Genius of Place

by Justin Martin

  Olmsted had tried farming and had had his fill of it. But the deeper root of his dissatisfaction appears to lie in changed domestic circumstances. There was a new baby in the household. Olmsted was feeling added financial responsibility and was also troubled that the crushing workload was taking him away from his family.

  Henry Perkins Olmsted was less than a year old. Olmsted and Mary referred to him simply as “Boy,” as if saying “Henry” was tempting fate. The nickname was like a desperate prayer. The couple had lost two sons in infancy, and they grappled with terrible anxiety that the unthinkable might happen yet again.

  Bowles urged Olmsted to move up to Massachusetts, maybe near Springfield, and slow down. He also counseled him to split with Vaux. After all, Bowles pointed out, Olmsted did the bulk of the work in the partnership. He could set himself up as an independent consultant instead. But Olmsted was forty-nine years old and worried whether he could make enough money on his own to support a family of seven. Furthermore, he responded, “Even if there were no ties of sentiment & obligation I have not courage enough left to dispense with V’s cooperation.”

  Nevertheless, Olmsted continued to grouse about his hectic life. “I am looking in earnest for some less irritating & exasperating method of getting a living than I have lately followed,” he wrote to Kingsbury.

  Unbeknownst to Olmsted, on the very day he posted the letter—October 8, 1871—the Great Fire broke out in Chicago. That’s the conflagration that occurred, according to myth, when Mrs. O’Leary’s cow kicked over a lantern. The truth was that the fire raged for two days, killed several hundred people, and destroyed $200 million worth of prime property in America’s fastest-growing city. In an unfortunate coincidence, the entire United States slipped into an economic depression not long after the Great Fire. The effect of the depression was especially pronounced in Chicago, and Olmsted and Vaux’s work in the city was sorely affected.

  Among the business casualties was the Riverside Improvement Company, which went bankrupt. Thus ended a maddening chapter for Olmsted and Vaux. They had battled Emery Childs at every turn. The partners had been forced to sue the RIC twice for nonpayment before simply resigning from the project. The home-design bounty never materialized; before ties were cut with the RIC, Vaux designed but a single house in Riverside that was actually built. As for the grand boulevard to connect Riverside and Chicago, only a tiny stretch was ever completed. (A vestigial sliver of this roadway still exists today in the Lawndale section of Chicago.)

  Olmsted and Vaux had taken on the project dazzled by the possibility of earning in excess of $100,000. But as payment, only a handful of lots were ever transferred to them. And Childs wildly overestimated their value. Once Chicago was hit by a severe economic downturn, they proved to be worth still less. When Olmsted and Vaux finally managed to unload their lots, they collected a fee believed to be just $2,000, representing their total payment for Riverside.

  Childs confirmed the partners’ worst fears. He turned out to be a swindler very much in the Mariposa mold. But at least he was a swindler with taste. By the time the RIC went bankrupt, 1,176 of the 1,560 acres were finished, and, crucially, the work had been done in accordance with the original plan. Construction of the roads, sewers, and other features was faithfully carried out by the firm of William Le Baron Jenney, the architect that Olmsted had met during the siege of Vicksburg. Once Chicago recovered economically, people began moving to Riverside in droves. In the future, the suburb would feature houses by such notable architects as Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright. Riverside, with its curving streets and abundant common space, would become the template for a model suburban community. Any modern suburb—if it’s well thought out—likely owes a debt to Olmsted and Vaux’s 1868 plan.

  The Great Fire had a more direct effect on their plans for a park system in Chicago. Various deeds and property records pertaining to the project and in the possession of assorted local attorneys and real estate agents burned up. Although the documents could be replaced, momentum was irretrievably lost. In the aftermath of a terrible disaster, the idea of building a new park system in Chicago was just no longer a priority. Four square miles of downtown had been destroyed and were in need of rebuilding; nearly 100,000 residents had been left homeless.

  Even so, work on the inland park—the more modest composition of woodland and meadow—proceeded, albeit slowly. Horace W. S. Cleveland, a landscape architect who had worked on Prospect Park, supervised the construction of what came to be known as Washington Park. But what about the shoreline park? What about those lagoons, the lush plantings, people gliding along in boats on languid July evenings, skating down the frozen Midway mile in January? Following the Great Fire, such an extravagant place seemed like something out of a dream, a dream with a huge price tag attached. For the next two decades, Chicago would pretty much forget about the shoreline park. But one person would remember. During all the long years ahead, Olmsted would hold on to the dream and serve as its keeper.

  CHAPTER 24

  Battling Boss Tweed, Splitting with Vaux

  THERE WERE FAILURES. There was the Great Fire. But for Olmsted and Vaux, the greatest fear of all was that a park already done would be undone. Nowhere was this anxiety more pronounced than with Central Park. As a great civic work in the middle of a vast and unruly metropolis, there was never a shortage of people eager to mess with Olmsted and Vaux’s original design or to propose new features for the park, new purposes for the land.

  Generally, these were fended off. But the pair had never before encountered a menace the equal of Tammany Hall, the preposterously corrupt political machine that managed to seize power in New York City by trading jobs and favors for bribes and votes. During the early 1870s, it achieved ascendancy under the leadership of William Marcy Tweed—the notorious Boss Tweed—a demagogue of rare and diabolical talent. Tweed had worked his way up from volunteer fireman to Democratic Party boss and had amassed a fortune rumored at $200 million.

  Tweed’s most trusted henchman and the brains of the Tammany machine was Peter Sweeny. Whereas Tweed was the aw-shucks populist, Sweeny was the cunning, remain-in-the-shadows operator. He had a variety of nicknames, none flattering, including Sly Sweeny and Spider Sweeny. A stout, ugly man with a big black walrus mustache, he was once described as having eyes that shined “like little dollars in the night.”

  Boss Tweed installed Spider Sweeny in a plum job as president of the newly created Department of Public Parks. Just like that, Sweeny became ruler of a large fiefdom that included all of the city’s parks and public squares. For some reason, the job even gave him control over street improvements in Upper Manhattan. But Central Park was the jewel; as an ample space that employed a large number of people, the park represented an irresistible opportunity for a patronage-based political machine.

  Sweeny immediately went on a hiring binge, pushing the head count—which had hovered around several hundred during the late 1860s—to several thousand. This vast crew was wholly unqualified for park work; many of the hirees were old or infirm and had simply been handed a job as a political payoff. Under Sweeny’s direction, they set to work on such tasks as cutting low-hanging branches, until the first thirty or so feet of many of the park’s trees looked like poles. This was done, according to the minutes of a Tweed Ring park-board meeting, to increase the “circulation of air” in the park. An army of Tammany hires was loosed upon the Ramble, where they busied themselves trying to remove lichen from boulders. Others were given the task of banishing all traces of rusticity from Vaux’s structures; they were instructed to pumice those archways until they fairly shined.

  Sweeny retained Olmsted and Vaux as consulting architects, but that was only for show. They were not consulted. Also for show, Andrew Green was kept on as a member of the board. Actually, Green was deeply loyal to Central Park in his own parsimonious way. Now, Olmsted would have welcomed some form of intervention from his old nemesis. But Green was utterly impotent. He’d show up for a park-board meeting
and would be the only one present. The new commissioners were in the habit of lying to Green; they’d hold their own private meetings at undisclosed times.

  Sweeny and his Tweed toadies had ambitious plans for the park. At the southern end, they planned a trotting course for horses. They also began work on a zoo on the grounds of the hourglass-shaped North Meadow, at that time the park’s most fetching open space. The Dairy—the place where mothers brought children for untainted milk—was converted into a restaurant. There was also talk of erecting in Central Park a fittingly lavish monument to Boss Tweed. For Olmsted, never a fan of statues, this was anathema.

  Olmsted and Vaux protested loudly against the whole situation—the damage already done their park and that which was planned for the future. Not only was their masterpiece in jeopardy, but the partners worried that if Sweeny had his way, Central Park might cease to be a professional calling card. It could hurt their future business. Potential clients might conclude: Why spend heavily on such a project? Just look at Central Park! Look at what an eyesore a park can become in the space of a few short years. Once again, the press-savvy Olmsted tried to engage public opinion, just as he had when Dillon and Belmont tried to overhaul the original Greensward plan. He wrote a series of articles attacking the Tweed Ring’s plans. But that only got the partners fired as consulting architects.

  Things looked bleak. Olmsted despaired of saving Central Park. “It is disheartening to have the best work of my life made nothing of by Hilton & Sweeny,” Olmsted wrote to his old friend Kingsbury. (Henry Hilton was another member of the Tweed park board.)

  But then the New York Times, the paper for which Olmsted had worked in its earliest incarnation, came to the rescue. It devoted some of the finest reporting of its history to exposing the Tweed Ring. In the autumn of 1871, the Tweed Ring collapsed. Boss Tweed was arrested and would be in and out of prison for the few years of life that remained to him. Sweeny fled to Canada, then France. Eventually, he snuck back into the United States, where he lived incognito in and around New York City.

  Following the fall of the Tweed Ring, a new Central Park board was assembled. Among its members was Frederic Church, the Hudson River School painter who was also a close friend of Vaux’s and a distant relative of Olmsted’s. For Olmsted, the inclusion on the board of an artist—especially one as notable and civic-minded as Church—represented a genuine commitment to change. “Church’s name was first suggested by Vaux, and we both did what we could to secure his appointment,” wrote Olmsted to Brace, adding, “The appointment of Church signifies more—That offices (for the present) are not for sale to those who want them, but are to seek and draw in the best men.”

  Olmsted and Vaux were restored to their posts as consulting landscape architects. A provision was adopted whereby no structure could be placed in the park until they had first viewed plans for it and discussed the matter with the board. Green was asked to serve on the new board as treasurer, but he declined. Instead, he accepted a job as New York’s comptroller; he would apply his talents to cleaning up the entire citywide fiscal mess wrought by the Tweed Ring.

  Shortly into the new board’s tenure, its president took a five-month leave of absence. Henry Stebbins set off on a business trip to Europe. On May 29, 1872, Olmsted was chosen to act as temporary president and treasurer. Although the Tweed Ring’s grip on Central Park was relatively short, only lasting about a year, they managed to make quite a mess. “The Park has suffered great injury,” Olmsted lamented. Sweeny had run up $1.5 million in debts and had entered into another $500,000 worth of bogus contracts. Olmsted set to work razing the zoo structures that had been built on the North Meadow. (The familiar zoo that exists at the southern end of the park is a different, non-Tweed, creation.) He planted thousands of shrubs to replace ones that had been grubbed out by careless workers.

  When Stebbins came back from Europe, Olmsted returned to his position as consulting landscape architect. But the fact that Olmsted was named president, albeit temporarily, says something about the profile he had managed to achieve. The nineteenth century didn’t have celebrities in the same frenzied fashion as later eras, but Olmsted had become what might properly be termed a notable public person. All manner of entreaties came his way. He was offered, and turned down, the presidency of Iowa’s agricultural college. He was also offered, and turned down, the presidencies of a variety of companies, among them a maker of earth closets (an alternative to the privy) and an outfit devoted to photo sculpture (making statues based on pictures snapped from a variety of angles).

  Olmsted also received numerous letters from strangers. Naturally, many wrote requesting information about landscape architecture. How do I break into this new field? Or simply: How do I tastefully landscape the grounds surrounding my home? But others wrote with off-kilter requests—for example, seeking tips on how to stop drinking.

  Among the most notable of Olmsted’s correspondents was William Hammond Hall. Hall was a bold young engineer who had landed a big job, designing a park in San Francisco. When it came to park making, Hall had zero training and zero credentials, something Olmsted could surely appreciate. Ironically, Hall was also dead-set on doing the exact thing that Olmsted had refused to do in San Francisco. Olmsted had felt that the city’s climate and topography required a unique treatment. But his plan, sunken promenades and all, had been roundly rejected. Hall had won the commission by promising that he could somehow manage to re-create Central Park in windswept San Francisco.

  As a first step, Hall started teaching himself all about landscape architecture. He obtained Olmsted and Vaux’s reports on Central Park and Prospect Park and read them religiously. Once he summoned the nerve, Hall wrote directly to Olmsted. “Please excuse the liberty I take in addressing you without being even an acquaintance,” Hall began. He then requested that Olmsted send him a list of books that might aid him in his work. Hall closed by writing that he had “visited and carefully studied and noted the principal parks and grounds about London, Paris, and the United States; particularly have I roamed through your Central Park . . . and the Brooklyn [park] ... to say nothing of those beautiful spots on the Hudson with which that gentleman of great taste, Mr. Downing, and yourself too I am told, had so much to do.”

  That Hall had actually visited all these spots was a stretch, at best. And Olmsted hadn’t designed any “beautiful spots” along the Hudson. But the reverent tone was duly noted. And the reference to Downing was a touch guaranteed to win Olmsted’s favor. Olmsted wrote back with a long list of titles that Hall might consult. Among them, Olmsted suggested works by John Claudius Loudon, Humphry Repton, and Uvedale Price, an author that he had read as a boy in the Hartford library. Olmsted ended his letter with a word of caution: “I have given the matter of pleasure grounds for San Francisco some consideration and fully realize the difficulties of your undertaking.... But the conditions are so peculiar and the difficulties so great that I regard the problem as unique and that it must be solved if at all by wholly new means and methods. It requires invention, not adaptation.”

  The indefatigable Hall approached the task in exactly this spirit. The land chosen for Golden Gate Park was a rectangle roughly three miles long and a half mile wide, the exact shape and nearly the same size as Central Park. At its western edge a large portion of land was entirely given over to barren dunes. Stiff winds blew sand over the rest of the land, making parklike plantings virtually impossible. Hall believed the solution lay in a technique he’d read about known as plant succession. He decided to start with yellow broom, a hardy shrub that might grow in the dunes. This shrub could act as an anchor, making it possible to grow larger plants and eventually trees. But the yellow broom wouldn’t take.

  Then a fortunate accident occurred. Hall and some colleagues were riding over the dunes on horseback, studying them. They fed their horses barley. Some scattered barley seeds sprouted in the sand. Hall had found his anchor. With some tweaking, he figured out that a sequence of barley, lupine, and then maritime pine
would still the shifting sands. It then became possible to landscape Golden Gate Park after the fashion of Central Park or Prospect Park. In doing so, Hall consulted the various titles that Olmsted had recommended.

  Throughout the early 1870s, during the initial construction of Golden Gate Park, Hall carried on a vigorous correspondence with Olmsted. He asked Olmsted to recommend a gardener; Olmsted suggested Frederick Poppey, a man who had worked on Prospect Park. To create various rustic structures, Hall hired Anton Gerster, the Hungarian craftsman who had worked with Vaux on Central Park.

  People often mistakenly credit Golden Gate Park to Olmsted and Vaux. The design is all Hall. It’s more accurate to view Olmsted as a kind of mentor, offering encouragement, suggesting pertinent books, steering talented employees Hall’s way. Olmsted is the man behind the man who created Golden Gate Park.

  On June 21, 1872, Olmsted was nominated in absentia as vice president of the United States by a small group of prominent citizens. This was a political splinter group in the sheerest sense. Incumbent Ulysses Grant was the presumptive nominee for the Republican Party. A dissident faction of Liberal Republicans was instead backing Horace Greeley as its candidate. A group of twenty-two men who favored neither Grant nor Greeley met at New York’s Fifth Avenue Hotel.

  Among those present was James McKim, one of the financial backers of the Nation, and Robert Minturn, a New York philanthropist instrumental in the original call for Central Park. They proposed a ticket featuring Olmsted as VP, and as president William Groesbeck, a former U.S. representative from Ohio who had served as a counsel to Andrew Johnson during his 1868 impeachment trial. The party dubbed itself the National American Democratic Republicans, a name that “seems to have nearly a word for each member,” as Greeley’s own New York Tribune sneered.