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

by Rybczynski, Witold

Olmsted Drives Hard

  IN JANUARY 1890 Charles Brace sent Olmsted a copy of his latest book. “It strikes me as your best work from a literary point of view,” Olmsted replied, but “I do not see why you should say it is probably your last.” He did not know that Brace, four years his junior, was seriously ill; he died that August. Olmsted mourned his lifelong friend. “His death was a shock to me,” he wrote Kingsbury, “and the shock has been growing greater since.” About himself, he was philosophical. “Of course, I am not planning to live longer,” he wrote in another letter. He was approaching seventy. His beard, entirely white now, curled in disordered profusion. “What a good ancient philosopher you look like!” Norton wrote him, after seeing his portrait in Harper’s. “But, indeed, what a good old philosopher you are!” It was one of those rare times that Olmsted was contented. “I enjoy my children. They are the center of my life; the other being the improvement of scenery and making the enjoyment of it available. Spite of my infirmities which do drag me cruelly, I am not to be thought of as an unhappy old man.”

  He was now the head of a national consulting business with as many as twenty employees. The firm, called F. L. Olmsted & Co., had a new partner: Henry Codman. After completing his apprenticeship he had spent most of 1889 in Europe, working in Paris with André and traveling as far as Morocco to study arid landscapes. Harry, as everyone called him, was a tall, burly young man with a dark mustache. Intelligent, energetic, and affable, he had just those qualities that Olmsted deemed necessary for a landscape architect. Harry shouldered some of the burden of traveling to project sites, while John supervised the apprentices, draftsmen, and clerks who worked in the new office wing that had been added to Fairstead. Olmsted thought that his firm was “much better equipped and has more momentum than ever before.” He once observed that “I have all my life been considering distant effects and always sacrificing immediate success and applause to that of the future. In laying out Central Park we determined to think of no result to be realized in less than forty years.” In enlarging his practice Olmsted took the same long view. John was in his thirties, Harry was twenty-seven, and Rick, who had decided to become a landscape architect, was just starting at Harvard. In one form or another Olmsted & Co. would stay in business a long time.

  August 1890 found Olmsted and Codman in Chicago. They had been invited by the board of the corporation that was overseeing the construction of the World’s Columbian Exposition, commemorating the four-hundredth anniversary of the discovery of the New World. Chicago had recently edged out St. Louis, Washington, D.C., and New York for the honor of hosting America’s first world’s fair. (Olmsted had been consulted on possible sites by New York and had taken part in a campaign to keep the fair out of Central Park.) The Chicago board wanted advice on the best site for the fair.

  There were seven alternatives. For a variety of reasons the choice narrowed down to South Park, which Olmsted and Vaux had planned twenty years earlier. The obvious choice was Washington Park, the partly finished inland portion; so-called Jackson Park, by the lake, remained a barren marsh. To Harry, the lakeside site appeared desolate—“swampy, the surface of a large part of it not being materially above the surface of the lake at high stages of the water.” Three months later they returned to Chicago to present their recommendation. Olmsted, who still considered Lake Michigan Chicago’s only striking natural feature, had insisted on Jackson Park. John Olmsted once observed that “it was one of the greatest advantages that Father had that his employers usually grew to have such faith in him that they often were prepared to accept his recommendations without attempting to understand them.” This was one of those times. At first the board balked, but after much discussion and debate it agreed. Olmsted was delighted. “We have carried our first point, that of tying the Fair to the Lake,” he wrote John.

  Olmsted had one particularly strong supporter, an unofficial adviser to the corporation named Daniel Hudson Burnham. Burnham was only forty-four but with his partner, John Root, was already one of the most successful architects in Chicago. Intelligent, charming, and, like Olmsted, largely self-made, Burnham was a dynamo. A contemporary described him as someone who “inspired confidence in all who came within the range of his positive and powerful personality.”

  The board appointed Burnham chief of construction, which effectively put him in charge; Root was named consulting architect; Olmsted and Codman were retained as consulting landscape architects.1 The four worked together on the overall plan. They were a good team. Olmsted’s experience balanced Burham’s brashness. Burnham, a skillful planner, was always willing to concede in artistic matters to his partner, Root, a gifted designer. Codman was the youngest, only twenty-seven, but he quickly gained the respect of the Chicagoans. “Harry Codman’s knowledge of formal settings was greater than that of all the others put together,” Burnham later recalled. “He never failed.”

  The underlying concept originated with Olmsted and Codman. The major natural landscape feature of the fair would be water, not only Lake Michigan but also a system of basins, canals, and a lagoon. An existing stand of small oaks dictated the location of a large island in the center of the lagoon. The excavated earth would be used to create raised terraces on which the buildings would be constructed. In contrast to the naturalistic lagoon, the terraces would have hard edges and would surround a formal basin.

  The arrangement of buildings around the basin was inspired by the last world’s fair, the great Paris Exposition of 1889, whose monumental buildings had lined the central mall, terminating in Gustave Eiffel’s tower. Root is generally credited with the design, but Olmsted and Codman undoubtedly contributed. After all, Olmsted was then working out the formal terraces of Biltmore, and Codman was familiar with the French exposition after his three months in Paris. While the buildings around the lagoon would be varied, those around the basin would be formal and monumental. The fair covered all of Jackson Park and stretched up the Midway Plaisance. Altogether, this extraordinarily ambitious scheme was four times larger than the Paris exposition.

  The general principles of the plan were approved by the board. Burnham, who saw the fair as a great national event, proposed that a select group of prominent architects design the main buildings. With Olmsted’s and Root’s advice, a list was drawn up. Richard Morris Hunt was an obvious choice; so was Charles McKim of McKim, Mead & White, and Robert Peabody of Peabody & Stearns. George B. Post of New York and Henry Van Brunt of Van Brunt & Howe in Kansas City were both highly respected practitioners. The five architects represented a close circle: Post and Van Brunt had been Hunt’s pupils, and Howe and Peabody had been pupils of Van Brunt’s; Hunt, McKim, and Peabody had all studied at the Beaux-Arts, and all three had worked with Olmsted.

  World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago (1893).

  At first the Easterners were standoffish. But Burnham’s eloquence—and no doubt Olmsted’s participation—won them over. Burnham then earmarked five Chicago architects—among them Louis Sullivan and Olmsted’s friend Jenney. In January all the architects met in Chicago. A pall hung over the proceedings, as just after the meetings started John Root died of pneumonia. The architects assembled formed a committee that included Olmsted and Codman, and elected Hunt as their chairman. They gave a “cordial and unqualified approval to the plan as originally presented,” Olmsted recalled. The Easterners would design the buildings around the basin, and the local architects, the buildings around the lagoon.

  They returned with their sketches at the end of February. Olmsted and Codman were there; so was Augustus Saint-Gaudens, who had agreed to act as an artistic adviser to the fair and to aid in the selection of sculptors. Burnham described the scene:

  We had a breakfast for the visiting men. They were filled with enthusiasm. Charles McKim, with a good deal of repressed excitement, broke out, saying: “Bob Peabody wants to carry a canal down between our buildings.” I said I would agree to that, even though it would cost something. . . . Next, Saint-Gaudens took a hand. He said the east end
of the composition should be bound together architecturally. All agreed. He suggested a statue backed by thirteen columns, typifying the thirteen original States. All hailed this as a bully thing.

  Olmsted recorded that “the general comradeship and fervor of the artists was delightful to witness & more delightful to fall into.” At the end of this meeting, “Gussie” Saint-Gaudens made his famous comment to Burnham: “Look here, old fellow, do you realize that this is the greatest meeting of artists since the fifteenth century!”

  • • • •

  The fair was to open on May 1, 1893. That left only two and a half years to transform the more than six hundred forlorn acres. By May 1891 the excavation of the lagoon, canals, and basins was complete. Supervision was complicated. At first, Olmsted and Codman directed the work from Brookline. At Burnham’s urging, Codman spent more and more time on the site. He was joined by Rick, who worked for the summer as an unpaid assistant to the superintendent of construction.

  Olmsted spent about half his time working on the fair, the rest on Biltmore and the firm’s many other commissions. During this period he advised the Union Pacific Railroad on hotel sites in Utah, and real estate developers on subdivisions near Denver. He wrote a report on the National Zoo in Washington, D.C., and was consulted by the superintendent of West Point. He advised the governor of Alabama on the state capitol grounds, and the federal government on a nature reserve at Hot Springs, Arkansas.

  That summer he was struck down by what he said was arsenic poisoning induced by new wallpaper in his bedroom; he also was fatigued from the continuous travel, and from the insomnia that plagued him. He spent the summer convalescing in Brookline. In early September he felt well enough to go to Chicago. Under Burnham’s guidance rapid progress had been made. Most of the major buildings were under construction and planting had commenced. It normally takes decades to establish the landscape of a park; Olmsted and Codman had only two years and had to contend with unpredictable winter weather and the lake’s fluctuating water level. They decided to use the first planting season for testing different varieties, and the second for replanting, repairing, and finishing.

  The following March, Olmsted was in Chicago again. The winter had been mild and the planting could resume. For this Herculean task, he later estimated that the shores of the lagoons alone required “one hundred thousand small willows; seventy-five large railway platform carloads of collected herbaceous aquatic plants, taken from the wild; one hundred and forty thousand other aquatic plants, largely native and Japanese irises, and two hundred and eighty-five thousand ferns and other perennial herbaceous plants.” Olmsted and Codman could not rely on local nurseries for this material. The majority of the cattails, rushes, irises, and pond lilies were collected from lakes, rivers, and swamps in Illinois and Wisconsin.

  “I never had more before me or less inclination to lay off than now,” Olmsted observed. His visit to Chicago was part of a trip that included stops in Biltmore, Knoxville, Louisville, and Rochester—2,700 miles in all. He continued to drive himself hard. Richardson, despite his fame, had died insolvent, bequeathing his widow only debts; Olmsted had no intention of leaving Mary in such a predicament.2 That explains his willingness to accept commissions farther and farther afield, despite the long-distance rail travel that was becoming increasingly discomforting as he grew older. Now, feeling weak and not fully recovered from the previous summer’s illness, he decided that the best restorative for him would be a European trip. Codman appeared to have matters well in hand in Chicago, so in early April Olmsted sailed for England. He was accompanied by Marion, who had never been abroad; Rick and Phil Codman, Harry’s younger brother, who was an apprentice, were there as companions and pupils.

  As in the past, a European trip was an opportunity for Olmsted to revisit parks. This time his schedule included tours only of England and France. The Chicago fair was uppermost in his mind, and he spent a week on the Thames trying out a variety of electric launches; he made notes about reeds and other waterside vegetation. In France, he discussed the Paris Exposition with André and visited the grounds. Many of the surviving buildings displayed polychrome decoration—the bright gayness appealed to him. “They show, I think, more fitness for their purposes, seem more designed for the occasion and to be less like grand permanent architectural monuments than ours are to be. I question if ours are not going to look too assuming of architectural stateliness and to be overbonded with sculptural and other efforts for grandeur and grandiloquent pomp.” With an eye on Biltmore, he visited the new château at Chantilly and made a tour of the Loire Valley. He was impressed by the architecture but not by the landscaping. “All these châteaux that we have seen, looked at largely, appear dreary, incomplete and forlorn for want of adequate foliage furnishing.”

  Traveling with the young men and Marion was a pleasure. “I am having a great deal of enjoyment, and I hope laying in a good stock of better health,” he wrote Mary. The latter goal was not realized. When he returned to England, he became ill. He spent three months sequestered in the home of an English physician who—like doctors in the past—could find no physical ailment. The sleeplessness—and the resulting fatigue—resumed. Nevertheless, he stayed on, touring, meeting people, taking notes. He returned home after an absence of six months. For the purpose of his health, the trip had been a failure. “More than a failure. I was more disabled when I returned than when I left.”

  • • • •

  Olmsted returned from Europe at the end of September 1892; by the next month he was in Chicago. Now Harry Codman was unwell, so Olmsted saw to the planting of the wooded island. After his European tour he was more than ever convinced that simplicity and naturalness were required as a counterpoint to the grandeur of the architecture, especially as it had been decided to paint all the buildings around the basin uniformly white. He instructed the gardening superintendent to increase the quantity of green foliage. “I fear that against the clear blue sky and the blue lake, great towering masses of white, glistening in the clear hot, summer sunlight of Chicago, with the glare of water that we are to have both within and without the Exposition grounds, will be overpowering.” Olmsted counted on the wooded island to be a shaded oasis for tired fairgoers.

  He was concerned about the fair since he saw it as an unparalleled opportunity to influence popular taste. Traveling between Brookline, Biltmore, and Chicago, and overseeing park projects in Milwaukee, Knoxville, and Kansas City, he could see that his work was “having an educative effect . . . a manifestly civilizing effect” on the American public. As a writer, reporter, and editor, he had always sought a large audience. Now he had one. Just as he taught landscaping to the young men who came to his office, in Chicago he was preparing a national lesson.

  Abruptly his plans were thrown into confusion. On January 13, 1893, Harry Codman, who was recovering from an appendectomy, died. It was a hard blow for Olmsted. “I am as one standing on a wreck,” he wrote to Pinchot in Biltmore, “and can hardly see when we shall get afloat again.” He was in low spirits again: not only was his protégé dead, the most important project of his firm was in jeopardy. Despite a serious cold, he rushed to Chicago. There, a doctor warned him of pneumonia. That—and a blizzard—kept him from immediately attending to business. He wrote John a wretched letter. “It looks as if the time had come when it is necessary for you to count on me out. . . . I do think that we shall have to decide on throwing up a lot of our business. I am not to be depended on. . . . I say again common prudence requires that you should lay out your course, not counting on me. It is very plain that as things are we are not going to be able to do our duty here.”

  John, who knew his stepfather, took these dire predictions with a grain of salt. The firm weathered the blow of Harry’s death. This was due in no small part to Charles Eliot, to whom Olmsted turned in his distress. Eliot came out to Chicago to help with the crucial final planting and finishing. He had been successful on his own, and his writing had gained him a reputation, but he enjoyed
working with his old teacher on a large project. A month later F. L. Olmsted & Co. became Olmsted, Olmsted & Eliot.

  * * *

  1. Harry Codman probably negotiated the $22,500 fee; he had earlier convinced Olmsted to demand a hefty sum from Stanford.

  2. He estimated that he was putting aside more than a thousand dollars a year (about thirty thousand in modern dollars)—a considerable sum.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

  The Fourth Muse

  The Concert Hall, Madison Square Garden, New York

  Saturday, March 25, 1893

  The flamboyantly ornamented room, designed by Stanford White, is decorated with evergreens and palms. Three crimson banners hang from the ceiling. Each bears a single word surrounded by a wreath of gilded laurel: “Painting,” “Architecture,” “Sculpture.” Below the banners are round tables seating men in evening dress—the ladies are in the gallery. Over the clatter of cutlery and the clink of glasses floats the lively music of the Hungarian Band.

  The occasion is a tribute to Daniel Burnham. There is a smattering of politicians, businessmen, and civic leaders, but the majority of those attending are in the arts: painters, muralists, sculptors, craftsmen, architects. Daniel Chester French, whose monumental statue adorns the fair’s basin, is there; so is the actor Edwin Booth, the glassmaker Louis Comfort Tiffany, and the conductor Walter Damrosch. The literary world is represented by Charles Scribner, Parke Godwin, and E. L. Godkin. The novelist and influential critic William Dean Howells sits at the head table on the stage; so does Charles Eliot Norton, who has come down from Cambridge to give one of the toasts. Norton sits to the left of Hunt, who presides. Hunt, McKim, Saint-Gaudens, and the painter Francis D. Millet—who is Director of Decoration for the fair—are among those who have organized this event. Hunt, too, penned the droll dedication that appears in the program of toasts: “A director of faith is good; but since faith without works is dead, a Director of Works is better. The Daniel who now comes to judgment may safely be lionized.”