Establishment of the City Gardens Club
Founded in 1918 by Frances Peters, the City Gardens Club of New York City embodied the convergence of several core impulses of early twentieth century American progressivism. The cultivation and preservation of natural beauty within the city’s crowded streets for the benefit of all its citizens represented a multifaceted and effective form of civic engagement.
Frances Peters was uniquely suited to make the Club a success: in her interests and talents as well as her extensive administrative and political experiences, Peters had the energy and skills to transform her central City Gardens Club vision into a productive, long-lasting and adaptable enterprise.
Frances Peters was born in 1862 into a prominent New York City family. She was the eighth child of the fourteen children of Alice Richmond Peters and Thomas McClure Peters. Her grandfather, William Richmond, great-uncle, James Cooke Richmond, and father were the third, fourth and fifth rectors of St. Michael’s Church; her older brother, John Punnett Peters, was St. Michael’s sixth rector. Altogether, the Richmond-Peters family led St. Michael’s for exactly one century; its men, both clergy and lay, and women were leaders of the church, in politically influential society and among charitable organizations throughout the region. Frances Peters and her five sisters – none of whom ever married — all devoted themselves to major organizations, associations and activities including St. Michael’s itself, social work and welfare agencies, hospitals, parks, and universal suffrage. Even among the many Richmond-Peters women, Frances Peters was exceptionally energetic and productive.
Frances Peters’ initial visibility beyond her home parish resulted from her success as a chess player. She played in city-wide and regional tournaments and by 1902 had been voted to the Board of Directors of the Women’s Chess Club of New-York; by 1910, she had become the Chess Club’s Vice-President. Chess players – Frances Peters’ friends – figured in the growing suffrage movement: their names appear side by side in New York newspapers. Peters’ skills as a public speaker increased. By 1915, she was “leader” of the Woman Suffrage Party of New York’s 15th Assembly District; one newspaper reported that she “gave an instructive and brilliant talk on the history and progress of suffrage” at a public meeting. [[ref]]
Like her brother, the Rev. John Punnett Peters who lobbied the New York City Council and the New York State legislature in favor of the development of Manhattan city parks and the prevention of a proposed above-ground railroad on Amsterdam Avenue, Frances Peters was active in the development, design and preservation of Riverside Park. In 1916, Peters was elected corresponding secretary of the newly formed Women’s League for the Protection of Riverside Park.
By 1917, Peters had begun a campaign to raise public awareness concerning the central principles of a potential City Gardens Club. In a letter to the New-York Tribune (April 5, 1917), Peters evoked the happy success of a recent Flower Show and asked why those who had “available backyards” had not yet landscaped them and used them to create “some verdure there.” The key elements of her argument – beauty, real estate taxation and public health – are all present. “We are constantly calling for more green breathing spaces in this congested city. Why not develop these highly taxed bits of property …? A very beautiful garden can be made on a tiny scale … A view from our back windows of green spaces, with iron grilles between instead of the ugly board fences, will be a pleasure on a spring morning, and allow, besides, a far better circulation of air.”
An interim club – the City Garden Club for the Improvement of Back Yards – briefly existed; Peters led it. She wrote in another New-York Tribune letter (March 21, 1918), “The time for gardens is approaching once more. You long for one here in the city? Why not have one in your own back yard? … We become all too easily accustomed to ugly conditions. This is unnecessary. … The garden habit, once acquired, will never leave you. … Encourage your children to make a little garden in your backyard. It will prove safer than the streets and more healthful than the movies. We need more beauty, and here both beauty and use may be combined, for in one back yard in the city enough lettuce, radishes and parsley were grown to furnish the table for a whole summer … We have neglected our back yards for too long. Shall we improve them now?”
Within a year, the City Gardens Club was formed, and Peters was in the newspapers again, praising the virtues of back yard gardens for both improved air quality with a consequent reduction of infant mortality and the creation of beauty. Aesthetic impulses and public health strategies merged. In the late summer of 1919, the city itself noticed the existence of the City Gardens Club. A New-York Tribune reporter noted, “deep ethical, hygienic and civic reasons for gardens in cities” were being realized at last. Annual membership in the new Club was $1.00 and, after less than eighteen months, activities had already expanded beyond individuals’ backyards to include projects in “vacant lots (and) grounds about public institutions. (August 3, 1919)” The reporter concluded by saying that anyone interested in the work should contact Miss Peters. “She will welcome you to the fold and tell you what to do next.”
The immediate success of the City Gardens Club was attributable not merely to the innate value of its mission and its projects, but to Peters’ deft connecting of CGC activities to those of other institutions and organizations of which she was a part. On November 14, 1920, the New York Herald ran a major story on the CGC’s collaboration with the Women’s Municipal League to mount an exhibit on “a new creation … of a new city” that was “distinctive” to this modern era. The article, “Shows Progress towards a ‘City Beautiful’’ extolled the City Gardens Club successful efforts to “reclaim the arid and waste spaces everywhere in the city, particularly the unsightly and unsanitary back yards.” The article featured a picture of CGC member Mrs. John A. Dix’s “back yard” on East 79th Street between Park and Lexington Avenues and of Frances Peters herself.
Between Frances Peters’ establishment of the City Gardens Club in 1918 and her (early cancer (double check)) death in 1924, the Club expanded rapidly and Peters continued her active CGC leadership as well as her involvement in the women’s suffrage and its application, local politics and various public parks advocacy activities. The CGC hosted window box competitions and photography contests. The New York Times noted that the work of the club extended well beyond flowers, indicating in 1922 that the club “numbers several hundred members, many of whom have developed city gardens, or are otherwise actively interested in civic improvement” (December 3, 1922).
When Frances Peters died, she was widely mourned. The Brooklyn Life and Activities of Long Island Society Newsletter reported on May 23, 1925, “A live oak tree, planted in 1923 in Cambridge Court, Jackson Heights, by Miss Frances Peters, the founder, and, until her death, president of the City Gardens Club of New York City, was dedicated as a memorial to her in recognition of her beautiful life devoted to public service … The dedication address was delivered by Charles Lathrop Pack, president of the American Tree Association, his subject being, ‘Trees as Significant of Life’.”
The originating mission of the City Gardens Club of New York City represented a very particular early twentieth century Progressive optimism: New Yorkers of all classes could engage together in projects that would correct the destructive ills of a crowded industrial city, create renewed and fresh beauty, contribute to citizens’ physical happiness while elevating principles of public health, and affirm the effectiveness of civic engagement. Conceived in the hopefulness that held the country’s spirit at the conclusion of the “war to end all wars” and administered by women, led by Frances Peters, whose administrative savvy was shaped and sharpened by the suffrage movement, the City Gardens Club has proved to be even more enduringly effective than its founder might have dared to imagine.