American-based design practice Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects and owner Thomas L. Woltz are renowned for their designs drawing inspiration from the history and ecology of the land. Ahead of the launch of Thomas’ new book, we are pleased to share an exclusive extract from the book, highlighting the design of Brooklyn Naval Cemetery Landscape in New York:
Before Nelson Byrd Woltz took on this unusual site and made it a meadow, it appeared to be the rare undeveloped parcel within walking distance of downtown Brooklyn. A century earlier, the land had been a burial ground for the Brooklyn Naval Hospital next door, which opened in the 1830s. Both the hospital and cemetery lie within the historical bounds of the Brooklyn Navy Yard around Wallabout Bay, where the U. S. Navy built ships from the early 1800s to the mid-twentieth century. After the government closed the Navy Yard in 1966, the City of New York bought the land, about 300 acres, and eventually a development corporation filled it with film studios and hundreds of other businesses—except for the hospital, which remains vacant, and the cemetery, which is not quite vacant.
In 1926 burials, some unmarked, were removed and taken to Cypress Hills National Cemetery in Brooklyn, though the work was incomplete, as was discovered after the site had become a ballfield.
At that point, the grounds fell silent, stranded within a thick shroud of trees alongside a one-way chute of Williamsburg Street at the edge of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. There were few appropriate reuses for such a sensitive place.
NBW worked within strict parameters to create the first public space of the nonprofit Brooklyn Greenway Initiative, which has developed a 26 mile bikeway that encircles the borough. Funds for acquiring the land came from Nature Sacred, a national nonprofit that promotes accessible open space in cities as a public health imperative. The group advocates for these urban escapes in part by opening them and in part by compiling evidence, with academic backing, among people that such spaces favor well-being—improved vital signs and metabolism, better mood and fitness.
As for the better mood part, one thing everyone notices about this landscape today is a total bodily shift upon going in. The city outside is a storm of noise and traffic fumes and mazes of buildings
and streets. The Naval Cemetery entrance clears a way through that overload, up a low stair to a long, wood-framed gate. A few steps farther in is utter calm, and soon, contemplation. A boardwalk opens before a wide angle of meadow surrounded by a solid fortress of trees. Tall grasses and wildflowers are everywhere, swaying under a dozen breezes at once. The meadow plantings inject a reservoir of pollen- and nectar-rich species into an urban setting mostly devoid of them, bolstering the food web vital both to wildlife, particularly insects, birds, and bats, and to human survival. On a July day, in the heat of noon, there is a blanket of yellow woodland sunflowers and eruptions of purple coneflowers and bee balm. The milkweed is plentiful, but it bloomed in June and is headed for seed.
There is also mugwort, a hated weed, and as likely as not, a Greenway staff person is there pulling it out. Or perhaps serving as a guide. The Greenway hosts regular programs for the community. School groups come to soak in the rich ecology, learn about plants, pollinators, and city wildlife; they watch, listen, draw, or walk around to get to know the place. The heaviest duty of this landscape is to connect people with nature. There are sessions of botanical drawing, meditation, bird-watching, fashion shows, and talks about the nature of nature—a modest amphitheater of benches occupies one corner of the boardwalk.
Before the Navy, before the Americans and the Dutch before them, this site was all a wetland in Lenape country. Wallabout Creek spread out and meandered across the site toward Wallabout Bay and the East River. The creek’s flows, long since drained out of sight, suggested the shape of the boardwalk of black locust that loops around the site’s edges, vanishing beyond curves this way and that, swallowed by the meadow.
The boardwalk floats along its entire path. The firm could disturb the ground no more than four inches down, so the wood structure and entrance threshold rest on a system of surface piers that provide strength and stability without a need for excavation. The constraint on disturbance additionally inspired the major scheme for a prairie of perennial grasses and forbs, the seeds of which could be sown at the surface and pressed in gently.
High granite steppingstones form a broken line out into the meadow—a few long strides to complete immersion. One corner has a miniature grove of black cherry trees, planted small to avoid digging and by now thickened into a screen. Behind them is a bench where Nature Sacred offers a meditation journal in which visitors are encouraged to record their thoughts. Some people sketch. Others confess or grieve. They wish the world well.
There is always life in the meadow. The plantings churn yearly through the greens of ripe grasses and the browns of dormancy in winter. The growing season once again ignites the flat field with the succession of blue false indigo; hot orange butterfly weed; the purples of wild bergamot, hyssop, and coneflower; yellow tickseed and skinny sunflowers, and later, the familiar flush of goldenrod just as blue returns as a fog of asters. The dead receive, as it were, the rites of new and multiplying life. The design hallows the site. The dead, it says, are everyone. They are us.
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The Land is Full book launch will take place at the museum on Tuesday 25 March, 7pm: book tickets (in person or online tickets available)
Kindly supported by Munder Skiles
Photos Max Touhey