Genius of Place

by Justin Martin

  Every one on the land had to go: bone boilers and hog farmers and waiters. Records show that the city paid $5,169,369.90 for 7,250 lots. Andrew Williams, one of Seneca Village’s founders, received $2,335 for his house and property. He had purchased the land for $125 in 1825. Marshals forcibly evicted those who didn’t go willingly. Supposedly, the great-great-grandfather of Yankee ballplayer Joe Pepitone was one of the marshals charged with clearing people so that work on Central Park could begin.

  Andrew Jackson Downing would have been the natural choice to design the new park. Just a few years earlier, President Millard Fillmore had commissioned him to landscape the grounds between the Capitol and the White House. At the time, this would have been the largest park in the United States.

  On July 28, 1852, Downing set off for New York City, aboard the steamship Henry Clay. He was en route to Washington, D.C., to work on his park commission. The Henry Clay got into a race with another craft, the Armenia. Opposite the town of Yonkers, fire broke out in the engine room of the overtaxed Henry Clay. Passengers began jumping overboard to escape the flames. First, Downing tossed deck chairs into the Hudson to serve as flotation devices. Then he jumped in himself.

  Downing was a skillful swimmer. He ventured far out into the Hudson to help a woman with whom he’d once been romantically involved. In his younger days, Downing had swum this very river to meet up with this very woman. When he reached the woman, she threw her arms around his neck, in panic, and dragged him to his death.

  His wife, Caroline, survived, clinging to a deck chair. Perhaps it was one he’d thrown overboard. At least, that’s what people said in trying to console her. Downing was just thirty-six. The accident happened just one year after Olmsted’s brief meeting with him in Newburgh. “There is no Downing among us,” the New York Herald later declared, conjecturing about who should design Central Park.

  For a time, it appeared certain that the job would go to Colonel Egbert Ludovicus Viele. Viele (pronounced Vee-Lay) was a West Point grad, engineer, and veteran of the Mexican War. He was surprisingly uncouth and was in the habit of swearing in the presence of women. He also had a strange fixation with the occult, centering on ancient symbols and their mystical powers. Most of all, he was ambitious. While working as a topographical engineer for the State of New Jersey, he’d repeatedly visited the land slated for Central Park. On his own time, sans pay, he had drawn up a park design.

  Viele then managed to land the job as chief engineer of the park project. During its earliest days, there was a skeleton board of commissioners, consisting of just two members. Viele wrangled verbal okays from both of them. He then annotated his park plan with “adopted by the commissioners,” dated it, and filed it as an official document. When a full eleven-person board was convened, Viele’s plan was tabled for the time being. It was hoped that a better plan might emerge.

  Olmsted began his work as superintendent in the autumn of 1857. It was his modest duty to cart away stones and drain swamps, clearing the way for a park design, perhaps even the one drawn up by his boss, the odious and grandiose Colonel Egbert Ludovicus Viele.

  On his first day of work, Olmsted wore his finest suit. This appears to have provoked Viele. During their initial interview, the engineer had voiced concerns that Olmsted was too much the writer, not sufficiently “practical.” Now Viele summoned a foreman to show Olmsted around the park. The foreman appeared wearing high wading boots and proceeded to lead Olmsted on a kind of hazing expedition, through thickets, over rock facings, and down into bogs, thickly congealed with the runoff from pig sties and bone-boiling works. It was a sweltering day, and Olmsted found the stench overpowering. The foreman spoke hardly a word, never smiled, but occasionally Olmsted detected the barest flicker in the man’s eyes. Clearly, he was enjoying this march, as Olmsted recalled it, “through the midst of a number of vile sloughs in the black and unctuous slime of which I sometimes sank nearly half leg deep.”

  Olmsted set to work. There were 700 laborers in his charge, and he had something to prove. During his first days on the job, he supervised the draining of swamps and the demolition of hundreds of abandoned structures.

  It was treacherous work. A team of men assigned to clear underbrush fell ill, fevered and itching terribly. Turns out, they had mistakenly set poison ivy vines ablaze. During a particularly grim week, Olmsted estimated that 100 of his workers came down with remittent fever, the old-fashioned name for malaria. In the mid-1800s, no one knew that malaria was caused by mosquitoes that bred in brackish water. But Olmsted certainly made the general connection between disease and the squalid park site.

  Olmsted received his first paycheck, $80, and was starting to feel a bit easier about his prospects. But just one month into his new job, the economy, already shaky, took a nosedive. Ominous signs had been piling up for quite some time. Ever since 1849, the steady flow of Gold Rush gold had caused inflation to steadily climb. With the end of the Crimean War, Russia had reentered international markets, and demand for U.S. agricultural exports had dropped precipitously. Now, the Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Company collapsed due to rampant embezzlement.

  In an earlier time, this latest event might have been containable. But thanks to the telegraph, news of the company’s failure quickly spread across the United States, sparking panic selling in the stock market. It was a full-scale “revulsion” in the financial parlance of the day. Later, this event would come to be known as the panic of 1857, a frighteningly precipitous economic downturn.

  The city comptroller had just floated a fresh round of Central Park bonds, but now the issues found no takers. With money short, work on the site ground to a halt. Olmsted was forced to furlough most of his 700 employees. Throughout the city, jobs were scarce, and the laid-off workers faced impending winter and grim futures: frigid tenement rooms, bread lines, eviction, starvation. “Everything is black & blacker in New York,” observed Olmsted. The clearing of Central Park had been the single largest public works project in the city. Now, ill-clad men milled about the partially cleared grounds. They kept warm by burning scrap lumber and waited to be called back to their jobs.

  Olmsted continued to show up at Wagstaff House, an old farmhouse that served as the superintendent’s office. Wagstaff House was at the eastern edge of the future park, on 79th Street, one of the few uptown New York streets then in existence, as opposed to merely appearing on the grid plan. As days dragged on, as the crisis deepened, mobs of the unemployed, sometimes 5,000 strong, surrounded Wagstaff House.

  Many of the desperate job seekers were German, and Olmsted saw placards that read “Work-Arbeit” (the second word being the German translation of the first). More ominously, he spotted a sign bearing the slogan “Bread or Blood.” Politicians representing the hardest-hit wards delivered speeches, stirring up chants of “soup, soup, soup.” On one occasion, Olmsted even feared for his safety. A candidate for a magistrate’s post stood upon a wagon bed, urging the assembled crowd to demand work. The man produced a prop, a short piece of rope, which he fashioned into a noose. He then pointed to a tree. That would be the fate, the man suggested, of anyone who stood in the way of gainful employment.

  Fortunately, the revulsion of 1857 was V-shaped, its rapid onset matched by an equally swift recovery—a common pattern for economic crises. It was over in a matter of weeks. The city aldermen were soon able to authorize $250,000 for park construction. Olmsted rehired many of the laid-off workers, even adding new hands for a total force of 1,000.

  The main job was now breaking stones, taking sledgehammers to outcroppings of schist. Larger pieces were carted to the edges of the park and then piled up for what was to be a six-mile retaining wall. Small pieces were gathered to pave future paths.

  Fresh hires earned as little as 3¢ an hour for working 6:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., six days a week. Olmsted proved a taskmaster: Employees who missed two days were summarily fired. But there was a ready pool of men willing to work a punishingly long day for less than a dollar. Those who rose to the
position of foreman, overseeing a team of roughly a dozen men, could make $1.50. Anyone willing to work Sundays—disguised on time sheets as “unusual times” so as to avoid the ire of Sabbatarians—could earn time and a half. Olmsted boasted that he had whipped his charges “into a capital discipline, a perfect system, working like a machine.” Things were going well.

  But then came news of Olmsted’s brother, and it was devastating. All through 1857, John and his family had been traveling, in an effort to find a climate where he might convalesce. They had tried Cuba, St. Thomas, Rome, and Switzerland. Now he was in Nice, on the French Riviera. But this desperate search was taking its toll, and he arrived at this latest locale completely worn out. He checked into a flea-ridden hotel and consulted with a doctor who told him that the resort’s winter climate might prove colder and damper than is ideal for a tuberculosis sufferer.

  John was failing fast. His weight had fallen to one hundred pounds. He was short of breath and terribly weak. Excruciating cramps shot up and down his back and sides. “Dear dear Fred,” begins a letter from Nice, “it appears we are not to see one another any more.... I never have known a better friendship than ours has been & there can’t be a greater happiness than to think of that—how dear we have been & how long we have held out such tenderness.” John urged Fred to hold on to one of his possessions, as a memento: “I want you to keep something of mine—my watch or cane or something.”

  To treat the pain, John was administered progressively heavier doses of opium, and he slipped into a stupor. Olmsted’s father raced to be at his son’s bedside. On November 24, 1857, John died. He was just thirty-two. He left behind a wife, Mary, and three young children.

  Olmsted received the news in a letter from his father. “In his death I have lost not only a son but a very dear friend,” his father wrote, adding: “You almost your only friend.”

  It was true. If not his only friend, John had certainly been Fred’s best friend. Even as adults, the two brothers had lived together on the Staten Island farm. They had traveled through Texas on a rugged horseback adventure.

  Olmsted read and reread his brother’s letter from Nice. Hard to fathom, painful, but these really had turned out to be John’s final words to him, a deathbed letter. The very last line was striking. Here, John delivered an imploring message to his brother: “Don’t let Mary suffer while you are alive.”

  CHAPTER 11

  Right Man, Right Place

  JOHN’S DEATH STILLED something in Olmsted. Before, there had often been a lightness about him, an exuberance even, but such displays would become rare going forward. In the months following John’s death, he fell back on what would become a pattern in his life when dealing with grief. He threw himself into work.

  Olmsted continued to clear Central Park, breaking stone, demolishing shanties, draining swamps. In what spare moments he could find, he worked to complete A Journey in the Back Country, the final book in his Southern trilogy.

  While Olmsted toiled, completely unbeknownst to him, a sequence of behind-the-scenes machinations was nearing completion, and soon his relationship to the Central Park project would be drastically altered. The unlikely agent of this change was Calvert Vaux.

  Vaux was an architect, a profession in scant supply in nineteenth-century America. He was also the onetime business associate of dearly departed Andrew Jackson Downing. Olmsted had met Vaux briefly and unmemorably during his own pilgrimage to Newburgh.

  Vaux was born in England to a surgeon father who died young. As a teenager, he set out on his own, becoming an apprentice to Lewis Cottingham, a Gothic Revival architect. It soon became clear that Vaux was a superb draftsman. He traveled on the Continent, making a series of sketches of royal gardens. In 1850, his work was exhibited in a London gallery. As luck would have it, Downing was visiting England at this time. And he was on a mission. His landscape gardening practice was flourishing, and he was increasingly being called upon to design houses, too. The time was right, he realized, to bring a trained architect into his practice.

  Downing saw the exhibit and was enchanted by Vaux’s sketches. He asked Vaux, then twenty-five, to join his firm, and Vaux immediately accepted. Three weeks later, Vaux had relocated to Newburgh, New York.

  For the Newburgh practice, Vaux combined Gothic architecture, then in vogue in England, with Downing’s scrupulously honed rural aesthetic. It was a compelling mix. Signature touches included rustic stonework, severely pitched roofs, and jutting eves that fostered a play of light and shadow. The pair preached the value of asymmetry in house design and the need to bring a home into harmony with the surrounding landscape.

  One of their first commissions was to renovate a house near Newburgh owned by Warren Delano II, a wealthy merchant. Shortly after, a daughter, Sara Delano, was born into the household. Sara Delano, in turn, was the mother of FDR.

  Downing and Vaux began to receive increasingly prestigious jobs, such as a commission to design a house in Newport, Rhode Island. The client was Daniel Parish, a clothing magnate-turned-financial speculator and one of the richest men in America. There was even a commission from President Millard Fillmore, who called upon Downing’s firm to design a park in Washington, D.C. For this, Vaux appears to have helped design a suspension bridge (never built) and an arch (same fate). One cannot be sure, as the architectural sketches are signed only by Downing. It is also believed that Vaux suggested modifications (ignored) to Robert Mills’s Washington Monument, then under construction. Neither he nor Downing liked this obelisk. They didn’t appreciate having to work around it in their park plan. When Downing drowned, a shaken Vaux identified the body. Following his mentor’s death, Vaux carried on the architectural practice and remained in Newburgh.

  Mid-nineteenth century, Newburgh was a seat for painters of the so-called Hudson River School. These painters had taken up Ralph Waldo Emerson’s call to “ignore the courtly Muses of Europe.” Rather than city scenes or royal portraits, they made the landscape of America—verdant, untrammeled, awe-inspiring—the central subject of their paintings. Figures of people, when they appear at all, are dwarfed by the scenery, an assertion of egalitarianism: We are mere specks, and our best selves are found in an outward-looking apprehension of nature’s grandeur.

  Vaux became friendly with a number of Hudson School painters, including Worthington Whittredge, Frederic Church, and, most especially, Jervis McEntee. McEntee favored a melancholic palate, creating hushed hymns of brown and gray and tan. He was renowned as a master at depicting autumnal scenes. In exchange for a painting, Vaux designed a little board-and-batten studio for McEntee. Then Vaux married the artist’s sister, Mary Swan McEntee.

  In 1856, Vaux moved to New York, source of an increasing number of his commissions. Shortly after arriving, he helped found the American Institute of Architects. There were no architecture schools then in the United States. Neither was there any form of licensing or accreditation. Owning a hammer was about the only prerequisite for designing a house or building, and that’s pretty much how it went. Vaux was aiming to create some standards for his upstart profession.

  Vaux was a tiny man—standing four feet ten inches tall—and anxious, too. He constantly pushed his spectacles up on his nose. He was easily flustered, stumbling and stammering, losing his train of thought. In spite of this manner, Vaux managed to communicate one thing loud and clear: He burned with a white flame for pure art.

  Summer of 1857 found Vaux in a state of agitation. At this juncture, Viele’s plan was still the plan for Central Park, and Vaux couldn’t believe it. Why, Vaux wondered, on a civic undertaking of such vital import, was the plan to go with a design, never debated, never discussed, simply rubber-stamped years back by two provisional park commissioners who had since moved on? “Being thoroughly disgusted with the manifest defects of Viele’s plan,” Vaux later recalled, “I pointed out whenever I had a chance, that it would be a disgrace to the City and to the memory of Mr. Downing.”

  Vaux voiced his concerns to a couple of
members of the Central Park board, urging them not to be so hasty. He had made inroads into this powerful body, having recently designed the Fifth Avenue mansion of one of its members, John Gray. What’s more, Vaux was the living emissary of Downing, America’s Apostle of Taste. Vaux even had a little son named Downing Vaux. Utterly persuaded, the commissioners agreed to table Viele’s plan. He continued to lobby the park commissioners in his bumbling, but strangely effective, way. How about a design competition? In England, where he had received his training, competitions were a wellestablished method for ensuring that architectural jobs were doled out on merit. Once again, the commission took up Vaux’s suggestion.

  In the autumn of 1857, the board announced a competition for the design of Central Park, open to the general public. Though Viele’s plan had been tabled, he was welcome to submit it for consideration against the other plans. He was also given the option of making changes to it or drawing up an entirely new design.

  For all submissions, the following design elements were mandatory: a prospect tower, exhibition hall, formal garden, large fountain, and three playgrounds. Contestants were required to include at least four separate roads crossing the park. They would also need to provide for a parade ground, 20 to 40 acres in expanse. Not only did all plans need to include these elements, but all plans had to be executable within a budget, set at $1.5 million.

  The contest participants would have access to a topographic map, executed by Viele, to aid them in their work. Designs were to be done in a scale of one hundred feet to an inch. That meant contestants would need to execute large and detailed plans that were roughly ten feet long by two feet wide. It was an odd shape, awkward and unwieldy, just like the park. First prize was $2,000, and there would be prize money for second through fourth places, as well. The due date was March 31, 1858.