Who was this practical blockhead? Olmsted did not name names. Nor did he refer to his feuding with Green or the behind-the-scenes maneuvering of board members and supposed friends. As he explained to Brace, “Consideration of the responsibility of several men of good standing for some of the more atrocious bargains obliged me to steer as delicately as possible.” But without scandalous details The Spoils of the Park did not cause a stir. Olmsted received congratulatory letters from many of his professional friends—Waring, Eidlitz, Potter, Weidenmann, Cleveland; Norton offered to buy a hundred copies to send to his friends. But the pamphlet did not make much of an impression on the public.
In October 1881 Frederick and Mary received a disturbing telegram from Owen that his health was “very low.” Owen was then living in Montana. Clarence King, whom Olmsted had hired as a young man to carry out the first survey of Yosemite, had helped Owen to start a cattle company (with financial assistance from Olmsted). Owen was attracted to the venture not least because, like his father, he was physically frail. He hoped the outdoor life of a rancher would improve his health. It had the opposite effect. John hurried West to fetch his ailing brother, but Owen died in Albany, New York, before reaching home. On top of this calamity, Olmsted fell from his horse and suffered a broken breastbone, which laid him up for several weeks.
It was not an auspicious start to their new life in Brookline. Yet the town agreed with them. Brookline had seven thousand inhabitants. It had maintained its rural character and resisted annexation by Boston, attracting many wealthy and successful families as well as people of more modest means. It was a quintessential nineteenth-century suburb, a true “borderland,” lying between town and country. The rolling, wooded hills recalled the leafy Hartford of Olmsted’s childhood. “I enjoy this suburban country beyond expression,” he wrote Brace, “and in fact, the older I grow, find my capacity for enjoyment increasing. We have had great trials & agitations in the last year but the result on the whole has been with all tranquilizing. I am to turn sixty with two grandsons.2
He looked like a grandfather now, for he had grown a full beard that, like his hair, was turning white. When his father had turned sixty, he sold his business and retired. Olmsted was reasonably well-off—he could afford to live in Brookline—but he was not in a position to stop working. In any case, it was not his character. Feeling renewed in health, his spirits lifted, he threw himself back into his profession.
He was hired to plan a new campus for Lawrenceville School, near Princeton, New Jersey. Here was an opportunity to implement an idea that he had first proposed to the trustees of the College of California, almost twenty years earlier. At that time he had envisaged student residences “having the general appearance of large domestic houses, and containing a respectably furnished drawing-room and dining-room for the common use of the students, together with a sufficient number of private rooms to accompany from twenty to forty lodgers.” The headmaster of Lawrenceville School, James Cameron Mackenzie, thought along the same lines. The Lawrenceville “student houses” proved so successful that the arrangement has survived to the present. The brick buildings were designed by the accomplished Boston architects Peabody and Stearns, who also built masters’ residences, a chapel, and a large stone classroom building in a Richardsonian-inspired Romanesque style. The sturdy brick architecture is handsome, but what impressed me as I walked about the school grounds was the sweet simplicity of the Circle, which forms the green commons of this little school village.
Richardson asked Olmsted to collaborate with him on more projects: the Oakes Ames Memorial Town Hall in North Easton, Massachusetts, with its remarkable Civil War cairn, which Olmsted planted with honeysuckles, wild roses, andromedas, and daphnes; the Quincy library; and no fewer than fourteen stations for the Boston & Albany Railroad. Olmsted did more than landscaping. In the case of the town hall he advised Richardson to build on a rocky outcropping in the center of town. According to Mariana Van Rensselaer, who knew both men, “Mr. Richardson . . . was constantly turning to Mr. Olmsted for advice, even in those cases where it seemed as though it could have little practical bearing upon his design. And where it could have more conspicuous bearing he worked with him as a brother-artist of equal rank and of equal rights with himself.” Olmsted’s taste for rusticity influenced the architect, who incorporated rough glacial boulders into some of his buildings. This made it hard to know exactly where the building stopped and the landscape began, an effect that Olmsted often sought. Richardson’s habit, acquired when he was a student at the Beaux-Arts, was to cogitate a design problem before setting pencil to paper; Olmsted was his sounding board.
Lawrenceville School, New Jersey (1886).
Olmsted’s biggest project during this period was another public park. The city of Detroit wanted to create a park for summer excursions on an island in the Detroit River, Belle Isle. It was an unusual problem—to combine a Lido with a natural recreation area—and Olmsted produced an unusual solution. He placed the ferry dock at one end of the island. Here he concentrated the public establishments: a refectory, boathouses, a lookout tower resembling a lighthouse, playing fields, a racing oval, and exhibition grounds. He called this area the City Fair. The rest of the two-mile-long island was left in as natural a state as possible. A gently sloping beach controlled erosion of the shore. The woods of elm, oak, and hickory were thinned out to create meadows, the largest of which was eighty acres and could function as a parade ground. This minimalism was not simply a question of economy. The simplicity that had emerged in Mount Royal had become an aesthetic goal. To drain the marshy land of the low-lying island, he proposed a system of underground pipes leading into canals, which were emptied out by steam-operated pumps. The canals also served for pleasure boating. The most dramatic structure was a sixteen-hundred-foot-long roofed gallery that curved sinuously between the two boat piers. The two-story gallery was one of the first large buildings that he designed himself, and its flowing, organic shape is more adventurous than anything that even Richardson was doing at the time. Olmsted had definite ideas about architecture in his parks and was confident in his own ability. “In what may be termed the project of a design, I am stronger than most architects,” he once boasted, “and I can work effectively & harmoniously to a result having unity of design with an architect, and can persuade & control and induce an architect to work harmoniously with me.”
• • • •
Olmsted was paid seven thousand dollars for Belle Isle, which included a supervision fee for three years. He and Mary must have felt financially secure since they decided to give up their rented house for more permanent quarters. Richardson suggested a building site next to his own house and offered to design a “beautiful thing in shingles.” Instead, in the summer of 1883, they bought a seventy-year-old farmhouse nearby. Olmsted established his office in the front parlor, which he extended ten feet to accommodate a large drawing table; the second floor of the extension was a sleeping porch off his bedroom. From his window he could see the continuous green canopy formed by the trees on both sides of the road. On the southwest corner of the building he added a sunroom. The clapboard house was painted dark red with green trim. Olmsted—or more likely Mary, who often suggested the names for his projects—called the house Fairstead, the beautiful place.
Fairstead, a five-minute walk from the Richardsons’, was in a neighborhood of rolling hills and twisting country roads. Like many nineteenth-century suburbs, Brookline had started as a summer resort, and it still contained large estates such as Sargent’s Holm Lea. Olmsted’s property was small, less than two acres. He set about to turn the grounds into a garden. Or, rather, a miniature park, for his approach to gardening was really a smaller version of his larger landscapes—a blend of opportunism and artifice. At the entrance he laid out a carriage turn and planted a Canadian hemlock in the circle. Immediately on the right of the circle was a natural depression dominated by a large outcropping. He built a craggy flight of steps leading down into the hollow and ad
ded a fieldstone arch to make a grotto. Rhododendrons, cotoneasters, dogwoods, and a profusion of vines completed the effect of a secret dell.
Belle Isle, Detroit (1883).
On the south side was the site of an old gravel pit. Here he laid out a path banked with pudding stone, planted mountain laurel, birch, ash, and cherry, and created a small version of the Ramble in Central Park. The rest was a lawn. In the middle he planted a single American elm. Olmsted disapproved of bedded flowers; instead he ringed the lawn with a rich composition of greens: trees, shrubs, ferns, and ground covers. Dark yews formed a background for lighter ostrich ferns. The hillside at the back of the garden was planted with larger trees: hemlocks, oaks, and Norway maples. He generally followed the instructions that he had once given a gardener: “to mix shrubs with the trees; to use shrubs to break the edges of the plantation; and to see that there were no sharp lines between groups of this and groups of that.” A spruce-pole fence, covered in fast-growing climbers, ivy, and creepers, ringed the two sides of the property that were close to the road, and a rustic gateway marked the entrance.
There was nothing manicured about Olmsted’s treatment of this suburban garden, far from it. “Less wildness and disorder I object to” was his philosophy. The most extreme example of this taste for wildness was the way he treated the house itself. He installed a grid of wire on the south and east walls and planted Chinese wisteria and bower actinidia. Soon the facade was entirely shrouded by a thick blanket of creepers and vines interrupted only by protruding window shutters and the striped canvas awning of the sunroom. Classical gardeners such as André Le Nôtre had extended architecture far into the landscape by means of terraces, reflecting pools, topiary, and geometric beds. Olmsted did the opposite—he made architecture disappear.
• • • •
The improvements to Fairstead were carried out while Olmsted was traveling. John did much of the implementation. With his scientific college background, his European travel, and his exposure to a variety of projects, he was becoming skilled. In 1878 Olmsted had considered his apprenticeship complete and gave him an interest in the business. Nevertheless, John remained shy and withdrawn. When the family moved to Fairstead, he was thirty-one. Still unmarried, he lived with his parents.
The other Olmsted children at Fairstead were Marion and her thirteen-year-old brother. At the age of seven Henry had been renamed Frederick. Or, rather, Frederick Law. Olmsted had once reminded John that his most valuable legacy was likely to be the “good will of my business.” How better to ensure the continuity of this goodwill than by having a “Frederick Law Olmsted” in the firm for years to come? Mary, a practical person, must have concurred in this extraordinary decision. Rick, as everyone called him, had no say in the matter. He would go into the family business, and he would do so bearing a famous name.
And Olmsted was famous. He now attracted a steady stream of clients and commissions. However, his old way of working was proving unequal to the demands of an expanding practice. John was a valuable colleague, but they needed more assistants. The first of these was Charles Eliot, a tall, lanky twenty-three-year-old who had taken courses in agriculture and horticulture after graduating from Harvard. He came highly recommended by Charles Eliot Norton, who had been one of his professors (and who was also a second cousin), and by the architect Robert Peabody, his uncle and Olmsted’s neighbor and sometime collaborator. Eliot started immediately. “I am to go about with Mr. Olmsted, and am expected to gather the principles and the practice of the profession in the course of this going,” he wrote a friend. “I am to be of what service I can, and this, if I am to judge by ten days’ experience, will consist chiefly in doing draughtsman’s work, making working drawings from preliminary design-plans, etc. I have already had a little journey with Mr. Olmsted to Newport and Providence, and learned much and enjoyed more.”
A year later Eliot was joined by Henry Sargent Codman, a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the nephew of Charles Sprague Sargent. Codman and Eliot were from privileged backgrounds (Eliot’s father was the president of Harvard). Olmsted was not a snob, but he understood that an important part of a landscape architect’s job was “influencing men of means and enterprise” (as he once put it to John). To do this it helped to be one of them. He had his eye on both of these bright young men as future partners in the firm; for the moment they were “apprentices.” Olmsted looked to Richardson for this model. Richardson treated his employees as both assistants and pupils, somewhat in the fashion of a Parisian atelier. Of course, most of his employees were formally trained—at the École des Beaux-Arts or at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Olmsted had to be more systematic. “We put them to such work as they can do in our office,” he explained, “if we can find room for them, and they travel with us (at their own expense) and read under our advice for two or three years. After that they generally make a tour of foreign study.” Olmsted the reluctant student had become a schoolmaster.
* * *
1. There were constant efforts—resisted by Olmsted and Vaux—to introduce into Central Park a running-course, or speedway, where drivers could race their carriages.
2. Charlotte had borne two children since her marriage.
CHAPTER FIFTY
The Character of His Business
OLMSTED WAS SETTLED, surrounded by friends and colleagues, economically secure, and busy with work. Yet he still fell prey to occasional depression. He expressed his feelings in a letter to Brace. “You decidedly have the best & most worthily successful life of all whom I have known. The C. A. [Children’s Aid Society] is the most satisfying of all the benevolent works of our time. I have done a good deal of good work in my way too but it is constantly & everywhere arrested, wrecked, mangled and misused & it is not easy to get above intense disappointment & mortification.” Central Park continued to be plagued by politics. Vaux had been appointed landscape architect by the Parks Department in November 1881. His advice was ignored and he resigned; a year later, their old enemy Colonel Egbert Viele, who still maintained that Olmsted and Vaux had plagiarized his design, wheedled his way onto the Central Park board. Viele, a Democrat, was using the position as a stepping-stone toward a congressional seat. The future of Prospect Park was compromised when a new Brooklyn administration fired the indefatigable James Stranahan and abolished the park board. Mount Royal was still incomplete, due to a lack of funds. (In 1881 Olmsted published a pamphlet on the Montreal park hoping to influence the city council, but to no avail.) At Chicago’s South Park, Cleveland had only managed to complete less than half of the inland site.
Olmsted’s depression was underscored by several events. The previous year his stepdaughter Charlotte, who had grown woefully unstable after the birth of her third son, had to be institutionalized. Then Olmsted lost his two mentors—George Geddes, who had introduced him to scientific farming, and Henry Whitney Bellows, who had drawn him into the great national endeavor of the Sanitary Commission, both died. More unexpected was the death of his young architectural collaborator Thomas Wisedell. Olmsted had also just read Brace’s obituary of Friedrich Kapp, their faithful collaborator in the free-soil movement. “Instead of being shocked by the death of old friends, I wonder they could have lived till so lately,” Olmsted reflected. “Most of all [I wonder] that I am still living,” he added gloomily.
Brace forwarded Olmsted’s letter to Frederick Kingsbury—the three often exchanged correspondence—and later sent Kingsbury’s sensible reply to Olmsted.
I enjoyed Fred O’s letter, which I return. It’s a pity he should attach so little importance to the much he has accomplished and so much to the little he has not succeeded in doing to his mind. No man ever comes up to his ideals who has any. And as for reputation, there are few men who have a more enviable one than Fred. Well known and highly respected in two hemispheres and in three departments of human effort, Literature, Philanthropy and Art. Most men would be fairly satisfied (if men ever are satisfied) with his position in
either.
He ought to be able thoroughly to enjoy the fruits of his labor, and I hope he still may be as he gets into a serener period of life if things go well with him.
“I am not sure however but that last is all gamon [sic] as I don’t think life seems any serener with me as I grow older,” Kingsbury added. Olmsted certainly had not grown serene. He was still hurt by public criticism. “I think it comes harder to an old man to be grossly insulted,” he observed. Nor had he learned to accept professional setbacks. This is something that Charles Eliot Norton chided him about: “You are preaching truths above the comprehension of our generation. . . . Montreal indifference, New York degradation are conditions to be anticipated and therefore not to excite disappointment. . . . Your original success with the Central Park was an anomaly.” Norton did not have a high regard for the public’s taste. “You are compelled to throw your pearls before swine,” he cynically observed, “and are fortunate if they do not turn and rend you for not giving them their favorite swill.” This was not Olmsted’s view. He maintained a constant—if guarded—optimism about people’s ability to appreciate the scenic and restorative powers of landscape. That is why the failures rankled so.
A Clearing In The Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the 19th Cent Page 39