‘Animating Central Park’: Q&A with Dawn Day Biehler

In Animating Central Park, Dawn Day Biehler examines the vibrant and intimately connected lives of humans and nonhuman animals in one of the world’s most iconic green spaces. We caught up with Biehler over email to learn more about her research for the book and how these entangled multispecies histories in Central Park can inform our understanding of urban wildlife and green spaces in the present.

You begin your book with Christian Cooper, the Black birder who was racially targeted by Amy Cooper (no relation) after asking her to leash her dog in the Ramble, a sensitive bird habitat in Central Park. How does this incident introduce wider conversations about multispecies relationships in the park?

I was devastated to learn that that happened to Christian Cooper, and also it sounded familiar from my work in the archives. As Cooper himself writes, birders and dog-walkers have been having these “dustups” for a long time. There are files upon files of letters to the park commissioners from privileged dog owners and from people who experienced dogs as a menace. Whether it’s over dogs, birds, goats, fish, horses, sheep, or hippos in the menagerie, these struggles hinged on people’s knowledge and claims about what animals need to exist with us in the city.

These struggles have also been wrapped up with humans’ power and identity: race, nationality, class, gender, sexuality, age. Relationships with animals are not universal, and dominant people have often claimed space for their way of being with animals, for example when early commissioners chose a refined English sheep breed for the park. But others also shaped the multispecies park in their own ways, for example by sneaking fish into the park’s ponds, which was against park rules.

Birders have built a special kind of power in their intricate knowledge of the Ramble and the North Woods, another great bird habitat, and they have endeavored for over a hundred years to protect these spaces and educate the public. But birders are not a monolith either, as prominent Black naturalists like J. Drew Lanham or Corina Newsome have pointed out. It has been heartening to see Christian Cooper using his political savvy and knowledge of birds to promote conservation and equity within the conservation field.

Recent stories like that of Christian Cooper or the escaped owl, Flaco, are likely well-known, but your book reveals a long line of animal stories in the park. What were some of the more surprising things you uncovered in your research?

Relating to Flaco, it was surprising how in the early days of the park, zoological department directors like William Conklin grappled with which animals should be free and which should be in cages. Their choices might seem weird to us today. They worried about wild birds’ vulnerability, so sometimes the staff in the 1860s and ’70s captured members of certain species, like a mallard and a night heron, to keep and display in the menagerie. But then Conklin released some donated animals into the park, like prairie dogs for example. There was tension between wanting to enliven the park landscape on the one hand and, on the other hand, keeping desired animals in the menagerie to protect them from predators.

Looking back at the 1800s and the era of grand park-building helps me clarify what urban communities want, such as local control of the land, resources to maintain green spaces, and defining their own relationships with animals.
Dawn Day Biehler

Other New Yorkers were also anxious to see animals preserved in the park as urban development paved over the rest of Manhattan island. Apartment dwellers would drop off animals at the menagerie, from rail-birds who collided with windows to raccoons found lurking in their courtyards.

Can you share a few examples from the book that reflect the ways that animal spaces in Central Park were used, as you write, “by white supremacists and heteronormative users to maintain hegemony over the landscape”?

The first space that comes to mind is the bridle paths. Since the park’s origins, the bridle path was an exclusive space for an expensive leisure activity. Furthermore, race was entangled with horsemanship. Elite white horse owners (including many enslavers) would have Black men and boys work in stables, and even have them race as jockeys, but many whites could not fathom Black people commanding these large, powerful animals for their own leisure.

Equestrians used the bridle paths as a multispecies social space and for gaining access to secluded natural areas while atop powerful animals. Paths required careful and costly maintenance to remain gentle on horses’ hooves and to prevent the surface from becoming muddy or dusty. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

By the early 1900s, other park users challenged the exclusivity of the bridle paths—bicyclists and joggers, for example, and also a wider social spectrum of equestrians as stables made hiring a horse more accessible. Black equestrians integrated the bridle path amid these other tensions over the space, while the condition of trails was also degrading from lack of maintenance. Black riders like Bessie Augusta reported being accosted on the bridle paths by hostile white riders.

The singer Ethel Waters and other women performers from the Cotton Club loved to go riding to unwind together. Waters was quite famous, and the staging of the show sexualized her and her fellow performers. Some white riders objected to Waters’s race, gender, and sexuality on the trail, and they even tried to have her arrested for supposed rowdy behavior there. It was like they could accept her as an object to be seen on stage, but not as someone to cross paths with in nature, particularly not in the way that horse-rider dyads command space.

How has your research for this book on Central Park shaped your wider work in environmental justice and community ecologies in Baltimore?

In New York in the 1850s and ’60s, planners, reformers, and investors saw an opportunity to create a major green space for the city. Some wanted to impose order and profitability through green space—getting rid of Seneca Village and the subsistence farmers, hastening the growth of real estate markets. The architects, [Frederick Law] Olmsted and [Calvert] Vaux, gave little attention to animals. But lots of animals came, through lots of different means, and city-dwellers were drawn to them. Regular folks beyond the park went out of their way to keep animals in their lives as the city grew—building bird houses in neighborhoods threatened by gentrification and keeping geese and goats in tenements.

Olmsted and Vaux’s plan for a working dairy that brought urban children together with the source of their milk did not come to fruition, but this photo, circa 1868, shows cattle donated to the park, tethered and grazing near the Arsenal building, where menagerie animals were housed. Courtesy of the New York Public Library Digital Collections.

Today, planners and investors see new opportunities to designate urban green space. In Baltimore, a century of racial segregation and ongoing marginalization by municipal investment has left hundreds of empty lots that people’s homes once occupied. What happens as city governments demolish the houses, leaving potential green spaces? Looking back at the 1800s and the era of grand park-building helps me clarify what urban communities want, such as local control of the land, resources to maintain green spaces, and defining their own relationships with animals. Do they want small-scale animal agriculture, ponds for fishing? How might they work with scientists and planners to configure space for wildlife habitat?

How would you like your book to influence public perception of urban wildlife and green spaces?

I want us to know that urban spaces have always been multispecies spaces if we know how to look back in history. Central Park’s beauty obscures thousands of years of multispecies relationships, going back to Indigenous people who fished and hunted there. In the 1850s the city erased Seneca Village to build the park—a community that was built to advance Black liberation and where Black folks kept horses for their livelihoods as cartmen. Immigrants who lived off the land in central Manhattan with their goats, geese, and hogs got pushed to the margins as developers built mansions and apartment buildings on park-side parcels. Human-animal relationships have always been part of urban life, and even park development can wipe some relationships off the map

It’s also important to recognize that urban green spaces are not enough. Central Park’s leaders and the boosters for its animal populations in the 1800s thought about the park as kind of a museum of nature in part because capitalists and settlers were consuming North American nature so rapidly. And the conversion of wildlife habitat and small farms for suburbs, industry, and industrial farms continued. It’s wonderful that birds thrive in the Ramble and the North Woods in Central Park, and we also need to preserve the landscapes all along migratory birds’ journeys. And cities and communities managing green spaces need the resources to maintain them as healthy, welcoming places for diverse humans and animals.

Baltimore-area folks can catch Dawn Day Biehler in conversation with Rylee Wernoch of the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center on January 21, 2025 at 7:00 PM ET at Red Emma’s.

Dawn Day Biehler is associate professor in the Department of Geography and Environmental Systems at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She is author previously of Pests in the City: Flies, Bedbugs, Cockroaches, and Rats.