ABSTRACT
One morning in 1993 we were sitting in the archives in the Bedford Town Hall leafing through the correspondence on a zoning controversy. An elderly gentleman walked into the room and said with a faint smile on his face, “So you’re back, are you? What are you finding we’ve done wrong this time?” We recognized him as J.Halstead Park, a descendant of the first white settlers in Bedford-an affluent suburb not far from New York City-and former chairman of the local historical society. We had interviewed him in the early 1970s for an article in which we argued that there were social divides in Bedford between an old WASP elite, a new upper middle class, and an old working class, and that landscape tastes played an important role in the performance of these groups’ identities. Halstead Park explained to us, “Don Marshall [the town historian] came to dinner one night to discuss what we should do with your article. We decided to bury it. It would have ruffled too many feathers.” With that, he wished us a good day, and was gone.
