ABSTRACT OF THF THESIS



THE ROLE OF HIGHLAND AESTHETICS IN

THE CREATION OF AN INTERSTATE PARK:



GEOGRAPHIC CONCEPTION IN THE LOWER

HUDSON VALLEY (1783-1909) AND THE

EVOLUTION OF A REGIONAL

RECREATIONAL LANDSCAPE



by RAYMOND J. O'BRIEN

Thesis Director: Professor Peter Wacker



Concepts and attitudes toward landscape, springing from both a European and North American milieux, are analyzed as to their role in the creation of a scenic-recreational entity.  The interplay between conceptual imagery and actual land use as both a stimulus to, and explanation for, the "impulse" to cherish, idealize, and eventually safeguard that which is deemed aesthetic on the face of the land is studied.  Analysis is made of the culturogeographic conditions which

led to the establishment of a specific urban fringe recreational entity, i.e. the Palisades Interstate Park in New York and New Jersey.  The park's formation is viewed in terms of environmental concepts and landscape attitudes cultivated throughout the nineteenth-century and ultimately seized upon as a modus operand! by groups and individuals concerned with landscape preservation.  By testing the validity and applicability of ideas advanced by geographers and others concerning North American environmental attitudes and their historical conditioners, the present research gives firm evidence and supportive examples

to previously speculative generalizations.  The study concerns itself especially with ideas expressed by David Lowenthal.  His ideas which have a direct relevancy to tills work, and which have not largely been applied to individual case studies, include: the degree to which mental landscapes conform to reality; nostalgia and the idealization of the historical landscape; and landscape tastes of "outsiders" and "insiders" and their relationship with environmental design. Other themes of landscape concept are explored as part of the overall analysis: the role of the "sublime" and "picturesque" in the Nationalist-Romantic era; the "Hudsonian" search for the ideal in the formation of a regional aesthetic; and the functional importance of geologic "curiosities," historical associations, and "art fully-decayed" or "ruined" structures in an arcadian-pastoral landscape (James Vance, "California and the Search for the Ideal," Annals of the AAG, 1972

and Paul. Shepard, Man in the Landscape, 1967). Chronologically, the study is organized around two approximate dates: the Revolutionary War (1770's-80's) and the Hudson-Fulton celebrations (1909), coupled with the creation and expansion of the Palisades Park system (1900-09).  Within these time brackets, cross-sections in time, or sequential periods of economic utilization, are constructed to "better record those processes of cultural growlh that brought the landscape into being. The largely preserved and sanctified Hudson Valley confirms what many have thought to be true of environmental relationships. As an historical

geographic document, t.'his river valley corroborates in classic fashion the complex interplay between the evolution of a cultural landscape and those mental concepts--translated into social attitudes--that guided the process of its spatial transition.