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

by Rybczynski, Witold

  The idea of an aquatic park had no antecedents either in Olmsted and Vaux’s work or in anyone else’s. Like the Ravine in Prospect Park—although on a vastly enlarged scale—it represented the deliberate introduction of a “theme” into a public park, in this case Lagoons of the Tropics. Vaux had never seen the tropics, but Olmsted had. Eight years earlier, on his way to California, he had crossed the Isthmus of Panama and had been overwhelmed by the landscape. “After my excitement was somewhat tempered,” he wrote at the time to Ignaz Pilat, the head gardener at Central Park, “I naturally fell to questioning how it was produced, and whether, with materials that we can command in the temperate regions, we could to any marked degree reproduce it.” What interested Olmsted was not the different vegetation, nor even the general appearance of tropical scenery, but the emotion it aroused in him. “If my retrospective analysis of this emotion is correct, it rests upon a sense of the superabundant creative power, infinite resource, and liberality of Nature—the childish playfulness and profuse careless utterance of Nature.” It was this playfulness that he wanted to achieve at South Park, although he was realistic about the means:

  You certainly cannot set the madrepore or the mangrove at work on the banks of Lake Michigan, you cannot naturalize bamboo or papyrus, aspiring palm or waving parasites, but you can set firm barriers to the violence of wind and waves, and make shores as intricate, as arborescent and as densely overhung with foliage as any. You can have placid and limpid water within these shores that will mirror and double all above it as truly as any, and thus, if you cannot reproduce the tropical forest in all its mysterious depths of shade and visionary reflections of light, you can secure a combination of the fresh and healthy nature of the North with the restful, dreamy nature of the South.

  Playfulness was fitting for the Lagoon Plaisance. In contrast to Central Park and Prospect Park, which were largely intended for passive leisure, much of South Park was destined for active recreation. The difference had less to do with a change in Olmsted and Vaux’s idea of what a city park should be than with the difference in the natural settings of Chicago and New York. The surroundings of New York—and Brooklyn—offered many sites where people could picnic, swim, and play games. This was not the case in Chicago. The Chicago River was an industrial thoroughfare; the windblown shore of Lake Michigan—an inland sea—was inhospitable in its natural state; and the flat prairie offered few attractive settings. The pleasure grounds in South Park would rectify this situation.

  * * *

  1. Olmsted corresponded with Knapp about tabulating the results of the Sanitary Commission survey, but no work appears to have been done.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  Henry Hobson Richardson

  SHORTLY AFTER OLMSTED RETURNED to New York from California, he met a young man who would become not only one of his closest friends but also his most esteemed colleague: Henry Hobson Richardson. Richardson, the son of a successful New Orleans businessman, was born and raised in Louisiana, graduated from Harvard, and was sent to Paris in 1859 to study architecture at the École des Beaux-Arts, only the second American to do so (he was preceded by Richard Morris Hunt). When the outbreak of the Civil War abruptly cut off his financial support, he came back to Boston, where his fiancée lived. Richardson, who was sixteen when he left New Orleans, was not an avowed secessionist. He may have stayed in Boston, but he felt uncomfortable taking an oath of allegiance to the Union when his younger brother had just quit Harvard to enlist in the Confederate army. He returned to Paris and continued his studies at the École des Beaux-Arts, supporting himself by working in an architect’s office.

  Six months after the end of the war, he returned to the United States. The ambitious young man who had spent six years learning both the theory and the practice of architecture was eager to start his career and settled in the commercial capital of the country, New York (he never again returned to New Orleans). He spent an uneventful year doing small jobs for decorators and builders. Then, thanks to a college friend, he entered a competition to design a church in Springfield, Massachusetts. “That is all I wanted,” he said gleefully on learning that he had won, “a chance.” He could now marry his faithful fiancée—Julia Gorham Hayden, the daughter of a Boston physician. They settled in a rented cottage on Staten Island. Soon after the birth of their first child (there would be six in all), with the financial help of his father-in-law, Richardson started building a large, wood-shingled house for his new family—in Clifton, where Olmsted lived.

  Olmsted recollected the first time that Richardson came to his home. A pile of rough tracings was on Olmsted’s desk, which prompted Richardson to observe:

  The most beguiling and dangerous of all an architect’s appliances was the T-square, and the most valuable were tracing-paper and india-rubber. Nothing like tracing over tracing, a hundred times. There was no virtue in an architect more to be cultivated and cherished than a willing spirit to waste drawings. Never, never, till the thing was in stone beyond recovery, should the slightest indisposition be indulged to review, reconsider, and revise every particle of his work, to throw away his most enjoyed drawing the moment he felt it in him to better its design.

  This was Olmsted’s own view.

  In early 1868 Olmsted offered Richardson an architectural commission. The previous year, Alexander Dallas Bache, Olmsted’s old friend from the Sanitary Commission, had died. Bache’s colleagues wanted to erect a cemetery monument and asked Olmsted to recommend an architect. It might appear odd that Olmsted picked a neophyte rather than his seasoned partner Vaux, but the commission was small—the construction budget was two thousand dollars—and Olmsted may have wanted to give an aspiring practitioner a helping hand.

  Not that Richardson needed the work. By now he was designing three churches, an addition to the Century Association, and two large residences. One of these was for William Dorsheimer. Since Olmsted had just met Dorsheimer at the time, he probably recommended Richardson. This was not a small commission—when it was completed, Dorsheimer’s house was one of the finest on Buffalo’s stylish Delaware Avenue. Olmsted’s recommendation was a sign of his growing confidence in the young architect.

  It was easy to like Richardson. An admiring female acquaintance described him: “He was of good height, broad-shouldered, tall-chested, dark complexion, brown eyes, dark hair, parted in the centre, and had the look of a man in perfect health and with much physical vigor. He wore his clothes, which fitted him well, with an indescribable air of ease.” Richardson shared Olmsted’s admiration for Paris, his love of domesticity and family life, and his devotion to work.1 Still, they were an odd pair: the forty-six-year-old New Englander who had written so scathingly about the South, and the thirty-year-old Southerner whose family had been slave owners.

  • • • •

  On July 20, 1870, Olmsted published a letter in the New York World about the future of Staten Island. He summarized his recommendations to the Staten Island Improvement Commission, which the state had created in reaction to the malaria epidemics that regularly broke out on the island. The Commission, impressed by Olmsted’s call for a comprehensive study, hired him. Olmsted assumed that the future of the island, which was still largely farmland, would be as a residential suburb of New York. Yet he found that “the district is much less healthy, and the pleasure with which a family, having any feeling for natural beauty, can reside in it is not nearly as great as it was twenty years ago.” Here was a “suburban district of great beauty, declining in value of real estate apparently because of being brought nearer to town, and this, at a period when in other directions suburban real estate has been advancing five and ten fold in value!” Part of the problem was undoubtedly the prevalence of malaria, which his report proposed to eradicate by constructing drainage systems, flood courses, and flood regulators.2 Olmsted understood that to attract city dwellers Staten Island had to offer more than a healthy environment. The report proposed a far-reaching plan to improve the island’s roads; two large water preser
ves and conservation areas combined with public recreation lands to guarantee the quality of the natural environment; and improvements to the ferry service to encourage commuting. People who moved to the suburbs wanted space. “If the interior land should be cut up into smaller plots than an acre,” Olmsted warned, “most people will prefer to pass a little more time on the public conveyances, and go farther.” The report referred to Riverside and recommended quarter-acre house lots near the ferry landings, and lots of up to five acres in the interior of the island.

  Staten Island covered sixty square miles—this was in effect America’s first regional plan. Olmsted approached this new task with characteristic thoroughness. He consulted no fewer than seventeen local physicians. He compiled appendices on sanitary geology, the results of soils and water-quality tests, a report by an engineer on improving ventilation in the ferryboats, and an extract of a French evaluation of a British steam-powered road locomotive. He sought the advice of experts in many disciplines: public health, geology, chemistry, engineering, and veterinary science. He drew on his wide range of professional contacts: his old adversary at the Sanitary Commission John Newberry, now teaching geology at Columbia College; William LeBaron Jenney’s engineer partner, L. Y. Schermerhorn; and a British engineer, George Radford, who was overseeing the construction of the Buffalo parks for Olmsted, Vaux & Co. But the idea of regional planning was simply too novel—his recommendations were never acted upon.

  Olmsted had made two demands of the Commission: first, the work should be adequately compensated (the Commission agreed to pay $1,200 for the study); second, he would not do the work alone. He proposed a team consisting of “three gentlemen, residents of the island, who now occur to me qualified by their professional education, training and experience to advise the Commission.” The crucial public health issues were handled by Dr. Elisha Harris, who had been a cofounder of the Sanitary Commission and in New York had recently organized the first free public vaccination program for smallpox. Drainage and road construction were the responsibility of a civil engineer named Joseph Trowbridge. The third expert was H. H. Richardson. What he contributed to the study is not exactly clear—there is a brief mention of house design. In his letter to the Commission, Olmsted described Richardson as “a gentleman trained in the most thorough French technical school familiar with European roads and Sanitary Engineering and of highly cultivated tastes with a strongly practical direction.” Although Richardson was both cultivated and practical, this made the young architect sound like a graduate of the great French civil engineering school, the École des Ponts et Chaussées.

  The following year Olmsted and Richardson collaborated again. Richardson was appointed architect for the State Asylum for the Insane in Buffalo. The site being adjacent to the largest of Olmsted and Vaux’s parks, they were asked to advise on the location of the buildings and the layout of the grounds. Olmsted surveyed the site with Richardson and prepared a landscaping plan. The vast asylum occupied Richardson for the next five years.

  Richardson’s congenial personality, his social credentials and Parisian background, and his rigorous Beaux-Arts training attracted clients. He also began to show real originality. In 1870 he won a competition for the Brattle Square Church in Boston. This design is generally considered a breakthrough in his architectural development, the first building in which he adopted the Romanesque style that he would make his trademark. Richardson’s talented assistant on the church was Charles Follen McKim (whose father, James Miller McKim, had financed The Nation). Richardson, like Olmsted, attracted able collaborators. The frieze of the beautiful tower was sculpted by Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi (who would later design the Statue of Liberty); the interior was to be decorated by the New York muralist and stained-glass maker John La Farge. Thanks to La Farge and Olmsted, Richardson took on a red-haired young man who would soon become his chief assistant—Stanford White.

  Olmsted had been introduced to architecture by Vaux, who was solidly grounded in the picturesque High Victorian tradition of Ruskin. Vaux’s work, while often of high quality, was derivative. Richardson was a different sort of architect—not only better trained, but interested in finding a different, simpler mode of architectural expression. In that regard, he and Olmsted were kindred spirits. But Richardson’s creative talent was largely intuitive—he was not an intellectual. He also lacked Olmsted’s broad experience of American culture and society. That was the real reason that Olmsted had invited his young friend to be a part of the Staten Island study—to further the latter’s education.

  * * *

  1. Richardson also had a physical impairment: he stuttered.

  2. Malaria was thought to be caused by “bad air,” related to dampness and poor drainage. Standing water does, in fact, serve as a breeding ground for malarial mosquitoes, but this relationship was not discovered until 1897.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  Olmsted’s Dilemma

  BETWEEN AUGUST 1868, when Olmsted started to work in Buffalo, and March 1871, when the plans for South Park were completed, Olmsted and Vaux’s practice grew. They prepared a second study for the Fairmount Park Commission in Philadelphia, started to build city parks in New Britain, Connecticut, and Fall River, Massachusetts, and planned park systems for Albany and Hartford. The work in Brooklyn continued—and expanded: they were commissioned to build a large parade ground next to Prospect Park, to landscape Tompkins Square, and to lay out a brand-new park on the grounds of Fort Greene; Ocean Parkway was completed and work started on Eastern Parkway; the planting and architectural embellishment of Prospect Park required both partners’ full attention. There were more residential subdivisions—one in Needham, Massachusetts, and another on a beautiful nine-hundred-acre suburban site in Tarrytown Heights, New York—and campus work at Vassar and Amherst. Many of these projects produced only reports; others resulted in complete plans; some—New Britain, Riverside, and Buffalo—were under construction. Olmsted also had several personal clients such as the Staten Island Improvement Commission, Cornell University, and Quartermaster General Meigs, whom he advised on landscaping national cemeteries for the war dead.

  It should have been a triumphant period for Olmsted. The landscape practice that he and Vaux had begun only five years before was a success. There had been setbacks such as Riverside, but Prospect Park—their masterpiece—was nearing completion, the Buffalo park system was progressing smoothly, and Chicago’s South Park promised to seal their reputations as the preeminent landscape architects in the country. Still Olmsted was dissatisfied. He relished taking on new and challenging commissions, but the pressure of having to produce plans and reports for so many impatient clients began to make themselves felt. He started to feel inadequate, which was usually a sign that he was overdoing it. “I am poorly qualified for a great deal of the work which I feel myself impelled to regard as coming to me as a duty,” he wrote his friend Kingsbury. He felt harried. “The very hardest of [my work] I cannot possibly perform, to satisfy my sense of duty under ordinary everyday conditions—in my office subject to interruptions & with all the distractions of constant complicated demands of a host of people.” He found himself taking work home. “I wish I could meet what I think to be my duties to the public & to my family with less work,” he complained.

  He resented being drawn away from his family, all the more so as he was now the father of a new baby—a son—born the year before and christened Henry Perkins after Mary’s father. Olmsted cherished his domesticity. Here is his description of a typical Sunday at Clifton:

  I am longer at breakfast & get a better one than usual. I read two Sunday newspapers, I smoke after breakfast as I usually do not. Being on the coast & near shipping, I reciprocate their courtesy & pay the day the compliment of hoisting my ensign or seeing the children do it. I play with the children more. Generally late in the day I go out with some of them—in summer we go rowing—sometimes drive back on the island—go to the Brewery & I treat them to sangaree [sangria] or a little beer; in winter I
have been to the skating ponds with them. My wife generally goes with us. She has often been—at least more than once or twice—to the Brewery. Sometimes we go picnicing either by boat to the Long Island shore or to the high woods by wheels.

  But he added, “I wish these excursions were more frequent, but I rarely get through or get too tired to go on further with my work till near sunset, & it is too late for anything but a row.”

  Olmsted and Vaux shared the work. They developed the designs together, then Olmsted wrote the reports and Vaux and his draftsmen produced the plans. Vaux also supervised the design of any park structures such as bridges and pavilions. Yet the collaboration was unequal, for Olmsted devoted considerably more time to the partnership than Vaux, who also carried on an architectural practice. Between 1868 and 1871, Vaux and Withers designed and built three large hospital complexes and about a dozen private residences, including one for E. L. Godkin. Vaux’s most celebrated client was the noted landscape painter Frederic Edwin Church, who commissioned a remarkable Islamic-Moorish villa overlooking the Hudson River.

  The responsibility for overseeing the landscaping and planning projects increasingly fell to Olmsted. His subordinates were engineers who supervised topographic surveys, drainage, and road construction, and landscape gardeners who attended to planting. But he oversaw the work and visited the sites—in Chicago, Buffalo, and scattered all over New England. Since he dealt with the clients, they wanted to see only him. Olmsted signed the preliminary Buffalo report with the name of the firm, but when it was published by the Commission, it was given the title “Mr. Olmsted’s Report.” He was the one to whom people talked, whose recommendations they wanted to hear. He was also the one who drummed up business.