Genius of Place

by Justin Martin

  Vaux was seventy-one, and his health, along with his architectural practice, had been failing for some time now. He was also deeply lonely: His wife had died a few years earlier in a carriage accident. Such details led to natural speculation that Vaux’s death was a suicide. In fact, a man told the Brooklyn Eagle that he’d encountered Vaux on the pier and found his demeanor curious. The point is moot. Slip or jump, the water had pulled tiny Vaux down then deeper all the same, just as it had Andrew Jackson Downing, his beloved mentor, all those years earlier.

  Mary could keep the news from Olmsted for only so long. She felt honor bound to inform him about Vaux’s death. When she finally did, to her surprise, Olmsted appeared weirdly energized. It gave him something to do: Olmsted announced that he planned to write a fitting tribute to his old friend and partner. But in the next moment, the matter slipped from his mind.

  About the only sustained pleasure that Olmsted managed was sitting by the side of a pond, watching ducks splash. His condition was so upsetting to sensitive Marion that Mary worried her daughter would “go off” like Charlotte. Mary rarely mentioned her other daughter, away in an institution. No one in the family did; it was easier that way.

  One thing was becoming clear: This English experiment wasn’t working. Earlier, Mary had purchased 46 acres of land on Deer Isle. Now, she wrote to John asking him to arrange for a house to be built there. She planned to move back to Maine and to care for Olmsted. Of course, she planned to have help this time, such as a live-in housekeeper and a nurse. “I am quite equal to looking after him three hours a day and that is all,” Mary wrote in a letter to Brookline, addressed to her “dear boys”—John and Rick. She added: “I really can not sketch out a scheme of life—I feel too old.” Mary was sixty-six, nearly a decade younger than her husband. She had always been tough. But this was taking its toll.

  In a separate letter to John and Rick, Marion drew a plan for the house and the surrounding grounds. It includes a small body of water, marked pond, with a tiny sketch of a duck. Marion was showing an interest in the family line of work.

  Before returning to America, there was a matter that Mary wanted to attend to—alone. She placed Marion on a ship and sent her back to the States. She parked Olmsted with a caretaker. Then Mary traveled to the Continent. In Geneva, she visited the house where her sons John and Owen had been born. She arranged to have a photo taken of the place. And she went to Nice, where she visited the grave of John Hull Olmsted, her first husband, Fred’s brother. Mary was distressed to find the grave site in a neglected state. She arranged to have some repairs done. Then Mary returned to England, gathered up Olmsted, and sailed for America.

  By early 1897, Mary and Olmsted were moved into the new house in Maine. It featured a little pond, just as Marion had prescribed. Mary dubbed the place Felsted. She sorely wanted to abide by her husband’s wish to be cared for in a home setting. But Deer Isle didn’t work the second time around, either. Olmsted’s condition was just too far advanced. Sometimes he sat for hours watching the ducks, his blue eyes glazed and empty. Those were his good days. On bad days, his eyes filled up with uncomprehending rage.

  In September 1898, the family made the painful decision to commit Olmsted to the McLean Asylum. This was the very institution for which he had designed the grounds years earlier. On becoming a patient, he reputedly said, “They didn’t carry out my plan, confound them!”

  By this point, John and Rick were business partners. The new firm was called Olmsted Brothers. John was forty-six and had been a landscape architect for years. Rick was twenty-eight and had no formal training. Then again, neither did his father, nor anybody else in this era. Luckily, Rick turned out to share his father’s awesome ability for conceptualizing landscapes. Surely, parts of this talent were inherited. In the years ahead, he would create a whole other set of incredible spaces and places, scattered all over the United States. Of course, he would collaborate with John and others in the growing practice. But Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. was the driving force.

  As for John, he had taken Rick into the partnership without any outward fuss. In his letter to Rick announcing the decision, he was coolly composed as always: “I said you could come in January 1st. I meant in name only because our fiscal year is February 1st.”

  What choice did John have anyway? He wasn’t about to go against the wishes of his father, even if his father was in no condition to object. Furthermore, John recognized that Rick would be an asset. And John certainly knew the value of working with someone who was a visionary. He’d done so his entire adult life.

  CHAPTER 32

  Fade

  LATE SUMMER OF 1903, a call was received at Fairsted from McLean. Olmsted was unconscious, his breathing terribly labored. He was not expected to live very much longer. Mary, John, and Rick raced to the institution in nearby Belmont, Massachusetts. They began a bedside vigil, but when Olmsted continued to hang on, John and Mary went home. Rick remained by his father’s bedside. At two o’clock in the morning on August 28, 1903, Olmsted died. He was eighty-one.

  Three days later a funeral service was held at Fairsted. It was a small affair, attended only by immediate family. Olmsted’s body was cremated, and his ashes were placed in the family vault in Hartford’s Old North Cemetery.

  Olmsted’s final years were isolated and apparently empty. Time was, he’d crafted landscapes, written books, blanketed the country in travel, generated more letters than seems humanly possible. But five long years at McLean had been passed by Olmsted in a kind of hush. During this time, a new century had dawned, with new promise and new problems. There were dazzling new inventions. The call that had summoned his family to McLean came via a telephone, an innovation just beginning to appear in American homes. Perhaps Olmsted was dimly aware of all this change, more likely not.

  For those final years, Frederick Law Olmsted—a man capable of such epic drive, full of passion and moral fervor and creativity and unquenchable energy, so central to his times—had been slowly fading from this world.

  EPILOGUE

  Olmsted’s Wild Garden

  YET HE’S STILL with us. In the course of his career, Olmsted designed more than thirty major city parks, the U.S. Capitol grounds, and such planned communities as Riverside, Illinois, and Druid Hills in Atlanta. His work on campuses included Stanford, Amherst, and American University in Washington, D.C., and assorted other places such as the grounds of Moraine Farm in Beverly, Massachusetts.

  He died uncertain whether any of his creations would survive into the future. His proposition—maintain valuable center-city land as green space—was tenuous and vulnerable to the developers of housing tracts and racetracks and shopping districts. But Olmsted’s worst fears haven’t been realized. Instead, his creations have become centerpieces, points of pride for scores of communities across the country. Far from receding, Olmsted’s influence has only increased in the century since his death, growing and spreading like the Ramble, his beloved wild garden.

  Olmsted Brothers turned out to be a smashing success, far beyond anything he could reasonably have expected. Just as Olmsted was the foremost landscape architect of the nineteenth century, the firm run by John and Rick became the preeminent practice for a new age. Much of its business involved circling back around to Olmsted’s original creations to do maintenance or to add modern touches such as swimming pools. Olmsted Brothers did such work on their father’s parks in Chicago, Louisville, and Rochester as well as Mountain View Cemetery. In 1908, the firm revised a plan for Bryn Mawr College that Olmsted had done some work on in the spring of 1895—one of his very last projects.

  Over time, Olmsted Brothers also built up an impressive list of original works such as Memorial Park in Maplewood, New Jersey, the grounds of the University of Idaho, and the Seattle park system.

  Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. fulfilled his uneasy destiny and truly became “leader of the van.” He helped Harvard, his alma mater, to set up the first university course in landscape architecture ever offered i
n America. Following in his father’s footsteps, he also became a pioneering environmentalist. When the bill to create the National Park Service was written in 1916, Rick contributed some of the key language and phrases. He helped establish national parks in the Everglades, the Great Smoky Mountains, and Acadia in Maine.

  Rick also served alongside Daniel Burnham on the prestigious McMillan Commission, which reorganized various Washington, D.C., public spaces such as the Mall, the White House grounds, and Jefferson Memorial into a more coherent scheme. This experience pushed him into urban planning, far further than his father ever ventured. He drew up plans for the future growth of cities such as Detroit, Pittsburgh, and Boulder, Colorado. He also designed Forest Hills Gardens, a lovely and verdant 147-acre community smack in the middle of New York City (the community is not to be confused with nearby Forest Hills). This is Olmsted junior’s masterpiece as surely as Central Park is his father’s. Robert A. M. Stern, dean of the Yale school of architecture, recently described Forest Hills Gardens as “one of the finest planned communities ever.”

  Olmsted Brothers carried on—in one form or another—for many decades. Along the way, the firm employed such notables as Frank Lloyd Wright Jr. and Arthur Shurcliff, known among other things as the landscape architect of Colonial Williamsburg. Marion Olmsted, who never married and continued to live at Fairsted, was also involved in the family business. A talented photographer, she took pictures of sites and reputedly even did some drafting work. But this was a different era, so the contributions of an Olmsted sister to Olmsted Brothers success—unsigned and uncredited—are impossible to reconstruct.

  The firm continued well beyond John’s death in 1920, one year before Mary’s death. It was still going strong when Marion died in 1948. It even outlasted Rick, who retired in 1949 and died in 1957.

  After there were no brothers involved in the business, the name was changed to Olmsted Associates (never mind that no Olmsteds were involved, period). The name held considerable equity, enough to propel the firm to 1980—when the offices moved from Brookline to Fremont, New Hampshire—enough even to carry it all the way to 2000. In the final year of the millennium, the business finally shut down. By then, the impact on the American landscape of Frederick Law Olmsted and his successors was—quite simply—indelible.

  Olmsted’s influence also extends far beyond his own firm. From 1857 onward, there isn’t a single U.S. landscape architect that doesn’t owe a debt to Olmsted. During his lifetime, he provided counsel not only to William Hammond Hall of Golden Gate Park but also Horace Cleveland, who designed the Minneapolis and Omaha park systems. Olmsted also carried on an active correspondence with George Kessler, the prolific designer of Houston’s Hermann Park; Deming Park in Terre Haute, Indiana; Overton Park in Memphis; and a variety of other places. Not one of these is an Olmsted park, yet his fingerprints—the naturalistic designs, emphasis on ease of use, bold feats of engineering when necessary—are all over them.

  Olmsted’s reach extends to the current era, to such modern landscape architects as Peter Walker. Considered one of the field’s preeminent practitioners, Walker has designed a vast array of spaces, including Burnett Park in Fort Worth, Texas; the grounds of a new airport in Bangkok; and the campus surrounding Pixar’s Emeryville, California, headquarters. In 2004, Walker’s San Francisco firm won a competition to design a memorial on the site of New York City’s World Trade Center. “With my work, I always keep in mind that the goal is creating something socially useful,” Walker told me. “I think that comes mostly from Olmsted. That social vision is the thing that defines his greatness.”

  Olmsted also left behind a formidable literary legacy. During the 1850s, his dispatches from the South were among the first works to “signal” (in the words of his friend Edwin Godkin) that the New York Times was a serious paper devoted to vital issues. The Cotton Kingdom, the abridged version of Olmsted’s Southern trilogy, first published in 1861, remains in print to this day. While in prison, Malcolm X read The Cotton Kingdom and later credited Olmsted with providing a startlingly unvarnished look at the institution of slavery. In an introduction to the 1953 edition, historian Arthur Schlesinger described The Cotton Kingdom as “the nearest thing posterity has to an exact transcription of a civilization which time has tinted with hues of romantic legend.”

  Olmsted was also involved in the startup of the Nation and helped steer that publication on to its course as a prominent left-leaning journal devoted to broad inquiry. Since then, the Nation has featured an incredibly varied group of contributors: George Orwell, Ralph Nader, Hannah Arendt, Langston Hughes, Hunter S. Thompson, and Naomi Klein.

  And then there are all the names and terms that have entered the language—Olmsted loved to come up with these. Drive down any divided road, even one of terribly modest and uninspired design, and chances are it will be called a “parkway,” a term coined by Olmsted and Vaux. Visit the wild section of a fair, filled with rides and carnival barkers, and chances are it will be called the “midway.” That’s a nod to the Midway Plaisance, a stretch of Olmsted and Vaux’s original 1871 Chicago parks plan that wound up housing the Ferris wheel and other attractions during the 1893 World’s Fair. Or you could visit Millbrae, California. In 1865, Bank of California president Darius Mills rejected Olmsted’s design for his estate. But the name Olmsted suggested stuck, and today Millbrae is a community of 20,000 people just south of San Francisco International Airport. And then there’s Fenway Park. The home of the Boston Red Sox takes its name from the nearby place that Olmsted called the Back Bay Fens.

  Yes, Olmsted is still very much with us. You can read his work; let one of his choice phrases “fall trippingly from your tongue,” as he once put it. Better yet, you can visit one of his green spaces. These transcendent creations provide a window into his spirit as surely as regarding the Starry Night will rouse Van Gogh.

  Perhaps you have a favorite Olmsted spot. I know I do. I walk down the steps of Central Park’s Bethesda Terrace, past the Angel of the Waters statue, and make my way to the edge of the Lake. Then I follow the shoreline to the Bow Bridge and walk across. I like to stand at the water’s edge, soaking up this peerless composition: Vaux’s beautiful bridge, both spanning the Lake and reflected in the Lake, and Olmsted’s untamed Ramble all around.

  But this is so far beyond a mere work of landscape architecture. Looking around, I’m always struck by the variety of people—every income group, every nationality, young and old, enjoying a dizzying number of different activities. Here it is, the twenty-first century, and one of Central Park’s original purposes remains very much intact. In the truest sense, this place belongs to everyone. I think Olmsted would be proud.

  NOTES

  KEY

  Unless otherwise indicated, correspondence is from the Frederick Law Olmsted Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

  Loeb Library: Used to cite letters from the John Charles Olmsted Papers, Francis Loeb Library, Graduate School of Design, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

  NYPL: New York Public Library.

  Papers: Used to cite the multivolume collection of Olmsted’s writings, reports, and other documents edited by Charles Beveridge. On first reference, a full citation of the volume will be provided; for example, The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted, vol. 1, The Formative Years (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1977). Subsequent citations of the same volume will use an abbreviated form, with the volume and page numbers separated by a colon, as in Papers, 1:30.

  The following initials will be used for frequently cited figures:FLO = Frederick Law Olmsted (subject)

  FLO Jr. = Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. (son)

  JO = John Olmsted (father)

  JCO = John Charles Olmsted (stepson)

  JHO = John Hull Olmsted (brother)

  JM = Justin Martin (biographer)

  MAO = Mary Ann Olmsted (stepmother)

  MPO = Mary Perkins Olmsted (wife)

  Introduction: Why Olmsted M
atters

  1 “Each of you knows”: Daniel Burnham speech of March 25, 1893, Ryerson and Burnham Libraries, the Art Institute of Chicago.

  2 “I was born for”: FLO to JHO, March 27, 1856.

  4 “When Olmsted is blue”: George Templeton Strong, Diary of the Civil War, 1860–1865 (New York: Macmillan, 1962), 243.

  Chapter 1: So Very Young

  7 During this period, Hartford: Lee Paquette, Only More So: The History of East Hartford, 1783–1976 (East Hartford, CT: Raymond Library, 1976), 29.

  8 In 1632, this original: Henry King Olmsted and George Kemp Ward, Genealogy of the Olmsted Family in America (New York: A. T. De La Mare Printing and Publishing, 1912), x.

  8 Voting records show: Paquette, Only More So, 31.

  8 Fred’s very first memory: FLO, “Passages in the Life of an Unpractical Man,” reprinted in FLO Jr. and Theodora Kimball, eds., Forty Years of Landscape Architecture , vol. 1 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1922).

  9 suffering from postpartum depression: For more on this topic, see Melvin Kalfus, Frederick Law Olmsted: The Passion of a Public Artist (New York: New York University Press, 1990), 96.

  9 she had attended: MAO to JHO, April 14, 1846.

  9 “I chanced to stray”: Autobiographical fragment, undated, FLO Papers, Library of Congress.

  9 “No a/c kept”: JO diary, March 12, 1826, FLO Papers, Library of Congress.

  10 “celebrated beauty of the day”: Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe: Compiled from Her Letters and Journals, pt. 2 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1890), 30.