How Big Oil Shaped America’s Parks

Oil is the foundation of American life, with the consumption of gasoline written into the very landscape of the nation itself. Historian Raechel Lutz argues that even our sense of nature has been shaped by “oil, oil wealth, and road technologies,” and uses Palisades Interstate Park as a prime example of how the nation’s petroleum infrastructure shaped its landscapes.

Petroleum magnate John D. Rockefeller Jr. is celebrated for his millions of dollars in land and monetary donations for the park that saved the Palisades. It is less well known that he made the forty-two-mile-long Palisades Interstate Parkway, which travels the length of the park, a condition of his largesse.

By the 1890s, “local citizens, conservationists, and the Federation of Women’s Clubs” demanded that New Jersey and New York create a park along the cliffs to save them from destruction.

The Palisades stretch north from Staten Island, New York, through Jersey City, New Jersey, to Nyack, New York. They are most dramatic north of the George Washington Bridge, where the twenty-mile stretch of cliffs preserved as a park begins. At their tallest, they reach 540 feet above the Hudson River. One of the East Coast’s most dramatic geological features, the cliffs are named for their similarity to a palisade or defensive fence. Local Native Americans called the cliffs the “rocks that look like trees.”

Made up of a two-hundred-million-year-old igneous diabase, the Palisades proved irresistible to miners in the nineteenth century. The cliffs were mined for stone for buildings, including early skyscrapers, and roads. By the 1890s, “local citizens, conservationists, and the Federation of Women’s Clubs” demanded that New Jersey and New York create a park along the cliffs to save them from destruction. As a result, the Palisades Interstate Park Commission was created in 1900 by the two neighboring states. But neither New Jersey nor New York would fund the commission.

So the commission instead turned to people with money for the purchase of land and the termination of mining activity. John D. Rockefeller, Sr., J.P. Morgan, and Mrs. E. H. Harriman all gave major gifts of money and land. Rockefeller was the richest man on the planet; his $900 million in 1912 equaled about “$22.5 trillion in today’s money.” Rockefeller’s son, John D., Jr., who “assumed stewardship of the family’s wealth and public image” in 1921, ended up contributing substantial amounts for the protection and development of Palisades Interstate Park.

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Rockefeller Jr. was instrumental in the formation of other parks in the US, but the Palisades received “over half of his cumulative donations” for park landscapes. In addition, he “furtively orchestrated a massive land-buying program” around Fort Lee and nearby New Jersey towns when the George Washington Bridge construction sparked a development frenzy. After purchasing the land in secret, he gave it to the commission.

As Lutz explains, Rockefeller Jr. was an ardent conservationist, but he was also a firm believer in the automobile and its place in nature. Transportation infrastructure—strictly for cars, not for public transit, railways, or ferries—would become integral parts of parks from now on. “Rockefeller Jr. embraced park development,” writes Lutz. “He believed roads, used to showcase and direct traffic through landscapes, would ultimately preserve nature rather than deface it.”

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The Rockefeller fortune was based on kerosene, but from the early 1920s it began to get bigger because of gasoline. General Motors’ discovery that the addition of tetraethyl lead eliminated engine knock, “making cars safer, more efficient, and more enjoyable” translated into even more wealth for Rockefeller’s Standard Oil (and more deadly pollution for the world). Lutz believes Rockefeller “never saw road building as a way to sell more gasoline” and was “genuinely motivated to increase people’s access to inspiring and beautiful landscapes.”

The 1920s and 1930s were the “golden age of park road building,” with parkways conceived as scenic drives for cars only. “Horse riders, pedestrians, cyclists, trucks, and buses” were to be kept out. Construction of the Palisades Parkway started in 1947. Opposition was brushed aside. The road was dedicated in 1957 and completed in 1962. But by then it was an anachronism: an idea of the 1920s in the era of the interstate highway system, which was launched by the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956. The scenic parkway became another way to access the George Washington Bridge and I-80. Today, the parkway sees 6.5 million vehicles every year, and may be better known than the Palisades themselves; after all, you can’t actually see the cliffs from the road. In selling the park in 1955, the commission used a photograph of the Rockefeller Lookout to show a full parking lot, not the view itself.

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