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

by Rybczynski, Witold

  Even on a flat alluvial site, like that of Chicago, it is essentially wasteful and extravagant. In proportion as a site is rugged and rocky it is only more decidedly so; not simply because in this case it involves greater unnecessary cost, but because variety of surface offers variety of opportunity, and such an undertaking often deliberately throws away forever what might otherwise be distinctive properties of great value.

  The new master plan divided the annexed area into four parts. The village of Morrisania, which had already started to adopt the Manhattan grid, was the commercial center of the new district. Farther north, in an area called West Farms, Olmsted and Croes laid out moderately dense residential neighborhoods. The area west of the Riverdale Road, a rugged promontory overlooking the Hudson, was to be an exclusive residential suburb. “What is meant by treating the district as a suburb,” Olmsted explained, “is, that the development of a distinctly suburban and picturesque character should everywhere be kept frankly in view as a source of wealth, and that the roads should be adapted to a population living less densely, and with which pleasure driving and walking are to be, relatively to heavy teaming, more important than in the streets of the compact city.” The agricultural northern part of the Twenty-fourth Ward was to be a relatively low-density suburb similar to Tarrytown Heights.

  Croes designed a railway system linking the new wards to the city, and circling the entire area. This was an important ingredient of their plan. The rail lines were carefully planned to take advantage of the topography and to avoid grade crossings; tracks were either depressed below street level or carried above on bridges. Planning rail lines and streets simultaneously was unusual in the nineteenth century; tracks were typically laid long after the streets were built, requiring expensive expropriation and causing disruption of the city fabric and traffic. “A judicious laying out of the annexed territory requires a certain effort of forecast as to what the city is to be in the future,” Olmsted wrote in the preliminary report. “In this respect, there is a great danger in attempting too much as in attempting too little.” What is striking about the Bronx plan is how circumspect it is. There are no grand parkways or ronds-points. At first glance, it appears almost conventional.

  Olmsted had learned to be cautious. In 1873, shortly after his breakup with Vaux, the Northern Pacific Railway had asked him to plan the new city of Tacoma, its western terminus in the Washington Territory. With the assistance of Radford, he produced a plan artfully adapted to the hilly site. The avenues curved sinuously across the slopes; the perpendicular narrower streets ran uphill. All the lots were served by lanes. The main street terminated in a park overlooking Puget Sound. It was an elegant solution. Yet the client was aghast. A contemporary observer summed up the reaction: “The most fantastic plat of a town that was ever seen. There wasn’t a straight line, a right angle or a corner lot. The blocks were shaped like melons, pears, and sweet potatoes. One block, shaped like a banana. . . . It was a pretty fair park plan but condemned itself for a town.” Actually, almost all the individual building plots were conventionally rectangular, and the curved and doglegged streets would have reduced construction costs. Yet the railroad directors would have none of it. They found themselves a surveyor who laid out a simple grid.

  In the Bronx plan, Olmsted avoided anything that would scare his client. Yet his simplicity was deceptive. The subtle adjustments to the current policy of continuing the Manhattan grid produced a very different urbanism. The new parts of Morrisania had long blocks oriented north-south instead of east-west, so that all houses got some sun. West Farms consisted of a patchwork of grids whose slightly shifting orientation created variety, the same kind of variety that makes such cities as New Orleans and San Francisco interesting. The picturesque suburban layouts were derived from earlier projects, but what makes the Bronx plan unusual is that Olmsted showed how areas of low, medium, and high density could be combined into a seamless whole that would be “the plan of a Metropolis; adapted to serve, and serve well, every legitimate interest of the wide world; not of ordinary commerce only, but of humanity, religion, art, science, and scholarship.”

  Twenty-third and Twenty-fourth Wards, New York (1877).

  The adjustment of streets to terrain and the integration of rail lines and streets would save money in the long run, but would require large, immediate investments. This proved a stumbling block. Andrew Green, the city comptroller, had inherited a depleted treasury from the Tweed era. He would not approve spending money on surveying and buying rights-of-way in the new wards when downtown Manhattan, where the majority of New Yorkers lived, urgently needed public investments. Even Henry Stebbins, who generally supported Olmsted, balked. More than a year’s work had come to naught.

  It is hard to fault Green’s logic. He simply did not have the money. But even had the money been available, the farsighted plan may still not have been approved. Most New Yorkers accepted the standardized grid of their city. It may not have been beautiful but it was expedient. There was no need, Stebbins pointed out, for anything more “fanciful.”

  * * *

  1. That year, Richardson christened his sixth child Frederick Leopold William as a tribute to his partners and his supportive patron.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  “I Shall Be Free From It on the 1st of January”

  IN 1874 WILLIAM H. WICKHAM, a Democrat with Tammany connections, became mayor of New York. The New-York Times observed: “The Park is still a prize which Tammany—‘reconstructed’ Tammany—yearns to get into its possession. It will always be the coveted booty of the Democrat organization, and we are sometimes inclined to think that the success of the designs upon it is only a question of time.” Wickham’s first move was to get rid of Andrew Green, the upright and incorruptible comptroller, known—not altogether affectionately—as Handy Andy. When Green’s term was up, Wickham appointed John Kelly, another Tammany man. The following year the composition of the four-man Central Park board also changed drastically: three of the four Democrats were now Tammany supporters. Olmsted soon felt the effect, as he later recounted in a memoir:

  There were symptoms such as this: that, while observing great ceremony of politeness with me, there were three of [the commissioners] whom I was never able to get to meet me on the Park (nor on any park). . . . Twice an appointment was actually made; and each time the commissioner failed to keep it, afterwards courteously apologizing. . . . I myself received from without the board several warnings, both direct and indirect. . . . Threats were made in such a manner as to leave me in no doubt that it was intended to guard against a public accountability for them. . . . I knew that my movements were being furtively dogged, and I presumed that they were so with a view to obtaining pretexts upon which to urge my removal.

  This unpleasantness caused Olmsted to consider a leave of absence. He thought of going to Europe. He wasn’t really running away; he was returning to his professional roots, as he had done before. He had another reason. In early September 1877 he had sent John, now twenty-five, to spend several months in England and France. The trip was to be part of his apprenticeship. To that end Olmsted had given him six pages of instructions, “to be read over and committed substantively to memory while at sea, re-read in London and again in Paris.” John was to examine parks and public grounds, zoological gardens, park structures, and architecture in general. Olmsted expected “full notes and . . . careful & specific reports” about the parks. “This is not discretionary,” he added firmly. He was explicit about what he wanted John to look at: how older parks such as Birkenhead and Hyde Park had aged; what replanting was being carried out; what measures were taken to facilitate nighttime use; did older park structures look picturesque, or merely “forlorn and shabby?” John was to keep his eye out for “any substitute for the common French edging of iron,” and for a fifteen-foot-diameter fountain for one of the Buffalo parks. Olmsted listed useful contacts: in Liverpool, Alfred Field (his neighbor in Staten Island who had moved back to England); in London, Sir William
Hooker, the superintendent of Kew Gardens, and William Robinson, an author and landscape gardener; in Paris, Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi, and the American sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, who was honeymooning in France. John was also to call on Olmsted’s friend Edouard André, a talented young landscape architect who had been the assistant of the great Alphand, builder of the Bois de Boulogne. When André had been in New York, Olmsted had shown him around Central Park and Prospect Park. Now he would return the favor.

  Olmsted soon realized that he may have overdone the planning. “I know that it is feasible to do it all but I think perhaps you will be obliged to work too hard,” he wrote shortly after John’s departure. He advised him to watch his health and ease up if he felt fatigued. When he arrived, John dutifully reported his activities, writing long letters every two or three days. Olmsted reciprocated. “[Your letters] are in all respects admirable and give us great pleasure,” he wrote. He informed John of his increasingly precarious situation on Central Park and his plan to take a leave. He also encouraged John to study hard since he would probably be obliged to earn a living on his return.

  Except for a hurried visit to Paris and the English countryside, John spent most of the first two months in London, much of it in the South Kensington Museum, reading books on architecture. He stopped touring parks and reporting on landscape matters. He wrote dreamily of his plans to study architecture. On December 1 Olmsted wrote a seventeen-page letter scolding John for “drifting with the currents of personal ease and habit.” He admonished him to devote more time to direct observation. “There are hundreds of structures which you have seen in a month which incontestably contain more worthy results of human study and labor and are higher monuments of art, each of them, than is to be found in all the churches on this continent or than all the architects and schools of architecture can in all your lifetime place before you.” Olmsted insisted that landscape architecture offered the greatest chance for John’s future. His reasoning was pragmatic: “The chances of the good will of my business, when I am dead or superannuated, to any one capable of making it amicable, are equivalent in value to a moderate fortune . . . worth more than all else I can leave my family.”

  Olmsted was unsparing in his assessment of John’s talent. “You are not a man of genius in art. A man of less artistic impulse I never knew,” he wrote. “You have no care to produce anything—to carry to perfect realization any conception. Consequently as you have insisted on making yourself an artist, you must spend great labor, years of study with little satisfaction of any worthy ambition. Of all this I thoroughly warned you.” This was needlessly harsh. Olmsted’s problems with the board had made him irritable; now John bore the brunt of this discontent. Still, Olmsted’s anxiety was real enough, even if his prescription was bad-tempered. He was afraid that his shy, introverted stepson would drift from one occupation to another, much as he himself had done. Moreover, he was counting on John’s help in his landscaping business. He was writing as a concerned father, but also as a demanding teacher. Olmsted took the long view, and he did not allow himself—or John—to have any illusions. “Don’t be so cowardly as not to face your necessities with good will, or so silly as to make believe that you are what you would simply like to be,” he counseled. Despite the criticisms, Olmsted continued to supply John with an abundance of money, and he made it clear that the final decision would be John’s own.

  Two weeks later Olmsted returned from a business trip to find several long letters from John, more than eighty pages of detailed reporting on his activities in London. They showed that Olmsted’s outburst had been hasty. “It is evident that there was little occasion for the long letter which I wrote on the text of certain expressions of despondency and evidencies of fatigue & temporary embarrassment,” he wrote sheepishly. It is a measure of John’s docile nature—and of his closeness to his stepfather—that they patched it up. “I agree to what you say as to my capacity and artistic impulses,” John wrote, but added “that I shall never produce artistic work . . . I am not so sure of and that remains to be proved.”1 The rest of their voluminous correspondence—more than fifty letters exchanged during four months—continued a candid discussion of the best way for John to acquire “art wisdom.”

  At one point John even suggested that he might return to New York and become Olmsted’s surrogate at the Park Department, “with the understanding that I was to be directed by you unofficially.” The suggestion was only half-serious; “I am, on the whole, inclined to think that you will not be compelled to leave,” he wrote. Olmsted was not so sure. He continued to make plans for his European trip, strengthened now in the conviction that his presence would help John acquire the firsthand knowledge that was so essential to his further education.

  • • • •

  In December Olmsted received an anonymous letter containing a newspaper clipping with a marked passage stating that “disgraceful charges” were pending against him. These became public soon enough. Comptroller Kelly announced that he was suspending Olmsted’s salary, for the reasons that “Mr. F. L. Olmsted, Landscape Architect . . . renders little or no service in that capacity; that his duties outside the City of New York render his absence necessary and frequent, that he had been absent from his duties for twenty-six days during the month of October, and that the parks are in that state of completion that the services of an architect can be dispensed with.” The threat contained in the last statement was unmistakable.

  Olmsted felt this public humiliation keenly. “It will not be thought surprising that I should have had sleepless nights, or that at last I could not keep myself from over-wearing irritation and worry,” Olmsted later recalled of this stormy time. “The resulting depression, acting with an extraordinary prostration from the great heat of the summer, and the recurrence of an old malarial trouble, brought me, late in the season, to a condition comparable to that often produced by a sun-stroke, perhaps of the same nature.” His doctor advised a vacation. On December 15 Olmsted wrote John about his impending dismissal and reiterated his plan to come to Europe. He thought he needed a rest first: “I shall go at once to some quiet place, perhaps on the Devonshire coast, with pleasant short walks and interesting scenery & take lodgings for a month.” The next day he changed his mind and wrote that he thought it likely that “after 10 days at sea with tolerable weather I shall have gained enough to be able at once to begin active diversion.” By Christmas he was sure his days with the Parks Department were numbered. “I shall be free from it on the 1st of January,” he wrote. He looked forward to making an extended European tour with John. He originally thought of visiting only England, France, and Germany, but the ambitious itinerary he sketched out to John also included Belgium, Holland, Switzerland, Austria, and Italy. “Think it well out and be prepared to see what is most valuable to be seen by us in the route,” he instructed John, and added the practical advice: “You will want a small steel tape (10, 20 or 30 ft.) & a pocket rule in feet and inches, a good traveling lantern & candles & compact sketching materials. Your luggage must be light and handy. Examine guide books with care & buy discreetly if there is occasion.”

  The day after Christmas, Olmsted officially requested an unpaid three-month leave of absence. He did not expect a favorable response, but the leave was immediately granted. He was to sail for England on January 9, 1878. On January 5 the board passed the following resolution:

  It is therefore Resolved, That the Bureau of Design and Superintendence [Olmsted’s department] . . . is hereby discontinued, and the offices connected therewith are abolished; and it is further

  Resolved, That the Hon. F. Law Olmsted . . . is hereby appointed “Consulting Landscape Architect” to the Commission, his services to be paid for out of the appropriate fund from time to time, as they are availed of.

  It was cleverly done. Olmsted was not exactly fired, nor could the board be accused of acting behind his back. The commissioners offered to meet him on the following Wednesday, the very day he was scheduled to sail. They co
rrectly guessed that he would not postpone his trip. Before embarking, Olmsted wrote them a letter asking that the decision concerning his position on the park be deferred until his return, and that his longtime assistant in the Bureau, Howard Martin, be put in charge during his absence. He must have known that the requests would be denied. Norton wished him Godspeed: “I am glad you are going abroad, for I believe, as well as hope, that a vacation in Europe will do you good.”

  • • • •

  Olmsted landed in Liverpool, revisited Birkenhead Park, and met John in London. From there they set out on their journey, more or less adhering to Olmsted’s original itinerary. They went to Antwerp, Brussels, The Hague and Amsterdam, spending one or two days in each city, only long enough to visit the public park, zoo, or botanical gardens that Olmsted had deemed worthy of study. From Frankfurt, John wrote his mother, “He seems to have enjoyed what he has seen very much and so far as his conversation shows has not been worrying about things in New York.” They continued to Munich, Venice, Florence, Pisa, and Como, and skipping Switzerland, arrived in Paris in mid-March.