Genius of Place

by Justin Martin

  Olmsted could be a convincing salesman. “Such land in Europe would be made a forest,” he continued, “partly, if it belonged to a gentleman of large means, as a preserve for game, mainly with a view to crops of timber. That would be a suitable and dignified business for a man like you to engage in. It would, in the long run, be probably a fair investment of capital and it would be of great value to the country to have a thoroughly well organized and systematically conducted attempt at forestry made on a large scale.”

  Vanderbilt mulled this for a few months. As follow-up, Olmsted sent him a copy of Cleveland’s pamphlet. Vanderbilt liked the idea of harvesting timber on his property; that would provide a source of income. And he was intrigued by the notion of a showcase for managed forestry. Eventually, he agreed to Olmsted’s experiment.

  At the beginning of 1889, Vanderbilt and Hunt set off on a trip together to England and France. They gathered ideas and inspiration during visits to assorted châteaus, such as Waddesdon Manor in Buckingham, an estate done over in French Renaissance style, then popular in England and increasingly in America as well. Stateside, Olmsted began to work out his plan for the Asheville grounds. He was to receive $3,000 per year for his services.

  From the outset, Olmsted recognized the Vanderbilt job as peculiar but full of potential. On the grounds immediately surrounding whatever manse Hunt designed, it would surely be necessary to lay out geometric, ornamental, manicured gardens, something anathema to Olmsted. But on the outlying acreage, he’d have free rein, the opportunity to plant an entire forest. The job was a private estate, a type of commission that, while lucrative, had often left Olmsted feeling compromised. But Olmsted’s public projects were also full of compromise, thanks to combative and money-starved city commissions.

  This job could be ideal: A rich man’s estate promised him more latitude as a reformer than some of his people’s parks. Vanderbilt would be receiving many powerful and influential visitors; Olmsted’s work here could serve to disseminate his ideas about forest management. “This is to be a private work of very rare public interest in many ways,” Olmsted wrote. “... I feel a good deal of ardor about it, and it is increased by the obviously exacting yet frank, trustful, confiding and cordially friendly disposition toward all of us which Mr. Vanderbilt manifests.”

  For Vanderbilt, Hunt designed a house—or, rather, a palace—that when complete would be the largest private residence in the history of the United States. Everything about it was huge, right down to its 4-acre footprint. He designed it before he had ever visited the Asheville site. Olmsted, who once described Hunt as “earnest, tempestuous and used to having his own way,” wasn’t about to let this pile simply be plunked down on the hilltop. Olmsted positioned the house, orienting it to take in the best views. And Olmsted also insisted that Hunt add a significant feature, a long terrace extending off one side of the house.

  Walking the grounds, Olmsted had noticed that a ferocious wind sometimes blew in from the mountains. Hunt might know big, bold, and beautiful, but Olmsted had a grasp of the practical. The walls of the terrace would act as a windbreak. Moreover, when visitors ventured outside of Hunt’s house, the terrace would prevent them from being wind-whipped while strolling in Olmsted’s landscape.

  On the hillside, beneath the terrace, Olmsted designed a series of gardens. Everything was on such a vast scale: He had 40 acres to work with. To address the uneasy stylistic collaboration with Hunt, Olmsted’s design started out formal near the house site and became consecutively wilder on the way down the hillside. At the base of the hill, the final, most untamed, garden was to give way to forest, a logical and satisfying progression. Olmsted had a pair of observation towers built that reached the height of two aspects (the terrace and the windows in the music room) of Hunt’s design. By climbing the towers, Vanderbilt was able to get a preview of how Olmsted’s landscape would look from the house, before it was even built.

  But to Olmsted the forest was the thing. He immediately began planting thousands of white pines on Vanderbilt’s ever-expanding, though shabby, acreage. Given the demand for untold numbers of trees, shrubs, and flowers, Olmsted quickly realized that a nursery was needed. Growing plant stock on the estate would allow for greater control, as well as being cheaper, than shipping in more mature plants. To oversee the nursery, Olmsted hired Chauncey Beadle, a Canadian-born botanist who had studied at Ontario Agricultural College and Cornell. Beadle’s vast horticultural knowledge filled Olmsted with awe. In his mind’s eye, Olmsted could vividly picture that youthful horseback journey through dense Carolina woods. Grudgingly, he could lay out an ornamental garden design. As always, an expert such as Beadle was needed to do the actual care and coaxing of plants, to execute Olmsted’s vision.

  As a kind of corollary to the forest, Olmsted also started planning an arboretum. For Olmsted, who likened arboretums to “tree museums,” this would be the Louvre to the Arnold Arboretum’s Uffizi. In the moderate Carolina climate, it was possible to grow so many more varieties of trees than in Boston. Where the Arnold Arboretum featured single specimens, Olmsted planned to grow entire stands of different species. That would make it possible to study how tree species grow in proximity, to learn whether some species crowd out others, all in the service of Olmsted’s novel experiment in forest management.

  During the project’s early stages, one last task that Olmsted took on was christening the estate. Bringing a landscape to life was helped immeasurably by dreaming up the perfect name. It was a favorite challenge for Olmsted. The name should “fall tripingly [sic] off the tongue” he wrote to Vanderbilt, before offering a series of suggestions. Perhaps the estate could take its name from a local Indian tribe, often a winning formula. Or what about the nearby French Broad River? Olmsted offered up “Broadwood.” Riffing off Olmsted, Vanderbilt hit upon the name: Biltmore. It combines Bildt, the region in Holland from which his family hailed (and his name’s last syllable), with more, an old English term for rolling hills.

  By 1890, Olmsted was making several lengthy visits to the estate per year, often traveling there in the Riva, a private rail car provided by Vanderbilt. With commissions, Olmsted’s typical MO was to pay a visit or two to a site, then hand off the ongoing work to a local superintendent. But a project as big as Biltmore required more extensive personal consultation.

  Upon arrival, Olmsted typically fell ill and was laid up for several days with assorted maladies such as sciatica, lumbago, and facial neuralgia. He stayed at Brick House, guest quarters on the grounds, while the mansion was under construction. When feeling up to it, he played whist in the evenings.

  The Biltmore Estate was Olmsted’s first southern landscape architecture project, and in some ways he felt like he’d come full circle. Where he’d once chronicled the antebellum South’s moral turpitude for the New-York Daily Times, now he was creating something—with his planned model forest—of abiding social value in the same region. What’s more, the Biltmore Estate was like a beachhead from which Olmsted could venture elsewhere in the South, stirring up other potential work. Olmsted was committed to giving the Biltmore his best, but he had such a surfeit of energy that he couldn’t possibly give it his all.

  Olmsted met with officials in Montgomery, Alabama, to discuss landscaping the grounds surrounding the state capitol. The job went to someone who quoted a smaller fee. In 1890, Olmsted also traveled to Atlanta to discuss a planned suburb akin to Riverside, Illinois. That commission he won, and he set to designing the neighborhood known as Druid Hills.

  Besides making southern inroads, Olmsted also sought to expand westward. An ambitious park system of his design was well under way in Rochester, New York. He also began working on a set of parks in Milwaukee. He was even laying out a subdivision on the outskirts of Denver, called Perry Park, though he would withdraw from the job after several visits. Olmsted hired more employees to meet the increasing workload. In 1890, he made Harry Codman a partner and changed the firm name to F. L. Olmsted and Company. “My office is much be
tter equipped and has more momentum than ever before,” he crowed in a rare moment of optimism.

  Then sad news. Olmsted learned that Brace was dead. Olmsted had been aware of Charley’s recent trip to Europe for health reasons but had no notion of the direness of his condition. Brace had been suffering from Bright’s disease, the same malady that killed Richardson. With his strength rapidly waning, he had traveled through Germany, along the way seeing some places fondly remembered from his long-ago walking tour with Fred and John. Brace died in Switzerland in a cottage near Lake Silvaplana. He was sixty-four. With Charley’s passing, Olmsted’s oldest and dearest friend was gone. Olmsted received the news while at the Biltmore Estate. “His death was a shock to me,” Olmsted wrote to Kingsbury, his last remaining link to the uncommon set, “ . . . and the shock has been growing greater since.”

  Shortly after learning about Brace, Olmsted took ill with a bad case of the flu. He was certain that he caught it from Hunt. Olmsted was treated by a doctor whom he described as a “Confederate physician.” The man “dosed me excessively with calomel, quinine, whisky, and opium,” reported Olmsted.

  Woozy, half out of his mind, Olmsted wrote a letter in pencil on a piece of wrapping paper to Elizabeth Baldwin Whitney. She was married now—had been for some years—and was none other than the celebrated Miss B., object of his youthful infatuation. Apparently, Brace’s death had thrown Olmsted into a tailspin of nostalgia. The letter hasn’t survived. But in relating the episode to Kingsbury, an embarrassed Olmsted described the contents as “in vino veritas.” One thing is for certain: Mrs. Whitney, who hadn’t communicated with Olmsted in decades, found a measure of impertinence in the rambling wrapping-paper missive. She wrote back a formal letter, politely inquiring about Olmsted’s life and accomplishments in the years since they had known one another.

  Olmsted was relieved to have a second chance. He composed a reply that was sober, quite literally. By way of apology, he made quick mention of his previous “queer note” before launching into a lengthy letter, heavy on details about his career and professional achievements. “I know that in the minds of a large body of men of influence,” he wrote, “I have raised my calling from the rank of a trade, even a handicraft, to that of a liberal profession—an Art, an Art of Design. I have been resolute in insisting that I am not to be dealt with as an agent of my clients but as a councillor—a trustee in honor.” Olmsted added: “I am thinking that of all the young men that you knew I was the last to have been expected to lead such a life as I have.” In a surprising turn, he gave the former Miss B. credit for setting him on the course that led him to become a landscape architect: “And you gave me the needed respect for my own constitutional state and an inclination to poetical refinements in the cultivation of them that afterwards determined my profession.”

  The handwritten letter is fourteen pages long. It makes but the briefest passing reference to Mary. The mention occurs when Olmsted describes his 1860 carriage accident, relating how his wife saved the baby as she was thrown clear and how little John Theodore died soon afterward.

  At a time when Olmsted felt compelled to gaze at his distant past, he also couldn’t help but look forward to the future. The future was stepson John, to be sure, but Olmsted saw it even more clearly in his natural son and namesake, Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. Rick had been born to Olmsted and Mary late in life. As a consequence, while Olmsted was in his sixties now, Rick was only just headed off to college to begin his freshman year, and would be attending Harvard. This was an event guaranteed to stir emotions in a parent—doubly so, given that Rick’s departure came within weeks of Brace’s death.

  Olmsted wrote Rick a series of letters, inquiring about his studies and his social life. In one letter, he instructed Rick to draw up a memorandum, “stating on honor” the times at which he went to bed each night. He also furnished Rick with an account of the firm’s current success: “I have, with an amount of forethought, providence, and sacrifice and hardship of which you can hardly have an idea, been making a public reputation and celebrity of a certain kind, which at last has a large money value. We have, as a consequence, more business than we can manage. The business increases faster than we can enlarge our organization and adjust our methods to meet it. And it is plain that this depends as yet almost entirely on me.”

  And then, a few paragraphs later, Olmsted delivered the kicker: “I want you to be prepared to be the leader of the van.” He added: “I have all my life been considering distant effects and always sacrificing immediate success and applause to that of the future. In laying out Central Park we determined to think of no results to be realized in less than forty years. Now in nearly all our work I am thinking of the credit that will indirectly come to you. How will it as a mature work of the Olmsted school affect Rick? I ask, and then, with reference to your education, How is Rick to be best prepared to take advantage of what in reputation I have been earning? Reputation coming as the result of what I shall have done, but not coming in my time.”

  This was a lot for the young man to process. In response, Rick wrote a letter almost entirely devoted to a football game between Harvard and Yale. Football was a new sport, not generally embraced by those in his father’s generation. In his description, Rick concentrated on the incidentals—the spirited crowd that he estimated at around 18,000, the fact that Harvard won, the postgame celebratory bonfire. “It would be no use for me to try to tell you about the game itself as you could not understand it,” wrote Rick.

  CHAPTER 30

  A White City Dreamscape

  WHILE OLMSTED BEGAN WORK on the Biltmore Estate, and as he clattered southward and westward collecting new jobs, the city of Chicago was battling to land a World’s Fair. This was a time when World’s Fairs were transformative cultural events. Cities that hosted one could claim serious bragging rights, not to mention reap considerable economic benefits. But unlike the modern Olympics, say, these fairs weren’t held on any regular schedule. There was no agreed-upon World’s Fair designation among the international community. Fairs were more like parties: some good, some dreadful, all dependent on the host’s magnetism and the list of guests who showed up.

  Starting with London in 1851, there had been about a dozen events sufficiently large and well organized to merit the title “World’s Fair,” along with countless pretenders. Philadelphia had hosted a bona fide fair in 1876, and most recently, in 1889, Paris had held its Exposition Universelle.

  The Paris Expo was widely considered a smashing success. Unfortunately, U.S. participation in Paris met with a mixed verdict. Visitors and judges alike were wowed by American exhibits related to agriculture and industry, and the country collected numerous medals. But America made a very poor showing in areas such as the decorative and fine arts. To deliver such artistic mediocrity in Paris—moreover, to be an aesthetic featherweight at a fair distinguished by the debut of the majestic Eiffel Tower—well, it all served to reinforce those good old American cultural insecurities. Afterward, there was a groundswell movement to host a U.S. fair that would set matters right.

  To put on a proper fair, however, a host country needed to commemorate a suitable anniversary. The ’76 Philadelphia fair coincided with the centennial of American independence, and Paris fell on the centennial of the storming of the Bastille. Boosters lit on 1892, the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s voyage. That was a momentous historical date, no question. What’s more, the date could work as a subtle jab at France and the rest of Europe, since the case could be made that 1492 marks the beginning of a power shift from the Old World to the New.

  Once a date was settled, Chicago entered into a bruising competition, pitted against such rival candidates as New York, St. Louis, and Cincinnati. The battle first played out in the press. Chicago papers called Cincinnati a “toothless, witless old dotard” and referred to St. Louis as “our impotent neighbor.” A New York City paper suggested that if Chicago won, there was danger the event would be a “cattle show.” During these prelimin
ary skirmishes, Olmsted’s only involvement was making an emphatic public pronouncement: If New York hosted the fair, he sincerely hoped Central Park wouldn’t be the site. He and Vaux’s creation, lined with exhibition halls, tourists stomping about—it was beyond his worst nightmare.

  As it turned out, the matter would be decided by Congress, not cities, anyhow. It made sense, given that so many communities were vying for the honor. To be host would require congressional approval this time around. The battle soon moved to Washington, with Chicago and other rivals hiring lobbyists to plead their cases. The spring of 1890 found Congress debating this highly divisive issue. New York came on strong. Even tiny Cumberland Gap managed to get a single vote during a House roll call. In the end, Chicago took the prize.

  Congress set the fair’s date for the summer of 1893. Although 1892 would be the anniversary of Columbus’s landing, it didn’t leave enough time to plan such a massive undertaking. The event could still be called the World’s Columbian Exposition even if it happened the following year. Why quibble over the details?

  Winning the fair was confirmation that Chicago had fully recovered from the Great Fire. Back then, Joseph Medill’s Tribune had famously declared: “Chicago Shall Rise Again!” It had, coming back even stronger than before. Chicago was an economic center and transport hub, famed for its stockyards and featuring some of the nation’s tallest buildings. As of 1890, Chicago’s population had just crossed the 1 million mark. It moved ahead of Philadelphia to become America’s second-largest city.

  But there was one problem. It’s nicely summed up by a nineteenth-century visitor to Chicago: “In all the world, there is perhaps no site better suited for a prosperous city, no site less adapted for a beautiful one.” Chicago was modern, thriving, and—to some observers—homely. Even three months after congressional approval, the forty-five men who sat on the fair’s board of directors remained paralyzed. They had yet to settle on a place in their city that was right for hosting such an event, an event seen as a crucial world-stage test of Chicago and America.