For the curious among you who are wondering aimlessly about the history and meaning of the "greensward" shirt, rest easy and you may now unfurl your brow:
In 1860, the city commission of New York issued a design contest for a landscaping plan to fill the center portion of Manhattan island. Over 1000 entries were submitted from all over the globe, but it was a submission by Fredick Law Olmstead and Calvert Vaux entitled, "The Greensward Plan" that ultimately won the day.
The ambitious Greensward Plan proposed roughly 8 years of massive terraforming and redirection of waterways in order to reconfigure the feral, rock-strewn land into a sprawling opus of open public space in the center of the country's most crowded city.
It is remarkable to remember that while it may seem like a preserved natural space, Central Park and the Greensward Plan represent the totalizing efffect of man-made space. Every square foot of Central Park was mapped out and reformed by steam shovels and good old-fashioned Irish labor, more than anything else it represents man's ideal vision of nature.
Thank you Sean-William Scott for your wearing on chest a most memorable homage to manscaping.
The Greenward shirt is available on the Back Door section of the Barking Irons webstore, get yours NOW!!!
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