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

by Rybczynski, Witold

  Olmsted, never bashful when it was necessary to sell a client on an idea, painted this enticing picture of the parkway:

  Having a means of communication with the city through the midst of such a ground, made gay and interesting by the movement of fine horses and carriages, and of numbers of well-dressed people, mainly cheerful with the enjoyment of recreation and the common entertainment, the distance would not be too great for the interchange of friendly visits, for the exercise of hospitality to a large circle of acquaintance, or for the enjoyment of the essential, intellectual, artistic, and social privileges which specially pertain to a metropolitan condition of society.

  He understood that a potential drawback to suburban living was isolation. Later planners conceived suburbs as a means of escaping the city. Olmsted did not see it this way. The parkway was an essential link. For him the “metropolitan condition” included cities and suburbs.

  By 1868, suburbs were a well-established part of the metropolitan life of New York and Boston. The earliest suburbs grew up around existing villages such as Clifton on Staten Island, or Brookline outside Boston. The first formally planned suburban community was Llewellyn Park, begun in 1853 on a four-hundred-acre site in West Orange, New Jersey. The architect Alexander Jackson Davis with Eugene Baumann devised a picturesque layout according to Downing’s principles. Childs, an Easterner, must have been familiar with Llewellyn Park. That was probably his chief reason for approaching Olmsted, Vaux & Co.—who better to design a beautiful “villa park” than the preeminent park builders of the day? Olmsted, who had known Davis since the time he had asked him to design a house for Sachem’s Head, admired Llewellyn Park; when he was planning the College of California, he wrote to Vaux: “I propose to lay [it] out upon the Llewellyn plan.” But now he was dead set against the idea. He pointed out to Childs that not only was the flat site unsuited to a park, but that parks and suburbs were different. “The essential qualification of a park is range, and to the emphasizing of the idea of range in a park, buildings and all artificial constructions should be subordinated,” he wrote in his report. “The essential qualification of a suburb is domesticity, and to the emphasizing of the idea of habitation, all that favors movement should be subordinated.” (The latter quality is precisely what makes Olmsted’s suburb so different from late-twentieth-century suburbs, with their obsessive focus on movement and the automobile.)

  Olmsted’s objections were also practical since the projected building lots were much smaller than in Llewellyn Park: most were half an acre instead of three. Domesticity required a plan that accentuated the particularity of each house and yet created a harmonious relationship between the different houses, which would be close together. Not that common needs were ignored. There were ball fields and croquet grounds, an island in the river was designated a picnic ground, and in addition to the 160-acre park on both sides of the river, several commons, groves, and greens were scattered throughout the suburb. Together with the streets and roads, public areas constituted almost a third of the total area of Riverside, as the project came to be named.1

  Riverside was based on a grid, but not a simple rectilinear grid. “We should recommend the general adoption, in the design of your roads, of gracefully-curved lines, generous spaces, and the absence of sharp corners,” Olmsted wrote. “The idea being to suggest and imply leisure, contemplativeness and happy tranquillity.” With the exception of Quincy and Burlington Streets, which were parallel to the railroad tracks and bordered by three hundred small lots, there were no straight streets in Riverside, only winding roads.2 Today curvilinear suburban layouts have become a cliché and are usually so poorly executed that it is easy to dismiss Olmsted’s achievement. To understand what he was getting at, one must see Riverside for oneself. The streets curve gently, just enough to break the monotony of endless open vistas. The judicious location of street trees, the careful design of sidewalks and common green areas, the variety of open and closed views, all contribute to the contemplativeness and happy tranquillity that he sought. Olmsted once described suburbs as combining the “ruralistic beauty of a loosely built New England village with a certain degree of the material and social advantages of a town.” Riverside was the first fully realized rendering of this American ideal: a compromise between private and public, between domesticity and community, between the city and the country.

  • • • •

  In the summer of 1930, some sixty years after Riverside was begun, a visitor wrote:

  If a stranger were blindfolded, whisked to the heart of Riverside, Illinois, and then permitted to look about, he would probably never suspect that he was standing in a prairie oasis and that just beyond the confines of his vision lay gangster-ridden Chicago and all the endless gridiron and monotony of the Western Chicago region. After he had seen the long curving Common with an elm-arched road on each side, and the attractive houses already of some age, facing the Common and set well back from the road in the midst of trees and shrubs, the stranger would doubtless believe that he was in a New England village.

  Riverside, Illinois (1868).

  Longwood Common and Scottswood Common do resemble New England town greens, and the associations evoked by the irregular plan and the tree-lined roads were not accidental. Like Lancelot Brown, Olmsted adapted his design to the capabilities of a site, but when these were absent or skimpy, as they were in the featureless Illinois prairie, he was not averse to creating scenic effects. He dammed the Des Plaines River to allow swimming and pleasure boating. The elm-arched roads and the attractive groups of trees and shrubs that the 1930 visitor to Riverside admired were Olmsted’s work, too. He planted no less than seven thousand evergreens, thirty-two thousand deciduous trees, and forty-seven thousand shrubs.

  * * *

  1. Olmsted did not like the name Riverside, but even with Mary’s help, failed to provide an acceptable substitute. On the other hand, he probably was responsible for several of the road names: Downing, Repton, Loudon, Kent, and Uvedale (Price), as well as Audubon (after the great ornithologist), Bartram (after the American botanist), and Shenstone (after the eighteenth-century British landscape gardener).

  2. Olmsted distinguished between “streets,” which were urban and straight, and “roads,” which were rural and winding.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  Best-Laid Plans

  ALTHOUGH THE OPPORTUNITIES to plan a comprehensive park system for a major city and to lay out a large suburban community from scratch came to Olmsted by chance, there was nothing accidental about what he produced. He was not, of course, a trained planner. For Olmsted, the lack of formal education was no more of a disadvantage in his planning than it had been in his landscaping. His ability to look far ahead served him well. “It should be well thought of that a park exercises a very different and much greater influence upon the progress of a city in its general structure than any other ordinary public work,” he advised the city fathers of Buffalo, “and that after the design for a park has been fully digested, a long series of years must elapse before the ends of the design will begin to be fully realized.” Unlike many later planners initially trained as architects, he did not approach planning as an extension of architecture. “Let your buildings be as picturesque as your artists can make them. This is the beauty of a town,” he once wrote. “Consequently, the beauty of the park should be the other. It should be the beauty of the fields, the meadow, the prairie, of the green pastures, and the still waters.” He was concerned with beauty but he did not try to impose his aesthetic vision on the city as a whole. “We cannot judiciously attempt to control the form of the houses which men shall build,” he wrote in his Riverside report. “We can only, at most, take care that if they build very ugly and inappropriate houses, they shall not be allowed to force them disagreeably upon our attention when we desire to pass along the road upon which they stand. We can require that no house shall be built within a certain number of feet of the highway, and we can insist that each householder shall maintain one or two livi
ng trees between his house and his highway-line.”

  Olmsted’s city planning was influenced by the book that he was writing. Its working title was now “The Pioneer Condition and the Drift of Civilization in America.” In March 1868 he drew up a new outline with six chapters. The first, largely complete, described the frontier society of Bear Valley. The others would deal with the effects of immigration, the results of the Sanitary Commission survey, life in large cities, and countervailing tendencies.1 As he saw it, the “drift” of American civilization was toward mediocrity, even barbarism, but not inexorably so. “Nothing is decided as yet,” he wrote. There were “civilizing currents” in American society, not the least of which was concerned individualism: a “lively sense of the personal interest and the personal property of every man in those things which benefit communities.”

  “The Pioneer Condition” was a hopelessly ambitious project for someone as busy as Olmsted. He never finished it. He last wrote on the subject in late 1868 or early 1869. In one of the remaining fragments he posed the questions:

  Rich men and poor men, Rich communities and poor communities. Penetrate the lacquer and which is which? Where is there trustworthy evidence of true prosperity? Who is it that is successful? What is healthy growth & what is diseased monstrosity?

  The last question was a reference to American cities and towns, which, like the American frontier, were changing. “The recent rapid enlargement of towns and withdrawal of people from rural conditions of living is the result mainly of circumstances of a permanent character,” he told a meeting of the American Social Science Association, of which he was a founding member. He did not deplore the change; he had seen too much of rural life to romanticize it. Moreover, he understood the attraction of city life. “Compare advantages in respect simply to schools, libraries, music, and the fine arts,” he told his fellow social scientists. “People of the greatest wealth can hardly command as much of these in the country as the poorest work-girl is offered here in Boston at the mere cost of a walk for a short distance over a good firm, clean pathway, lighted at night and made interesting to her by shop fronts and the variety of people passing.” He knew that “the poorest work-girl” was unlikely to be drawn to the fine arts, but he added that this was merely a question of education—another essence of city life.

  Olmsted gave up writing his book at the time he realized that town planning could be an effective way of promoting what he called “healthy growth.” Unlike modernist city planners of the 1920s, Olmsted was neither a radical nor a utopian; he believed that it was possible “to realize familiar and traditional ideals under novel circumstances.” This attitude appealed to civic leaders, businessmen, and politicians alike and explains why his planning proposals were easily accepted. (He was also a good salesman.) It took Dorsheimer’s citizens’ committee and the Buffalo city council less than a year to mobilize legislative support. Olmsted, Vaux & Co. were hired to oversee the work. The final plan adhered to the concepts that Olmsted had sketched out in his Buffalo talk. Vaux designed a boathouse in the Park, a pavilion in the Front, and a large grandstand for a thousand spectators in the Parade. The work would continue over the next seven years until Buffalo became, as Olmsted proudly wrote to Waring, “the best planned city, as to its streets, public places and grounds, in the United States if not in the world.” For decades, these parks and parkways guided the growth of what subsequently became known as the City of Elms. It would take the automobile, urban renewal, and a less sensitive generation of planners to undo Olmsted and Vaux’s achievement.

  • • • •

  Childs, true to his word, started construction at Riverside immediately. Olmsted, Vaux & Co. opened a field office headed by their partner, Frederick Withers. The firm received several architectural commissions. The initial plan did not show a town center—people were expected to do their shopping in downtown Chicago. Later, Withers did design a commercial block with stores and offices near the railroad depot. The town’s water tower, a striking structure that resembled a medieval German keep, was built by William LeBaron Jenney, the young military engineer whom Olmsted had met during the siege of Vicksburg. Jenney, who practiced architecture and landscape gardening in Chicago, was responsible for the hotel and several houses in Riverside—including his own.

  Construction was progressing, but Olmsted, Vaux & Co. was having difficulties with its client. Olmsted suspected that the value of the building lots they were receiving in payment was inflated; the developer’s position was that he was basing his calculations on the final land value. However, sales were slow. Childs announced the founding of Riverside Female University, “which will be completed for use at the commencement of the Fall term next year.” No university materialized. He declared that the parkway to Chicago would be finished in four months—another exaggeration. Olmsted, Vaux & Co. bore the brunt of the developer’s financial troubles. “We have had to commence legal proceedings twice to hold our own position as Superintendents in a satisfactory way,” Olmsted wrote a friend. Nevertheless, he called Riverside “the most interesting of all the undertakings we have been connected with,” and he stayed on.

  Shortly before Olmsted’s first visit to Riverside, the Illinois legislature debated a bill to create a large public park in Chicago. Although the idea of a park had been in the air since the founding of the city, it had recently come to the fore with the publication of an ambitious park scheme in the Chicago Times. Two of the most vocal supporters of the park bill were Ezra B. McCagg, a wealthy lawyer, and William Bross, the lieutenant governor of Illinois. Both men had been influenced by Olmsted. McCagg, who had been president of the local branch of the Sanitary Commission, met him during the war; the two had discussed Chicago’s need for a park. Bross met Olmsted when he visited the Yosemite Valley with the Colfax party. As he later recalled, they spent most of their time together in conversation about Central Park. “Both Colfax and Olmsted agreed with me that nothing was needed to make Chicago the principal city of the Union but a great public improvement of a similarly gigantic character.” The intention to create a rival to Central Park was a measure of Chicagoans’ lofty ambition.

  The park bill did not pass. The advocates of the park proposed new legislation, this time not for a single park but for a system of parks and parkways spread across the entire city. This tactic successfully broadened public support and the bills were enacted. Three separate park commissions were created, each responsible for a different part of the city. There was no master plan. The northern division incorporated the partially completed Lincoln Park. The western division included three parks—Humboldt, Garfield, and Douglas; Jenney was to be the landscape architect. The southern division, the site of the original proposal, was the largest of the three. Called South Park, it was the centerpiece of the Chicago park system.

  Shortly after the legislation was passed, Olmsted contacted the newly appointed South Park commissioners. A year later, Olmsted, Vaux & Co. was hired to plan South Park. The fee was set at $15 per acre, or more than $15,000, $2,500 to be paid immediately. With cash in hand and a major commission in their pockets, Olmsted and Vaux no longer had to put up with Childs’s chicanery. His latest scheme was to build his own house in the middle of Long Common. “I am shocked and pained to hear that such a suggestion could for a moment be entertained,” Olmsted wrote to Childs. “I entreat you to give it up.” Childs relented, but this was the final straw. At the end of April, Olmsted, Vaux & Co. and the Riverside Improvement Company parted ways. The planning of the suburb was complete, and the landscaping, roads, drains and sewers, and gas and water lines were well advanced. Supervision of the construction passed to Jenney.

  South Park was a challenge. Larger in area than Central Park, it was made up of three distinct parts: a 593-acre piece of land along Lake Michigan (now Jackson Park); a 372-acre rectangle of prairie about a mile inland (now Washington Park); and a 600-foot-wide strip linking the two. The land beside the lake was low-lying and marshy and too windswept for large tree
s to grow; the inland site was flat and featureless. Altogether, the “capabilities” of the site appeared distinctly inauspicious. Olmsted and Vaux described their solution in the report that they submitted with their plan:

  There is but one object of scenery near Chicago of special grandeur or sublimity, and that, the lake, can be made by artificial means no more grand or sublime. By no practical elevation of artificial hills, that is to say, would the impression of the observer in overlooking it be made greatly more profound. The lake, may, indeed, be accepted as fully compensating for the absence of sublime or picturesque elevations of land.

  The unifying motif of South Park was water. Olmsted and Vaux proposed dredging the swampy land next to Lake Michigan to create an intricate system of lagoons and waterways for boating and swimming. The shore would be dotted with shelters and landings. They named this area the Lagoon Plaisance. Olmsted and Vaux foresaw that this part of the park, with its dramatic waterfront and unique lagoons, would become a major attraction. They planned a thousand-foot pier for ferryboats to bring pleasure seekers from the center of the city, six miles away.

  Olmsted and Vaux called the long strip of parkland the Midway Plaisance and planned a mile-long canal along its length. Pleasure rowers in the summer—and skaters in the winter—could thus start in the Lagoon Plaisance and travel all the way to the inland portion of the park. The canal ended in a series of small ponds called the Mere. The Mere was the focus of the so-called Upper Plaisance, which included a deer paddock, a children’s play area, playing fields, picnic areas, a music stand, and a refectory pavilion. Making the best of the flat, open site, they turned the rest of the inland park into an immense meadow—the Southopen Green—also useful for parades and athletic events. One of the commissioners, examining the drawing of the meadow, said, “I don’t see, Mr. Olmsted, that the plans indicate any flower beds in the park. Now where would you recommend that these be placed?” Olmsted’s promptly replied, “Anywhere outside the park.”