Destruction of Nature
A large city like New York is built from the destruction of other places. At their peak, more than 130 Hudson River brick factories manufactured at least a billion bricks annually for construction downriver, with serious consequences due to the clay's extraction. A towering skyscraper like the Empire State Building (1931) created new holes in the ground. Expanding industrial spaces were conducive to economic “growth” but disregarded the existing ecosystems. Since native plants rarely survive in urban landscapes, their removal was seen as necessary (Schmid). The prioritization of profit catalyzed industrial expansion, disregarding the negative impacts on destroyed and surrounding natural landscapes (Clement). Against this material backdrop, the urban / rural divide of art during the New Deal records an erasure of the natural world (rural) in favor of industrial spaces (urban).
American urbanization provides an irony, in that nature was disregarded for development yet later came to be valorized within urban centers. It has been shown that urban green spaces improve quality of life. Psychologically, economically, and socially, green spaces provide healthier environments that benefit residents (Wheatley). Recognizing the benefits, city residents bring nature back into an area where it had been purposefully destroyed. The major proponents of reintegrating nature in cities were wealthy residents. A severe Tuberculosis outbreak in America coincided with significant urban development in the 1920s and ‘30s, leading many wealthy people to desire a return to “hygienic” greenspaces (EarthShare). That trend is apparent in New Deal-era art, shown by the artistic glorification of rural landscapes. It is important to note that urban development was not rapid, but steady. By the 1930s, cities were developing, but most still remained in contact with nearby farming regions, as seen the Philip Cheny’s Long Island Farm (1937).
Whether consciously or not, artists working for the Federal Art Program depicted the expansion of urban landscapes into the natural world and the reintroduction of nature into spaces where it had been destroyed. Bruce Nelson’s The Ridge (c. 1935) is just one of countless views documenting the strange beauty of Central Park, whose construction was preceded by the eviction of free Blacks and Irish immigrants; by removing five million cubic feet of glacial schist and then importing 18,000 cubic yards of topsoil from Long Island and New Jersey (Rosenzweig). On a seemingly smaller scale, Mabel Dwight’s Christmas Trees (1939) creates a snow globe scene whose bounty has appeared magically from somewhere, arriving in a prosperous neighborhood of the city. Reminders of ecological webs, like a pig displayed in a window, appear strange and unnatural because of a broken connection.
Works Consulted
-- Clement, Matthew Thomas. “Urbanization and the Natural Environment: An Environmental Sociological Review and Synthesis.” Organization & Environment 23.3 (2010): 291–314. JSTOR. Link
-- EarthShare. “Public Parks and Urban Green Spaces: A History of Accessibility.” 3 Sept. 2024. Internet Archive, access 11 May 2026. Link
-- Rosenzweig, Roy. The Park and the People: A History of Central Park. Cornell, 1998.
-- Schmid, James A. “The Environmental Impact of Urbanization.” 213-251 in Perspectives on Environment, ed. Ian R. Manners and Marvin W. Mikesell. University of Chicago, 1974. Link
-- Wheatley, Mary Christine. “Green Urbanism: Enhancing City Life Through Integrated Green Spaces.” Premier Journal of Environmental Science 2024; 1:100007. Link