Calvert Vaux, two years younger than Olmsted, had been born in London. At nineteen he became an apprentice to a London architect who specialized in restoring Gothic churches. For unexplained reasons, Vaux left before completing his apprenticeship and spent the next four years knocking about the London architectural scene. A talented draftsman, he supported himself by doing illustrations for printers. In August 1850 he was introduced to a visiting American, Andrew Jackson Downing. Downing was in England looking for an architectural assistant. As a result of his house-pattern books and his flourishing landscaping practice, he was being approached by clients who wanted him to design houses. He needed an architect. He and Vaux—an intense, small man (only four feet ten inches) with a full beard and an artistic demeanor—hit it off. A week later, Vaux sailed with his new employer to New York.
Working under Downing’s direction, Vaux designed a dozen or so residences, ranging from country estates in the Hudson Valley to a large seaside villa in Newport, Rhode Island. After Downing’s tragic death, Vaux continued to practice in Newburgh with some success, eventually forming a partnership with Frederick Withers, another English architect who had worked for Downing. Vaux was ambitious and saw himself as Downing’s heir; to consolidate that position, he published a Downingesque house-pattern book, Villas and Cottages. When he got a large commission in New York for a bank building, he concluded that his future lay in the city, and after four years he and Withers split up. Vaux, now an American citizen and married with two children, moved to New York.
He was soon caught up in the debate over Viele’s Central Park proposal. “Being thoroughly disgusted with the manifest defects of Viele’s published plan I pointed out, whenever I had a chance, that it would be a disgrace to the City and to the memory of Mr. Downing (who had first proposed the location of a large park in New York) to have this plan carried out,” he recalled. Viele’s pragmatic plan was not really that bad. In fact, his naturalistic layout largely followed Downing’s precepts, but it was the work of an engineer and lacked that elusive quality, “good taste,” that Vaux prized. He was acquainted with two of the park commissioners: Charles Elliott, who had been a friend of Downing’s, and John Gray, the bank vice president, for whom Vaux & Withers had recently designed a residence as well as an office building. They arranged for Vaux to speak to the board. His impassioned testimony undoubtedly did much to convince the commissioners to set aside the chief engineer’s plan. In August 1857 the board announced a public competition for the design of Central Park.
Vaux intended to enter the competition. Six years earlier he had been introduced to Frederick Law Olmsted at Downing’s Newburgh nursery. Vaux now approached Olmsted and asked him if he would consider entering the Central Park competition with him. Vaux was no novice in landscape design. He had assisted Downing on many large projects, such as the plan of a farm near Poughkeepsie for Matthew Vassar, the wealthy brewer and future founder of Vassar College. He had also helped Downing with a major park commission: a 150-acre public garden between the Capitol and the Washington Monument, in Washington, D.C. Why did he approach Olmsted? He later maintained that he was attracted by Olmsted’s writings and by his familiarity with the site, and that Olmsted’s position as superintendent was not a consideration. This strikes me as disingenuous. Vaux was shrewd enough to appreciate that politics would play a role in the competition. He knew that Olmsted was currently the favorite of the board, hence someone with whom it would be advantageous to be associated.
Olmsted found Vaux’s proposal attractive. He was still brokenhearted at his brother’s death and ashamed of the commercial failure of his publishing venture. “I was just in mind to volunteer for a forlorn hope,” he later recalled to his biographer, the architectural critic Mariana Van Rensselaer. He then added mysteriously: “There was something else of which I have told you nothing, and I shall tell you nothing which made absorption in the work of the moment the more necessary for me.” Not surprisingly, he was reluctant to reveal that several thousand dollars of personal debt had drawn him into his life’s work. He owed money not only to his father but also to his friends, his landlord, even to his stableman. He might even be held responsible for the indebtedness of Curtis’s bankrupt publishing firm, whose legal affairs were in the courts. Debt made it “the more necessary” for him to enter the competition. “If successful, I should not only get my share of $2,000 offered for the best, but no doubt the whole control of the matter would be given me & my salary increased to $2,500,” he wrote his father.
Olmsted first cleared the matter with Viele. The chief engineer, who was himself preparing an entry, said that he had no objection to Olmsted’s participation, as several other park employees were competing. Olmsted and Vaux started working on the plans sometime in the fall of 1857. They met nightly and on Sundays in Vaux’s house on Eighteenth Street. The deadline, originally set as March 1, was extended to April 1. Even so, they were a day late. Their project, titled “Greensward,” was the last to be submitted.
• • • •
The thirty-three entries included eleven designs by people who were—or had been—associated with the park, not only the chief engineer and the superintendent, but also gardeners, engineers, surveyors, and clerks. The competition attracted only two entrants from outside the United States. Notably absent were some of the better-known American landscape gardeners: Eugene Baumann, who had been responsible for landscaping the New Jersey suburb of Llewellyn Park; Adolph Strauch, the expert Prussian-born landscape gardener who was in charge of Spring Grove cemetery in Cincinnati; and the celebrated Horace Cleveland, who was then laying out Sleepy Hollow cemetery in Concord, Massachusetts. Cleveland’s partner, Robert Morris Copeland, did enter. So did Howard Daniels, who was responsible for planning cemeteries in Columbus, Cleveland, and Poughkeepsie. No prominent landscape gardeners were on the jury. There had been a proposal to invite the superintendent of Liverpool’s Birkenhead Park, as well as Jean-Charles-Adolphe Alphand, the French engineer who had supervised the transformation of the Bois de Boulogne into a public park, but neither was present.
The jury consisted solely of the commissioners. They deliberated four weeks. Three projects were disqualified, including the French entry, which required razing the old reservoir to make room for a Champ de Mars. There were nine rounds of voting. The entry that treated the park as an allegorical map of the continents, with ponds serving as oceans, did not receive much support, nor did the entries that turned the park into a kind of amusement ground. The jury was looking for something more dignified. Susan Delafield Parish, the sole female entrant, did not get any votes. Copeland, who was probably the most experienced landscape gardener competing, was not a finalist; neither was Viele, to his everlasting chagrin. The jury appears to have been divided politically between two different contemporary fashions in park design: Democrats favored the formal European approach while Republicans opted for the picturesque English style. The entrants were supposed to have been anonymous, but it appears likely that their identities were known since three of the four prizes went to park employees, and voting was along party lines. Fourth prize was accorded to Howard Daniels for an accomplished design that, on the whole, followed the European tradition of a monumental civic space, complete with replicas of ancient temples; French, English, Dutch, and Italian gardens; and a formal avenue running up the center of the park.1 The third prize went to two park commission clerks whose chief qualification appears to have been a family tie with one of the commissioners. Second prize was awarded to the superintendent of gardeners, Samuel Gustin. The Times later dryly commented on the mediocrity of the second- and third-place finishers: “We do not find in them the decided merit discovered by the Board.” Gustin, a Democratic appointee, had the solid support of the three Democrats. The vote for first place was unequivocal. The six Republicans, together with the reform Democrat Andrew Green, all cast their votes for the same project: Greensward. Vaux and Olmsted had won.
* * *
1. The descri
ptions of the entries are from the written reports; only three of the submitted plans have survived.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
A Brilliant Solution
THE COMMISSIONERS WERE no doubt influenced by politics, but they picked a remarkable design nonetheless. It is worth examining Vaux and Olmsted’s plan in some detail. Like all the competitors, they were required to incorporate a large number of specified features: three large playing fields, a parade ground, a winter skating pond, a major fountain, a flower garden, a lookout tower, and a music hall or exhibition building. Scattering these about the site would create a piecemeal impression—an overall organizing principle was required. Vaux and Olmsted looked to Downing. He had described his vision of the New York park only in general terms: “broad reaches of park and pleasure-grounds, with a real feeling of the breadth and beauty of green fields, the perfume and freshness of nature . . . lovely lakes of limpid water, covering many acres, and heightening the charm of the sylvan accessories by the finest natural contrast . . . the substantial delights of country roads and country scenery.” That was not much help. Winning a competition requires standing out from the crowd. Vaux and Olmsted knew that many of the entrants would follow Downing’s naturalistic teaching (in fact, two-thirds of them did). They needed something more.
Downing had one insight that provided an inspiration. “Pedestrians would find quiet and secluded walks when they wished to be solitary,” he wrote, “and broad alleys filled with thousands of happy faces when they would be gay.” The “broad alley” that was Vaux and Olmsted’s starting point in planning Greensward was a quarter of a mile long, a pedestrian boulevard flanked by double rows of American elms. They called it the Promenade, although it was almost immediately renamed the Mall. It led to a large formal terrace and a fountain on the shore of the skating pond. Emerging from the canopy of elms, one would have a vista across the water to a rocky bluff. The bluff was a tangled, natural landscape of rhododendrons, black oak, and azaleas, many of which were already growing. On the top of the bluff, which was the chief geological feature of this part of the park and was known as Vista Rock, they proposed a martello tower, “but by no means a large one, or the whole scale of the view will be destroyed.” The ensemble—Mall, terrace, lake, bluff, tower—became the central feature of the southern half of the park.
It was a brilliant solution. The city had been able to acquire the rocky and swampy land for the park in part because it was unsuitable for normal real estate development. Vaux and Olmsted turned this liability to an advantage by exploiting the craggy outcrops and turning the lowlands into lakes. The Mall was a nod (but only a nod) to the European tradition of formal landscape gardening favored by many of the commissioners. It was large enough to provide a commensurate sense of scale, but not so large that it overwhelmed the rest of the park, which was intended to appear natural. Although the Mall was formal, it was informally placed on one side and at a slight angle to the edges of the park. This left plenty of room for the parade ground (now called the Sheep Meadow) and a ten-acre playground (the Ball Ground). These were side by side and gave the impression of a single large rolling meadow.
Illusion lay at the heart of Greensward. It was all very well to talk of green fields, limpid water, and sylvan accessories, but aside from the rock outcroppings that Vaux and Olmsted incorporated into their design, the site was not rich in attractive natural features. Worse, it was disfigured by an old reservoir that stood awkwardly in the very center, on the site of the present-day Great Lawn. A new reservoir was being built immediately to the north, but this large body of water, bounded by embankments, could not function as a landscape attraction. (Vaux and Olmsted surrounded it with a bridle path.) The chief shortcoming of the Central Park site was its shape. Although it was almost eight hundred acres and stretched nearly two and a half miles from 59th to 106th Street, it was only half a mile wide.1 To maintain a sense of a natural landscape, Vaux and Olmsted took great pains to create diagonal views that directed attention away from the intruding views of the buildings that would be built along Fifth and Eighth Avenues.
Perhaps their most successful illusion—certainly the most original—was the way that they dealt with the competition program’s difficult requirement that four or more public streets traverse the park. City traffic would have been a noisy and dangerous intrusion and would have destroyed the effect of country scenery. Vaux and Olmsted placed the streets in large excavated trenches, eight feet below ground. Like the British ha-ha, or sunk fence, the sunken streets dealt with a functional necessity in such a way that the visual continuity of the landscape remained undisturbed; pedestrian ways, carriage roads, and bridle paths simply bridged the streets. This also had the advantage of allowing the park to be closed at night without interrupting traffic. No other entry included this feature.
“The great charm in the forms of natural landscape lies in its well-balanced irregularity,” Vaux had written in Villas and Cottages. He dedicated this book to Mrs. Downing and to the memory of her husband, just as Olmsted had dedicated the second volume of Walks and Talks of an American Farmer in England to Downing. Not surprisingly, Downing’s influence was strongly felt in Greensward. What is surprising is the extent to which Olmsted and Vaux diverged from Downing’s teachings. He had imagined the park as a site for “winter gardens of glass, like the Great Crystal Palace, where the whole people could luxuriate in groves of the palms and spice trees of the tropics.” He described zoological gardens, horticultural and industrial shows, and “great expositions of the arts.” Downing’s vision combined recreation with instruction. Many of the contestants took his advice to heart and provided museums, zoological and botanical gardens, and large exhibition halls. In several entries, a glass structure on the lines of the Crystal Palace was made the focal point of the park; one included an Italianate concert hall, complete with fountains and terraces; three entries provided a track for horse racing.
Vaux and Olmsted did none of these things; in fact, they minimized the number of architectural structures. Greensward included two ornamental towers and a military gate to the parade ground, but the other buildings were small and utilitarian: a changing room for cricket players, a small stables, a police station, and a house for the superintendent. They underlined this in their report:
Buildings are scarcely a necessary part of a park; neither are flower-gardens, architectural terraces or fountains. They should, therefore, be constructed after dry walks and drives, greensward and shade, with other essentials, have been secured, and the expenditure for them should be made with entire reference to the surplus funds at the disposal of the commission after the park is constructed . . . in our plan the music hall, Italian terrace, conservatory, flower garden and fountains, are but accessories of a composition in which the triple promenade avenue [the Mall] is the central and only important point.
Nor did Greensward owe much to Downing’s only public park. Downing had designed the Washington, D.C., park as six distinct areas, each developed according to a different theme: a perfect circle of elms in front of the executive mansion, a meadowlike garden surrounding the Washington Monument, a formal evergreen garden, and so on. It was a somewhat clumsy attempt to apply the principles of residential gardening on a larger scale. One must look elsewhere for Greensward’s precedents. They are found among the picturesque rural cemeteries. Brooklyn’s Greenwood and Philadelphia’s Laurel Hill introduced landscaping features such as winding paths, naturalistic ponds, and secluded groves. The other precedent was Paxton’s Birkenhead Park, with its carefully contrived vistas, its contrast of meadows and copses, its subordination of artifice to the scenic effects of vegetation and water, and above all, its being a single, unified design.
• • • •
The New-York Daily Times article that announced the results of the Central Park competition noted “the established character for good sense and liberality of Mr. OLMSTED, the actual Superintendent of the Park,” and “Mr. VAUX . . . creditably known from his conn
ection with the lamented Mr. A. J. Downing.” The reporter referred to Messrs. Vaux and Olmsted, then Olmsted and Vaux, then Vaux and Olmsted, in an unconscious attempt to fairly apportion credit for the design. Olmsted and Vaux themselves always maintained that the design of Central Park was a collaborative effort. But who did what?
Central Park, New York (c. 1880).
It is fairly easy to surmise the division of labor with regard to the competition documents: Vaux, the accomplished draftsman, would have had the leading role in preparing the “before and after” sketches that were an effective part of their submission; Olmsted probably oversaw the writing of the report and the preparation of the budget estimates. He also compiled the planting lists, which, like his earlier report to the board, were explicit and detailed. Both men probably collaborated on the site plan; Vaux’s son later recalled that family and friends were enlisted in drawing the thousands of trees and dotting the grass pattern on the ten-foot-long drawing. One of Vaux’s British friends, a mercurial architect named Jacob Wrey Mould, who would play a major role in Central Park, also helped. So did Vaux’s brother-in-law, Jervis McEntee, a Hudson River School painter, who contributed a small painting of the view of the existing park from the proposed Terrace.
It has been suggested that Vaux, as an experienced architect, should be accorded a disproportionate share of the credit for the creative aspects of the plan. Had the park been a purely Downingesque design, that might be a plausible claim. Yet many of the key ideas in the plan have no precedent in either Vaux’s or Downing’s work. Olmsted’s keen analytical mind was an important asset. So was his experience in surveying, his drawing ability, his intimate knowledge of Birkenhead, not to mention his familiarity with the Central Park site, over which he spent most of his days ranging on horseback. Nevertheless, while Vaux might have entered the competition alone, the opposite is not true. Rather, as Mariana Van Rensselaer recounted: “Together they had all the knowledge and ability required; but alone, Mr. Olmsted is always anxious to explain, he could at that time have done nothing to good purpose.”
A Clearing In The Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the 19th Cent Page 18