Genius of Place

by Justin Martin

  Shortly after moving to Fairsted, Olmsted took on his first apprentice, Charles Eliot. The decision was inspired by Richardson. Richardson, who had attended Paris’s École des Beaux-Arts, was one of the few formally trained architects in the United States, a distinction he shared with Vaux. He viewed it as an obligation to teach his skills to others, and a series of apprentices passed through his Brookline workshop. As the pioneer of landscape architecture in America, Olmsted realized that he needed to do more than simply bequeath his firm to his sons at some future point. He also needed to draw others to the field.

  Olmsted was thrilled by Eliot’s qualifications—also his pedigree. Eliot, son of the president of Harvard, had just graduated from the university’s horticulture program. He was also the second cousin of Olmsted’s friend Charles Eliot Norton. Soon, young Eliot was joined by a second apprentice, Henry Codman. Codman was a recent graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the nephew of Charles Sargent. There’s an incestuousness at work here, like so much in Olmsted’s professional life. But it was certainly a heartening sign that young people such as these were attracted to landscape architecture.

  There was plenty to keep the apprentices busy. Olmsted had recently landed a major commission for Belle Isle, an island park in Detroit. There was a land subdivision in Providence, Rhode Island, and he had just started designing the campus of the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey. Still other jobs involved further collaboration with Richardson, such as more private estates as well as some Massachusetts train stations. Olmsted made John a formal partner in the business. The firm was rechristened F. L. & J. C. Olmsted. Olmsted instructed John to “throw more upon Eliot and let him throw more on Codman.”

  But the Boston park system remained Olmsted’s primary obligation. “Nothing else compares to the Boston work,” he stated. During this period in his career, his goal was “doing the best for Boston all the time.” In 1884, he began work on a new park for the city. During his 1875 visit with commissioner Dalton, Olmsted had singled out this piece of land as particularly attractive and parklike. At the time, it was considered the potential site for a future West Roxbury park. Now it was a go. The place was dubbed Franklin Park. Benjamin Franklin had left a bequest to the City of Boston that was scheduled to mature soon. The plan was to tap some of the money for park-construction costs. This didn’t happen, but the name remained.

  For his design, Olmsted conceptualized Franklin Park’s roughly 500 acres as two distinct parcels destined for very different treatments. The larger piece was a hilly section dotted with hemlocks and other attractive old-growth trees. Experience had taught Olmsted that on those rare occasions when one is blessed with a truly fetching piece of land, the task is simple: Just leave things alone.

  For the other parcel, he pursued a serious overhaul to convert it into a recreational space. Times had changed in the nearly quarter century since Olmsted and Vaux had designed Central Park. America was becoming more active, and people were increasingly enjoying outdoor sports. For Franklin Park, Olmsted designed a raised terrace, nearly three hundred feet long, with a wall of boulders that were Roxbury puddingstone. This elevated plateau was meant so spectators could overlook the fields where people engaged in baseball, tennis, and other games. Olmsted also designed a long fieldstone building to serve as a locker room and a shelter. He called it Playstead. Olmsted was a landscape architect; designing a building was the province of architects. But Olmsted was nothing if not versatile. (Unfortunately, his terrace and shelter have fallen into ruin today.)

  Franklin Park is the biggest park in the Boston system. Ultimately, Olmsted would provide a park treatment for a large glacial kettle hole (Jamaica Pond) and add several smaller parks to go along with the Back Bay Fens, Arnold Arboretum, and Franklin Park. He’d use a variety of means to stitch the whole thing together. Olmsted even made some adjustments to Commonwealth Avenue, integrating this existing grand thoroughfare into his system. Commonwealth Avenue, in turn, connected with two established smaller parks, the colonial-era Boston Common and the Public Garden from 1837.

  Taken together, this was a bountiful green space, 1,100 acres arrayed over nearly seven miles from downtown Boston. It was far and away the most ambitious park system of Olmsted’s career. Olmsted referred to the system as the “Jeweled Girdle.” He had a knack for nomenclature, but this was not a winner. An unknown someone came up with the name that stuck: the Emerald Necklace.

  CHAPTER 28

  Saving Niagara, Designing Stanford

  AT THE STROKE of midnight on July 15, 1885, a ceremony was held where Niagara Falls was officially “opened,” free of charge, to the public. Thousands of people were on hand to view this American icon. Many of those present were first-time visitors who lived within mere miles of the falls. But they had never before seen them because the place had grown into such a racket, such a horrid hassle. “From this hour, Niagara is free,” announced William Dorsheimer during the ceremonies. Dorsheimer, Olmsted’s onetime patron on the Buffalo parks, was chairman of the newly formed Niagara commission. This was a major victory for Olmsted, too, as his involvement in the cause stretched back over many years.

  During the nineteenth century, Niagara Falls had become the number-one tourist destination in America. In the process, it had become a grotesque parody of the natural wonder famously glimpsed by Father Hennepin in 1678. On arriving at the falls, visitors were immediately mobbed by barkers and sharps intent on diverting them to various entertainments. There were amusement parks, sideshows, and fireworks. Acrobats such as the Great Blondin regularly crossed the gorge beneath the falls on tightropes. If that wasn’t enough, the Niagara River was fairly choked with industry; pulp mills and flumes and piers lined the banks. And everywhere there were billboards for products like “Parker’s Hair Balsam.” Getting an unobstructed view of the falls was a challenge, and people paid for the privilege. The best spots were on private property, and sightseers were assessed hefty fees. “To drive around and visit all the places worth seeing costs a single person at least ten dollars,” lamented one contemporary account. “If you are on foot, at every few yards a hackman shouts to you for your patronage, or a low shop-girl affectionately invites you into a store.”

  Olmsted had first glimpsed the falls at age six during a family trip. Ever since the 1869 meeting at Cataract House, Olmsted had been working to focus attention on the sorry state of this once-grand piece of scenery. He had been part of a New York State survey team that had explored the feasibility of tearing down the mills, removing the carny-style amusements. He had also spearheaded a petition drive demanding that Niagara be restored to a more natural state. In this effort, Charles Eliot Norton had joined him. Like Olmsted, Norton had a deep well of contacts. The pair managed to gather hundreds of signatures, including those of Emerson, Longfellow, and Whittier as well as Morrison Waite, chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, and seven of eight associate justices. Because the falls are also visible from the Canadian side of the Niagara River (and because Canada was then a dominion of Great Britain), Olmsted and Norton also obtained the signatures of such English notables as Ruskin, Lord Houghton, and Sir James Stephen. “Carlyle signs,” crowed Norton, when the literary hero of Olmsted’s youth added his name to the petition.

  The survey report, penned by Olmsted and accompanied by the petition, prompted New York State legislators to draw up a bill calling for the preservation of Niagara Falls. But it failed to pass due to the vehement opposition of Governor Alonzo Cornell. He was against spending taxpayer money, especially given that nothing was wrong with the natural wonder itself. What would be the point, he demanded, of removing the mills and amusement parks? “I don’t see that it will make any difference—the water will run over the falls all the same,” said Cornell.

  Olmsted kept up the pressure. He perceived that this was a cause best furthered via the press, a forum where he had always enjoyed an advantage. This would be another of his nineteenth-century public relations battles. But h
e would wage it by proxy. By this time, Olmsted had grown extremely busy with the Boston system and other jobs. So Olmsted and Norton arranged to have Henry Norman, a recent Harvard graduate, write a series of articles that appeared in the New York and Boston papers as well as the Nation. Olmsted directed Norman, instructing him how to frame the Niagara Falls problem for public consumption. Olmsted and Norton also tapped Jonathan Harrison, a clergyman, to write more articles and even go on a speaking tour.

  Meanwhile, hostile Cornell left office and was replaced by Buffalo native Grover Cleveland, an advocate of preserving the falls. “Governor Cleveland strongly in favor of Niagara,” wrote Richardson to Olmsted in 1883. He had gathered this scuttlebutt while having dinner with Cleveland and Dorsheimer, for whom he had designed a mansion along one of Olmsted and Vaux’s Buffalo parkways. Within months, the state finally passed legislation to preserve Niagara Falls. Following that, an even more critical bill was passed, setting aside the money necessary to purchase the land from private interests. “I congratulate you, prime mover,” Norton wrote to Olmsted. “I hail you as the Saviour of Niagara!”

  In 1885, a five-person commission was appointed, and Dorsheimer was named chairman. As a first act, he presided over that midnight “Niagara is free” festivity. Then it was on to the complicated business of purchasing forty parcels of land held by twenty-five different owners. It would be necessary to tear down roughly 150 different structures. Once the structures were down, someone would need to give the grounds surrounding Niagara Falls a proper landscape treatment.

  Olmsted was the obvious choice. But Niagara was like an echo chamber of his past associations. One of the five commissioners was actually Andrew Green, his old Central Park tormentor. Green declared that the choice of Olmsted was “particularly offensive” to him. Whom did Green favor instead? Maybe Green was simply trying to stick it to Olmsted. His suggestion—Vaux!

  Actually, Vaux was a logical choice. Vaux was one of the parties present for that seminal 1869 visit that set the “Preserve Niagara” movement in motion. Vaux was also close friends with Frederic Church, the civic-minded artist who had done the definitive Niagara Falls painting in 1857. Church and Olmsted were distant relatives. Echoes and more echoes.

  Ultimately, the Niagara commission voted four to one to hire Olmsted for the project. Green was the lone dissenter. As a compromise, Olmsted simply agreed to team with Vaux. His old partner needed the work.

  The bumbling, agitated manner; the constant fiddling with his spectacles—these had always conveyed that Vaux was a pure, uncompromising artist. It also communicated that he was difficult. As for the Metropolitan Museum and Museum of Natural History, the twin commissions that had promised to elevate him to the highest echelon of American architects—he’d been cut loose from both. In each case, structures designed by Vaux were actually built. But as the buildings expanded, he lost control of the commissions. Over time, his original work on both the Met and the Museum of Natural History would be almost entirely obscured by later work by other architects.

  The years since Olmsted, Vaux & Company had ended had been cruel to Vaux. He was sublimely talented, yet his own business had dried up. Charley Brace had helped by hiring him to build a series of residences for the Children’s Aid Society. It was modest work. Vaux was sixty-one now and filled with worry—about the future, about slipping into poverty, about his uncertain legacy. A diary entry by painter Jervis McEntee concluded sadly that for his old friend Vaux, “life seems a struggle.”

  Olmsted and Vaux began working out their plan for Niagara Falls in 1886. (They would submit their formal report early the following year.) The site was such a contrast to Yosemite, Olmsted’s first effort at preservation. Yosemite was isolated and forbidding and even by the 1880s received only a handful of visitors. But Niagara Falls was the ultimate tourist destination, a simple fact that could be neither ignored nor undone.

  Olmsted and Vaux perceived that the challenge, from a landscape architecture standpoint, lay in framing the falls, but also making them accessible to the masses. The Niagara railroad depot was the stepping-off point for thousands of travelers who arrived weary, hungry, and confused. Olmsted and Vaux suggested adding a large building where tourists could check their possessions, purchase food, and use lavatories. Information signs—something that had been sorely lacking in the otherwise cluttered environs—should be strategically posted to guide people to the various sites. They also proposed simple “furniture” such as benches facing especially fetching vistas. For safety’s sake, Vaux designed railings to be placed in front of various precipices. The railings were utterly unobtrusive—just posts with three crossbars—and in a strange way, they were the apotheosis of his nature-first ethos. Awed by the falls, visitors wouldn’t even notice the railings.

  Olmsted was especially fond of the islands in the Niagara River above the falls. He felt the spectacle of the falls overshadowed the more subtle charms of these places. “I have followed the Appalachian chain almost from end to end,” noted Olmsted, “and traveled on horseback, ‘in search of the picturesque’ over four thousand miles of the most promising parts of the continent without finding elsewhere the same quality of forest beauty which was once abundant about the falls.”

  Olmsted and Vaux’s plan sought to restore wildness to places such as Goat Island and the Three Sisters Islands. But per the mandate, these also had to be accessible. They suggested a system of carriage paths and footpaths that would guide visitors through the scenery. The carriage paths were one-third the width ordinarily used in a park. (At around this time, in a separate effort, Canada also began restoring its side of the falls.)

  Vaux traveled to Fairsted at one point to work on the Niagara plan. “He helped me and I helped him and at some points each of us crowded the other out a little” is how Olmsted described their collaboration. In other words, they fell back into their old pattern. Vaux wrote Olmsted a long worried letter wondering when they were going to get paid. Olmsted offered to lend Vaux four or five hundred dollars. Olmsted had other work, and money was coming in, making him “well windward of expenses,” as he put it. Going forward, he would pretty well turn the job over to Vaux, who would supervise construction of the railings, benches, and other touches. It would give Olmsted’s old partner a needed source of income.

  On April 27, 1886, around the time work on Niagara Falls was getting started, H. H. Richardson died. He was forty-seven. The cause of death was Bright’s disease, a kidney disorder now known as glomerulonephritis. Only a few weeks earlier, Olmsted had seen Richardson. His friend, always of ample girth, had ballooned to a massive weight, a symptom of the illness. At the beginning of the visit, Richardson seemed downcast. But then he grew suddenly animated on the topic of an architectural commission. As Olmsted described it, “He went on discussing for the better part of an hour, growing to sit up erect, his voice becoming clear, his utterance empathetic, his eyes flashing, smiling, laughing like a boy, really hilarious.”

  The funeral was held at Trinity Church with many of his fellow architects in attendance. Mourners passed around a story that Richardson had been blessed with a peaceful death. This was comforting: Richardson had created such great beauty during his brief lifetime that it seemed only fitting that he achieve some measure of grace as he exited this world. But it was far from the truth.

  Richardson died as he’d lived, messily. He left behind a wife and six children. Though he was one of America’s most successful and prolific architects, he also left behind a mountain of debt, a final display of what Olmsted called Richardson’s “characteristic unconquerable recklessness.” He didn’t just slip peacefully away, either. Richardson spent the last day of his life in excruciating pain.

  Richardson’s death was a hard blow for Olmsted. He lost a dear friend and a professional collaborator; he had anticipated that their best works together lay in the future. But he’d experienced so much loss of late. Sorrowful events had come one after another, packed tight. Shortly after having her
third child, Charlotte—always unstable—had fallen into the grip of serious mental illness. She was sent to an asylum, where she would spend the rest of her life.

  Olmsted had seen many old friends pass away. The Reverend Henry Bellows, from Civil War days on the USSC, had recently died, as had George Geddes, the man who gave Olmsted his start in scientific farming. On learning that Friedrich Kapp, one of the Texas Germans, had died, he had written to Brace that “changes in our time have been so great that while I feel myself in the full fruit of the life of today, I feel that the life of our early days was almost another life.” He added, “Instead of being shocked by the death of old friends, I wonder they could have lived till so lately—most of all that I am still living.”

  So much change. So much loss. It made Olmsted feel the need to take stock. His self-assessment was unsparing: “I have done a good deal of good work in my way too but it is customarily & every where arrested, wrenched, mangled and misused. It is not easy to get above intense disappointment & mortification.” He was more generous toward Brace: “You decidedly have lived the best and most worthily successful life of all whom I have known. The C.A. [Children’s Aid] is the most satisfying of all the benevolent works of our time.”

  Brace passed Olmsted’s letter along for Kingsbury to read. It was like the old days of the “uncommon set,” where everyone knew everyone else’s business. Only now the set’s ranks had thinned to three: brother John was long departed, and Charley Trask had drifted to the point that the others weren’t even certain of what city he lived in.

  Kingsbury wrote Brace back commenting on Olmsted’s letter: “It’s a pity he should attach so little influence to the much he has accomplished and so much to the little he has not succeeded in doing to his mind. No man even comes close to his ideals who has any.” Kingsbury had always seen Olmsted with particular clarity. He knew that his old friend wasn’t about to rest easy.