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

by Rybczynski, Witold

  Olmsted thought that he was carrying an unfair share of the firm’s work, but did not know what to do about it. He almost quit. “I feel myself so nearly desperate that I have to school myself against the danger of some foolish undertaking—such as putting all I can get together in a farm, cutting the world and devoting myself to asceticism. But against extreme lunacy in this way my wife makes a pretty strong bar.” Mary, who had had her fill of farming, would have nothing to do with the idea; he had to find some other solution. Olmsted discussed his predicament with his friend Samuel Bowles in Springfield, Massachusetts, where Olmsted was advising two of Bowles’s friends on landscaping (obviously part of Olmsted’s problem was that he couldn’t say no). Bowles, who shared Olmsted’s tendency to overwork, suggested that he move to the country, not to be a farmer but to work as an independent landscape consultant “not tied to any architectural firm.” The idea of striking out on his own intimidated Olmsted. “You write in view of one horn of my dilemma,” he wrote Bowles on his return to New York. “I want more assistance and, even if there were no ties of sentiment & obligation I have not courage enough left to dispense with V’s cooperation.”

  Mary and the children usually spent the summers away from Staten Island. That September Olmsted joined them in Lake George. The month’s vacation did not lift his spirits. He was still undecided about his future. “I am looking in earnest for some less irritating & exasperating method of getting a living than that I have lately followed,” he wrote to Kingsbury on October 8, 1871, the very day the great Chicago fire broke out. Olmsted, who was in Chicago a month later, wrote a long article for The Nation. He mentioned that one of the less obvious but equally catastrophic effects of the fire was the destruction of “important papers, contracts, agreements, and accounts, notes of surveys, and records of deeds and mortgages.” Among these were all the plans and records for South Park, including the nearly completed assessment rolls. It would take months of painstaking work to recover this information. In any case, it seemed unlikely that construction of the park would begin soon; rebuilding downtown Chicago meant that the pleasure ground would be put on hold. Tropical lagoons and thousand-foot piers would have to wait.

  • • • •

  In addition to their professional practice, Olmsted and Vaux continued their on-again, off-again relationship with Central Park. They were appointed “Landscape Architects,” a title that proved largely honorific as their advice was rarely sought. In May 1870 William “Boss” Tweed pushed through a new city charter that supplanted the park board by a Department of Public Parks; Olmsted and Vaux were named “advisors” and “Chief Landscape Architects.” This turned out to be merely window dressing, too. Over their protests the Tweed administration spent large amounts of money “improving” Central Park—planting flowers, clearing undergrowth, building a zoo. After six months Olmsted and Vaux’s positions were abolished.

  The Tweed regime did not last long. A year later, thanks in large part to the perseverance of Andrew Green, who was now city comptroller, Tweed was indicted and the so-called Tweed Ring collapsed. Henry Stebbins, who had headed the Board of Commissioners during Central Park’s early years, was brought back. Olmsted was delighted: “The appointment of Stebbins as Prest, of Green as Treasurer (which he declines) and of O. & V. as Landscape Archts. Advisory, is the public vindication of the Old Board.” Olmsted and Vaux also secured the appointment of Frederic Edwin Church as a park commissioner; his presence would ensure that in the board’s deliberations “the art element should be recognized.”

  Olmsted and Vaux were paid a joint salary of six thousand dollars per year (later increased to ten thousand dollars). Their official title was now “Landscape Architects and General Superintendents,” but their roles soon diverged. Vaux busied himself with architectural matters such as designing the Boathouse. Olmsted, directing the Bureau of Design and Superintendence, turned his attention to repairing the damage and disrepair caused by the neglect and poor management of the previous administration. “The Park has suffered great injury,” he wrote, “which it is even now impossible wholly to retrieve through the neglect of timely thinning of the plantations and the maltreatment of the last year and a half.” He loved Central Park. He threw himself wholeheartedly into the job. He fired off letters to Stebbins, memoranda to park supervisors, and lengthy directives to the keepers and gardening staff.

  In May 1872 Stebbins went to Europe on business and Olmsted was elected acting president and treasurer of the Department of Public Parks. He took full advantage of his authority. He initiated an inquiry into the advisability of lighting the park at night and opening it to the public. He issued a handbill publicizing park activities for children. (“At the Dairy and the Great Hill there is turf on which young children are allowed to play, and shaded seats; fresh, pure and wholesome milk is furnished at 5 cts. a glass, and bowls of bread and milk for children at 10 cts.”) He recommended a reorganization of the park police. (The first murder in Central Park occurred in October 1872.)

  During that summer Olmsted received an unexpected offer. The Liberal Republicans had nominated Horace Greeley as their presidential candidate in the 1872 election. A dissenting faction, of which James Miller McKim was a member, proposed an alternative slate and nominated Olmsted as its vice-presidential candidate. This was all done without Olmsted’s knowledge and he refused the nomination, even publishing an announcement to that effect in the New York Evening Post. Privately, he wrote McKim, “It appeared to me in the highest degree absurd.” Nevertheless, he admitted, “I am surprised & gratified that it is so well received.”

  On October 24 Stebbins returned from Europe. To be acting president, Olmsted had resigned his position as landscape architect and general superintendent, leaving Vaux alone in that role. Now Olmsted and Vaux requested Stebbins to change the earlier working arrangement. Henceforth Olmsted would be “Landscape Architect” and Vaux “Consulting Landscape Architect” to better reflect their respective responsibilities. They informed Stebbins that separate appointments would be necessary as they were no longer business partners. A week earlier, they had signed the following agreement:

  It is hereby mutually agreed between Fredk. Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux that the partnership heretofore existing under the name of Olmsted and Vaux Landscape Architects (which has for some months been inoperative in reference to Central Park) shall now close so far as new work is concerned, and that all outstanding engagements on joint account shall be as soon as practicable be adjusted to this date.

  Olmsted had overcome whatever qualms he had had about striking out on his own. I can’t help but see Mary’s hand in this. She could be fully as impulsive as Frederick, and she would have pressed for a decision. She had never warmed to Vaux. She would have encouraged her husband to make a break. Vaux, too, was at a turning point. He had severed his partnership with Withers a few months earlier and now had a new partner: Jacob Wrey Mould. Two important commissions for the New York Park Department had since come their way: the new Museum of Natural History, on Manhattan Square adjacent to Central Park, and across from it the new Art Museum on the east side of the park. When completed, the Museum of Natural History would be the largest building in the United States; the Art Museum (now the Metropolitan Museum of Art) was to be the foremost cultural institution of the city. Building these two civic monuments would make Vaux the leading architect in New York.

  It was an amicable break. They agreed to work together again should the opportunity arise; for many years Olmsted kept a photograph of Vaux in his office. But both men wanted to go it alone. The partnership that had begun fourteen years earlier with Greensward was over.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  Alone

  AS THE WORK on Prospect Park wound down and his responsibilities for Central Park increased, Olmsted found living on Staten Island inconvenient; he had already spent the previous winter in Manhattan with friends. Now he also needed an office of his own. He bought a five-story brownstone on the north side of
West Forty-sixth Street, and his family moved there in November 1872. His office was a large room on the first floor overlooking the rear garden. The rest of the house was the family quarters. A suite of rooms was set aside for Olmsted’s father and stepmother.

  Mary and Frederick were still unpacking when a letter came from his half brother Albert. Albert casually mentioned that their father had slipped on an icy walk and broken his hip. Alarmed, Olmsted caught the first train to Hartford. He arrived that evening to find his eighty-one-year-old father in pain from the injury but otherwise in good spirits. In the morning, seeing that the situation was not serious, Olmsted returned to New York. The next day he received a telegram from Albert confirming that their father was doing well. A few hours later a second telegram indicated that he had taken a turn for the worse. Again, Olmsted hurried to Hartford. His father greeted him with a smile: “Why! Who’s this? Fred? So you’ve come back!” But he appeared “dreadfully older than the day before”; according to the doctor, there was no hope. John Olmsted died at one o’clock the next morning, calmly and without struggle, surrounded by his wife, his daughter Mary, and his two sons.

  Shortly before his death, John Olmsted had appointed Frederick and Albert trustees and executors of his estate. He willed his house and “a fair provision for its maintenance” to his wife; he divided the balance of his property, which consisted of mortgages, railroad bonds, and manufacturing stocks, equally among the four children. (Olmsted estimated each would get an annual income of fifteen hundred dollars).1 Among his father’s private papers Olmsted discovered a file of old newspaper clippings going back twenty years, including Yeoman’s letters, book reviews, and articles about Olmsted’s landscaping work. He was touched by this evidence of paternal pride. “He was a very good man and a kinder father never lived,” he wrote Kingsbury.

  His father’s death signaled the beginning of a difficult year. Olmsted’s next trial was at Central Park. Seeking to cut costs, the board called for a reduction in the number of park police, or keepers. To stretch his resources Olmsted devised what he called a “round system.” He required keepers to make a tour of the entire park three times a day, and to check in at predetermined locations following a schedule. This meticulous routine was unpopular and produced complaints. The keepers’ cause was taken up by the press, and the ensuing public furor obliged Olmsted to write a long, defensive report explaining his actions to the public—and to the board. The board, unconvinced, voted to create a separate division of Police (as well as of Landscape Gardening), severely limiting his authority. Olmsted, who still considered himself superintendent, protested; Stebbins, siding with him, resigned his presidency. The board backed down and withdrew its proposals. Yet it did not stop questioning Olmsted’s authority on a variety of matters. At the end of the summer, frustrated, he impetuously asked Salem Wales, the new president, to relieve him of his responsibilities as landscape architect. The board tabled his letter and immediately sent a telegram asking him to stay on. Mollified, he agreed.

  The very next day, Jay Cooke & Co., a leading New York bank, failed. During the following week several other large banks would go out of business, and the Stock Exchange closed until the end of the month. The so-called Panic of 1873 produced more than five thousand bankruptcies across the country. Olmsted’s position with Central Park was secure, but the panic did affect his practice. Work on South Park in Chicago had been limping along under the independent supervision of Horace Cleveland, who had worked for Olmsted and Vaux on Prospect Park—now it virtually ceased. The Tarrytown Heights Land Company, for whom Olmsted and Vaux had planned a nine-hundred-acre residential subdivision to rival Riverside, declared bankruptcy. The roads and villages that Olmsted had so carefully fitted to the beautiful hilly terrain would never be built; moreover, the company shares that he had taken in lieu of fees were worthless.2

  The overwork, the quarrels on the park, and the belated emotional stress of his father’s death finally had their effect. The following month Olmsted succumbed to a serious depression; this time he could not read at all. He spent all of four months recovering. It could not have been an easy convalescence—incapacitated in a darkened room and unable to work. All he could think of was his father’s death, his breakup with Vaux, his problems on the park, his failed commissions, his future.

  When Olmsted was low, he often reached out. When he was finally able, he wrote to friends: Knapp, Brace, and Katharine Wormeley (with whom he had continued to correspond since their days on the hospital ships). His letter to Brace, written a few days before Christmas, is particularly gloomy, reflecting his sorry mood. Olmsted’s hero, John Stuart Mill, had died earlier that year; “May my last end be like his,” he wrote. He admired Mill’s agnosticism; evidently Olmsted’s illness had not made a believer of him. In his present state his writing became more tortured than usual. “Suppose a man who sees things so far differently from the mass of ordinary healthy men is thereby classed as of defective vision, as of diseased men,” he wrote Brace. “Then I have not a doubt that I was born with a defect of the eye, with a defect of the brain.”

  He missed his friend Richardson. Richardson had won a prestigious competition to design Trinity Church in Boston, and since most of his work was now in New England, he moved to Brookline, a Boston suburb. He and Olmsted now saw each other only occasionally.

  Later that summer of 1874, Olmsted asked Richardson to design a memorial arch for Buffalo’s Niagara Square. By then he had recovered his eyesight and returned to work. He continued to work at Central Park. Tying up loose ends, he and Vaux submitted an annual report to the Brooklyn Park Commission. It turned out to be their last—following the financial panic, the city could no longer afford their services. New commissions came to Olmsted: the grounds of a hotel in Saratoga Springs, the Hartford Institute for the Insane, a cemetery in Syracuse, and the commons in Amherst. He was assisted by Jacob Weidenmann, a Swiss-born architect and landscape gardener who had previously worked for him on Prospect Park. In May 1874 the two men formally agreed to work together on selected projects. “Mr. Olmsted and Mr. Weidenmann can at all times be commanded for any business of their common profession,” the public announcement read. Olmsted was back.

  The Mall, Central Park

  Saturday, May 23, 1874

  The double rows of American elms, planted fourteen years earlier, create a green tunnel. Sunlight filters through the canopy of new leaves and throws dappled patterns of light and shade on the gravel walk. It is a beautiful day, the Mall is crowded: ladies in voluminous skirts and colorful hats; Irish nurses in bonnets and white aprons, pushing baby carriages; gentlemen in frock coats and top hats; a few young clerks in stylish broadcloth suits; the children in a variety of dress, miniature versions of their parents. It is a decorous crowd; tomorrow—Sunday—is when working people have a holiday and attendance will be even larger.

  At the north end of the Mall, on the west side, is the bandstand. Mould has pulled out all the stops for this design. The raised platform is covered by a Moorish-style cupola, dark blue and covered with gilt stars. It is topped by a sculpture of a lyre. The roof is supported by crimson cast-iron columns. The bandstand is unoccupied—the Saturday-afternoon concerts start next month. The annual summer series is so popular—up to forty-five thousand people attend—that the park board has provided extra seating and has taken the unprecedented step of allowing listeners to sit on the grass. Not everyone admires these free concerts. “The barriers and hedges of society for the time being are let down,” sniffs the Times, “unfortunately also a few of its decencies are forgotten.”

  The barriers of society are not altogether absent. Across the Mall from the bandstand is a broad concourse where the wealthy park their carriages and, separated from the lower orders by a long wisteria arbor, listen to the music in comfortable isolation. Beside the concourse stands a large one-story building with a swooping tiled roof and deep, overhanging eaves. Originally the Ladies Refreshment Pavilion, it has recently been converted into
a restaurant called the Casino.

  Mary and Marion Olmsted come out of the Casino, followed by Frederick carrying little Henry. Charlotte is not with them, she is visiting friends. John is at Yale and Owen is in school with Knapp.

  “That was a wonderful lunch, my dear,” says Mary Olmsted. “Shall we walk down to the lake?”

  The footpath, skirting the concourse and the entrance to the arbor, leads down to a small plaza. They pass the unusual fountain with its rotating arms that spray water into the air and join the throng of people on the Mall. There is little to distinguish the Olmsteds from the other strollers. Mary, fashionably dressed, lace at her throat, her brunette hair covered by a comely bonnet, is carrying a parasol. Twelve-year-old Marion is in a short crinoline skirt, white socks, and buckled shoes. She would like to skip ahead, but she walks obediently beside her mother. Olmsted is wearing a light-colored jacket, a dark vest and matching trousers, and a broad-brimmed hat. His drawn face and the pallor of his skin attest to the previous year’s illness. His limp is more apparent as he carries his three-year-old boy.

  The main carriage drive of the park runs beside the plaza. As usual, a crowd has gathered here to stare at the prancing horses and the smart carriages, hoping to catch a glimpse of someone rich or famous. The Olmsteds do not pause but descend a broad staircase that leads to an arcade beneath the drive. The vaulted tunnel is covered by glazed Minton tiles that Mould has imported from Staffordshire. The extravagant colors of the tiles and the shapes of the arches are intended to evoke Granada, according to the effervescent Englishman. Olmsted finds it overdone—and why Granada?—but the public seems to like the exotic effect.