Genius of Place

by Justin Martin

  Olmsted worked closely with John. Olmsted’s drafting skills were limited, so he drew rough sketches—this was how he typically worked. Once he’d settled on a design, his stepson gave it a more polished treatment. On October 24, 1878, Olmsted presented a preliminary plan to the commissioners. They instantly accepted it.

  But Olmsted wasn’t sure. He requested a meeting with Boston’s city engineer. He wanted to make certain that the plan was feasible from a technical standpoint. The city engineer brought along the superintendent of sewers, and the men huddled for four hours. Once he was convinced, Olmsted was ready to move forward. The commissioners formalized the arrangement, hiring him for the job. In a better mood now, Olmsted saw his stepson in a better light. He gave John, now twenty-six, a financial stake in the business.

  As a first step, Olmsted had the swampy stretch dredged and reshaped so that the water traveled in a sinuous line—more natural than nature. In cooperation with the city engineer, intercepting sewers were built to catch refuse before it flowed into the waterway and gates were installed to regulate the flow with the Charles River. Olmsted wanted to maintain a constant water level that never varied more than a foot. After all, he didn’t want the grounds to flood afresh at every high tide.

  As for plantings, Olmsted called for a huge variety: sedges, salt grass, salt cedar, sea-buckthorn, and beach plum. He even suggested Oregon holly grape, a species brought back East by Lewis and Clark. Olmsted was a master at arranging plants in artful compositions but an undistinguished talent at actually growing them. For this project, he simply suggested a long list of salt-tolerant species. The idea was to see what would take. Just as Ignaz Pilat oversaw the plantings in Central Park, trained nurserymen did the actual planting here.

  Not even lowly eels had been able to survive in the foul creek. But Olmsted was certain that abundant plantings coupled with cleaner water would provide a habitat. Birds like swans could be introduced, and he also hoped that wild fowl would be drawn here of their own accord. “The collection of water-birds should not be confined,” he wrote in a report to the commission, “... to a few sorts of swans, ducks, and geese, but include as many varieties of these as practicable, and also pelicans, cormorants, cranes, and other waders, and fishers.”

  Olmsted’s creation can fairly be called America’s first wetlands restoration. What it was not was a park, at least by any ordinary definition. The commissioners were intent on calling the place Back Bay Park. But Olmsted was a stickler in such matters. Olmsted owned a dictionary published in 1706, which he often consulted when looking for suitably oldfangled names. He provided commissioner Dalton with a list of possibilities such as “Sedgeglade” and “The Sea Glades.” But then he hit upon it: the Back Bay Fens. Fens is an archaic word for a marsh or boggy piece of land.

  Olmsted’s plan called for pathways in the basin above his salt marsh so that people could amble past the landscape without trampling the plantings—or falling into the water. To cap his creation, Olmsted invited Richardson to design a bridge. That placed Richardson in the Vaux role, amplifying a landscape with architectural flourishes. In temperament, the effusive, bearlike Richardson was nothing like Olmsted’s slight onetime partner. And the bridge he designed was nothing like one of Vaux’s subtle, nature-first creations.

  But it worked. Richardson’s Boylston Street Bridge—mammoth, hewn out of blocks of Cape Ann granite—succeeded in pulling the design together. It provided a needed focal point, visible from all over the Back Bay Fens. It doubled as an observation deck; a person standing on top of the bridge could gaze out across this piece of landscape memory smack in the bustling heart of Boston.

  In 1879, while work on the Back Bay Fens progressed, Olmsted began on another project in Boston. Once again, Olmsted moved his family away from New York for the summer, this time taking a rented house in Brookline. The project involved designing the grounds for an arboretum. Like so many Olmsted jobs, this latest grew out of an idea that had been bouncing around for years. Back in 1873, he had visited Boston to attend a rhododendron show held on the Common. At the time, he was still employed by Central Park, and he was on official business, scouting for flowers. While at the show, he met Charles Sprague Sargent, and the two became fast friends. Sargent was a man very much in the Olmsted mold. Like Olmsted, Sargent didn’t exactly cotton to formal education. In fact, he’d finished eighty-eight out of a class of ninety at Harvard. Yet so intense was his passion for trees, that he had recently been named director of Harvard’s fledgling arboretum.

  Sargent had a dream of turning the arboretum into a public park. Although Olmsted admired Sargent’s resolve, he didn’t think this was a very good idea. An arboretum is essentially a collection of trees, where different species are grouped together, often following a scientific order. This would be so limiting, Olmsted felt, when it came to a park design.

  But Sargent kept pursuing his idea for years. By 1879, the ever-strapped Boston park commission had finally come up with the money. Sargent asked Olmsted to collaborate, and Olmsted reluctantly agreed. The plan was to create a public park, with the city responsible for such things as policing and routine maintenance. At the same time, a proper arboretum required the expertise of trained botanists at a place like Harvard.

  Sargent was a cantankerous man, more at ease with trees than people. Thus, it fell to the worldly Olmsted to work out a unique arrangement where Harvard sold the land to the City of Boston, which, in turn, leased it back to Harvard for 999 years. Olmsted brokered this unique public-university partnership and found the negotiations exhausting.

  That was the easy part. Olmsted also had to design the grounds of the arboretum. Here was the challenge: Hundreds of trees had to be planted in a precise order dictated by the Bentham and Hooker system, a Victorian Era scientific classification. Lindens need follow tulip trees need follow magnolias in rigid sequence. A suitable roadway had to be fashioned—winsome and winding—yet ensuring that visitors viewed the trees in the proper order. The idea was that this would be a drive-through park, where people traveled by carriage, looking at the trees.

  All through the summer of ’79, Olmsted produced study after tortured study. In his initial plans, the carriage road was so twisted as to make a pretzel look like a straight line. But he loved a good challenge. Although he’d initially been dismissive, he grew very passionate about Sargent’s public arboretum. Eventually, he figured out an elegant road to carry people past the trees in the exact order spelled out by the Bentham and Hooker system.

  Today, visitors walk over the grounds of Boston’s Arnold Arboretum following the same path Olmsted originally designed for carriages. The trees are arranged in the exact same order. Some of the original trees are still alive, including a silver maple and a cherry.

  Olmsted’s focus was shifting from New York to Boston. He received yet another project from Dalton and the commission, for a park treatment along a section of the city’s Muddy River. This was another unlovely stretch of fetid water, per its name, and once again Olmsted had to contend with both aesthetic and sanitary engineering challenges. He also teamed up with Richardson on a couple of private estate commissions in communities near Boston. In Easton, Massachusetts, Richardson designed the Ames Gate Lodge for railroad scion Frederick Ames, while Olmsted laid out the surrounding grounds. The pair also collaborated on the Ephraim Gurney House in Beverly, Massachusetts.

  Meanwhile, Olmsted had ongoing jobs such as the Capitol grounds in D.C. And he was becoming increasingly involved in a project that was more like a personal mission. He was fighting to preserve Niagara Falls, an outgrowth of that meeting at Cataract House back in 1869. The falls were fast becoming a wretched tourist trap, the stunning natural scenery slipping into ruin.

  But in New York City, Olmsted’s work had pretty much evaporated. In the winter of 1881, Olmsted spent a weekend with Richardson at his home in Brookline. On awaking Sunday morning, Olmsted looked out the window and saw a team of men clearing the streets of snow. “This is a civi
lized community,” he announced. “I’m going to live here.”

  The idea of returning to New England where he’d grown up was appealing. Olmsted entered into yet another rental situation, this time moving to a house on Walnut Street in Brookline. He rented out the brownstone in New York City. But just as the family was getting settled, Olmsted received disturbing news about Owen. Apparently, his stepson had fallen gravely ill.

  Owen, now twenty-four, had headed out West after graduation from the Columbia University School of Mining. As a sickly person, he’d pursued a nineteenth-century medical regimen that prescribed counteracting one’s constitution through rugged outdoor activity. His natural father, John, had tried this, too. But Owen took it to the extreme. He’d spent two years learning cattle ranching from Clarence King, a man who had years back helped Olmsted survey Yosemite. Afterward, Owen had run a ranch of his own on the Powder River in Montana. Olmsted put up some of the money to help him buy cattle. He’d seen Owen, too, within the past year, and his stepson had appeared healthy, thriving even. But now a telegram arrived saying that Owen was “very low.”

  Stepson John Charles was dispatched west to attend to Owen. He met up with him at Spearfish, South Dakota, where Owen had gone to convalesce in a fleabag hotel. The backwater town was one hundred miles east of his ranch, but it boasted a doctor—in name, at least. John sent telegram after telegram back to the family in Brookline. On one day, Owen would appear to be rallying. But on the next day, John would report that Owen seemed to have taken a dire turn. “We are again under the tension of a great domestic anxiety,” wrote Olmsted to Norton.

  Finally, John packed Owen onto a train and brought him back East. Olmsted and Mary met up with the train in Albany. By this point, Owen was comatose. He never regained consciousness. On a clean white piece of card stock, in a hand much clearer than his usual rapid-fire scrawl, Olmsted wrote: “Albany, 21st Nov. 1881. Owen died here tranquilly at noon today.”

  Owen had looked eerily like Olmsted’s brother John. He shared the same easy temperament. And now he had died from the same malady, tuberculosis. Olmsted, curiously, insisted on claiming that Owen succumbed to diabetes. It’s quite possible that he suffered from this disease, too. There’s a link between the two illnesses. But Olmsted was in denial, unable to accept the fact that tuberculosis had actually killed Owen.

  Condolences flooded in to Olmsted and Mary. But there’s an air of puzzlement in many of the letters. “The whole thing seems to me incredible,” reads one from a man named John Platt. “How could he have been so ill as he must have been? ... I can not understand. It is all very sad, but what extraordinary pluck and resolution the boy must have had.”

  Vaux’s note to Olmsted was particularly dissonant. “John certainly felt that you were suffering less than might be anticipated from such a shock—but the actual suffering is not always the criteria.” Actual suffering not always the criteria? Apparently, Olmsted didn’t appear to be in as much pain as one might expect under the circumstances. In a letter to Brace, Olmsted described the effect of Owen’s death on him as “tranquilizing.” There’s that word again. Olmsted had suffered so many tragedies. With this latest one, he appears to have simply gone numb.

  Still, he managed to feel something. Shortly after Owen’s death, Olmsted lost control of his horse, was thrown, and fractured his sternum.

  Olmsted longed for something, anything—in work, in life—that didn’t feel ephemeral. Meanwhile, the Boston commission finally managed to line up ample funding. Olmsted had been working on a park-by-park basis. Now the commission asked him to create an entire park system, like what he’d done earlier in Buffalo. Olmsted was charged with designing new parks and also cobbling together the odds and ends he’d designed so far—a wetland preserve, an arboretum—into a single integrated system. The whole thing would be connected with ribbons of green space, or waterways in some cases, as well as his signature parkways. In February 1883, Olmsted was officially named “landscape architect advisory.” He signed a three-year contract at a salary of $2,000 per annum.

  Several years of guaranteed work were just the inducement Olmsted needed. He was ready to cut his last ties with New York. Olmsted began looking for a permanent home in Brookline. Richardson wanted Olmsted to move next door—as in, take up residence on his lawn. He offered to design him a house there, and in a letter to Olmsted he included a rough sketch, labeled: “Your house—a beautiful thing in shingles.” Richardson was in earnest, but Olmsted viewed this as just a lark.

  Still, Olmsted was set on moving to the “civilized community” of Brookline. In an era when his Riverside, Illinois, suburb was a novelty, Brookline was one of the few established suburbs in America. The place appealed to Olmsted for a reason that would become a venerable American cliché in the years ahead: Here, it was possible to have a big yard yet still be close to the city. No less a talent than Downing had landscaped the grounds surrounding several Brookline homes. Olmsted had lived in the country, the city, and now he was ready for the suburbs.

  Olmsted was especially taken with an old farmhouse at 99 Warren Street owned by Sarah and Susannah Clark, a pair of elderly spinster sisters. Olmsted made them an offer, but at first they refused. Then he hit upon a compromise. If they would sell him the house, stepson John would build them a cottage on the edge of the property. The sisters would have a place to live for the rest of their lives, and they’d have the proceeds of the sale. The Clark sisters agreed to sell Olmsted the house for $13,200.

  Being the nation’s premiere landscape architect had made Olmsted famous. It hadn’t made him rich. Olmsted’s new house was large, comfortable, but well short of a mansion. Still, he gave it a grand name: Fairsted. Fairsted was his family’s ancestral village in the county of Essex, England. Olmsted had visited the place during his 1850 walking tour.

  Olmsted converted the large north parlor of the new house into an office. Mary had never been enamored of Olmsted’s blending of domesticity and work. So at Fairsted, he built a “sleeping porch” above his office. He slept there by himself surrounded by books. Piled high on his nightstand were old favorites such as Carlyle, Gilpin, Ruskin, and Zimmermann’s Solitude. If he awoke in the middle of the night, gripped by an idea, he could shuffle downstairs to his office without disturbing Mary.

  As in the New York brownstone, this office was modestly appointed. There were bookshelves lined with titles on landscaping and reports from various parks. Hanging on the walls were a few framed reproductions of favorite plans such as Central Park, the Capitol grounds, and Mount Royal. The part-time draftsmen worked in little cedar-lined cubicles.

  This was nothing like Richardson’s flamboyant home office on nearby Cottage Street. Richardson’s office featured a huge fireplace elaborately filigreed with ironwork imported from Venice. Everywhere, there were elegant sofas and window seats. To create beauty, Richardson felt, one needed to be surrounded by beauty.

  Olmsted couldn’t have agreed more. But he had a different approach. He had once been a farmer, had signed his Southern dispatches “Yeoman.” Though he’d become a premier artist, he had never really been comfortable with the trappings of the artist’s life. His home office was utilitarian, a place for work. But fittingly, for a man so enamored of nature, Olmsted contrived it so that one need only walk out the front door. Here beauty held sway.

  Olmsted turned Fairsted’s 2-acre yard into a glorious personal park. It featured specimen trees such as a large elm that had drawn Olmsted to the property in the first place. Charles Sargent, who lived across the street, gave Olmsted a cucumber magnolia tree as a present. Olmsted also planted an area that was untamed and overgrown, his own private Central Park Ramble. He lined Fairsted’s walls with trellises and let the wisteria creep and crawl until it was hard to see where his garden ended and his house began.

  Olmsted was sixty-one years old when he moved to Fairsted. He’d gone completely bald on top, making his forehead appear prominent, domelike. This was what the Victorians referred to a
s a “noble brow.” On the sides, he let his hair grow into a long gray mane. He’d just added a shaggy beard. People had been telling him that he looked like Benjamin Butler, the Massachusetts governor. Olmsted didn’t approve of Butler’s politics. The beard, he claimed, was to distinguish himself from Butler, who sported only a mustache. Sometimes, Olmsted’s light-blue eyes still filled with their old spark. He’d seen more than his share of misfortune, but with age he was learning to take joy where he could find it.

  Three of his children lived with him. Shy and dutiful John had just turned thirty. He’d remain at Fairsted until he got married in late middle age. Marion, Olmsted’s “little old maid,” was twenty-two. Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. was thirteen now and attending Miss Rideout’s School in Brookline. He had a mischievous streak, like his father. Charlotte had married a doctor and was living nearby in Cohasset. Richardson—fond of saying, “I’ll plan anything a man wants from a cathedral to a chicken coop”—designed a modest house for the couple. Charlotte had two children, making Olmsted a grandfather.

  Living in Brookline, Olmsted enjoyed a vibrant social life. Besides Richardson and Sargent, both minutes away, his good friends Godkin and Charles Eliot Norton were nearby in Cambridge. Norton was a prominent critic and professor of art history at Harvard. Olmsted joined the St. Botolph Club, which numbered among its members William Dean Howells as well as publishers Henry Houghton and George Mifflin. Olmsted was surrounded by people who were accomplished, challenging, and socially conscious. “I enjoy this suburban country beyond expression,” he wrote to Brace.