For National Gardening Day: A Little Stroll Through Pleasure Gardens

We don’t often get occasion to add to our little section of posts defining the various types of variety arts and their venues, so we thought we would embrace National Gardening Day as an occasion to talk about Pleasure Gardens.

This is a kind of public space that very much continues to thrive, by the way, we’ve just fallen out of the habit of calling it by this name. For a couple of reasons, I think. One (this is just an instinct): I feel the word “pleasure” became sort of hijacked. While we still acknowledge the existence of such a thing as “innocent pleasures”, the need for a qualifier is an indication of the direction our society has gone in. “Pleasure” reads like a very strong word now, maybe on account of its use in advertising and its association with vices that are much more prevalent and out in the open than they were a century ago. A “Pleasure Garden” or a “Pleasure Palace” sounds like a massage parlor to me, or those porn cinemas they used to have around Times Square. So there’s that. On the other hand, there’s also a pressure towards obsolescence of the term from the other end. The word was employed a century and more ago to differentiate it from, ya know, a working garden, a kitchen garden, a vegetable garden, which most people had at their own houses in any case. The novelty of a Pleasure Garden was that you strictly strolled around, seeing and smelling pretty flora. The word “Pleasure” is thus used in this case much as “Amusement” is used in “Amusement Park”, and there is even a little overlap between these kinds of resorts.

Such gardens go back to ancient times, of course. The Hanging Garden of Babylon was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. In modern Europe, private Pleasure Gardens were features of great estates. Then, as with zoos (which we posted about a few days ago), they began to be opened up to the public in the Age of Democracy. One of the better known ones in London is the Vauxhall Gardens (Generally Anglicized to sound like “Voxhall”, FYI. If you can’t restrain yourself from saying “Vo-Hall”, someone’s liable to slap you down). It’s been around since ca. 1660.

And of course the reason we mention this kind place on this blog and in this kind of context is that Pleasure Gardens like the Vauxhall featured entertainment: musicians and singers were presented, there were fireworks, balloon ascensions, circus performances, military drill teams and mock battles, and such like. So it rates as another type of variety venue. Marylebone Gardens was another one dating from around the same time. Copenhagen has the famous Tivoli Gardens, now more of an amusement park.

And as we mentioned in No Applause, New York had them as well throughout the 19th century. The name of one of them is more widely known than all the others, though it’s now its its fourth incarnation and has quite a different mission and atmosphere: Madison Square Garden. You many have also heard of Castle Garden, which was at Castle Clinton (in Battery Park). (This is where Jenny Lind made her American debut). The one we have had the most occasion to refer to, because so many seminal performances took place there, is Niblo’s Gardens. New York also had its own version of the Vauxhall Garden and numerous others. Beer Gardens, an import from Germany, were also very popular starting in the 19th century. I touched on several of New York’s public gardens in this post about the Bowery.

In the Belle Epoque, entrepreneurs like F.F. Proctor and Oscar Hammerstein catapulted the concept all the way up to Pleasure Palaces, entire entertainment complexes incorporating multiple theatre venues, restaurants, roof gardens, and other public spaces all in one place. If you picture that era in the mind’s eye, and think of places like restaurants, steamships, and the lobbies of theatres and hotels, sometimes it can seem like the entire world was a Pleasure Garden. I dunno, I picture potted palms and other plantings in the public spaces of those times.

And there is plenty of that in contemporary New York, although, as we say, we call them by other names. The Winter Garden Atrium at the World Financial Center is one of my favorite of these. 60 Wall Street has a nice one. Paley Park, which I wrote about here, is a small-scale example of such a space. The city is full of them. Some are corporate (usually mandated by law at the outset of building projects). Some are community gardens, created by volunteers in abandoned lots. I love both kinds. And naturally, formal Botanical Gardens function as major social spaces and cultural platforms in addition to engaging in the more literal type of cultivation.

For more on like topics, please see No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous.