More than 30 students put in sweat equity Saturday to help launch a long-term project to beautify Montclair High School campus. Sponsored by the MHS PTA, the event, dubbed “Clean and Dream” is the start of reimagining unused outdoor spaces around the high school to build community.
According to Donna Montague, of MHS PTA who co-led the project with John Sullivan, the goal is to beautify underutilized spaces around the high school while creating more opportunities for connection between students and the community.Â
To that end, Montclair Garden Club offered design ideas and gardening advice on choosing the right plants for the spaces, including those that are deer resistant. The high school’s shop classes are also supporting the project, with the construction of new benches, tables, and planters.
The name George Inness School built at the site of an amphitheater forum on Tony’s Brook holds a beautiful significance . This gesture is a tribute to Frederick Law Olmsted’s vision for New York City’s Central Park being inspired by a George Inness painting of Montclair. The significance of Olmsted’s project for Central Park is that it is a huge naturalistic George Inness landscape painting, strategically placed in the heart of the developing city so that it would forever immortalize what the city’s landscape looked like in its original naturalistic condition. Olmsted believed that every major city, from Washington DC to Boston, would eventually merge into one continuous urban landscape. He envisioned each city having its own Central Park, a place that would forever preserve the original natural beauty of the location. Olmsted also envisioned that each Central Park would be connected by a green corridor, a “Park Way” This visionary concept came before the idea of developing the East Coast’s train lines that was planned by Julius Pratt of Montclair. Pratt’s vision for Montclair was that it would not develop into a mono-centric city, instead a green suburb planned to have six train stations, where passengers would get off directly in their neighborhoods and walk home surrounded by nature. (and visa-versa)
There is also a hidden tragedy in Olmsted’s visions and Inness’s landscapes. America was not an undeveloped naturalistic landscape when the visionaries came and began to paint and plan. Indigenous structures were demolished as well as communities like Seneca Village, an African American suburb that was removed so that Central Park could be a “zero landscape”. Grover Cleveland Park in Caldwell, for example, was once the site of primitive mill structures and windmills. All existing structures and original communities were removed to create Olmsted’s parks.