This was quibbling, and Olmsted knew it. At this time he was completing the Yosemite report. Vaux’s impassioned reminder that Olmsted’s true calling lay in the field of landscape gardening struck a responsive chord. Olmsted could finally no longer resist. He agreed to return but wrote that he would not leave until the fall. He had too much unfinished business: the landscape projects, Yosemite, his investments. He also still hoped to get some money from the Mariposa Company. Lest this sounded vague, he assured Vaux that he was ready to leave sooner if necessary: “I mean to hold myself as free as possible, and to have my business so I can wind it up in a hurry.” He mailed the letter (the telegraph lines were down) just before leaving for Yosemite with the Colfax party.
* * *
1. Yosemite, at this point, belonged to the State of California, but Olmsted suggested that it be thought of as “a trust from the whole nation.”
2. Twenty-five years earlier, John Claudius Loudon had published a book titled The landscape gardening and landscape architecture of the late Humphry Repton, esq. being his entire works on these subjects. According to landscape historian John Dixon Hunt, this is the first documented use of the term landscape architecture.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Loose Ends
A FEW DAYS AFTER returning from Yosemite to Bear Valley, Olmsted traveled alone to San Francisco to wind up his business affairs. On the way he fell seriously ill with what he thought was cholera. He was in bed for five days. He saw the owners of Mountain View Cemetery and collected his $1,000 fee for completing the first phase of the project. He also met the trustees of the College of California, who engaged him to survey the site and prepare a master plan; they would pay $1,000 in gold and $1,500 in land. He and Edward Miller spent ten days making a survey and sketching out the basic plan.
The site of the future college was a monotonous, scrubby hillside in Oakland. Olmsted proposed dense planting to limit the immediate views. To preserve the tranquillity of the college, he chose a location apart from the village plots that had already been laid out in a simple gridiron. The area surrounding the college buildings was divided into several neighborhoods of large, wooded residential lots. The winding roads resembled country lanes. A low, well-irrigated dell in front of the college buildings was the only turfed area. Olmsted recommended against building student dormitories and proposed that students rent rooms in the village or, if residences were needed, that they should take the form of large houses. He explained to the trustees that the overall arrangement of the college was intentionally picturesque rather than formal. This would blend with the desired character of the neighborhood, and it would also allow easy expansion and modification.
Olmsted was developing his own method of working, which was not based on a theory of design or a predetermined set of aesthetic rules. He thought things out from a practical point of view, carefully planning after firsthand observation of the topography and the landscape. He combined functional organization, site planning, urban design, landscaping, and gardening. And art. (Vaux had been right about that, Olmsted was an artist.) When he presented his ideas to the trustees, they accepted them enthusiastically and instructed him to proceed and develop the plan. They did not take up any of his suggestions for naming the college town, however. He proposed “Bushnell,” among others; instead, they decided on “Berkeley,” in honor of the Irish bishop and philosopher.
The detailed plans for Mountain View Cemetery and the report and plans for the College of California would be completed later by Miller, who had agreed to accompany Olmsted to New York. Olmsted intended to divide his fees with Vaux; he would not be returning to the partnership empty-handed. He also had a third project in mind. He wanted to “drive the San Franciscans into undertaking a park,” he wrote Vaux in his last letter. To that end he wrote an article that appeared in the San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin. In “The Project of a Great Park for San Francisco” he argued strenuously that all major cities deserved an important park. To critics who said that building such a park was too expensive, he responded that the longer the matter was put off, the more costly land acquisition would become. He hoped that with the aid of influential friends such as William Ashburner and Frederick Billings, a trustee of the College of California, the city fathers might be convinced to undertake the park and to award the commission to Olmsted and Vaux.
While he was still in San Francisco, Olmsted received a telegram from Godkin’s benefactor, James McKim.
YOU ARE CHOSEN GENERAL SECRETARY AMERICAN FREEDMEN’S AID UNION SALARY SEVEN THOUSAND (7,000) BELLOWS AND GODKIN ADVISING ANSWER.
The Freedmen’s Aid Union combined several voluntary societies whose interest was the welfare of freed slaves. Olmsted had often talked and written about the subject. He was well qualified for the position; Bellows and Godkin clearly thought so. Yet two days after receiving the offer, Olmsted wrote to his father, “I have no intention of accepting it. I am not fit for any duty requiring much writing or exciting labor.” No doubt his recent illness had unnerved him. Nevertheless, he must have been intrigued by the offer, for despite his previous commitment to Vaux he left the door open. The telegram had already been delayed almost a month. Hoping for an explanatory letter, Olmsted decided to wait for the next delivery of his forwarded mail from Bear Valley before answering McKim.
A week later the mail arrived—nothing from McKim, but a letter from Vaux. It contained two announcements: the Board of Commissioners of Prospect Park had passed a resolution to hire Vaux for one year to make a plan and oversee the work (the fee was $7,500); and the Executive Committee of Central Park had appointed Olmsted & Vaux “Landscape Architects to the Board.” The firm was to receive $5,000 per annum, and $5,000 as back pay for services already rendered. Vaux was elated but worried; Olmsted’s letter with his decision to return had not yet reached him. “I should be satisfied with the result if I felt well assured of your real cooperation,” he wrote. “As I said before, my main perplexity all through has been in this direction.” If Olmsted had any doubts, the opportunity to work on his beloved Central Park dispelled them. He immediately sent two telegrams. One was to Vaux, assuring him of his intention to return to New York; the other was to McKim. It said simply, “I decline.”
• • • •
Shortly after, disturbing news arrived over the telegraph. His New York banker, Ketchum, Son & Company, had been forced to close its doors. Edward Ketchum—the “Son”—had embezzled $5 million. Olmsted, who had earlier requested that his account be transferred to San Francisco, was on tenterhooks. He eventually learned that the $6,400 had been transferred the day before the firm failed! His total loss amounted to one hundred shares of Mariposa stock, worth about $1,200. He felt “as if I had just come out from a cold bath.”
Olmsted stayed another week in San Francisco arranging his affairs—he left more than $12,000 invested in California securities—and returned to Bear Valley. He planned to embark on a steamship that was sailing for Nicaragua (the Nicaragua route was cheaper than the Panama route). While he and Mary were packing, a telegram arrived from his friend Howard Potter in New York. Olmsted had granted Potter power of attorney and asked him to approach the Mariposa owners on his behalf. Potter’s message was unambiguous: “No funds here yet no satisfactory assurances obtainable.” Olmsted had waited for nothing. He left the Mariposa Estate on October 2, 1865, just a few days short of two years since he had arrived.
• • • •
It was the spring of 1996 when I visited Bear Valley. Scant evidence remained that this was once the headquarters of the mighty Mariposa Estate. A small standing section of stone wall and traces of foundation were all that was left of Oso House, which had burned down years ago. I could only guess where the company store had stood. On the hillside I could see a handful of houses, one of which was obviously abandoned, the roof sagging, the windows boarded up. Bear Valley had not prospered. A sign by the two-lane highway listed the current population as seventy-five. There was a general store with
two gas pumps. “Last Chance for Gas! No Service at Bagby,” the sign indicated. Bagby, five miles away on the Merced River, had been the northernmost point of the Mariposa Estate. The only other commercial buildings were a restaurant and “Mrs. Trabucco’s Mercantile,” advertising antiques and gifts. It was Sunday, and only the general store was open. I felt hot and dry and bought a bottle of soda and drank it outside in the shade of the porch. Rising to the east was the bulk of Mount Bullion, covered with scrubby growth. The grass between the clumps of trees was already burnt yellow by the sun. The view was cheerless. Frederick and Mary were happy here, but they could not have been sorry to leave.
A MAGNIFICENT OPENING
Calvert Vaux, June 1868.
We are neither of us old men you know. To me it seems & always has seemed a magnificent opening. Possible together, impossible to either alone.
—CALVERT VAUX TO FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED (1865)
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Olmsted and Vaux Plan a Perfect Park
THE TRIP HOME proved exhausting. It involved an uncomfortable carriage ride to Lake Nicaragua, crossing the lake by small steamer, and descending a rapids-infested river by stages to the Atlantic. Bad weather stranded them on the coast for a week. In all it took them forty-one days. In New York, Frederick and Mary settled in a boardinghouse—it would be several months before their furniture and possessions arrived from Bear Valley (by ship around Cape Horn). They had congenial company there—Charles Brace, who was still directing the Children’s Aid Society, his wife, Letitia, and their children were also lodgers. Boarding was more expensive than renting, but there was no time to set up a proper household. Olmsted, Vaux & Company, Landscape Architects—Olmsted had conceded the title—required his immediate attention. The fledgling firm shared space with Vaux and Frederick Withers’s architectural office at 110 Broadway. (Withers also was a partner in Olmsted, Vaux & Co.) Draftsmen were put to work completing the plans for the two California projects: Mountain View Cemetery and the College of California.
The Brooklyn park board expected a preliminary plan and a report by the end of the year. Vaux had offhandedly characterized the park to Olmsted as “an easy affair & a short job.” That was a gross understatement, yet in a sense, Vaux was right. Thanks to his own timely suggestions, the Brooklyn park had none of the complications of Central Park. The proposed site was not an elongated rectangle but a generously proportioned diamond shape, a mile and a half long and about a mile wide. It was unencumbered by unsightly water reservoirs. No transverse roads would be required. In a word, it was perfect. Olmsted and Vaux were fully aware that this commission represented a unique opportunity, and they convinced the board to extend the deadline by almost a month.
Prospect Park, Brooklyn (1871).
They submitted the preliminary plan as well as a report. The report is a remarkable document, not simply a technical description but an extended essay on urban parks. It begins by emphasizing that the purpose of such parks is to provide “the feeling of relief experienced by those entering them, on escaping from the cramped, confined and controlling circumstances of the streets of the town; in other words, a sense of enlarged freedom [emphasis in original] is to all, at all times, the most certain and the most valuable gratification afforded by a park.” Yet parks are more than scenery, the report emphasizes, they are social spaces “for people to come together for the single purpose of enjoyment, unembarrassed by the limitations with which they are surrounded at home, or in the pursuit of their daily avocations, or of such amusements as are elsewhere offered.” Olmsted and Vaux admit that there is a conflict between the desire to create a pastoral landscape to contrast with the urban surroundings, and the need of large numbers of people to enjoy avocations and amusements. The purpose of their plan is to bring these disparate elements into one harmonious whole.
The report began by laying out the theory behind park design, but the actual plan was also a response to the particular place. One of the site’s chief attributes, from a landscape gardener’s point of view, was the presence of a large number of mature trees. “These trees are in two principal divisions, between which a space of two or three hundred feet in width is found, of undulating ground, not wholly ungraceful, and now mainly covered with a ragged turf.” This undulating ground—at the north end of the site, closest to the built-up part of Brooklyn—became the so-called Long Meadow, three rolling pastures, stretching out a full mile in a graceful curve. The southernmost third of the site was flat farmland. This was the location of the lake, already identified in the sketches that Vaux had sent to Olmsted in California. Between the meadow and the lake was the remnant of a heavily wooded, ancient moraine. Across this treed, hilly ground Olmsted and Vaux laid out woodland paths and a meandering forest brook. “Although we cannot have wild mountain gorges, for instance, on the park, we may have rugged ravines shaded with trees, and made picturesque with shrubs, the forms and arrangement of which remind us of mountain scenery.” The brook, “taking a very irregular course, with numerous small rapids, shoots and eddies, among rocks and ferns,” was part of an elaborate waterworks. A steam engine pumped water from a deep well to a reservoir that fed the entire system of brooks, ponds, and lake.
The shoreline of the lake was varied with inlets and large and small islands, one of which served as the site for a music pavilion. The island pavilion was the focus of a semicircular space for concertgoers, and a formal garden. The lake narrowed into a little bay, at the head of which stood the Refectory. It was one of the few structures in the park, other than several bridges and rustic pavilions and arbors. Olmsted and Vaux proposed that museums and other educational buildings be erected on land belonging to the city on the other side of Flatbush Avenue.
The curved sweep of the meadows and the shape of the lake were both carefully delineated to produce an impression of great size, a technique Olmsted derived from Capability Brown’s park at Trentham. In an even more overt imitation of an English country estate, Olmsted and Vaux also included a deer paddock. Yet the mood of Prospect Park was not British; it was simple and robust in a way that can only be called American. The pavilions, shelters, and lookouts were intentionally rustic. The two iron bridges were more like works of sturdy engineering than the refined filigree of Central Park’s Bow Bridge. One of the large bridges (no longer extant) was timber; another was built out of boulders. Many of the smaller footbridges were constructed out of rough-hewn logs. Such exaggerated ruggedness, as well as the extraordinary feeling of expansiveness—the “sense of enlarged freedom”—demonstrated by the open spaces, was undoubtedly inspired by Olmsted’s encounter with the Western landscape and Yosemite Valley.
Although some of the scenic effects were influenced by the British landscape tradition, the focus of this American park was the public.
. . . in a park, the largest provision is required for the human presence. Men must come together, and must be seen coming together [emphasis added], in carriages, on horseback and on foot, and the concourse of animated life which will thus be formed, must in itself be made, if possible, an attractive and diverting spectacle.
Three different systems of circulation accommodated carriages, horseback riders, and pedestrians. Yet, unlike in Central Park, here the roads and walkways could be kept well apart. The carriage drive, for example, was largely restricted to the perimeter of the park, allowing the interior to be uninterrupted landscape. The absence of transverse roads likewise allowed Olmsted and Vaux to create large stretches of meadow and water.
Vaux had proposed that the park should have a “principal natural entrance.” On the preliminary sketches he had sent to Olmsted, he noted that the majority of people coming from Brooklyn would arrive at the northern tip of the park. At the intersection of Flatbush and Vanderbilt Avenues he had drawn an oval plaza—now Grand Army Plaza—the one formal element in the park. The plaza both signaled the presence of and provided a transition to the park. The visitor moving through Prospect Park would experience a sequence of thre
e different landscapes. First, the open, sunny, gently rolling meadows; next the dark, hilly, brooding wood; lastly the idyllic lake. Grass, woods, and water—the Brownian trilogy—were “the three grand elements of pastoral landscape for which we were seeking,” wrote Olmsted and Vaux in their report.
The division of labor between the two partners was the same as before, with Olmsted doing most of the writing and Vaux overseeing the drawing. But Vaux’s voice can be heard in the text, just as Olmsted undoubtedly influenced the design. Vaux had become an accomplished planner, judging from his masterly early reorganization of the site; Olmsted, after working independently on landscape projects in California, had more confidence in his artistic skills.
They had come a long way in the eight years since Greensward won the competition. Central Park is an impressive achievement for two neophytes, but it is the work of beginners. Its many different parts barely hold together—they are simply fitted into the awkward rectangle, side by side. There is no narrative thread. Prospect Park is different. Its elements demonstrate, with startling clarity, both variety and unity. Each has its own character yet interacts with its neighbor. Each also has a meaning. Laurie Olin describes Prospect Park as “a meditation on post–Civil War America”: a transcendental vision of a unified, peaceful country, in which the meadows represent agriculture, the wooded terrain is the American wilderness, and the lakeside terrace and its more refined architecture, civilization. Neither Olmsted nor Vaux anywhere enunciates this compelling vision, but then artists are often reticent about their work. And there is no doubt that they did view Prospect Park as a work of art. In a section of the report titled “The Artistic Element in the Design of a Park,” they unequivocally spelled out their vision:
A Clearing In The Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the 19th Cent Page 30