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

by Rybczynski, Witold

  They emerge into the bright sunlight, on a large terrace beside the lake. Directly in front of them is the new fountain. It consists of two superimposed basins, the upper basin topped by a bronze statue of an angel, wings outswept, holding a lily.

  “Why, Mary, don’t you think that Mrs. Stebbins has done a creditable job?” says Olmsted.

  He has known the sculptor Emma Stebbins, sister of his colleague Henry Stebbins, for a dozen years. He likes The Angel of Waters, which refers to the miraculous Biblical Pool of Bethesda in Jerusalem. The double metaphor of the nation healing itself after the war and parkgoers recovering from the stress of city life appeals to him.

  He puts Henry down, takes his hand, and leads him a short distance to one of the stone benches that ring the terrace. Olmsted allows himself a rare cigar and contemplates the scene. They are sitting beneath one of the two flagpoles from which long gonfalon pennants are suspended. The placid surface of the lake stretches out in both directions. The terrace serves as a landing, and a group of people are waiting to board a rented boat, a long craft with a canvas roof. Several smaller rowboats are on the water as well as a graceful black gondola. It is a real one, from Venice, a gift from John Gray, one of the commissioners. Olmsted can see the Ramble across the lake. The foliage that he and Pilat planted is fully grown and hides Vista Rock, now the base of the Belvedere Castle.

  The Ramble appears unkempt to his eye. The trees badly pruned, or not pruned at all; unthinned evergreens choking one another. His gardening force is inadequate. It’s difficult to convince the board that the park requires constant care, especially now that it has become so popular. The park keepers have recorded more than 10 million visits for each of the last three years. Ten million!

  Henry tugs at his father’s sleeve. “He wants to feed the swans,” says Mary. “Why don’t you take him. Marion and I will wait here.”

  They walk across the terrace. A keeper in a long gray uniform coat recognizes Olmsted and salutes.

  “Good afternoon, sir. Fine day. Everything in order.”

  * * *

  1. Mary Ann Olmsted contested the will and accused her son and stepson of dishonesty during the probate hearings. The will was upheld, and relations between Olmsted and his stepmother never healed.

  2. The Panic of 1873 also brought the Riverside Improvement Company to insolvency; it would be another twenty years before Riverside was complete.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  “More Interesting Than Nature”

  Olmsted’s status as the preeminent landscape architect in the country was confirmed when he was invited to lay out the grounds of the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C. The invitation came during his prolonged incapacitation. He managed to submit a preliminary report by the following January. A few months later, Congress voted to proceed, appropriated the money, and placed Olmsted in charge.

  Between the Capitol and the rising Washington Monument lay Downing’s park, unfinished and already severely compromised by the intrusion of the Smithsonian Institution and the tracks of the Washington & Alexandria Railroad. Thus the civic space that should have been the focus of the national capital lacked both coherence and dignity. As was his custom, Olmsted wanted to expand the scope of his work and proposed to develop a comprehensive plan for the entire area. Not wanting to appear forward—but not willing to leave judgments about design to politicians—he called for an oversight committee made up of prominent landscape architects, including his friend Horace Cleveland of Chicago, and William Hammond Hall, who was building Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. Congress was reluctant to undertake the expensive task of replanning the national capital and instructed Olmsted to confine himself to the fifty acres on Capitol Hill.

  L’Enfant’s original plan showed the Capitol facing west across a square toward the Potomac. The final plan for Washington, drawn by his successor, Andrew Ellicott, moved the building closer to the brow of the hill and located the square on the other side. The result was an architectural contradiction: the building faced the square, which was the formal entrance and the site of important public ceremonies such as presidential inaugurations, but it turned its back on the Washington Monument and the Executive Mansion. Olmsted proposed to restore L’Enfant’s concept, so that “what has been considered [the Capitol’s] rear will be recognized as its more dignified and stately front.” He did this by adding a monumental terrace and broad steps descending the west flank of Capitol Hill. On the east side of the building he laid out a drive lined by tulip trees, a pair of fountains, and a large open plaza in front of the building. These improvements were designed in the neoclassical spirit of Latrobe and Bulfinch’s Capitol. Only farther from the building did Olmsted resort to a more naturalistic landscaping of turf and clumps of trees, arranged to create selected vistas of the immense dome. The work proceeded slowly. Olmsted refused to be hurried and spent time—and money—on preliminaries such as soil preparation and drainage. The two-hundred-thousand-dollar budget proved insufficient, and it was a decade before Congress appropriated funds for the terrace.1 This project would involve him for years to come.

  • • • •

  New York was the foremost city on the North American continent, famous for its size—1 million people—its wealth, its grand buildings, its elevated trains, and, of course, its Central Park. So, when Montreal, the largest city in Canada, decided to build a public park, it turned to Olmsted. He was, at first, reluctant. He was occupied with Capitol Hill, the Central Park administration, and several smaller landscaping projects. “I was not eager to take it,” he later recalled.

  Montreal was small by American standards—only 120,000 people—but attractively sited on an island in the St. Lawrence River. The most striking natural feature of the city was Mount Royal, a 735-foot-high mass of traprock, about a mile long and half a mile wide, that rose in the middle of the island. Montreal and its suburbs stretched between the river and the rocky escarpment of the mountain; no buildings were on Mount Royal itself, which was divided into several large estates. The city had spent more than a million dollars to acquire these parcels, until it owned almost the entire mountain—430 acres. This was where Olmsted was to lay out a park. The site was another reason for his reluctance: “diffidence in my ability to do justice to so unusual a problem.”

  Mount Royal, Montreal (1877).

  Nevertheless, he agreed to go to Montreal. As he expected, the hilly site was hardly ideal for a park. Yet the rugged slopes were picturesque, and the views were extraordinary. From the heights of the mountain one could see the entire city with its dozens of church spires, the great river, several curiously shaped hills that punctuated the flat St. Lawrence lowland, and far away, the ranges of the Green Mountains and the Adirondacks. He was intrigued. “I would observe that the distant prospects in all directions, offer such controlling attractions that some of them, being commanded from nearly all parts of the ground, the immediate local landscape conditions are of much less consequence than they usually are in pleasure grounds, and that it is not undesirable that they should be subdued in character,” he wrote the commissioners on his return to New York. He accepted the job.

  His design was straightforward. “It would be wasteful to try to make anything else than a mountain of it,” he advised the commissioners. What impressed Olmsted was the diversity of the mountain site. He divided it according to topography, vegetation, and soil into eight distinct areas, to which he gave his customarily evocative names. The Piedmont and the Côte Placide were gently sloping ground at the eastern base of the mountain; the Underfell was a treed area located immediately below the Crags, a dramatic cliff; Cragsfoot was steep and heavily wooded; Upperfell, near the mountaintop, and Brackenfell, lower down, had rocky outcroppings and clumps of trees, the Brackenfell being distinguished by its richer soil and cover of ferns; the Glades was an attractive meadowlike area adjacent to the Upperfell.

  Mount Royal was Olmsted’s first major urban park since his break with Vaux. It represents a depa
rture from Prospect Park. Instead of using “the three grand elements of pastoral landscape” (meadows, forest, water) and manufacturing scenic effects, he based his design on the site’s intrinsic scenic characteristics. Having identified these qualities, he set out to either heighten their advantages or mask their shortcomings. He treated the undramatic Côte Placide as “a little park district” and laid out a residential neighborhood of 270 residential lots. His idea was to sell lots to help pay for the park. He planted vines and low shrubs in the Crags to make the cliff appear higher. He thinned out trees in the poor soil of the Upperfell and thickened the forest of the Brackenfell. He did little in the Glades, which already resembled a mountain meadow. Olmsted paid great attention to the carriage drives. They should be integrated into the slope to create the minimum disturbance and should be gently—but not uniformly—graded, “so that a good horse, with a fair load, can be kept moving at a trot without urging in going up hill, and without holding back in going down.”

  “Regard the work to be done in your behalf on the mountain as primarily a work of art,” Olmsted urged the commissioners. The landscaping of Mount Royal required no less artifice than Prospect Park, but it was artifice of a different order, simpler in its effects, more naturalistic in its means. Here, for example, are his detailed instructions for landscaping the freshly excavated edges of the drives:

  You can shape the banks at once in such desirable forms as frost, and rain, and root growths might chance to give them after many years. You can do more. You can, by a little forecast, make them at one point bolder and more picturesque in contour by a fitting buttress of rock than nature, working alone, would be able to do. By inserting little pockets of leaf-mould about this rock, and proper seeds or plants, you can then prevail upon nature to dress it with characteristic mountain forms of foliage and bloom, more interesting than nature would, in a century, otherwise provide. You can put in the way of immediate growth behind this rock a broad dark mass of low mountain pine, or pensive, feathery and brooding hemlock, educated to a character which nature, left alone, gives to one of its species in a thousand, to supply the degree of canopy and shadow which will be the most effective for your purpose. And, this being done, you are finally relieved of the nuisance and expense which the natural washing down of your abrupt bank would have otherwise entailed.

  The work did not go smoothly. The park commissioners were ordinary city councilors with no particular qualifications for overseeing the construction of a park. “They address the other members of the Council with no authority of their own in the matter,” he complained. They were tardy in providing him with a topographic survey, then rushed ahead to build a drive to the mountaintop, even before his own plan was complete. Eighteen months after commencing, Olmsted had to alter his design for a small lake in the Glades to accommodate a twenty-acre reservoir demanded by the City Council. He was further delayed by inaccurate information about the park’s boundaries. Nevertheless, he presented the finished plan in October 1877. He titled the drawing simply “Mount Royal,” for “the term park, as applied to the mountain, should be discarded, and its older, more dignified, and wholesomely suggestive appellation preserved and emphasized.”

  Olmsted wrote his final report in 1881. It would be another eight years before Mount Royal was finished. John Nolen, who would become one of the most accomplished town planners in the United States, wrote about the park in 1906. He called it “one of the most successful designs in the history of landscape architecture. And why? Because the conditions were understood and appreciated and made the basis of the improvements, and these improvements are but the application of a new and original manner of old art principles. The result is a public park that is convenient and beautiful, and that becomes more and more satisfying each year.” Nolen saw Mount Royal in its prime. Despite Olmsted’s exhortations, subsequent generations of city officials did not treat his work as art. The residential area on the Côte Placide was never realized. A belvedere and a chalet were built, but not where specified on the plan, and not according to Wisedell’s rustic designs. The top of the mountain, which was to have had a lookout tower, was overwhelmed by an eighty-three-foot-high illuminated cross. The reservoir that Olmsted had unwillingly integrated into the plan was never built; however, in the 1930s a kidney-shaped, masonry-edged pond was added to the Glades. Beside it stands a modernistic pavilion, the Canadian counterpart to the hideous Wollman Rink in Prospect Park.

  And yet. When I lived in Montreal, I would often walk up the long carriage road of Mount Royal—now closed to all vehicles except the occasional horse-drawn calèche—through the dark-forested Underfell and beneath the imposing Crags. I didn’t know the names and I didn’t give the scenery much thought—I was usually deep in conversation or, if alone, lost in reverie. The mountain was a popular retreat. During the summer the faculty and staff of the school of architecture where I taught gathered in the Glades for an annual picnic. In the winter the snow muffled all sound and it was easy to imagine myself in the Rockies. I would never have described Mount Royal as a “prophylactic and therapeutic agent of vital value”; it was just a place to go when I was feeling particularly happy or sad or solitary or sociable. The Mountain was a part of Montreal—and apart; natural and magical; healthful and healing.

  * * *

  1. Olmsted’s architectural assistant on the Capitol was Thomas Wisedell, a young British architect whom Vaux had recruited to work on Prospect Park.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  Olmsted in Demand

  OLMSTED AUGMENTED his annual salary of six thousand dollars from the New York Department of Public Parks by private consulting fees—five thousand dollars for Mount Royal, fifteen hundred for the U.S. Capitol, and income from smaller commissions. He landscaped the Schuylkill Arsenal in Philadelphia, and an army depot in Jeffersonville, Indiana; he prepared master plans for Trinity College in Hartford and Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore; he laid out the grounds of the McLean Asylum outside Boston. Weidenmann was a partner in some of these projects, and Olmsted occasionally called on Radford for engineering advice and on Wisedell for architectural support. He also had a new assistant, John Charles Olmsted. John joined him in June 1875 after graduating from college. He had intended to be a doctor like his father and had studied at Yale’s Sheffield Scientific School. Of his own volition he changed his mind and decided to become a landscape architect. Olmsted arranged for him to spend two summers working as a surveyor in Utah and Nevada. Owen, who was accepted at the Columbia School of Mines, also had a summer job as a surveyor—in Maine. Little Henry was only five; it was too early to know where his talents lay.

  In the summer of 1875, Olmsted convinced Richardson, who had never taken a vacation in his life, to join him on a “Cook’s Tour” of upstate New York, Quebec, and New England. The two men with their wives traveled to Buffalo, whose park system was almost complete, and saw Niagara Falls. The next stop was Montreal and Mount Royal. From there the party traveled to Quebec City and visited Montmorency Falls. They returned home through the White Mountains. Richardson later referred to the trip as his “wedding journey,” and he enjoyed himself like a “school-boy,” according to Olmsted. The two friends took turns playing tour guide to Mary and Julia, Olmsted pointing out sites of scenic beauty and Richardson describing buildings of architectural interest.

  During the trip, Olmsted and Richardson discussed their current preoccupation: the New York State Capitol in Albany. This building, designed by Thomas Fuller, the British architect of the recently completed Parliament Buildings in Ottawa, had been under construction for six years. Things had not gone well. The $4 million budget was depleted and the walls had barely reached the second floor. An alarmed state legislature had formed an investigatory commission chaired by William Dorsheimer, who had recently been elected lieutenant governor. When the Commission decided it needed outside architectural advice, Richardson’s name naturally came up. So did that of Leopold Eidlitz, a well-known New York architect. The third member of
the architectural advisory board was Olmsted. Dorsheimer valued his judgment, as did Richardson and Eidlitz. “Mr. Olmsted . . . was associated in this Board upon equal terms with the two architects,” explained Mariana Van Rensselaer, “because of his practical familiarity with their art and his long experience with large public undertakings.”

  The three men were charged with examining the design as well as the construction of the Capitol. They found that while the foundations and basement were structurally sound, the building had defects. They argued that the style of the unfinished exterior—Italian Renaissance—was ostentatious and costly; they proposed that the building be finished in the simpler Romanesque style. Since the report included architectural drawings, the proposed changes obviously undermined Fuller. This produced a public outcry as many architects attacked the board for its lack of propriety in criticizing a fellow professional. The legislature dithered, but in the end Dorsheimer prevailed. The hapless Fuller was dismissed and the contract was awarded to the architectural advisory board. The experienced Eidlitz was the senior partner and designed the Assembly chamber and the central tower; Richardson was responsible for the Senate, the Court of Appeals, and the library; they collaborated on the exterior. Olmsted dealt with the terraces and the landscaping.1

  • • • •

  On January 1, 1874, New York annexed approximately twenty square miles from southern Westchester County. The question of how this largely rural area, called the Twenty-third and Twenty-fourth Wards (approximately half of what is now the Bronx), should be developed was put into the hands of the Department of Public Parks. Olmsted was called on to prepare a master plan. He worked with John James Robertson Croes, an engineer employed by the department. Olmsted saw this first major expansion of the city as an opportunity to rethink the Commissioners’ Plan of 1811, as he and Vaux had already tried to do in their plan for Washington Heights. In his opinion, the Manhattan grid had several drawbacks. The standardized two-hundred-foot-deep blocks constrained the size of buildings. “If a proposed cathedral, military depot, great manufacturing enterprise, house of religious seclusion or seat of learning needs a space of ground more than sixty-six yards in extent from north to south, the system forbids that it is built in New York.” Since all the building lots could not be less than one hundred feet deep, smaller, cheaper lots were precluded. Nor were the deep lots particularly efficient. “There are many houses not much wider than the hovels of other cities, which yet have sixty or seventy feet of depth, and fifty to sixty feet of height.” Lastly, the rectilinear grid could not be adjusted to changes in topography.