Symposium at Trinity College to Mark 150th Anniversary of Bushnell Park

August 6, 2004—Hartford, Conn.—As part of the year-long, city-wide celebration of Bushnell Park's 150th anniversary, Trinity College will sponsor a two-day symposium examining the origins and development of the park, and placing it in the larger context of Hartford's history and the present. The free event will be held in Mather Hall at the College on September 30 and October 1 and is open to the general public (see complete schedule below). No pre-registration is required.

Following welcoming remarks by Trinity President James F. Jones, Jr., Louis Menand, Professor of English at Harvard, staff writer for The New Yorker, and winner of the Pulitzer Prize in History for his book The Metaphysical Club, will deliver the keynote address entitled "The Paradoxes of Pluralism." Menand will discuss Bushnell Park in relationship to broader trends in mid-19th-Century American culture and society, including the tensions between native-born Americans and immigrant newcomers and how those tensions were reflected in the emerging urban public parks movement —a movement exemplified by the creation of New York's Central Park, which was begun just one year before the citizens of Hartford voted to create Bushnell Park.

Other speakers include Robert B. Mullin, co-author of The Puritan as Yankee: A Life of Horace Bushnell, and Charles Beveridge, co-author of Frederick Law Olmsted: Designing the American Landscape and senior editor of Olmsted's papers. Professor Mullin, from the General Theological Seminary in New York will examine the Reverend Horace Bushnell's campaign for Bushnell Park as one of many examples of his civic activism in Hartford. Professor Beveridge, a research historian at American University, will explore the central role in the public parks movement played by F. L. Olmsted, the Hartford-born landscape architect who is best known as the designer (with Calvin Vaux) of New York's Central Park, but who also designed individual parks or entire park systems in Boston, Montreal, Buffalo, Brooklyn, Baltimore, Detroit, Louisville, Ky., and his native city.

Sessions will also be devoted to the origins and development of Bushnell Park, its multiple civic functions, the city's ethnic, racial, and religious transformation as a result of successive waves of migration, the park's evolving social and cultural purposes, and the problems and prospects confronting Hartford today. Among those participating in these sessions as either speakers or panelists will be William Hosley, executive director of the Antiquarian & Landmarks Society; Sandy Parisky, managing director of the Bushnell Park Foundation; Tom Condon, columnist and "Place" editor at the Hartford Courant; Steve Courtney, author of a forthcoming biography of the Reverend Joseph Twichell; Peter Baldwin of the University of Connecticut, author of Domesticating the Street: The Reform of Public Space in Hartford, 1850 - 1930; Hartford City Council member Kenneth Kennedy, Jr.; and several members of the Trinity College faculty. An exhibition of historic photographs of Bushnell Park, curated by Nancy Albert of Wesleyan University, will be on display in the gallery space in Mather Hall. Also of note in Hartford’s commemoration of the Bushnell Park anniversary is the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art presentation of Celebrating Bushnell Park, on view from September 4 to November 14.

The Symposium is dedicated to the memory of the late Jan Kadetsky Cohn, G. Keith Funston Professor of American Literature and American Studies at Trinity, who initiated the idea more than a year ago and completed much of the planning for the event prior to her death on July 1, 2004. Professor Cohn came to the College in 1987 as dean of faculty, the first woman to hold that position. The symposium was organized by Cohn in cooperation with Susan Pennybacker of the Trinity College History Department, who is a founder and the director of the Hartford Studies Project, and Andrew Walsh, associate director of the College's Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion and Public Life.

For more information, call 860-297-2401.

Schedule of Events
Unless otherwise indicated, all events are in the Washington Room, 2nd floor of Mather Hall on the Trinity campus.

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