I daresay the goal of landscape architects such as Olmstead was to create the wondrous illusion of a pastoral setting in an urban environment, as a respite from the unrelieved visual jumble of any heavily populated area (no matter how charming the town). I always marveled at how wonderfully well this objective had been realized in Audubon; the golf course was never "in your face." My husband and I constantly remarked on how extraordinary it was that the golf course and golfing activity was so unobtrusive; you had such wonderful unobscured vistas of what appeared to be virtually pristine "countryside." I thought, God, what a miracle to have the best of both worlds - what a tour de force.

Now, on the contrary, we find the thing to be hideous. Despite the crowing flacks with their benighted sense of what's attractive, to real nature lovers, the effect is completely unnatural and unsettling. The beautiful pastoral vistas have now become a surreal phony landscape - the neon green pimply terrain is NOT our local terrain, and looks grotesquely out of place and unnatural. Not only THAT, but the golfing activity has become infinitely more visible; now to anyone walking, it has become a vaguely threatening busy-busy presence. You have the sense of all this activity, balls flying, carts racing around - much more a feeling of things potentially coming at you. The whole sense of serenity and the former miraculous low-key juxtaposition of the golfing activity with the other park activities is gone.

I just finished a book put out by the Yale Press called Redesigning the American Lawn, advocating changing the predominant American lawn/right-of-way/park/golf-course style from a so-called monoculture, heavily herbicided & pesticided "Industrial Lawn" to a more environmentally sensitive "Freedom Lawn," consisting of diverse plant species, still mowed to look like grass, (if grass is what seems to make Americans so happy -the ideal of course, for most green spaces, would be larger native plants which are ever more endangered and much better hosts to the "creatures.") I've thought ruefully, so many times since this debacle, how sad & ironic that the ANI, which should theoretically be at the forefront of serious environmental concern and change, has basically converted all those acres from what essentially WAS a freedom lawn to a horrible industrial lawn.

In closing, I just want to reiterate how much I resent the papers only printing the views of those who find it so "beautiful," as though they speak for everyone, when to any REAL nature lover, the park is now infinitely less attractive, if not an out-and-out eysore, and I mean from a purely aesthetic sense. I guess all any of us can do is go around like the Ancient Mariner, grabbing people by the arm and trying to convert them to a more enlightened view!