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This article examines the life and work of the nineteenth-century French-American artist Victor Prevost. While Prevost's name is familiar to photography historians, the diversity of his artistic accomplishments has not been fully appreciated. An artist celebrated for work in several mediums, Prevost was already making large-format calotypes in 1851 while living in New York City. He was also responsible for innovations in telescopic photography, joining with astronomers at the West Point Military Academy in 1854 to capture a solar eclipse on paper. This paper seeks to broaden knowledge of Prevost's life and work as a commercial artist in New York during the nineteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper addresses issues of race, species, and kind through an incident that took place 25 May 2020, when a birder and a dog owner crossed path in the Ramble of New York's Central Park. The birder, a gay Black man, was searching for scarlet tanagers and other songbirds. The dog owner, a white woman, was walking Henry, her blond cocker. The birder asked the dog owner to leash her spaniel, a bird dog, as required by park rules. The dog owner called 911, reporting that an 'African-American man was putting her in danger'. There is a pre-history to their encounter. Our dubious guide is John James Audubon, whose Ornithological Biography presents haunting scenes of life out of doors, the ramble, or the hunt, and how humans and animals prey upon each other. But the decisive voice is that of Frederic Law Olmsted, who not only designed Central Park (with Calvert Vaux), but also provided the moral and ethical code for its police force. Once it is shown how all the actors (human and animal) and the setting are in fact 'related,' it is the presence of the police in the park that must be explained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In tracing the controversy-ridden social history of the West Indian Labor Day Carnival in Central Brooklyn, the phrase 'Zoo York' emerged as a powerful descriptor of city life as a staged and enclosed spectacle, an ethos that is enunciated by Carnival. The term 'Zoo York' was coined by the hip-hop generation of the 1970s. Zoo York is said to have been inspired by the physical, literal zoo in Central Park, but might have been influenced by the major construction projects that enclosed the inner city of New York City decades prior. In this analysis, Carnival is shown to be a method and praxis for examining the racial and gender aspects of the city. This method places the West Indian Carnival within a larger narrative of enclosure that has been critical in the policing of Black cultural aesthetics in the United States and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An editorial is presented about transportation system in the U.S., citing the rapid transit lines to the suburbs, controversies in allowing cars in the Central Park and provision of space for bicyclists on bridges. It cites that the same problems on general issues are experienced from 1899 to 1999. The article also cites that the government is not making substantial progress towards resolving the issues.

The article discusses the transformation of landscape gardening into landscape architecture in the U.S. Topics include the book "Forty Years of Landscape Architecture," a two-volume work by Theodora Kimball and Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr.; the issue of building a memorial for landscape architect Andrew Jackson Downing; and the political context of the construction of Central Park in New York City.