A Clearing In The Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the 19th Cent

by Rybczynski, Witold

  The inspiration for the Brooklyn parkways is the Avenue de l’Impératrice (now the Avenue Foch) in Paris. The avenue opened in 1855; Olmsted saw it three years later in the company of its designer, Jean-Charles-Adolphe Alphand. The 330-foot-wide avenue, which led from the Place de l’Étoile to the Bois de Boulogne, incorporated a central carriageway flanked by a pedestrian mall on one side and a bridle path on the other. Side roads gave access to the villas that lined the avenue.

  The Brooklyn parkways resembled the Avenue de l’Impératrice in cross section but not in length. The Parisian avenue was relatively short—only four-fifths of a mile. The Brooklyn parkways—like the San Francisco promenade—ran for several miles. One extended from Prospect Park to Coney Island, a distance of about six miles. Another, of similar length, connected the park to Fort Hamilton overlooking the Narrows. Here the report proposed a “marine promenade.” A third parkway was to reach the Ridgewood Reservoir, in the hills east of the city. The most ambitious parkway extended to Ravenswood, opposite present-day Roosevelt Island. The island would provide an easy crossing of the East River by means of a ferry or a bridge.

  . . . connection may thus be had with one of the broad streets leading directly into the Central park, and thus with the system of somewhat similar sylvan roads leading northward, now being planned by the Commissioners of the central park. Such an arrangement would enable a carriage to be driven on the half of a summer’s day, through the most interesting parts of both of the cities of Brooklyn and New York, through their most attractive and characteristic suburbs, and through both their great parks; having a long stretch of the noble Hudson with the Palisades in the middle distance, and the Shawangunk range of mountains in the background, in view at one end, and the broad Atlantic with its foaming breakers rolling on the beach, at the other.

  Two of the parkways were built: Ocean Parkway, connecting Prospect Park to Coney Island, and Eastern Parkway, stretching from Prospect Park as far as Crown Heights. The Ravenswood parkway was not realized. Although the grand vision of a pleasure drive stretching from the Palisades to the Atlantic Ocean remained stillborn, the parkway idea caught the imagination of the citizens of Brooklyn. Over the next fifty years, the city built more than thirty-eight miles of parkways.

  The Narrows, New York

  Thursday, June 20, 1867

  It is late afternoon on a warm summer’s day. A steady stream of vessels fills the strait between Long Island and Staten Island, where the Hudson River spills into the Atlantic Ocean. Stolid square-riggers and graceful fore-and-aft schooners plow the choppy waters. Fast brigs and California clippers heel over in the brisk wind. A dark cloud of smoke from a transatlantic side-wheeler rises among the billowing sails. There are dozens of small vessels: coastal lighters, fishing boats, and steam-driven tugs towing heavily laden barges. All are headed in or out of Upper New York Bay, one of the great natural harbors in the world.

  Well away from this traffic, a small rowboat makes its way along the Staten Island shore. Olmsted, in shirtsleeves, is sitting in the stern munching an apple. His lean face is deeply tanned from days spent outside, supervising work on the park. A sailor’s cap covers his balding head; it makes him look younger than his forty-five years. John, a sturdy boy with the delicate features of his father, is rowing. His brother Owen, a chubby nine-year-old, is curled up in the bow, sound asleep.

  Towels and wet swimming costumes are draped over the bench. Olmsted has made it a summer habit to return home early, several afternoons a week, to take the two boys swimming. They have spent the last hour happily splashing about, and now they are returning home to Clifton. He treasures these little outings. While they were in California, he got used to spending time with the children. The previous year, his landscaping practice kept him away from home more than he liked, and he is being careful not to fall into his old work habits. He enjoys being on the water. It reminds him of boyhood summer holidays and boating on the Connecticut River with his brother. John was about fourteen then, too, he thinks, looking fondly at his stepson pulling intently on the oars.

  The Narrows are less than a mile wide, and Fort Hamilton is clearly visible across the water. Beyond the commanding bulk of the fortification he can make out the rising ground that is Mount Prospect. The park commands most of his attention these days. The workforce has grown to more than a thousand men. They are making swift progress: the first of the three meadows is almost complete, and by the fall it will be open to the public. He is worried about damage to the new planting, but he cannot refuse the insistent Stranahan—it is thanks largely to him that the work on the park is going so smoothly.

  “A little harder on the starboard oar, John,” he directs. “Try to keep Bedloe Island over my right shoulder.” The boat swings slightly as the boy dutifully alters direction. Olmsted notices the smoke from a paddleboat—the ferry from Brooklyn. He was on board a few hours ago after spending most of the day at the park. He finishes his apple and throws the core far into the water. A noisy group of seagulls swoops down, attracted by the splash. Owen wakes up, stretches, and sits up, looking across the bow of the rowboat.

  “Look!” he cries excitedly, and waves.

  Olmsted can see Mary and the two girls—Charlotte and little Marion—about a hundred feet away. He regards the small figure of his wife with affection. He is glad to see that she has come down to meet them—the sun and air do her good. Her health is finally improving. Last November she gave birth to a child. After a difficult delivery, the baby, a boy, lived only a few hours, not even long enough to be given a name. Mary’s recovery was slow—she is thirty-seven, after all, already old for childbearing, and this was her sixth child. She is so brave, he thinks. He was too worried about Mary to grieve for his nameless son, yet he feels the loss. Although he loves John and Owen, he had hoped for a boy of his own.

  He takes off his sailor’s cap and halloos to the figures on the shore.

  * * *

  1. Starting on May 1, 1866, Godkin and Olmsted experimented with two installments of sixteen pages that appeared on Tuesdays and Fridays. After two months they reverted to a single weekly edition.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  A Stopover in Buffalo

  OLMSTED, VAUX & CO. prospered. The partners planned a zoological garden near Central Park and a college campus in Maine. The Brooklyn park commissioners asked them to look at Washington Park, which was dilapidated and needed a thorough overhaul. Olmsted’s friend Potter owned land in New Jersey and wanted landscaping advice; so did Francis George Shaw, George Curtis’s father-in-law, who had an estate on Staten Island. Andrew Dickson White, the first president of the university founded by Ezra Cornell in Ithaca, consulted them about a new campus. The trustees, who had approved a plan whose chief feature was a formal quadrangle, resisted Olmsted’s proposal for a more irregular layout. He enlisted the help of his friend Charles Eliot Norton to influence the university president.

  Norton, too, had become a client. He wanted to subdivide his family estate in Cambridge and engaged Olmsted to draw up the plans. During one of Norton’s visits to New York, they resumed their discussion of Olmsted’s book on American civilization. With Norton’s help, he continued to accumulate research material. He was making slow progress—he did not have enough time. The daunting task of collating the statistics from the Sanitary Commission—more than eight thousand completed forms had to be classified and analyzed—remained. He wrote to Frederick Knapp asking him to undertake the task. Olmsted planned to work on the manuscript during his summer vacation.

  But the summer of 1868 proved to be one of Olmsted’s busiest. In August he received a letter from William Dorsheimer, who had written two years earlier for advice about a public park for the city of Buffalo. Now, as head of a private committee of leading citizens, he was extending a formal invitation. Buffalo was one of the ten largest cities in the United States. It had prospered because of the Erie Canal and was now a grain-handling port as well as an important meatpacking and iron-manufacturing
center. Olmsted, who was leaving that weekend for Chicago, immediately altered his travel plans to include a stopover in Buffalo.

  Buffalo, New York (1876).

  He was accompanied on this trip by one of his employees, a young engineer named John Bogart. On Sunday, August 16, they arrived in Buffalo, where they met Dorsheimer, who forthwith took them on a quick tour of several potential sites. He was the U.S. district attorney for northern New York State and, like Olmsted, a member of the Century Association. During the war he had served as a colonel and been active in the Sanitary Commission. Olmsted was impressed by his no-nonsense approach. “The business opened at once & promisingly,” he wrote Mary in one of his regular letters. He agreed to make a presentation to Dorsheimer’s committee on his way back from Chicago.

  Olmsted and Bogart returned to Buffalo exactly one week later. Olmsted discovered that he was to address a public meeting of two hundred civic leaders the following Tuesday. The meeting would be chaired by former president Millard Fillmore, who lived in Buffalo. Fillmore was not just a figurehead. As president, he had actively supported A. J. Downing’s plan for a public grounds in Washington, D.C. This august Buffalo assembly was expecting “to hear an address on the matter of a public park from the distinguished Architect of the N.Y.C.P. Fred Law Olmsted Esqr,” Olmsted wrote to Mary. He and Bogart got down to work. On Monday morning, they drove out to the sites. They made a quick survey and dug test pits to ascertain the nature of the ground; by nightfall they were half-done. They completed the work the next day. That evening Olmsted spoke at the meeting. He had contracted a cold on the train and had a sore throat, but managed to talk for an hour, he wrote to Mary, “with tolerable smoothness and I should think with gratifying results. At any rate the men who started it were very much pleased & encouraged.”

  Dorsheimer’s committee had reason to be pleased. Olmsted did not merely give a general talk about cities and public parks, he sketched out a specific park plan for Buffalo. He had been shown three alternative sites. The largest, in an undeveloped area four miles north of the city, was 350 acres. The second site, about two miles from the center of town, was much smaller, 35 acres. It occupied a dramatic bluff overlooking the mouth of the Niagara River. The third site was located on high ground and afforded a panorama of the city and Lake Erie.

  Olmsted proposed that the city acquire not one but all three sites. The large tract would be made into what he called the Park. He pointed out that the undulating ground and profusion of trees would require little beautification; Scajaquada Creek, which flowed through the valley, could easily be dammed to create a lake. The riverside park he called the Front. It would have a promenade and a waterfront terrace that could be used for civic ceremonies. The third park would be the Parade; it would serve for more active recreation. The three sites approximated the shape of a huge baseball diamond, with downtown Buffalo at home plate, the Parade at first base, the Park at second, and the Front at third. The distance between the “bases” was two to three miles. Olmsted proposed parkways and tree-lined avenues to link the parks with each other—and with the downtown. In two hectic days, he had conceived this extraordinary tour de force—the outlines not of a park, but of an ambitious park system. If carried out, this master plan would govern the growth of Buffalo for years to come.

  “I did a deal of talking privately & publickly [sic]—was cross examined &c & got thro very well,” Olmsted wrote Vaux, who was then in England. Olmsted enclosed a newspaper clipping that described the evening’s proceedings. “At least the project was advanced materially, I was told, & they will go to the Legislature in January for a Commission.” Dorsheimer’s committee, at its own expense, engaged Olmsted to prepare a preliminary report, which he submitted on October 1. Since Vaux did not return to America until November 16, this early work can definitely be attributed to Olmsted. He emphasized the need for a far-reaching solution. “We should recommend that in your scheme a large park should not be the sole object in view, but should be regarded simply as the more important member of a general, largely provident, forehanded, comprehensive arrangement for securing refreshment, recreation and health to the people.” The Park was a version of Prospect Park, with a large meadow and a lake. The idea of parkways was based on the plans that Olmsted and Vaux were carrying out in Brooklyn. Yet the scale and extent of the project were unprecedented in their work. Olmsted’s interest in city planning had its genesis in his proposal for San Francisco; in Buffalo, he was given the opportunity to put it all together.

  Buffalo had been planned in 1804 by Joseph Ellicott, the brother of Andrew Ellicott, collaborator and successor of L’Enfant in Washington. The focus of the plan was a large square—later named Niagara Square—from which eight avenues radiated like the spokes of a wheel. Olmsted admired Ellicott’s design. His proposal refined rather than altered the street pattern. He planned to widen several of the major streets to one hundred feet to create treed avenues. Among these was Delaware Avenue, which became the main approach from Niagara Square to the Park. From the Park, a mile-long, two-hundred-foot-wide parkway would lead to a large rond-point on the scale of the Place de l’Étoile in Paris. From this circle, two additional parkways would radiate to two more formal squares.

  The Parisian influences in Olmsted’s proposal are obvious. They are at odds with his later reputation as a proponent of winding streets and picturesque planning. He was nothing if not pragmatic. Indeed that was the strength of this plan. It is not a geometric diagram nor a theoretical construction imposed on the city. Unlike his San Francisco plan, it does not depend on a single idea. Nor, despite his respect for Ellicott, did Olmsted produce a version of European neo-baroque planning such as would later be revived by the City Beautiful movement. He was no historicist. Instead, his highly original plan was a complex and refined network of parks, parkways, avenues, and public spaces that represented a degree of sophistication in city planning previously unknown in the United States. He distributed parks throughout the city to make recreation space more accessible. Elsewhere, broad avenues and parkways brought trees and greenery into the congested grid of streets. In Buffalo, Olmsted showed how the burgeoning American industrial city could be made livable.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  Thirty-Nine Thousand Trees

  DURING THAT BUSY SUMMER of 1868, Olmsted and Bogart had gone from Buffalo to Chicago to meet Emery E. Childs, the president of the Riverside Improvement Company. The company intended to subdivide sixteen hundred acres into residential plots. They had only five days to meet Childs, tour the site, discuss possible plans, and negotiate the terms of a contract. Childs told Olmsted that he wanted to start building that fall. Olmsted agreed to write without delay a preliminary report that would be used to attract investors. He was confident, for in his usual quick manner he had already seized on the major limitations and opportunities of the site. He described these to Mary in a letter that he wrote while returning home on the train:

  The motive is like this: Chic. is on a dead flat. The nearest point having the slightest natural attractions is one about 9 miles straight back—West. It is a river (Aux Plaines) or creek 200 ft wide, flowing slowly on limestone bottom, banks generally sandy & somewhat elevated above the prairie level & about 10 ft above low water with sandy slopes & under water a little limestone debris. As a river not very attractive, but clean water 2 or 3 ft deep, banks & slopes rather ruggard [sic] & forlorn in minor detail but bearing tolerable trees—some very nice elms but generally oaks mostly dwarf. The sandy, tree-bearing land extends back irregularly, so that there is a good deal of rough grove land—very beautiful in contrast with the prairie and attractive. 1600 acres of land including a fair amount of this grove but yet mainly rich flat prairie have been secured, & the proprietors are now secretly securing land in a strip all the way to Chicago—for a continuous street approach—park-way. I propose to make the groves & river bank mainly public ground, by carrying a road with walks along it & to plan village streets with “parks” & little openings to incl
ude the few scattered motes [hillocks] on the open ground. An excellent R.R. passes through it & a street R.R. parallel with the park way is projected.

  Olmsted was aware of the risk involved in working with a land developer—he described the project in a letter to Vaux as “a big speculation.” It was expected that the sale of the 2,450 building lots would generate profits of up to $7 million—an immense sum. The agreement that Olmsted drew up in Vaux’s absence specified that they were to be paid $15,000 in installments before the end of the year. The payment was to be in the form of building lots “to be selected by Olmsted, Vaux & Co.,” or in cash if lots were not available. The fee for the execution and supervision of the project amounted to the princely sum of $112,500, likewise paid in lots.

  Only five days after returning to New York, Olmsted finished his report for Childs. In addition to elaborating the points he had already made to Mary, he discussed the connection between suburb and city. He conceded the importance of the twenty-minute railroad link (the first out-of-town station of the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad was located in the center of the property). Yet he argued that the railroad “at best affords a very inadequate and unsatisfactory means of communication between a rural habitation and a town either for a family or for a man of business.” What was needed was a pleasure drive to the city—in effect, a suburban parkway. He found the present form of the proposed road inadequate. He recommended acquiring a strip of land two hundred to six hundred feet wide and predicted that this promenade would become a major Chicago attraction. He estimated that construction of the parkway would cost $4 per foot of lot frontage. He pointed out that thanks to the enhanced value of the lots, which would sell for between $30 and $60 per foot of frontage, the parkway would more than pay for itself.