* * *
1. In 1863 the park was extended north to 110th Street, its present boundary.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
A Promotion
A FEW DAYS AFTER the competition results were announced, the winners met in Vaux’s architecture office. It was a sweet moment: after the months of hard work and the weeks of anxious waiting for the jury to decide, success. As they were dividing the prize money, Vaux said how much he had enjoyed their partnership. He would regret to see it come to a close. He had his architectural practice to attend to, and Olmsted would be busy as superintendent of the park. Olmsted was nonplussed. How could Vaux talk of withdrawing? Did he think that constructing what they had drawn was going to be that simple? Vaux had no idea what the park board was like. It was constantly offering suggestions, trying to cut costs, meddling. Moreover, the Democratic commissioners were going to make trouble; after all, none of them had voted for Greensward. And had Vaux forgotten the chief engineer? The Colonel was difficult to deal with under the best of circumstances; he was bound to be a sore loser. Their plan had won, but it would almost certainly require adjustment. Olmsted did not feel able to deal with all this alone—Vaux had to continue to work with him. The architect was reluctant, but finally he agreed. On May 10, 1858, the board authorized Olmsted as superintendent “to call in the services of his associate.”
Only a few days later Olmsted announced that he had been offered a promotion: henceforth he was to be not only superintendent but also architect-in-chief. Five years later he acknowledged that he ought to have insisted that Vaux be given an official position that recognized his coauthorship of the plan as well as his sole responsibility for the design of such significant architectural features as the Terrace. “I was technically not an architect & it was putting me under false colors, and I wanted you to be the Architect & to have that title. . . . The Commissioners’ arrangement was a bungling one,” he admitted to Vaux. But that was later. At the time he accepted the “false colors” readily enough. It may have been thoughtless, but it was not—as some biographers have suggested—selfish. He thought of the new position as a direct extension of his superintendency. It was his hard-earned right.
Vaux was officially the architect-in-chief’s “assistant.” He had no interest in management or organization, which he considered tedious, so he was quite willing to cede the superintendency of the park to his colleague. But, as a founding member of the American Institute of Architects, which was struggling to establish its professional legitimacy, he was irritated by Olmsted assuming the title of “architect,” let alone “architect-in-chief”! He thought that this slighted his own role as codesigner of Greensward. But he had to admit to himself that it was better for Olmsted to take charge than for somebody else. Had he realized the extent to which Olmsted would be thrust into the limelight, he might have voiced his disapproval. But he didn’t. In his diffident way, he chose to remain silent.
Vaux’s silence masked an important difference between the two men. Like most architects, Vaux considered design to be his paramount responsibility. Once a project was conceived and committed to paper, its implementation was more or less a mechanical task undertaken by others. This was reflected in his standard professional fee, two-thirds of which was for preparing drawings and one-third for supervising construction. Olmsted, perhaps because of his farming background, understood the difference between building design and landscape design. He referred to the Greensward plan as a “preliminary study” or a “sketch.” He, more than Vaux, appreciated the extraordinary organizational skills that would be required to flesh out this sketch, and to orchestrate the construction of a project as colossal as Central Park. He was also interested in overseeing the administration of the park after its completion, which was the reason for the “House for the Superintendent” in the plan. He understood that a landscape designer, unlike a building designer, was setting in motion a process that would take years and ultimately decades to complete. He spelled this out in his grateful letter of acceptance to the board, paraphrasing a passage from Walks and Talks of an American Farmer in England: “What artist so noble as he who, with far reaching conception of beauty and designing power, sketches the outlines, arranges the colors, and directs the shadows of a picture upon which nature shall be employed for generations before the work he has prepared for her hand shall realize his intentions.”
Gratitude was certainly in order. The combined positions of superintendent and architect-in-chief incorporated all the power he desired. “He shall be the chief Executive officer of this Board, by or through whom all work on the Park shall be executed, and shall have the government and supervision of all employees at the Park,” declared the official minutes of the commissioners’ meeting. His salary was raised to twenty-five hundred dollars a year. At the same time the board abolished the position of chief engineer and dismissed Viele.1 It had all happened just as Olmsted had foreseen. The literary gent had won.
• • • •
The commissioners authorized Olmsted to proceed with the Greensward plan, “subject to such modifications as may be suggested from time to time by this Board.” The modifications were not long in coming. The commissioners had already proposed, as cost-saving measures, narrowing the width of the carriage drives and eliminating one carriage entrance. These suggestions Olmsted and Vaux readily accepted. Not so the proposals of Robert Dillon and August Belmont, two Democratic commissioners. They disliked the Greensward plan, partly because it was supported by the Republicans, partly because their backgrounds (Dillon’s, Irish-American Catholic; Belmont’s, German-Jewish) did not incline them to the English landscaping tradition. Unable to block Vaux and Olmsted’s plan, they now attempted to modify it. They proposed a perfectly straight, two-mile-long promenade, called Cathedral Avenue, running almost the full length of the park. It traversed the lake on a suspension bridge, continued up to Vista Rock, and ran along the top of the old reservoir, cutting a crude swath through the natural landscape that Vaux and Olmsted’s plan had so carefully created.
Dillon and Belmont’s amendments—there were seventeen of them, including eliminating the sunken roads—were made public and were debated in the press. Editorialists who favored the amendments accused Olmsted of being a political appointee and an inexperienced farmer who had stolen his ideas from Viele. Dillon took out advertisements in the newspapers. He himself had proposed that Olmsted be appointed architect-in-chief; he had expected that the young superintendent would be a pushover. Olmsted cleverly enlisted the help of his journalist colleagues, including Richard Grant White of the Morning Courier & New-York Enquirer, Henry Raymond of the Times, Charles Dana of the Tribune, and his friend Parke Godwin. The tide turned. In the end, the board voted down the Dillon-Belmont proposal.
Olmsted had strenuously objected to Cathedral Avenue because it would destroy the natural character that was the key element in his vision of the park. Central Park was to be an American version of the “people’s park” that he had written about seven years earlier. Yet it would not just be a larger version of Birkenhead Park. One of Olmsted’s periodic reports to the commissioners ended with this extraordinary prediction:
The time will come when New York will be built up, when all the grading and filling will be done, and when the picturesquely-varied, rocky formations of the Island will have been converted into foundations for rows of monotonous straight streets, and piles of erect, angular buildings. There will be no suggestion left of its present varied surface, with the single exception of the Park. Then the priceless value of the present picturesque outlines of the ground will be more distinctly perceived, and its adaptability for its purpose more fully recognized. It therefore seems desirable to interfere with its easy, undulating outlines, and picturesque, rocky scenery as little as possible, and, on the other hand, to endeavor rapidly and by every legitimate means, to increase and judiciously develop these particularly individual and characteristic sources of landscape effects.
“Judiciously d
evelop” was an understatement—the picturesque outlines of the park would be the result of considerable artifice. A system of underground pipes would drain the swampy flats; the lowest areas would be excavated and turned into lakes. Ridges and boulders were to be blasted out where the subterranean roads crossed the park. Barren soil needed to be fertilized and seeded for meadows. The open farmland, long since denuded of vegetation, required extensive planting—three hundred thousand trees and shrubs, by Olmsted’s estimate.
On September 1, 1858, New Yorkers lining Broadway to watch the parade celebrating the first transatlantic telegraph were greeted by an odd sight. A contingent of workmen were marching in squads of four, with evergreen boughs decorating their hats. Horse-drawn wagons followed, draped with muslin banners reading ENGINEER CORPS. These were Olmsted’s men. He wanted to remind New Yorkers that the construction of Central Park was under way. By the end of the year he would have more than 2,300 workers at the park (the number would ultimately swell to as many as 3,600). Many were recent immigrants; more than three-quarters were Irish laborers. There were also Italian artisans and German gardeners. Manpower was crucial, for the millions of cubic yards of stone and earth that were moved, and the hundreds of thousands of cubic yards of granite that were excavated, were moved, and excavated by hand. The world’s first mechanized stone-crusher was constructed for use in Central Park, and steam engines were used to drive stationary derricks, but a practical steam-tractor had yet to be invented, and motive power came from either humans or horses. Materials were transported by horse cart, and teams of horses drew the heavy rollers that compacted the drives and walks (effective steamrollers did not become common until after the mid-1860s).
A cadre of engineers—the Engineer Corps—oversaw the work. Olmsted appointed William H. Grant superintending engineer. He was forty-three, an experienced railroad and canal builder from upstate New York (more experienced, in fact, than Viele). Grant, in turn, recruited a group of young engineers. With Olmsted’s support, these appointments were made on the basis of ability and technical knowledge, rather than social or political connections. These capable, dedicated men and their assistants were responsible for the organization and management of the labor force.
Vaux was in charge of all things architectural. His assistant was Jacob Wrey Mould. Mould, an off-beat character, was already infamous for his polychrome First Congregational Church—now destroyed—known derisively to New Yorkers as the “Church of the Holy Zebra” due to its striped exterior of yellow limestone and red brick. Mould’s talent as an ornamentalist played a decisive role in the design of Central Park. The original plan called for few structures other than the Terrace, but one of Dillon and Belmont’s sensible proposals, accepted by the board, was the need to separate pedestrian walks, bridle paths, and carriage roads. The separation required many bridges—more than forty in all. Vaux and Mould gave each a distinctive design and used a variety of materials: masonry, wood, and cast iron. An iron bridge over the skating pond—now called Bow Bridge—was their supreme creation. Over the years, several buildings were also added to the plan: the Belvedere Castle, a children’s dairy, a boathouse, and a casino. In addition, they designed numerous arbors, rustic shelters, and landscaping elements such as benches, walls, and lampposts.
Olmsted hired two individuals previously employed by the Commission who would be intimately associated with the development of Central Park. Ignaz Anton Pilat was a young Austrian-born gardener who had studied botany at the University of Vienna and had been employed in the Imperial Botanical Gardens at Schönbrunn. He had worked for the Commission preparing a botanical survey of the site and had submitted an “unofficial” entry to the Central Park competition. Olmsted hired him to be foreman of the gardeners, but within three years the able Pilat replaced Gustin as chief gardener, a post he would occupy for the rest of his life.
The other prominent member of Olmsted’s team was George Edwin Waring Jr., a remarkable man whose early career paralleled Olmsted’s. The son of a Connecticut merchant, he left school at sixteen, tried several careers, and was then apprenticed on a model farm to learn scientific agriculture. He was soon writing and lecturing on the subject. Waring moved to New York, where he met Olmsted. The two became friends, and since that was when John was in Europe, Waring became a tenant at Tosomock Farm. Several months later he was hired by the Central Park Commission as an agricultural engineer. He, too, had entered the competition. His design was unremarkable, but his report on drainage was “very full and thorough . . . and will be valued by the Board,” according to the Times. Olmsted placed Waring, who was only twenty-five, in charge of drainage.2
Without Grant’s experience of large-scale public works, Vaux and Mould’s architectural skills, Pilat’s plantsmanship, Waring’s inventiveness, and the Engineer Corps’s mastery of organization and logistics, Greensward could not have been realized. It takes nothing away from Olmsted’s later reputation to emphasize the abilities of the people with whom he worked on Central Park. These abilities are all the more important since the years Olmsted spent on Central Park could be considered his graduate school—these exceptional men were his teachers. He was too intelligent to delude himself about his lack of experience. He also learned something that was to stand him in good stead for the rest of his career: how to delegate authority to talented subordinates. Once, a year later, when Olmsted was away on an extended trip, Waring wrote to him: “Your successor at the helm does not know much of human nature . . . [everyone] does less work than he did under your system of placing some confidence in men’s sense of honor & duty.” Waring had put his finger on one of Olmsted’s most valuable qualities, his capacity to engender intense loyalty in the people with whom he worked. That, too, was to be a hallmark of his professional career.
He was not at all a figurehead; he was too strong-willed and too ambitious for that. If his background did not make him an expert, it certainly equipped him to oversee all aspects of the park. He could discuss surveying with Grant, planting with Pilat, drainage with Waring, and landscaping with Vaux. He, better than any of them, understood that their common goal was neither technical nor aesthetic. It was, above all, civic and social:
It is one great purpose of the Park to supply to the hundreds of thousands of tired workers, who have no opportunity to spend their summers in the country, a specimen of God’s handiwork that shall be to them, inexpensively, what a month or two in the White Mountains or the Adirondacks is, at great cost, to those in easier circumstances.
* * *
1. Two years later Viele sued the City of New York and received compensatory damages for unjust dismissal. However, his claim that his first plan for Central Park had been copied by half the competition entrants—including Greensward—was not upheld. Still, the embittered Viele always described himself as the true designer of Central Park.
2. Waring went on to have a distinguished career in municipal sanitation that included championing waterless toilets—earth closets—pioneering sanitary sewerage, and creating New York’s first effective street-cleaning department.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Frederick and Mary
JOHN HULL OLMSTED’S DEATH had left Mary with the responsibility for three children—John, Charlotte, and baby Owen, born three months before his father’s death. She might have lived in Hartford, where John Olmsted would have taken her under his wing, as he had the widowed Sophia Hitchcock. Instead, in the summer of 1858, Mary and the children moved to Tosomock Farm, recently vacated by George Waring. They stayed only a few months. Perhaps she sought comforting memories and found only loneliness; the prospect of spending a winter on the isolated farm could not have been appealing. She rented a house in Manhattan. Her new home was near Olmsted’s office, which was in an old farmhouse on the edge of Central Park. They saw each other often. She naturally turned to her late husband’s dearest friend and her closest relative for support. The children soon grew accustomed to Uncle Frederick’s visits.
On Monday, J
une 13, 1859, Frederick and Mary were married. The quiet civil ceremony, performed by Daniel Tiemann, the mayor of New York, took place in a house that stood in Central Park, on Bogardus Hill (now called the Great Hill). No record of their courtship survives. Some biographers have speculated that a sense of duty, not romance, led him to marry. After all, John’s last letter to Frederick closed with “Don’t let Mary suffer while you are alive.” But it is not far-fetched to presume that Frederick and Mary, drawn together by the death of a person they both cherished, fell in love. It was not a spring romance—she was twenty-nine, he was thirty-seven. They had known each other for almost eleven years. Childbearing had removed the bloom of Mary’s early youth, but she was still as “comfortably pretty” as he had found her when they first met. He was an attractive man—he now cut a dashing figure, with a handlebar mustache and long, wavy hair.
Olmsted knew that he was assuming responsibility for a family; she understood that she was marrying someone with a demanding position. After years of solitary life he sought domesticity; she offered it. Like all marriages it was a contract, and it proved remarkably durable. They weathered some difficult times. They had four children together, and they successfully raised their combined families. Frequently apart, they corresponded regularly on a variety of subjects. Tiny Mary (she was less than five feet), with her bright mind and lively disposition, was more than a match for Olmsted’s energetic intelligence. He shared with her not only the family life he craved but also his professional concerns. It was a fortunate union.
A Clearing In The Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the 19th Cent Page 19