For the College of California, meanwhile, he had been commissioned to lay out a large property that would include a university, a park, and a new residential community. In his plan, Olmsted suggested that the residences should extend right onto the campus lands. Rather than living in dorms, the students could live in clusters of houses. In Olmsted’s view, this would erase artificial distinctions between campus life and the life of the larger community. It was akin to what he’d experienced as a farmer who nonetheless hung out at Yale.
On receiving his recommendations, the College of California trustees were not convinced. His plan was promptly tabled and then lost. Several years later, he would receive a check for $2,832 for his work. (By this time, the university had been rechristened “Berkeley,” as had the surrounding community.)
Olmsted’s San Francisco park proposal was similarly ill met. “I like the plan myself,” Mayor Coon wrote to Olmsted, “but find at present great opposition to it.” He sent along payment for $500, and that was that.
While awaiting a verdict on Prospect Park, Olmsted also focused his attention in an entirely other direction—journalism. When Olmsted had sailed into New York Harbor aboard the Ericson, Vaux was waiting to meet him, but so was Godkin, editor of the Nation. This was no coincidence. There were rival claims on Olmsted—Vaux in the landscape architecture corner and Godkin in the name of journalism. Godkin, less than a year into his tenure as editor of the Nation, already found himself deeply embattled. He hoped that Olmsted could come to his aid.
During the Nation’s brief life, there had already been many twists and turns, and no shortage of intrigue. Back in 1863, recall, Olmsted and Godkin had contemplated a weekly publication devoted to serious issues. This notion, simple as it was, actually addressed an unfilled market niche given that there were serious monthlies (the Atlantic) and dailies (the New York Times), but few weeklies. Fervent as always, Olmsted came up with forty-five possible names, including Tide, Reviser, Scrutiny, and the Key. There was a war on, however, and the timing was wrong for starting a new publication. So Olmsted headed out to the Mariposa mines. Godkin was forced to take a job offered to him by the Reverend Henry Bellows, as editor of a house organ, the Sanitary Commission Bulletin.
Launching a new publication became a better proposition when it was clear that the Civil War was about to end. In 1865, a group of abolitionists started the Nation. It was meant to succeed papers such as the Liberator, soon to be obsolete once slavery ended. But new publications would be needed to cover “freedman’s issues.” The abolitionists raised $100,000 in start-up capital, even set up an office for the Nation in New York, sharing space with the American Freedmen’s Aid Union. They tapped Godkin to edit the new publication.
Godkin was a fitting choice. A stout English expat with a thick beard and reddish brown hair, he was avowedly committed to the rights of freed slaves. But he also had a broader agenda. On taking the job, he felt that he received assurances that he would have complete editorial control. He’d even written to Olmsted in California, calling the new publication “substantially the same as that which we had projected.”
For the Nation’s first issues, Godkin devoted ample ink to freedmen’s rights but covered a variety of other subjects as well. As a consequence, the financial backers soon split into two rival factions. Half agreed with Godkin. This group was led by James McKim, a prominent Quaker social reformer. McKim, in fact, was the person who had come up with the name, the Nation. He envisioned a general-interest publication, addressing the welter of complex issues facing a reunited nation. But half felt that the Nation should be exclusively devoted to issues related to former slaves. This faction was led by George Stearns, a wealthy Bostonian who had helped finance John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry.
In January 1866, Olmsted entered this fray, signing on as an associate editor. Godkin was delighted. It gave him an ally in the fight for editorial independence. Godkin wrote to a friend, “Olmsted’s coming in relieves my mind a good deal, particularly in ridding me of the hateful burden of over-caution.”
The impact of bringing in Olmsted was instantaneous. If Godkin hoped to throw “over-caution” to the wind and to increase the Nation’s eclecticism, he could not have teamed up with someone more catholic in his interests than Olmsted. Articles in the Nation during the 1860s were unsigned. Through records and correspondence, it’s clear that Olmsted wrote very few pieces. Rather, he dreamed up story ideas and shaped existing copy to reflect his interests and concerns. He’d learned well during his stint at the ill-fated Putnam’s. Now, he’d assumed the same role occupied at that magazine by the talented editors Curtis and Dana. Olmsted tapped various friends and acquaintances to write for the Nation, including Bellows, Charles Eliot Norton, and James Russell Lowell.
Olmsted’s active tenure as associate editor of the Nation is confined to the first six months of 1866. Yet the variety of Olmstedian themes and ideas visited in the stories that ran during this brief period is quite simply astounding. As an editor, he managed vastly greater range than was possible for a mere harried scribe. An article in the March 1 issue, for example, takes a skeptical look at a new stamp-mill technology being touted by an eastern inventor. Fresh from the Mariposa mines, this was certainly familiar territory for Olmsted. A piece in the March 15 issue covers the brutal conditions faced by sailors, a concern dating back to Olmsted’s days on the Ronaldson with Captain Fox. Although Olmsted wasn’t the author of either of these articles, his editorial fingerprints are all over them.
The Nation dispatched a correspondent to travel through the former slave states, providing weekly dispatches for a column called “The South As It Is.” This was kind of a post–Civil War retracing of Olmsted’s earlier travels as “Yeoman.” But in this case, the correspondent was J. R. Dennett, a recent Harvard graduate. He received $150 a month for his dispatches. There were also a number of articles on various agricultural topics, harking back to Olmsted’s years as a farmer. There was an article on the migration from farm to city, a transition Olmsted had made. There was also a piece about proper nutrition for soldiers, an echo of his time with the USSC.
Olmsted’s presence is clearly felt in the selection of books the Nation reviewed during this brief period. There was a review of Short Sermons to News Boys by Charley Brace. In his role as Children’s Aid Society founder, Brace had become focused on outreach to newsies, boys who lived on the street under particularly harsh conditions and hawked papers to get by. There was also a review of Samuel Bowles’s Across the Continent, a book that includes an account of the author’s visit to Yosemite where he met up with Olmsted. There was even a review of a memoir, Life of Benjamin Silliman, M.D. Professor Silliman taught the lone course that Olmsted enjoyed during his brief Yale stint, inspiring Olmsted to found the “Infantile Chemistry Association.”
Sometimes the consonance between Olmsted’s interests and a Nation article borders on the absurd. A piece in the March 22 issue is based on a Connecticut state survey of clergymen’s salaries. The conclusion: Endemically low pay forces the clergy into side professions such as running schools, thereby diluting their focus on spiritual matters. There’s no evidence that Olmsted wrote this piece. More likely, he learned about the survey and assigned a writer to cover it. As an editor, he probably shaped the copy to reflect his own very personal experience with this matter. Another piece titled “Hints for Tourists and Invalids on Italian Climates” features the following opening passage:The annual tide of travel from this country to Europe will very shortly set in, with the usual tendency after traversing the Continent during the intervening months, to rest in Italy during the winter. This will especially be true of such as are in feeble health, and are led to anticipate the most salutary effects from their sojourn upon the peninsula. As their disappointment will be most serious, and ought as far as possible to be prevented, we have thought some suggestions as to what to expect, what to avoid, and what of benefit and enjoyment may be obtained in the kingdom of Victor Emanuel [sic],
would have a timely interest and value.
Of all things, this is an article about how misconceptions about Mediterranean weather pose a danger to Americans suffering from chronic ailments. Olmsted’s own brother had just such an experience. He’d arrived in Nice, desperately ill with tuberculosis, only to be told by a doctor that the climate might not be so beneficial to his health.
Of course, Olmsted had also grown over the years to be a staunch abolitionist. As part of the Nation’s editorial mélange, there continued to be frequent articles on issues related to the freed slaves. But the subject wasn’t covered sufficiently to satisfy an increasingly agitated George Stearns. By the summer of 1866, Stearns—John Brown’s erstwhile benefactor—had had enough. It was clear that the Nation was anything but a journal devoted to freedman’s rights. He withdrew his considerable stake in the venture; the others in his faction followed suit.
The Nation was reorganized as a new company. Godkin held one-half of the stock, McKim held a third, and Olmsted took the remaining onesixth. As for the name of the new venture: E. L. Godkin and Company. “I wanted Olmsted’s name,” Godkin wrote to a friend, “but he was afraid it would injure his other business.” In any case, Olmsted would be a relatively absentee shareholder and within a few years’ time would transfer his interest (worth only a pittance) to the other partners. But he’d already made his mark on the publication. During a critical few months in the spring of 1866, Olmsted had boldly chosen a direction—broad inquiry over narrow focus—and had helped set the Nation on its course.
As for that “other business” mentioned by Godkin, it scored a major victory to offset the pair of California setbacks. Olmsted and Vaux’s design won the overwhelming approval of the Prospect Park commission. On May 29, 1866, the partners were officially appointed as landscape architects, and their fee was fixed at $8,000 per year. Earlier in the spring, Olmsted had moved to a new home on Amos Street in the Clifton section of Staten Island. He was now able to commute each day by ferry to his new job. John Olmsted, aged seventy-four, paid a visit. Olmsted proudly conducted his father over the grounds of his latest project.
From the outset, Stranahan and the other commissioners were extremely supportive. With his strong features and aquiline nose, Stranahan had a face like a Roman statesman. But the illusion was quickly broken by his manner and garb: Stranahan perpetually carried a black silk top hat in his hand, as opposed to wearing it on his head. He usually had an overcoat draped over his arm. He was a man in a hurry. After making a fortune as a railroad contractor, he’d devoted himself entirely to becoming Brooklyn’s number-one booster. To secure maritime commerce for his city, he’d taken the lead in developing the Atlantic Docks in Red Hook. A few years hence, he’d be a prime mover behind the Brooklyn Bridge, and many years later he’d urge the combination of Brooklyn, Manhattan, and the other boroughs into a single city.
Olmsted found Stranahan to be the opposite of Andrew Green. Stranahan didn’t interfere, and he didn’t pinch pennies. To work with so little oversight was an unexpected and gratifying experience. Early in the project, Olmsted wrote to his friend Norton, “It grows upon me and my enthusiasm and liking for the work is increasing to an inconvenient degree, so that it elbows all other interests out of my mind.”
As with Central Park, the creation of Prospect Park demanded a knack for illusion. The landscape had to be totally engineered yet made to look utterly natural. This presented ample technological challenges from a nineteenth-century standpoint. It also required a substantial workforce. By the summer of 1866, 300 men were at work on the park, and in the years ahead that number would swell to nearly 2,000. Whereas some of the tasks required brute force—digging holes and hauling stone—some demanded expertise and precision. To execute their design, Olmsted and Vaux oversaw a team of talented engineers and gardeners and architects.
A major technical challenge was filling the artificial lake. Initially, the plan was to rely exclusively on a network of drainage pipes. These pipes would conduct rain runoff from the parkland into the lake. But Olmsted wasn’t certain that rain alone would be sufficient to feed this vast 57-acre sheet of water. So a sixty-foot well was dug, and a state-of-the-art Worthington duplex pump powered by a 50-horsepower engine was installed to draw water. Capacity: 1 million gallons a day. The pumped water, in turn, could be directed through a series of natural-looking streams that merged, entered a ravine, and flowed over a waterfall before emptying into the lake—an ingenious solution. A set of sluices was built to drain water in the event that the lake got too full.
Olmsted’s tree-planting scheme also demanded a creative solution. The land slated for Prospect Park had a fine assortment of old-growth trees; problem was, they weren’t in the right places. Fortunately, John Culyer, a park engineer, invented a tree-moving machine.
Such a device would have come in handy at Central Park, especially during the construction of the Mall. At the time, Olmsted tried to bring in mature elms uprooted from the grounds of Sing Sing prison. But the transplanted trees all died very quickly. The only solution was to plant saplings. As a consequence, during Central Park’s earliest years, the Mall was flanked by scrawny juvenile elms rather than overhung with an intricate canopy. Once again, it had required time for the Greensward vision to be realized.
Culyer’s machine attached tightly to a tree trunk, then yanked the tree directly out of the ground, in the process pulling up an ample plug of dirt that kept the roots encased. It was like pulling a weed, but on a large, mechanized scale. Olmsted ordered hundreds of trees moved to comply with the blueprint that he and Vaux had prepared. When he encountered an especially striking specimen tree, he had it moved to a spot where it could really stand out and be viewed full-on in all its glory.
Shortly after work began, the commissioners announced an official opening day for the public. Thousands of people showed up. The routes of future pedestrian paths were marked by a series of red flags, and future waterways were marked with blue flags. But there really wasn’t much to see yet. It was more akin to a construction site. Like Central Park, Prospect Park’s magic would reveal itself slowly.
One of the first areas to be completed was an oval plaza that served as the main entryway into the park. The plaza featured a basin fountain and a statue of Lincoln. The nine-foot-tall bronze rendering (the work of Vaux’s friend Henry Kirke Browne) was the first statue of Lincoln to go up anywhere in the United States.
That Prospect Park was the site for this very first statue is somehow fitting. After all, the park was a grand civic work commenced immediately after the Civil War’s end. Lincoln was the man who saved the Union. It’s hard not to see the park in the context of a reunited America, though nothing about the park’s general design overtly addresses this theme. (Olmsted and Vaux were far too subtle for that.) But remember: Vaux had rejected two mismatched pieces of land in favor of a single unbroken stretch. Olmsted had recently devoted his attention to turning the Nation into a publication devoted to the broad interests of a postwar America.
As Prospect Park took shape, it would be notable for its unity (that’s the word often used) of design. Among the various elements—water, woods, and meadow—there was an undeniable harmony. Who knows? Maybe, like other artists, Olmsted and Vaux were simply caught up in the flow of events, of history, and this subconsciously informed their work.
Vaux created some of his finest structures in Prospect Park. In keeping with his motto, “Nature first, second, and third—architecture after a while,” he designed a series of rough-hewn stone archways that nestled into the sides of hills. To up the rustic feel still further, the archways’ masonry was generously draped in creepers and vines. Walking through one of Vaux’s masterful Prospect Park arches, one literally walks directly through a hill. The Endale Arch, constructed of alternating bands of New Jersey brownstone and yellow Berea sandstone, is particularly striking.
But the tour de force of Olmsted and Vaux’s design was the Long Meadow, the feature thrice marked “The
Green” on the original plan. When completed, it just rolled and rolled, luring visitors around comehither corners, whereupon a new expanse would open up ending in another enticing turn—the whole thing stretching out over nearly a mile.
As a brilliant touch, Olmsted and Vaux designed the pedestrian paths that crisscrossed this long green so as to be depressed below ground level. Perhaps this was inspired by the promenades of the failed San Francisco park plan, though these paths were sunk a matter of inches rather than twenty feet. This time, the intent was to provide someone looking out across the meadow with a view unbroken by paths. If any people happened to be walking on the paths, they appeared to a viewer to be gliding, because their feet were not visible. It was quite an effect, especially given the formal attire of the nineteenth century. One might look out across the Long Meadow, only to see a woman in a long skirt carrying a parasol, mysteriously floating along.
Olmsted and Vaux had expected their generously proportioned skating pond to be Prospect Park’s main attraction. But that distinction fell to the Long Meadow instead. Rather than skating mania, the park soon became the site of croquet mania.
Croquet had been invented in England less than a decade earlier. When the game stormed U.S. shores, no better venue presented itself than the ample green of the brand-new Prospect Park. Like skating, it was another outdoor activity that could be pursued by both men and women. Against a backdrop of strict Victorian morals, it provided another suitably chaste opportunity for the sexes to mingle. A croquet concession was set up in Prospect Park, where it was possible to rent equipment for 28¢ an hour. Some days, the Long Meadow was filled with people playing croquet. “He must be an exceptional compound of coarse clay and coarser habit who cannot in pleasant days of Summer find pleasure in this place,” waxed a reporter for the Brooklyn Eagle. “There are hundreds of maidens and their suitors busy at croquet on the lawn.”
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