Genius of Place

by Justin Martin

  He even went so far as to propose that a dedicated road be built to Chicago. That would serve horse and carriage traffic. The railroad was quick, to be sure, but he wanted people to have another, more leisurely, way to travel home to Riverside.

  As payment for the design, Olmsted accepted lots of land. This was against his better judgment, but the terms were just so enticing. According to Childs, the land that the RIC transferred to Olmsted, Vaux & Company for the design alone would be worth $15,000 once those lots were sold to residents. Supervising construction would net the firm additional lots, potentially worth more than $100,000. If just a fraction of this amount were realized, it would be quite a payday.

  Still more earning potential would derive from the fact that Vaux was a trained architect with considerable experience designing houses. Riverside was 1,560 blank acres demanding homes, not to mention all the houses and other structures needed along the boulevard to Chicago. “There will probably be a large demand upon us for cheap little cottages growing out of it, wood chalets,” Olmsted wrote his partner, referring to that long road, “—also for spring houses, arbors, seats, drinking fountains & c.” Riverside had the potential to be a genuine bonanza.

  In tandem with Riverside, Olmsted set to work in Buffalo. This was an Olmsted, Vaux & Company job, but once again, Olmsted very much took the lead. His plan—first enumerated during those impromptu remarks before the two hundred citizens—was nothing if not revolutionary.

  He designed a set of three separate parks, each with a distinct purpose. One park was called the Parade and was intended, as the name implies, to be the scene of large gatherings and vigorous activities such as sports. It occupied 56 acres. A second larger greensward was meant for passive pursuits such as strolling and sitting in quiet contemplation. Because this was the only fitting use for a true park, to Olmsted’s mind, he designated this 350-acre parcel as, simply, the Park. (Later, it was rechristened as Delaware Park.) The Park featured a natural-looking lake—totally man-made—with a meandering shoreline and plantings of weeping willows and other trees that looked more soft than stately, touches meant to lend a subtle, dreamlike quality to this creation. The third park was called the Front. For this one, Olmsted chose a 32-acre piece of land with a commanding view, a bluff overlooking the spot where Lake Erie starts to narrow as it feeds into the Niagara River. The Front also had a distinct purpose. Olmsted considered the Front to be a place with “a character of magnificence admirably adapted to be associated with stately ceremonies, the entertainment of public guests, and other occasions of civic display.”

  The land Olmsted selected for the three separate parks showed a genuine grasp of Buffalo’s landscape. Besides his Sunday horseback tour with Dorsheimer, Olmsted had also visited the city on USSC business during the Civil War. He was well aware that Buffalo didn’t adhere to a simple street grid like New York and so many other American cities. Rather, Buffalo’s street plan had a distinctly French accent. This was due to a blueprint for the city’s future growth, drawn up by Joseph Ellicott back in 1804. At the time, Buffalo had a mere two dozen residents. But its founders had a sense of manifest destiny. They hired Ellicott, who had worked with French-born Pierre-Charles L’Enfant during the early stages of planning Washington, D.C. In an echo of Paris, L’Enfant had suggested a radial plan for Washington, with the U.S. Capitol in the center and streets radiating out like the spokes on a wheel. Buffalo, at its inception, was designed by Ellicott with streets radiating out from a hub, Niagara Square.

  Because the city was founded on the shores of Lake Erie, however, expansion in all directions wasn’t possible. So Ellicott designed Buffalo as a partial radial—a wedge shape. Think of Niagara Square as home plate on a baseball field. And picture Buffalo growing outward, continually outward, but within the confines of the foul lines. In placing his three parks, Olmsted was careful to stay true to Ellicott’s original blueprint. Per the baseball-field analogy, think of the parks as being placed in left field (the Front), center field (the Park), and right field (the Parade).

  Olmsted also sited the parks at a considerable distance from the city center. They were arrayed along the town’s edge, not yet built up as of 1868. That made it possible for the city to obtain the selected parcels of land at low prices. Olmsted knew full well that as Buffalo grew, it would eventually surround these parks; land on the city’s outskirts would over time become priceless green space well within the city limits. In the years since 1858, when work on Central Park commenced, he’d watched this same process happen as development crept northward around the park’s periphery.

  Olmsted brought another dazzling innovation to the Buffalo project. He suggested a series of broad roads to connect the three separate parks. This was an idea that he and Vaux had been kicking around for some time. During one of his visits to Paris—the one he took in 1859 ostensibly to gather ideas for Central Park—he’d seen a variety of things that he simply tucked away in his mind for future reference. He was especially inspired by such grand thoroughfares as the Avenue de l’Imperatice and the Champs-Elysées, which he described at the time as “the most magnificent urban or interior town promenade in the world.”

  For some earlier designs, Olmsted had attempted to adapt Paris-style byways to his own idiosyncratic purposes. There’s the long road to Chicago in the Riverside plan. His rejected San Francisco proposal had suggested a sunken promenade connecting several parcels of land. The original plan for Prospect Park had called for a series of roads that would tie together various green spaces in the metropolitan area, maybe even connecting with Central Park. To describe this novel concept, Olmsted and Vaux had even coined a term: parkway. Two would be built in Brooklyn, Eastern Parkway and Ocean Parkway. These were grand roads, no question, but Eastern Parkway would simply serve as an approach to Prospect Park, and Ocean Parkway would travel to Coney Island. They didn’t tie any parks together.

  Maybe it had something to do with Buffalo’s original French-ified scheme, but Dorsheimer and the other civic boosters immediately grasped Olmsted’s intent. From the outset, he was given carte blanche to develop the parkways concept to the fullest. Per Olmsted and Vaux’s vision, the Buffalo parkways were ample, two hundred feet wide, and provided a quad-part separation of ways with dedicated pedestrian and bridle paths along with carriage and service roads. Elms were planted along the edges to create an overhanging canopy, and the medians were planted with flowers and shrubs. These were linear parks in effect. The idea was that a person could travel the entire six miles from the Front to the Parade without ever leaving green space. Everything was tied together.

  Buffalo was now the site of something brand-new—the world’s first park system. The system was even designed to help pay for itself with its own built-in revenue source. This, too, was an Olmsted idea. Whereas the parks and parkways were public land, the surrounding grounds were available for private development. As the parkways were laid out, the lots fronting on them became especially desirable addresses. In the years ahead, wealthy Buffalonians such as John Larkin, a soap baron, and George Birge, a wallpaper tycoon, would build grand houses along these roads. Assessments on their property would help defray the cost of the park system and served to maintain it going forward.

  Of course, a plan as ambitious as the Buffalo park system couldn’t be completed overnight. While Olmsted conceived of the design on his own, he was joined by his partner to see it through. Vaux collaborated with Olmsted and helped refine the plan. Per his standard role, Vaux also contributed structures to the parks such as bridges. In the Parade, he designed a long two-story refectory that was one of his most elaborate buildings. The Parade was close to a neighborhood that was home to many recent German immigrants; Vaux’s refectory was meant to serve as a place for festive gatherings. (In 1904 the building was torn down.)

  When Olmsted, Vaux & Company first opened for business, the following advertisement for the firm ran in the Nation: “LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTS. The undersigned have associated under the above titl
e for the business of furnishing advice on all the matters of location and Designs and Superintendence for Buildings and Grounds and other Architectural and Engineering Works including the Laying-out of Towns, Villages, Parks, Cemeteries, and Gardens.”

  That’s quite a scope of services. At the time the ad ran, Olmsted and Vaux had only a handful of jobs in their portfolio. With Buffalo, these ambitions were realized. This project was so much more than mere park making. It was about planning for the growth of a city and making sure that ample green space was set aside for the future. It also served a democratic purpose, ensuring that parkland was available to all the diverse citizens of Buffalo. As the city grew, it would have a set of three beautifully designed spaces, meaning that people in a number of different neighborhoods were in close proximity to a park. Olmsted would proudly describe Buffalo as “the best planned city, as to its streets, public places and grounds, in the United States if not the world.”

  Olmsted, Vaux & Company was like a ball of wax. As time went on, as the firm continually took on new work, none of the earlier projects ever seemed to be put to rest. That’s the nature of landscape architecture. While working on Buffalo and Riverside, it wasn’t as if Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, for example, was entirely finished. Why, the partners still had duties regarding their very first project, Central Park, now more than a decade old. To manage all this, Olmsted, Vaux & Company was a very flexible outfit. It took on surveyors and draftsmen on an asneeded basis.

  The two partners made a point of visiting project sites frequently in the early stages. Then once matters were well under way, they would turn the jobs over to others. Whenever possible, they tried to install people who would be sympathetic to their interests. The Buffalo park system was typical. To oversee construction, they recommended George Radford, an English-born engineer who was friends with Vaux. Radford was later replaced by William McMillan, another Olmsted and Vaux loyalist who had earlier worked on Prospect Park.

  The client was responsible for the salaries of the superintendents, horticulturalists, and other professional staff necessary to execute the plans. These people worked in close consultation with Olmsted and Vaux, keeping them updated through regular correspondence. They were executing the firm’s designs, after all. To do so required them to oversee large teams of local laborers, also paid by the client. That very first job, Central Park, provided the model: These were grand-style collaborations, requiring the work of vast numbers of people.

  When a problem or a major alteration to a plan arose, it sometimes became necessary for Olmsted or Vaux to personally visit a site even when a project was well under way. Meanwhile, new work was forever coming into the firm; the ball of wax just kept growing.

  Riverside led to another project in Chicago. The city hired Olmsted and Vaux to design a park system like what was underway in Buffalo. They proposed two large parks: one occupying an expanse of land right on the shores of Lake Michigan and the second roughly a mile inland. Picture this park system as looking sort of like a barbell with the two parks as weights and a thin strip of land—akin to a barbell’s metal bar—connecting them. At nearly 1,000 acres in total, the two parks and the mile-long connecting strip would represent Olmsted and Vaux’s largest work to date.

  The partners approached this big job with fittingly big ideas. The piece of land that fronted Lake Michigan was low-lying, soupy marshland. Their plan was to thoroughly dredge it and to create an intricate network of waterways. Visitors would get around by boating or swimming. This would be a park that people traversed by water—a new idea, utterly without precedent.

  For inspiration, the partners drew partly on Olmsted’s 1863 trip across Panama on route to California and the Mariposa mines. They dubbed a section of this lakefront park the Lagoon Plaisance—lagoon being evocative of a languid, meandering waterway, and plaisance a French word that roughly translates to “pleasantness.” Yes, this park on chilly Lake Michigan was meant to have a distinctly tropical ambience. Olmsted planned to drape the shoreline thickly with native plantings. “You certainly cannot set the madrepore or the mangrove to work on the banks of Lake Michigan,” he wrote, “you cannot naturalize bamboo or papyrus, aspiring palm or waving parasites, but you can set firm barrier to the violence of wind and waves, and make shores as intricate, as arborescent and as densely overhung with foliage as any.... [I]f you cannot reproduce the tropical forest in all its mysterious depths of shade and visionary reflections of light, you can secure a combination of the fresh and healthy nature of the North with the restful, dreamy nature of the South.”

  As for the strip of land that connected the shoreline park with the inland park, Olmsted and Vaux dubbed it the Midway Plaisance. The plan was to cut a mile-long canal running its length. That way, it would be possible to travel by boat right to the entryway of the inland park. In winter, it would be possible to skate along the canal, a scene right out of Amsterdam.

  Compared to the rest of their design, the inland park was pretty conventional—a mix of woodland and meadow. But oh, the approach to this place! Getting there would be all the fun.

  The Buffalo park system led to another project in that city. Olmsted and Vaux were commissioned to landscape the ample grounds (200 acres) surrounding the Buffalo State Asylum for the Insane. Architect Henry Hobson Richardson, then at the beginning of his distinguished career, was in the process of designing the asylum itself.

  Richardson was a rotund man with a vast appetite for food, drink, and convivial conversation. He was only the second American to attend the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. (The first was Richard Morris Hunt, who drew the ire of Vaux after proposing a series of monumental entryways into Central Park.) Richardson’s time in Paris gave him a thorough survey of French architecture. But he was far too ebullient to be constrained by rigid stylistic concerns.

  On returning to the United States, he took the Romanesque style that he’d seen in ancient French castles and cathedrals and pushed it and prodded it until it simply exploded. The result was an untamed architectural vocabulary all his own, replete with towers and turrets and rough-hewn stone walls that look like something out of a medieval hallucination. This style has come to be known as Richardson Romanesque.

  Richardson and Olmsted lived near one another in the Clifton section of Staten Island. While in Buffalo, the two men began to grow close personally and laid the groundwork for future professional collaborations. Olmsted was in his late forties during this period; Richardson was in his early thirties. They even took a trip, accompanied by Vaux and Dorsheimer, to nearby Niagara Falls. This great scenic attraction was at risk of being overwhelmed by a combination of circus-style amusements and industrial development. The four men met in Dorsheimer’s room at an inn called Cataract House and had a lively discussion about how Niagara Falls might be preserved.

  Olmsted and Richardson were soul mates of sorts, though decidedly mismatched in other ways. Olmsted was slightly built with a refined manner; Richardson was big and demonstrative. Olmsted was a wildly original thinker, yet there was an intense discipline, a precision even, to his creativity. Richardson followed a creative process as messy as his napkin after one of his epic meals. No work was ever finished, as he put it, until it was “in stone beyond recovery.”

  Because the Buffalo asylum was one of his first major commissions, Richardson was brimming with ideas, many of them probably better suited to structures with other purposes. The result: a twin-towered castle fantasia that’s like no mental institution built before or since. Unfortunately, Olmsted and Vaux’s landscaping plan for the surrounding grounds was lost before it could be executed. Olmsted later drew up a vastly simplified version of the initial scheme.

  But there is one touch from Olmsted and Vaux’s original plan that survived. They suggested rotating Richardson’s building so that it was on a diagonal to the line of the street. Initially, the directors of the Buffalo asylum were puzzled. It seemed such an awkward placement for this monumental structure. But then they realized that Ol
msted and Vaux wanted the building to face to the southeast so that as much soothing sunlight as possible would pour through the residents’ windows. When Richardson’s mental institution was built, it would be positioned exactly as Olmsted and Vaux had specified.

  An asylum in Buffalo, a park system in Chicago—the ball of wax kept growing. But that’s not to mention the various failures. There were plenty of those. The late 1860s and early 1870s were an incredibly productive time for Olmsted and Vaux, yet for everything they accomplished, their efforts came to naught in a shocking number of cases.

  Their proposals for parks in Albany, New York, and Providence, Rhode Island, were rejected. Plans for a park in Newark, New Jersey, were stalled indefinitely. Plans for the campus of the Maine College of Agriculture and the Mechanic Arts were abandoned. Landscaping surrounding a memorial chapel at Yale was never carried out. Olmsted and Vaux spent a huge amount of time drawing up a plan for a suburban development in Tarrytown Heights, New York. That, too, came to nothing. Typically, Olmsted, Vaux & Company would collect a modest fee for its efforts. Given that much of the pair’s work was on the front end—visiting a site repeatedly in the early going, preparing a detailed plan, writing a proposal—the failures took nearly as much time as the projects that moved forward.

  The heavy workload took its toll on Olmsted. He wrote to Samuel Bowles, “I feel myself so nearly desperate that I have to school myself against the danger of some wildly foolish undertaking—such as putting all I can get together in a farm, cutting the world and devoting myself to asceticism.” Bowles, the editor of the Springfield (Mass.) Republican, and Olmsted had first met during the Colfax party’s visit to Yosemite. The two men had stayed in touch and developed a friendship. “But I say to myself ten times a day that I positively must find some way of living in the country and escaping this drive.” Olmsted added, “I cannot live another year under it.”