Got Goats?

Goats munching on weeds in Norman Levy Park: Photo by Ariella Brown

 

The sight of carpet-like, green lawn may be priceless, but what goes into preparing it is a multi-billion dollar market. In 2023, The global lawn mowers market  was valued at a whopping $32.31 billion. 

Most of those sales  don't come from your basic manual style that relies on the rotary blade turned when you push it. While that style of lawn mower doesn’t take a toll on the environment, most people –and the gardeners that they employ – use machines powered by gas or electricity.  

While those machines have evolved to now feature advanced technology like GPS and even claims of AI, there is a simultaneous movement to embrace the very low tech approach to grass cutting that predates the invention of the lawn mower in 1830. 

Let’s take a brief tour of mowing grass from the 1700s to the present. 

Parklands in the 1700s

When you picture a park, something like Central Park may spring to mind. Today’s parks are  public spaces that offer a respite of green lawns and trees, especially in urban areas.

But back in the days of large country estates, a park could, in fact, be the private property of one wealthy family. 

That’s certainly the case of Mansfield Park, the estate that was featured as the title for one of  Jane Austen’s novels.Mansfield Park was written some time after Lacelot Capability Brown had reshaped the English landscape with rolling lawn and naturally set trees, shrubs, and bodies of water. His landscape designs offered a softer, less artificial effect to gardens than the formal garden styles that had been popularized by the very wealthy on the Continent. 

Those acres of grass needed to be trimmed regularly. One way was with grazing animals, typically sheep, who would also furnish the estate with wool, or possibly even cows that would provide milk. This required no more work than bringing the animals out to do what they do naturally, and they also provided the fertilizer in the same manner.

Another way that grass was kept in shape was through very arduous human labor. This is something that only the really wealthy could afford, hiring a team of gardeners merely to beautify their land with no yield of produce resulting from the work. 

A manicured lawn was a very visible sign of wealth and status. This is what is depicted in Leo Tolstoy’s novel  Anna Karenina. 

If you’ve read the book  or seen it rendered into film, you may have been struck by the sheer physical labor involved in mowing. As you can see in the clip below, it took a small army of men armed with scythes many hours to cut the grass neatly. 

it would seem that  the lawn mower had not made its way over to Tolstoy's part of Russia by 1873 -- when his book was release in installments. But a machine to reduce the amount of exertion necessary to trim grass had already been invented in England over forty years before that.

The first lawn mower 

Edwin Beard Budding, an engineer from Stroud, Gloucestershire, England invented the lawn mower in 1830. He is said to have taken the concept of its operation from the operation of  a machine in a cloth mill that employed  a cutting cylinder (or bladed reel)  to trim the surface of woolen cloth and leave it with  a smooth finish.

According to the post on “Mower History,” published by The Old Lawnmower Club, Budd partnered with another  engineer named  John Ferrabee to produce his mower design in a factory. A number of museums in the UK showcase such machines, and you can see a photo of one here.

Budding’s invention was actually not quite the design we use today, though it certainly paved the way. The lawn mower went through a number of improvements through other English inventors.

One of them was the Silens Messor, which was introduced by Thomas Green and Sons of Leeds and London in 1859. Using a chain to transfer power from the roller in the back to the cutting cylinder made it both more reliable and quieter to operate, hence the name, which means silent operation in Latin.

The first American patent for a lawn mower was awarded  1868 to Amariah Hills of Connecticut. It employed a reel-type spiral-bladed cutter” Two years later, Elwood McGuire came up with a “lighter, simpler machine” that was very popular. But there was yet another innovation at the very end of the century.

The improved lawn mower is an African-American invention

On  Sept. 8, 1898, John Albert Burr applied for a patent for his lawn mower design. He was granted U.S. patent 624,749 on May 9, 1899. The application describes the uniqueness of his invention as follows:

This invention relates to improvements in lawn-mowers of the most common type, comprising traction-wheels and a rotary cutter or shear operating in conjunction with a fixed bar relative to which the curved knife of the rotary cutter has shearing actions.

Why lawn mowers became so popular

Burr enjoyed quite a bit of success from his invention because it emerged at a time when gardening was taking off for the middle class. That’s what is posited in the American Gardening  blog post entitled, “Victorian Middle Class Wanted the Lawn Mower.”

While English gardens may have set the expectation for lawns on middle class homes, it also took root in American soil, thanks to the influence of prominent landscapers like Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903).He is the one who set out the vision for New York City’s Central Park in 1858 to include a Sheep Meadow. 

Sheep did in fact graze there, trimming and fertilizing the grass the old-fashioned way between 1864 and 1934. They were considered to add a “Romantic English quality” to the landscape.

 But for people who sought to emulate the look of neat grass without having to keep farm animals, there had to be another option beyond the heavy investment in labor with a scythe and so the lawn mower became a necessity for the fashionable home adorned by a lawn.

The blog quotes Mark Laird, who wrote in The Flowering of the Landscape Garden: English Pleasure Grounds 1720-1800: “Not until gardening became the leisure occupation of many new middle-class town dwellers did the mechanization of mowers begin.”

The Victorian Middle Class Wanted the Lawn Mower blog shows an ad for the Buckeye Lawn Mower from Springfield, Massachusetts from some time in the 1890s. It shows a fashionably dressed woman accompanied by an equally fashionably dressed girl who is pushing a lawn mower.Here mowing is depicted as a genteel, ladylike act of gardening, a far cry from the sweat-inducing labor we saw in Anna Karenina. 

Fueling lawn mowers and pollution

Mowing actually did become a lot more effortless thanks to motorization. Te Old Lawnmower Club dates “lightweight petrol [what we call gas in the U.S.] engines and small steam power units: all the way back to the 1890s. 

 Over in the United States, gas-powered mowers were first manufactured in 1919 by  Colonel Edwin George. But it was too costly for homeowners until after World War II.

Affordable gas-powered mowers, no doubt, promoted a lot of green lawns to adorn the houses sprouting up in new suburban neighborhoods after the war. The design of tractor-like models that didn’t need to be pushed but driven to cover large areas quickly and easily were particularly appealing to those who had large areas to mow.. 

In 1948  Max Swisher of Missouri invented an innovative zero-turn mower  called  the “Ride King..” As the name indicates the wheel could be turned 180 degrees, which eliminated the need to turn the whole thing around when tackling a new row. .

How green was my lawnmower?

Advances like these made mowing more efficient, though the green effect is not all that green in terms of energy consumption.

The stats on the resources expended to keep up green lawns in the United States are rather alarming. “Lawns use about 800 million gallons of gasoline a year to harvest their ‘crop’ of grass with lawnmowers, about 1/4 of 1% of national petroleum use,” according to Reducing Water for Lawns.

Regulations on emissions for lawn mowers only approached the stringency of those applied to cars in 2008, As a result, they are now cleaner than they had been, though how clean depends on what you choose.

What about electric power?

 Electric lawn mowers have been around for decades, but they were generally not as popular as gas-powered ones in part because they were tethered to a cord. However, this is changing with new designs. I bought one myself a few years ago from Worx. It came with rechargeable batteries. A single charge powers up all the mowing of the front and back lawn.

New robotic mowers also rely on electric power and are charged in docking stations. They can also include such technological marvels as “laser vision, smart navigation, garden mapping, memory, and self-emptying” which make them even more convenient to use than gas-powered mowers.

Remote control lawn mowers started emerging around the beginning of our current century. But in the past year or two, you’d more likely see them rebranded as “AI-powered.”  One of the companies benign them calls the line Electric Sheep. The name is a perfect segue to the sheep and goat used in the past that have made a comeback as an environmentally sound solution for trimming grass and weeds.   

 Putting the Goat back in Gotham

Goats can reach where people and most machines cannot, and what is work for people is just grazing for them.Accordingly, On May 21, 2019 Riverside Park Conservancy launched what it calls Goathem. It introduced goats to trim back the invasive plants in hard-to-reach section of the park.

As “goats are naturally effective weed whackers,” the park explains, “putting them to work in Goatham is like treating them to an all-you-can-eat buffet.” They can even eat poison ivy with no ill effects. 

While the New York City park may not admit it, the inspiration for its use of goats may have come from the Norman J. Levy Park and Preserve in Merrick. The goats pictures above are from there. 

The original group of Nigerian dwarf goats joined the park the early years of the current century and have since multiplied over the generations. They’ve also been augmented by 5 new goats and 2 new sheep that joined in May 2023. They all contribute to clearing the grounds and  maintaining the environment in this park.  

So we’ve come full circle in recognizing what animals can contribute as natural lawn mower even while packing even more bells and whistles in the machine designed for the job back in 1830.

If you have a lawn, how do you deal with maintaining it?

Related:
A grand vision of Victorian architecture and engineering

Discovering Buckminster Fuller on Long Island

Jane Austen and Capability Brown

How many times did Edison fail in attempting to invent the lightbulb?

Discovering Buckminster Fuller on Long Island

While I may have heard of Buckminster (more commonly known as Bucky) Fuller in the distant past, what made me grow curious about him was a visit to a Long Island park named for his friend, the author, Christopher Morley. There are far larger and more impressive parks on Long Island, but the distinction this one has is that Morley's Knothole -- a small house in his yard he would escape to to write in peace and quiet -- has been relocated on the park grounds. 

Failing to find the bathroom in the park

While anyone may build a shed of sorts in which to escape the hubbub at home, they are not likely to have it equipped with a Dymaxion bathroom. But as Morley was a close friend of the man who dreamt up the design, he got on for his Knothole. Curiosity about that drove me to visit the park to see this marvel of easy-cleaning engineering that dates back to 1936. Alas, you cannot see anything inside the Knothole, which is kept closed and is falling into a sad state of disrepair.

What it should have looked like is this:

source https://slideplayer.com/slide/4283236/

The bathroom would have been made out of metal in a very compact and efficient design that was meant to be very easy to clean. Fuller did plan to one day render it in plastic for greater comfort, but the ones he did get made were metal.  The bathroom was supposed to be just one component of the highly efficient Dymaxion house that he was hoping would take off but never did. 

Even Morley's Knothole follows very traditional-looking architecture with nothing that would make you expect it houses a revolutionary design. In contrast, the full Dymaxion home was meant to be modern all around, and I do mean round. See the vintage video that showcases it here: 

Reading Fuller

With my curiosity piqued, I checked out several Bucky Fuller biographies from my library last year. But despite being a pretty fast and determined reader, I couldn't make it through them. But in August, my library got in a new bio, and this one I was able to read within the allotted two weeks for new books. It's Inventor of the Future: The Visionary Life of Buckminster Fuller. 

If I were to give it a star rating, I'd probably give it 4/5. It's highly readable despite the geometric details entailed in describing Fuller's concepts and their applications that endure beyond his own lifetime (like the carbon formation that resembles a soccer ball that was named Buckminsterfullerene AKA Buckyballs in his honor).

However, I don't fully buy into the parallels that Nevala-Lee attempts to draw with modern day influential figures and Fuller. Not all people who may be described as visionary or innovative operate in the same way. Certainly, Fuller was never was a major commercial success and really did not have good business sense at all. 

This account of Fuller may upset some people. Other descriptions of him focused on his creativity and presented him as a kind of magnanimous leader. But the take on his personality here is much darker. There are several account of fallouts with people who felt they were shortchanged on credit for concepts or who were cut out of Fuller's organization because he refused to cede control.

Worse than that are the glimpses into his more private life that shatter the romantic story of his marriage. He remained married for over 60 years and was not even parted from his wife in death.They shared a funeral and a grave. Yet he cheated on her repeatedly -- sometimes with women young enough to be his daughter or just barely of legal age. It seems he bought into a kind of myth he created of himself and associated these women with muse-like figures, linking them to particular discoveries, as he wrote in a certain account himself. But the marriage itself reflects some of the Long Island connections that the book brought to light.

Fuller and  Long Island History

What struck me in particular is that Fuller was married at Rock Hall, a colonial house that has been a museum since the middle of the 20th century. But in the early part of that century, it was still being
used as a home by the Hewlett family. Fuller's wife, Anne, was a Hewlett, and her wedding took place in that house. The Fullers even lived in Lawrence for some time and attended a church in Far Rockaway.* As someone who grew up in that area and who has visited Rock Hall a few times, I found it striking that such a famous person had such a strong connection to the place is not featured at the museum at all. 

Fire Island lighthouse: photo by Ariella Brown

But there is yet another location on Long Island that is connected to the Fuller name. That is his great-aunt, Margaret Fuller. If you visit the Fire Island Lighthouse  -- or its site -- you can find an account of the shipwreck that proved fatal to her and her young son when she was returning to the United States from abroad 

Nevala-Lee does make much of the Margaret-Bucky connection, as they both had a strong sense of purpose and conviction that they were particularly endowed with abilities to use to guide the world. Bucky even took a nautical image to express that -- not of a lighthouse but of the small end on a ship's rudder that can determine its direction -- the trim tab. In fact that is what he had inscribed on his gravestone pictured below:

    

                                   https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bucky_TRIMTAB.jpg

*One thing the author does get wrong is the name of the hospital in Far Rockaway. He mentions that Anne went to St. Joseph's in Far Rockaway, but the name of the hospital is St. John's. It's still there.

Related:

A grand vision of Victorian architecture and engineering

  Going for the brass ring 

How many times did Edison fail in attempting to invent the light bulb?

History in Einsenhower Park

The 4 Chaplains Monument was installed in the park in 2009

On a visit to Eisenhower Park, I went into the the Veterans Memorial section. 

Some are reminders of some aspects of history that are not included in standard curricula on WWII, like the memorial to the 4 chaplains pictured on top. As reported in The Herald the monument was paid for by Valley Stream resident, Salvatore Spinicchia, a Marine Corps veteran from World War II and the Korean War, 

. 

The information on the memorial is the following:

THE FOUR CHAPLAINS, ALSO REFERRED TO AS THE "IMMORTAL CHAPLAINS" OR THE "DORCHESTER CHAPLAINS" WERE FOUR UNITED STATES ARMY CHAPLAINS, LT. GEORGE L. FOX, METHODIST; LT. ALEXANDER D. GOODE, JEWISH; LT. JOHN P. WASHINGTON, ROMAN CATHOLIC; AND LT. CLARK V. POLING, DUTCH REFORMED, WHO GAVE THEIR LIVES TO SAVE OTHER CIVILIAN AND MILITARY PERSONNEL AS THE TROOP SHIP USA DORCHESTER, HIT BY AN ENEMY TORPEDO, SANK ON FEBRUARY 3, 1943, DURING WORLD WAR II. THEY HELPED OTHER SOLDIERS BOARD LIFE BOATS AND GAVE UP THEIR OWN LIFE JACKET WHEN THE SUPPLY RAN OUT. THE CHAPLAINS JOINED ARMS, SAID PRAYERS, AND SANG HYMNS AS THEY WENT DOWN WITH THE SHIP. IN DOING SO, THEY BECAME AN ENDURING EXAMPLE OF EXTRAORDINARY FAITH, COURAGE AND SELFLESSNESS. THE DISTINGUISHED SERVICE CROSS AND PURPLE HEART WERE AWARDED POSTHUMOUSLY DECEMBER 19, 1944, TO THEIR NEXT OF KIN. A POSTHUMOUS SPECIAL MEDAL FOR HEROISM, NEVER BEFORE GIVEN AND NEVER TO BE GIVEN AGAIN, WAS AUTHORIZED BY CONGRESS AND AWARD BY THE PRESIDENT JANUARY 18, 1961.

To learn more about the 4 Chaplains, read this: http://www.fourchaplains.org/the-saga-of-the-four-chaplains/. You can also read this account of the annual tribute every first Sunday in February,   or watch this video


While there are over 300 memorials to their self-sacrifice, it appears that no one has ever dramatized the event.

Should you find yourself in the vicinity of the park, you can see the various memorials in person. They now extend recognition to those outside the usual parameters of army duty that were victimized,  including the "Comfort Women."

Jane Austen and Capability Brown

I'd rather by reading Jane Austen tote 

by Totally_Jane_Austen

    Capability_Brown
          by_Nathaniel_Dance,_(later_Sir_Nathaniel_Dance-Holland,_Bt)_              

                                                                                        

The road to true love begins to to run smooth 

The 50 miles of good road in Pride and Prejudice, Darcy's 10,000 a year, and the "ha-ha" in Mansfield Park are all features of the times and background for Capability Brown's influence on English gardening. August 30th 2016 marked the tercentenary of the baptism (his date of birth is unrecorded) of Lancelot 'Capability’ Brown (1716-1783). If you were in England this year, you may have seen certain events dedicated to this man who transformed the British landscape with his vision of naturalistic gardens See The genius of Capability Brown. People in Britain  were  even given the opportunity to buy special stamps to commemorate the 300th anniversary of Capability Brown's birth.  I only heard about him on this side of the Atlantic because on one of the tours of Old Westbury Gardens  (which were designed to emulate English estates to appeal to the taste of the owner's British bride) the guide mentioned Capability Brown as the designer. Of course, he couldn't have designed the Long Island estate directly, but his influence came through in the play of lawns, trees, and water to be found even on Long Island. thatched cottage at Old Westbury Gardens Curious about the person who shares our last name, my husband looked for books about him in our library system. We only succeeded in obtaining one: Roger Turner's  Capability Brown and the Eighteenth-Century English Landscape. The History Press Rizzoli International Publications, 1985. While Turner frequently quotes the poet Alexander Pope to give some literary background and one time quotes the writer Hannah More, he fails to mention Jane Austen in connection with the transformation of the landscape at all, and this is an omission I intend to rectify here.  In fact, we owe our visions of Mr. Darcy's beautiful estate, Pemberly, to Capability Brown, as well. He set out the design for Chatsworth House. that house was was used as the setting for Pemberley in the  2005 film adaptation of Pride and Prejudice.    In Ch. 32 of Pride and Prejudice, Darcy tells Elizabeth,  "`And what is fifty miles of good road? Little more than half a day's journey. Yes, I call it a very easy distance.''  Darcy was particularly appreciative of "good road"  because it was still a relatively recent convenience that made a dramatic difference to travelers.  As Turner writes on p. 17, "During Brown's practising years, 1750-80, the time taken between London and the major towns was halved. Before these improvements bad weather and wintry conditions made travel impossible for wheeled traffic."   Earlier in the book, we have the famous pronouncement about Darcy's wealth amounting to 10,000 a year. That figure is also one that Turner mentions as requisite for an estate owner to really maintain a good figure in society: "At least five or six thousand pounds a year was required to support a great house, to allow for the expenses of the London season and to enable the owner to patronize the arts. More comfortably it required ten thousand a year" (p. 17).  The book named for a park Awareness of garden features gains prominence in Austen's Mansfield Park. In chapter 10, Maria Bertram complains: “Yes, certainly, the sun shines, and the park looks very cheerful. But unluckily that iron gate, that ha-ha, give me a feeling of restraint and hardship. ‘I cannot get out,' as the starling said.” Refusing to remain restrained, she goes through, ignoring Fanny's warning of the danger of slipping into the ha-ha.  Of course, all this foreshadows Maria's breaking through the set boundaries of her marriage and becoming a fallen woman. But there still had to be a physical ha-ha, a type of sunken fence that created a barrier between the extended grounds of the estate where animals could graze and the gardens near the house without obstructing the view. This was not a feature that Brown invented but one that he did use.  Taylor refers to this device and the explanation for its name on p. 29 in  quotes Horace Walpole's 1770 essay On Modern Gardening:  "The capital stroke, the leading step to all that has followed, was (I believe the first thought was Bridgeman's) the destruction of walls for boundaries, and the invention of fosses -- an attempt then deemed so astonishing, that the common people called them Ha! Ha!s to express their surprise at finding a sudden and unperceived check to their walk." In fact, though, Charles Bridgeman (1680?-1738) could not have been the first to make use of this sunken fence, as it already was in use in Versailles before it appeared in England.  However, it appears to have become increasingly common in England in Jane Austen's time, enough so that she could safely assume her readers would be able to picture the obstruction posed by the ha-ha she references several times in Mansfield Park.  The woman writer Turner does quote, Hannah  More (p. 78) was already quoted by a prior biographer of the master gardener, Dorothy Stroud. She records what the writer said about here"friend Mr. Brown" who "illustrates everything he says about gardening by some literary or grammatical allusion." She said: "He told me he compared his art to literary composition. 'Now there,' pointing a finger, 'I make a comma, and there', pointing to another spot, 'where a more decided turn is proper, I make a colon, at another part, where an interruption is desirable to break the view, a parenthesis, now a full stop, and then I begin another subject.'” While Taylor doesn't like the literary take on landscaping, it strikes me as an inverse of what Austen said about her own writing in the expression about her own miniature scale. The quote comes from a letter to her nephew, James Edward Austen-Leigh: "What should I do with your strong, manly, vigorous sketches, full of variety and glow? How could I possibly join them on to the little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush, as produces little effect after much labour?" Capability Brown's landscaping took a great deal of labor to produce subtle effects that could be appreciated many years later. The same can be said of Austen's novels.

                                                                                Related posts:

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French vs. American Style: the du Pont Estates in Delaware

Going for the brass ring

Today I rode the  carousel at Hempstead Lake State Park. Counting my daughter (who did not want to go on by herself) and one other kid, the total number of riders came to three. On the round just before ours there were just two riders. I suppose carousels have fallen out of favor, though they actually have a much longer history than I suspected. 

On the cashier's counter was a pile of papers with some more information about the carousel. Unfortunately, the powers that be at Hempstead Lake State Park did not bother to upload that to the park's site. For example, the historic carousel is named for Heckscher  because August Heckscher donated it to the park in 1931. It continued operating until 2001  (though according to this, it faced a crisis in 1981. In 2003, the carousel was taken apart and shipped across the country to Carousel Works in Ohio  for a full restoration at a cost of $400,000. The carousel was put back in place  and once again opened to the public in 2005.

 Pictures and some more details about its history are in About article by Linda Tagliaferro. What's interesting about the major restoration is that it truly lived up to its name. Tagliaferro writes that in the decade between 1951 and 1961, eight of the original horses were replaced by aluminum ones. During the restoration project 10 years ago,  those replacements were taken out. In their place "four original Illions carved horses that had been found in storage, as well as two Illions horses that were taken from a carousel in Pennsylvania, and two new horses that were carved in the Illions style by Carousel Works, Inc." were put in their palce. 

The handout at the carousel also gave some general history of carousels, which is easier to find sourced online. Specificially, what we consider a plaything of children -- and the young at heart, of course -- actually started out as an exercise in knightly combat. Wikipedia covers that in its entry on carousels:

The word carousel originated from the Italian garosello and Spanish carosella ("little battle", used by crusaders to describe a combat preparation exercise and game played by Turkish and Arabian horsemen in the 12th century).^[3] This early device was essentially a cavalry training mechanism; it prepared and strengthened the riders for actual combat as they wielded their swords at the mock enemies.
By the 17th century, the balls had been dispensed with, and instead the riders had to spear small rings that were hanging from poles overhead and rip them off. 

The same point is made in a NYC report http://www.nyc.gov/html/lpc/downloads/pdf/reports/2528.pdf posted online  in connection to a carousel in Queens (which wasn't in operation when we visited the park a couple of years ago). Starting out with an eye to SEO, the NYC report includes all variant on name and spellings: "including carousel, carrousel, carousell, carousal, carosello, merry-go-round, roundabout, and steam riding galleries. " However you spell it, the mechanism dates back to the 16th century:  "Following Henri II’s unintentional death during a jousting match in 1559, French horsemen began practicing with straw and wood figures attached to rotating circular frames."

The NYC report includes  this  citation: 

Much of the information found in this section is found in Frederick Fried, A Pictorial History of the Carousel  (New York: Vestal Press, 1964, various editions), Lisa English, “Roundabout,” Metropolis (July/August 1990), 57-69, “Forest Park: The Carousel,” viewed at http://www.nycgovparks.org/parks/forestpark/highlights/12049.  Also see Richard W. Johnston, “The Carousel,” Life (August 27, 1951), 100ff.; Robyn Love, “The Painted Ponies of Queens: Celebrating the Magic of the Carousel,” poster, City of New York Parks & Recreation, 1995, LPC files; Eric Pahlke, Treasures from the Golden Age: East Carousels (forthcoming, 2013). It is worth noting that most essays and books that are devoted to carousels lack specific citations and references to primary sources. 

In the Hempstead Lake State Park handout, it explained that the brass ring that used to adorn carousels represents what the knights tried to catch as a test of skill. That was later adapted for riders of the ride for amusement around the beginning of the 18th century, according to the NYC report cited above.  The oldest one still around is in Germany. It was built in 1780, and there is more information about it here. 

As for the power used to propel the carousels, according to the NYC report,  the rides were first moved by serfs, then oxen. Later carousels incorporated steam power. In 2011, GE set up a solar powered carousel at South Street Seaport that it called Carousolar. But the ride was not intended as a permanent fixture in New York.