The Index of American Design Revives New York's Historic Gardens

In response to the concern America lacked a rich historical background in the arts in comparison to older European nations, the Depression-era, federally funded Index of American Design sought to illustrate a “usable past” by identifying and recording precedents of design in the largely unexamined realm of folk, popular, and decorative arts. The 18,000 watercolor renderings that resulted depict a range of common objects, from furniture to clothing, in accordance with a federally-stipulated schema. In New York City, a group of four researchers and seven artists departed from standard subjects and began to chronicle the city’s historical gardens with topographical watercolors. Like other Index renderings, these depictions of gardens were based on historic research and accompanied by information-rich data sheets. Following William Shack’s discovery of the Blackwell Survey in the Department of Engineering in the Municipal Building, artists captured a series of twenty-two, Victorian-era estates that would have occupied the surveyed land in northern Manhattan, including those of John Woodhouse Audubon, railroad man John A. Haven, and New York Herald editor James Gordon Bennett. Of the estates in the survey, only the Wheelock house survived in the 1930s, so the artists creatively reenvisioned each landscape. The Garden Project then expanded its scope to represent the city’s historically significant gardens, recreated from research of historical plant lists, such as the gardens of the Dutch West India Company, governor Peter Stuyvesant, and landscape-designer Andre Parmentier. These topographical drawings suggest their artists were driven by competing interests in the fantastic and the accurate.