carriage to produce what Olrn- sted described as a "concourse of animated life." The goal was not Arca- dia, but an attractive and diverting "spectacle."
Nor did the people who flocked to Prospect Park for concerts and ice cream seek unspoiled nature, according to Bluestone. He agrees with ar-chitect Horace Cleveland, who wrote in 1889 that "to the great mass of the so-called cultivated people, nature has no attraction except when aided the merest clap traps of fashionable...