Genius of Place

by Justin Martin

  Then came another letter from Dix. This time, Olmsted’s young partner said that everything at Putnam’s was copacetic. He’d merely panicked. Ignore my earlier letter, Dix urged, and don’t rush home on account of my overreaction. Stick around—enjoy England. The turnabout enraged Olmsted: “Write me in a fever of fear & trembling & what not one week—all going to the devil & no hot pitch to be had at any price unless I come home in my shirt tail to help you heat it up & then next day—all as smooth & jolly [as] a summer’s sea of champagne and icebreezes. Damn you for a high pressure hypochondriac.”

  Olmsted had lost thirteen pounds from the anxiety caused by Dix’s first letter, or so he claimed. He was getting very little accomplished. How could he enjoy England? He sailed for home. Back in New York, he quickly ascertained that Dix’s initial dire account of Putnam’s was more accurate than his second rosy one. The enterprise was losing $1,000 a month. Circulation had gone off a cliff, plummeting from a high near 20,000 to around 14,000. The falloff appeared to be due to a decrease in quality. There were whisperings that Putnam’s had simply lost the magic of its earlier issues.

  More bad news: John’s health was getting worse. When it came to tuberculosis, one school of nineteenth-century medical thought urged sufferers—at least during the initial stages of the disease—to try to live a normal life, even engage in vigorous outdoor activity. The other school stressed the necessity of a quiet life in a suitable climate. John—himself a doctor by training—had alternated between these two approaches. He’d earlier tried living in Europe, but found that the invalid life sapped his spirit just as surely as the disease. He’d also taken a demanding trip through Texas. Now he was growing weaker. He was spitting up blood. Add to that, his wife, Mary, was now pregnant with a third child. Desperate, he chose to switch course once again. John set off from Staten Island along with his family, bound for Havana and a warmer climate. A renter was found for Tosomock Farm.

  In a sad twist, John left just days before the publication of A Journey Through Texas. This was the account of the trip with his brother. It was also the book on which John had done much of the work. This latest Olmsted title was published by struggling Dix, Edwards & Company. It received great reviews but sold slowly—by now, an all too familiar pattern. Olmsted would always call A Journey Through Texas “my best book . . . because edited by my brother.”

  Putnam’s continued to flail and was soon at the edge of bankruptcy. Dix, Edwards & Company was dissolved, and Olmsted’s young partners scurried off. A new firm was formed, headed by George Curtis, Putnam’s editor. Curtis borrowed $25,000 from his father-in-law. The magazine’s printer, J. W. Miller, joined the venture for the purpose of protecting a large debt he was owed. He knew that if Putnam’s went bankrupt, it would become almost impossible to collect the money. The new firm was called Miller & Company. Olmsted, stuck in a defensive position similar to the printer Miller, also stayed on. He’d already sunk $5,500 into Putnam’s, money that he owed to his father. He needed some kind of bounce back.

  The spring of 1857 found Olmsted writing an introduction to a book called The Englishman in Kansas; or, Squatter Life and Border Warfare by Thomas Gladstone. This was the lone British literary property that had come out of his abortive trip to England. It was the only book that Miller & Company had on its publishing calendar.

  Olmsted’s introduction contains some of the harshest sentiments he would ever voice about the South. He laid into Southerners as “ruffians” and “bullies” with a “special proneness to violence.” Of the Kansas situation in particular he wrote, “The world should recognize the fact that the disgraceful condition of Kansas, the atrocious system which the federal government of the United States has been forced to countenance in Kansas, is the legitimate fruit of despotism, not of free government.”

  It’s hard not to see Olmsted’s heated and polemical writing as the product of his own grim turn of mind. Not only had he seen the country become increasingly divided, but his own life was in disarray. His two Southern titles were selling slowly; Putnam’s had lost its literary luster; Olmsted’s business venture, publisher of that magazine and a few stray books, was in financial trouble. Worst of all, his brother was growing sicker and had been forced to leave the country. “I much fear I shall never see him again,” he wrote to a friend.

  Olmsted was a man waiting on the next ill tiding. And when it came, it was no surprise. Olmsted was away from New York when he received a letter from Curtis. Apparently, Miller & Company had gone under. The plan was to sell Putnam’s immediately.

  Putnam’s wound up being purchased by another publisher for $3,400 (a fire-sale price), and the magazine struggled on for another year before folding, a ghost of its former self. It had existed just four years in total. After such a promising beginning, Putnam’s became just another casualty of the fast-changing new world of magazine publishing. Bankruptcy proceedings for Miller & Company would also drag on through the months ahead. Where Olmsted had once rubbed elbows with the likes of Ralph Waldo Emerson, he was now represented in bankruptcy by William Emerson, a New York lawyer and older brother of the celebrated philosopher and essayist. The final verdict found Olmsted liable to repay a debt of $8,000.

  In his letter to Olmsted, Curtis spelled it out succinctly: “We failed today!”

  III

  “A People’s Pleasure-Ground”

  CONCEIVING CENTRAL PARK, 1857–1861

  CHAPTER 10

  “Is New York Really Not Rich Enough?”

  IN EARLY AUGUST 1857, at a seaside inn in Morris Cove, Connecticut, Olmsted had a chance encounter that changed the course of his life. During afternoon tea, he struck up a conversation with Charles Elliott. Elliott was part of that tight nexus of interrelationships; he was a friend of Brace’s, and he had once studied gardening under Andrew Jackson Downing. Elliott was also a board member on a project to create a large green space named, prosaically, for its location in Manhattan: Central Park. He told Olmsted that the board was looking to hire a superintendent.

  Olmsted’s interest was piqued. Never mind that the super’s job, as Elliott detailed it, sounded pretty rough-hewn, overseeing teams of laborers, clearing brush, and smashing stones. The economy was in shambles, and Olmsted was in trouble. He had holed up at the Connecticut inn to finish A Journey in the Back Country, the final book in his Southern trilogy. The first two books, while critically acclaimed, had been financial failures, and he had no reason to think the latest installment would be any different. His prospects looked bleak.

  Elliott encouraged Olmsted to apply for the job. Olmsted took the opportunity very seriously. That very evening, he boarded a steamer and returned to New York. To establish his credentials as a gentleman in good standing, Olmsted submitted a letter signed by his acquaintances, many from the literary world. It was written by James Alexander Hamilton, lawyer, politician, backer of Olmsted’s abolitionist activities, and son of America’s first treasury secretary. Among the signees was Washington Irving, at seventy-four the eminence grise of New York letters. Olmsted had met Irving at a dinner at the New York Press Club in 1855. Olmsted also circulated his own petition to such luminaries as George Putnam, banker Morris Jesup, and writer Bayard Taylor.

  Olmsted submitted his formal application to the Central Park board. He enclosed Hamilton’s letter and his own petition, nearly two hundred signatures strong—an act of supreme overkill. He included a covering note that highlighted his experience managing teams of laborers, though truth be told, he’d never overseen more than eight men on his Staten Island farm. But Olmsted needed the job. Besides his ever-growing tab with his father and his share in the failed publishing venture, he owed $75 for three months’ lodging and $60 total to a pair of friends; his shoes were worn out, he didn’t have a proper hat, and he was low on coal. “What else can I do for a living?” he lamented.

  On September 11, 1857, the Central Park commission met in an office at 53 Liberty Street to consider Olmsted’s application. While they delibera
ted, Olmsted—a nervous wreck—waited in the office of a friend who happened to practice law in the same building. The board seemed to take an unusually long time. To pass the time, he wrote a letter to John, who had made his way from Cuba to St. Thomas to Europe, still in search of that ideal climate. When Olmsted finally got the verdict, he added a postscript: “P.S. After a very long session, and much debate, I am elected: on the final vote, 8 of those present voting for me, one against me. . . . The strongest objection to me, that I am a literary man, not active.”

  Ironically, the mass of signatures Olmsted assembled from New York’s leading lights gave the commissioners pause. The very person who had made the transition from farmer to writer was now viewed as too cerebral for such physically demanding work. Yet the signatures also convinced the commissioners that Olmsted was socially connected and reliable at least. He was hired for $1,500 a year and handed a job for which he was not ideally suited.

  But Olmsted was nothing if not a canny opportunist. Through a twist, he was soon to be handed the vital role, as designer of the new park. Central Park stands as Olmsted’s sublime achievement, a calm and lovely oasis in the frantic heart of Manhattan Island. This opportunity changed his life and transformed the practice of landscape architecture forever.

  Most of all, Central Park represents a kind of bold assertion. Olmsted crafted beauty from a homely slice of land, drew light from enveloping darkness. In the course of creating his masterpiece, Olmsted would face three personal tragedies. And everything that happened between 1857 and 1861 (the crucial, formative years for Central Park) happened against the backdrop of rising tensions between the North and South, tensions that would ultimately erupt in a national calamity.

  At the outset, however, Olmsted would act in a drastically more modest capacity, as superintendent. He was charged with the final cleanup necessary to ready the land for a park design. Olmsted stepped in during the final stages of a project that had been many, many years in the making.

  The first call for a large park in New York City dates to 1785 and appears in an anonymous letter, signed “Veritas,” that was sent to the mayor and alderman. Over time, the need became only more pronounced.

  Between 1800 and 1850, New York’s population increased fivefold to a half-million residents. Revolution in Germany and the Great Hunger in Ireland brought a flood of immigrants, and in some places 100,000 people were squeezed into a square mile.

  As the city grew, its green space shrank. In Olmsted’s time, New Yorkers still had fond memories of Niblo’s Garden, a place for coffee and refreshments. It was located at the modern-day intersection of Prince and Broadway. That was the edge of town when it opened in 1828 on the old Bayard farm property. Within twenty years, the city had swallowed up Niblo’s. The same fate befell Contoit’s New York Garden, where people gathered for the rarefied pleasure of drinking lemonade chilled with ice, and Vauxhall Gardens, which featured summer concerts, fireworks, and an outdoor wax museum. The city, tight-packed and teeming, kept pushing relentlessly northward.

  By midcentury, Manhattan Island had seventeen parks, all of them small and totaling a paltry 165 acres. Many of these parks were mere squares, oriented to their immediate neighborhoods. Meanwhile, places like Gramercy Park and St. John’s Park were private, reserved for the exclusive use of the people who owned the surrounding properties. Ordinary New Yorkers who needed respite had taken to visiting Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. By the mid-1800s, hundreds of thousands of people each year recreated in this graveyard, ambling among the headstones, picnicking in the shade of mausoleums.

  Enter Andrew Jackson Downing. Downing—America’s preeminent arbiter of taste and editor of the influential Horticulturist, a journal to which Olmsted had contributed articles—sounded the one note guaranteed to get the burghers of New York exercised. London had Hyde Park and Berlin the Volkspark Friedrichshain, Vienna had the Prater, Paris its Jardin des Tuileries. But what about New York? If it had any hope of being a true world city, Downing argued in a series of essays, it needed a real park, a grand park, commensurate with its aspirations. “What are called parks in New-York,” he chided, “are not even apologies for the thing; they are only squares or paddocks.” And in another essay: “Is New York really not rich enough, or is there absolutely not land enough in America, to give our citizens public parks of more than ten acres?”

  Downing hit the mark, and his call was soon taken up by other quarters, such as the popular press. William Cullen Bryant, editor of the New York Post, wrote a piece lamenting the existence of such a “very small space of open ground for an immense city.” In the New York Herald, James Gordon Bennett voiced a conceit that was popular in the nineteenth century, comparing a park to a pair of lungs, capable of drawing in air and refreshment. “There are no lungs on the island,” he wrote. “It is made up entirely of veins and arteries.”

  In 1850, both candidates for mayor of New York called for the establishment of a large park. There was a growing sense of urgency. The city’s breakneck pace of development meant that soon enough, Manhattan would be filled in with buildings. Now was the time to set aside some land, while land was still to be had, and could still be had cheaply.

  The first spot to receive serious consideration was Jones Wood, a 150-acre stretch along the East River. It was a fetching parcel of land, featuring gently rolling hills grown thick with trees that eased down to bluffs overlooking the water. Add a few paths, and it could be an instant park. The land belonged to a pair of old, established New York families, Jones and Schermerhorn. Neither was willing to sell. In 1851, a bill designed to take the property by eminent domain passed the state assembly and was signed into law. But the powerful families fought back, tying the eminent domain ruling up in court. Jones Woods was not to be.

  New York’s board of aldermen appointed a special committee to explore alternative park sites and options. Maybe a park could stretch across the island, east to west. How about a private, for-profit park? There was even a proposal for a serpentine park, winding through Manhattan. “Give us a park,” demanded an editorial in the New York Commercial Advertiser , “be it sidelong, here, there, anywhere ... a real park, a large park.”

  The special committee began to focus on a tract in the middle of Manhattan. It was in every way inferior to Jones Wood. The site consisted of a long, thin rectangle, a preposterously constraining shape for a park design. British troops had once camped here, denuding the area of trees. Post-Revolution, this had become a favored spot for New Yorkers in search of firewood or lumber for building, and there was scarcely a sapling to be found. Outcroppings of rock, bursts of 500 million-year-old mica schist, jutted through the turf at random intervals. If this wasn’t enough, two separate large reservoirs disrupted the grounds. One was the old Croton receiving reservoir, which had handled New York City residents’ water since 1842. The other was its replacement, just then getting under construction.

  But at least the tract was central. The park would be convenient for visitors from different parts of New York. And the clincher was a fiscal advantage: Turn a rectangle of land into a park, and all the properties developed along the periphery would be valuable. Steep property taxes would flow into the city coffers. On July 21, 1853, the act that created Central Park passed, allotting 778 acres of land from 59th Street to 106th Street. Later the park would extend to 110th. (Most of these streets didn’t even exist yet, but the city plan of 1811, in a kind of manifest destiny, laid a grid work of future streets all the way to 155th.)

  While the site looked more like a moonscape than a parkscape, it was far from uninhabited. In the years before Olmsted was hired as superintendent and charged with clearing brush, the land had to be cleared of people. This was to be accomplished by eminent domain, the first time in U.S. history that this principle had been used to create a large park. The city earmarked money to pay off the land’s occupants.

  Some were business owners. The future Central Park was a center for “nuisance” industries, grim Dickensian
operations that had been driven to the city’s outskirts. Leather dressers and match manufacturers conducted their vocations amid a mélange of noisome odors and toxins. A pair of bone-boiling plants processed animal carcasses to create glue and charcoal filters used in things like sugar refining.

  People also lived on the land. Impoverished immigrants, crowded into one-room cabins and rickety shanties, had formed communities with names like Dutch Hill and Dublin Corners. Residents tended small plots, growing vegetables like cabbage and corn to sell in pushcarts downtown. Following the 1849 cholera epidemic, livestock had been banned from the city proper, and anyone who wished to raise hogs, goats, or cattle had been pushed way up here. The animals roamed the land, foraging for feed.

  There was also a predominantly black community called Seneca Village, occupying the western edge of the future park from roughly 81st Street to 89th Street. By the dawn of the nineteenth century, two-thirds of the city’s blacks were free. Still, it wasn’t until 1841 that slavery was completely abolished in New York State. Even so, only black men could vote and only if they owned $250 worth of property. Seneca Village had 264 residents, according to the 1855 census, many of them former slaves, now enfranchised due to home ownership. And many of them worked downtown as waiters and domestic helpers, pretty solid jobs for this era. The names of Seneca Village’s churches, African Union Methodist and the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, showed a degree of ethnic pride that was rare in antebellum America.