Today in 1877, the birthday of Charles Downing Lay, an American Olympic medalist in…. town planning!
This was back in the relatively early days of the modern Olympic Games.
Back then there were competitions like military patrol, pistol dueling and cannon shooting.
And for several decades, there were artistic Olympic competitions alongside the athletic ones.
You could win an Olympic title in sculpture, or music, or painting (or, if you were really good, maybe all of the above).
These Olympians weren’t competing in real time against each other; it wasn’t as if all the painters were all in the same stadium working with paint tubes and brushes in adjacent lanes.
It was more like they would submit their work to the Olympic art exhibition and then judges would choose winners.
That’s how the town planning event worked in 1936, the one that Charles Downing Lay entered.
He was an urban planner and architect in New York, though he probably could’ve contended for some of the other arts medals, too, since he was also a painter and writer.
That said, he wasn’t a fan of architecture competitions; he thought it was too much work to participate.
He only entered the Olympics because there were fewer requirements, and because he had a project he’d already designed that he could send in.
Lay’s proposal focused on Marine Park in south Brooklyn.
He would have dramatically reshaped the shoreline and added canals, ponds and pools for swimming and boating.
The Brooklyn Daily Eagle also reported the plan included “athletic fields, parking spaces, a music grove, a zoo, an open air theater and a casino. There will also be a picnic grounds and a stadium seating 100,000″ (!)
In the real world, New York City scaled this plan way back, largely because it would have cost tens of millions of dollars.
But as a concept, in an Olympic design contest, it was a winner.
Lay picked up the silver medal for town planning, which was the first American medal of the 1936 Games.
And remember these Summer Games were held in Berlin and hosted by the Nazis, so while Charles Downing Lay wasn’t exactly the architectural version of track star Jesse Owens, he did at least help figuratively overturn the host committee’s apple cart a little.
Starting this Friday, it’s the South Carolina Apple Festival.
It’s been held for decades to celebrate the local apple harvest, but there will also be some competitions, like the Apple Dumplin’ Pageant and the Miss South Carolina Apple Festival Pageant.
I don’t think there’s a town planning competition, though.
And the Medal Goes To… (Brooklyn Public Library)
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