demonstrate they had arrived at the level of civilization previously reserved for European capitals. The garden's layout is rigidly axial — long rose allées, a walled greenhouse, geometrically partitioned beds — the work of a landscape committee that had studied photographs of Versailles and done its confident best with a municipal budget. Water has crept unusually high on both flanks of the peninsula, suggesting seasonal flooding that the garden's designers chose to regard as someone else's problem. Across the river, a rail viaduct and the low rooftops of an industrial district form the horizon, a reminder that this particular patch of cultivated order was placed, as civic gardens often were, precisely where it could turn its back on the freight economy that paid for it. The residents visible in the parking lot to the right arrived by car, as was now mandatory, to admire something that was designed to be approached on foot.

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