The two-hour dinner has come to a close. While the guests are served coffee and cigars, the lights dim and stereoscopic slides of the exposition are projected on a large screen. Most of those present have not yet seen the fair, which opens in five weeks. The views are spectacular. Hunt’s impressive Administration Building, which forms the gateway to the fair, has a dome larger than that of the Capitol; the arched steel hall of Post’s Manufactures Building is a wonder—it is the largest roofed structure ever built; McKim’s Agriculture Building, crowned by Saint-Gaudens’s Diana (originally intended for Madison Square Garden), is a jewel. The white buildings, adorned with sculptures and murals, cast rippling reflections in the canals; Frederick MacMonnies’s Columbian Fountain, the centerpiece of the great basin, sparkles in the sun; the planting in the lagoon is lush and tropical. The views are greeted with approval and much handclapping by the more than two hundred guests. The greatest applause comes with the final slide: an image of the Director of Works, Daniel Burnham.
Hunt, dignified, gray-haired, with a mustache and a spade beard, gets up slowly—he has arthritis. He says a few words of tribute, turns to Burnham, and removes a false bouquet of roses that stands in front of the guest of honor to reveal a massive silver loving cup. The foot-high vessel, designed by McKim, is engraved with the names of the 272 guests. Burnham pours an entire bottle of wine into the cup, drinks, and passes it up and down the table. The cup then circulates around the entire room. It is occasionally topped up with champagne, to the enthusiastic cheers of all assembled.
Hunt proposes a toast to Burnham. All in the room rise to their feet and lift their glasses. Then Burnham speaks. He is genuinely moved by the occasion. He praises the talent of his colleagues who have come together to create the fair and have worked so harmoniously and unselfishly together.
“You know who these men are. They sit with you tonight,” he says, sweeping his hand around the room. “Each of you knows the name and genius of him who stands first in the heart and confidence of American artists, the creator of your own parks and many other city parks.”
He pauses until the burst of applause dies down.
“He it is who has been our best adviser and our common mentor. In the highest sense he is the planner of the Exposition—Frederick Law Olmsted.” This time the applause is deafening.
Burnham is not finished. “No word of his has fallen to the ground among us since first he joined us some thirty months ago. An artist, he paints with lakes and wooded slopes; with lawns and banks and forest-covered hills; with mountainsides and ocean views. He should stand where I do tonight, not for the deeds of later years alone, but for what his brain has wrought and his pen has taught for half a century.”
Burnham was effusive. It was forty years—not fifty—since Olmsted had entered public life. But the accolade was on the mark. The fair was Olmsted’s creation, and not merely because he had contributed so much to the design. “Make no little plans,” Burnham is supposed to have said. Thinking big was something he and his generation had learned from Frederick Law Olmsted.
Yet the object of these encomiums was absent. Charles Eliot’s pocket diary notes that the evening of the banquet Olmsted was with him in Washington, D.C. They were returning home from Atlanta, and because Olmsted could no longer sleep on trains, they stayed the night at the National Hotel. Eliot also notes that on the same day his partner sent two telegrams—one to Chicago, one to New York. Were these regrets for not attending the dinner? Olmsted’s name—like that of John Olmsted—was engraved on the loving cup. The next day the New-York Times reported both Olmsteds among those present, suggesting that the reporter had used an official guest list. Possibly Olmsted was called away on urgent business at the last minute, or poor health prevented him from returning sooner (Eliot’s diary entry for the twenty-sixth: “Mr. O. ailing”). Yet the letter that Olmsted wrote to John from Atlanta just before returning does not mention poor health or being rushed. On the contrary, it offhandedly refers to possible stops in Baltimore and Philadelphia. Of the Burnham dinner, nothing. (It is unclear if John attended the dinner.)
I am inclined to think that the sudden trip to Atlanta was merely a pretext—Olmsted missed the banquet on purpose. The dinner invitation he received read: “We desire to give [Burnham] a banquet in recognition of the great benefits to architecture, sculpture, and painting that have resulted from [his] connection with the Columbian Exposition in Chicago.” The cover illustration of the program of toasts echoed the theme of the three crimson banners that hung over the banquet hall: three muses—sculpture, architecture, and painting—supporting a loving cup. The fourth muse, landscape architecture, was nowhere to be found!
If Olmsted was offended, he would not have made a fuss. But Burnham would have understood the real reason for his absence. That is surely another reason why he singled out Olmsted for such high praise—“he should stand where I do tonight”—mentioning him first, and speaking of him at length while making only brief references to the architects, painters, and sculptors. If Olmsted had absented himself on purpose, politeness would have required that he mention the reason at least to his close friend Norton. The Harvard professor of art history and one of the country’s leading intellectuals had been invited to the dinner to speak on “Architecture, Sculpture, and Painting.” Norton, whom someone once called a pessimistic optimist, was known to hold conservative, often curmudgeonly views about contemporary art, but he spoke highly of the fair. He closed with these pointed remarks:
The general design of the grounds and of the arrangement of the buildings was in every respect noble, original and satisfactory, a work of fine art not generally included in the list of poetic arts [emphasis added], but one of the most important of them all to America—that of the landscape architect. Of all American artists, Frederick Law Olmsted, who gave the design for the laying out of the grounds of the World’s fair, stands first in the production of great works which answer the needs and give expression to the life of our immense and miscellaneous democracy.
Norton knew that Olmsted was frustrated by people’s unwillingness to recognize landscape architecture as an art. Olmsted thought that this was chiefly because they confused it with what he called decorative gardening. According to him, landscape architecture involved composition and perspective in which details were subordinate to the whole, contrary to decorative gardening, which treated “roses as roses, not as flecks of white or red modifying masses of green.” He considered landscape architecture akin to landscape painting, except that the landscape architect used natural materials instead of pigments. That, of course, was the root of the problem. Since the medium—as well as the subject—was nature itself, the public often failed to discriminate between the two. No one would think of altering a landscape on canvas, but a garden was different. “I design with a view to a passage of quietly composed, soft, subdued pensive character, shape the ground, screen out discordant elements and get suitable vegetation growing,” Olmsted observed. “[I] come back in a year and find—destruction: why? ‘My wife is so fond of roses;’ ‘I had a present of some large Norway spruces;’ ‘I have a weakness for white birch trees—there was one in my father’s yard when I was a boy.’ ”
Long ago, he and Vaux had started calling themselves “landscape architects,” hoping that this would set them apart from horticulturists and decorative gardeners. Olmsted was still dissatisfied with the term, but in the absence of an alternative, he used it. He was aware of his leading position in the field; he wanted respect for his profession. Shortly after the Chicago fair opened, both Harvard and Yale offered him an honorary doctor of laws. He thought it was “the queerest thing,” but he accepted “because it gives a standing to my profession which it needs.”
It was thus that Olmsted had high hopes for the Chicago exposition. “If people generally get to understand that our contribution to the undertaking is that of the planning of the scheme, rather than the disposition of flower beds and other matters of gardening decoration,”
he explained to Mariana Van Rensselaer, “it will be a great lift to the profession.”
• • • •
“Everywhere there is a growing interest in the Exposition,” Olmsted wrote Burnham after the fair opened. “Everywhere I have found indications that people are planning to go to it. . . . There is a rising tidal wave of enthusiasm over the land.” Go they did. During six months, more than 27 million visitors went, a huge number considering that the entire population of the United States in 1890 was only 63 million. The public was dazzled by the fair, by its size, its technology, and its monumental beauty. The critics, too, were complimentary. Naturally, the spectacular buildings around the basin—which people called the Court of Honor—attracted the most attention, but some appreciated the achievement of the overall plan. The perceptive architecture critic Montgomery Schuyler wrote: “The landscape-plan is the key to the pictorial success of the Fair as a whole. . . . In no point was the skill of Mr. Olmsted and his associates more conspicuous than in the transition from the symmetrical and stately treatment of the basin to the irregular winding of the lagoon.”
Looking at old photographs of the fair in my battered copy of Official Views of the World’s Columbian Exposition, I am struck precisely by the charming contrast between the natural landscaping of the lagoon and the formal terraces that surround the basin. Water is the unifying theme; there are boats everywhere. “We should try to make the boating feature of the Exposition a gay and lively one in spectacular effect,” Olmsted explained to Burnham, on more than one occasion. Olmsted prohibited steam-powered boats as too large and too noisy and proposed electric launches instead. This technology was novel and largely untested in America. Olmsted overcame Burnham’s initial reluctance and personally oversaw the design of the boats, insisting on brightly varnished woodwork and gaily striped awnings. He was concerned about safety, too, and permitted only craft that could be turned and stopped quickly, such as Venetian gondolas. There were other exotic craft. A replica of a Viking ship crossed the Atlantic from Norway; it was joined by a Japanese dragon boat, a Venetian skiff, and a whaling bark. Olmsted had replicas of the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa María built and anchored them next to the Casino.
The comprehensiveness of his environmental design is astonishing. He introduced ducks, geese, and swans, “to supply a means of appropriate decoration and of pictorial interest to the interior waters of the Exposition,” instructing that “a variety of color in the fowl is desirable.” He explained: “The effects of the boats and the water fowl as incidents of movement and life; the bridges with respect to their shadows and reflections, their effect in extending apparent perspectives and in connecting terraces and buildings, tying them together and thus creating unity of composition—all this was quite fully taken into account from the very first.” Another of his ideas was to have a small fleet of birch-bark canoes, paddled by American Indians in buckskin shirts and moccasins. “The canoes would add a feature of interest to all observers, and most Europeans coming to the Fair would be glad to have a trial of them and to pay liberally for it,” he assured Burnham. Here the chief of construction drew the line. Such frivolity belonged on the Midway—in Sitting Bull’s Camp perhaps—not in the Court of Honor.
Olmsted did his best to liven the atmosphere of what the press had dubbed the White City. After the fair opened, he proposed that Burnham hire a squad of banjo players and other strolling musicians. “Why not skipping and dancing masqueraders with tambourines, such as one sees in Italy?” Olmsted asked. He also suggested having persons in native “heathen” costumes brought from the Midway Plaisance, which was the location of the amusement park, to the Court of Honor on Friday evenings.1 “They would at least give spice and variety to the scene, and a picturesque element.” But there was nothing frivolous about the Court of Honor, as far as Burnham, McKim, and the other architects were concerned. The temporary exhibition buildings were designed with an ambitious goal. “The influence of the Exposition on architecture will be to inspire a reversion toward the pure ideal of the ancients,” Burnham told a Chicago newspaper. Olmsted did not share this vision. On the contrary, he had been on the opposite side of a dispute with Hunt and Stanford White, who wanted to introduce classical monuments into Central Park and Prospect Park. Olmsted was uncomfortable with what he characterized as their doctrinaire fanaticism regarding classical architecture. Nevertheless, he respected their abilities and their sincerity. He explained his position to William Stiles, the editor of Garden and Forest, who was complaining about the classicists. “You know that these men of the enemy are my friends. . . . I have managed to work in hearty, active, friendly cooperation with them. . . . At Biltmore we have managed to reconcile the requirements of Hunt in his Renaissance buildings with a generally picturesque natural character in the approaches. . . . There has not been the slightest break of harmony between us.” Similarly in Chicago, Olmsted continued, he combined the “formal stateliness that our architectural associates were determined to have in the buildings” with natural scenery and “succeeded to their satisfaction.” “A sufficient explanation of the apparent anomaly,” he added, “is that there is a place for everything.”
A place for everything. Olmsted’s vision had room for the tropical ambience of the lagoon and the great sweep of cobbled beach beside Lake Michigan; for the refinement of the Court of Honor and the vulgarity of the Midway; for the diversity of the state pavilions and the sedate Palace of the Fine Arts. That was the chief difference between Olmsted and the architects. They wanted to create order out of chaos. He wanted to accommodate order and chaos.
* * *
1. The Midway Plaisance was such a success that midway became a synonym for any area of a carnival or circus devoted to sideshows and other amusements.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
Dear Rick
THE FAIR, THE EUROPEAN TRIP, Codman’s death, had taken a lot out of Olmsted. He was starting to feel his age. A letter he wrote to John from Biltmore shows his frame of mind: indecisive, anxious, unsure of himself.
I am doubting some whether Eliot had better come here now or wait till February when, if living, I must come again. It should depend on the state of work elsewhere. I should think that by the end of next week I should be ready to start for Atlanta. Have you no doubt of the expediency of my going on to Louisville, to Chicago, Detroit, Buffalo, Rochester? It is a long and risky journey for me. I am not quite sure of the plan we had in view when I left. Was it that Manning [the firm’s horticulturist] should go the round with me? or Eliot, or both? Am I needed at Kansas City? It is so long since I have been at Louisville that I shall be lost there if I go alone. You must send me the names of the people whom I shall need to renew acquaintance with. At this moment I cannot recall one. At Chicago they seem to have got away from me.
Whatever qualms he had about a long trip, Olmsted was eager to go to Atlanta. “With reference to your future business it is very desirable to make the firm favorably known at the South and ‘extend its connections’ as the merchants say,” he advised John. The business in Atlanta involved the Kirkwood Land Company, which he had been advising for three years. The company planned to build a residential subdivision on fifteen hundred acres, four miles from downtown Atlanta in an area later known as Druid Hills. Olmsted had recommended that a “convenient, rapid, agreeable and popular means of communication . . . be provided between the city and some central point on the property.” As in Riverside, he proposed a parkway, this time incorporating an “electric road”—that is, a trolley-car line. The parkway wound its way through a series of increasingly bucolic parks and man-made water bodies; the residential streets led away from this green corridor into the wooded hills. He completed the plan in 1893, although work was delayed until 1905 because of financial difficulties.
Olmsted’s main concern was still Biltmore. The deadline for the completion of construction was Christmas 1895. By the end of 1893 the limestone walls of the house had risen to the second floor and the landscaping was we
ll advanced. Hundreds of visitors came to tour the construction site, confirming Olmsted’s claim that Biltmore would generate great public interest. “It is far and away the most distinguished private place, not only of America, but of the world,” he assured John and Eliot, who did not share his enthusiasm for the project. Olmsted pointedly reminded his partners that while they stood at the forefront of the profession as far as public parks were concerned, “We have been unfortunate with private places. We have had no great success, have gained no celebrity. . . . The more important that we make a striking success where a chance is given us. This is a place and G.W.V. is a man, that we must do our best for.”
The following year Rick finished Harvard, graduating magna cum laude—Olmsted’s concerns that his high-spirited son was not academically inclined proved unfounded. He was extremely fond of Rick. “I like him very much,” he confessed to Norton, “and he is affectionate and confiding, to me, more than boys generally to their fathers, I think.” Olmsted encouraged Rick to become a landscape architect and set him a high goal. “I want you to be prepared to be a leader of the van . . . to make L.A. respected as an Art and a liberal profession.” Yet when Rick graduated, he was not invited to join the firm. Instead Olmsted arranged a surveying job for him in Colorado. He considered that despite his twenty-four years Rick needed toughening (Olmsted lamented his own lack of formal education, but he firmly believed in learning from experience). He also wanted to broaden Rick’s horizons. “The more you see—the more parts of our country and the more varied topographical and climatic conditions you have opportunity to carefully observe even from [railroad] car windows, the larger will be your professional capital,” he wrote him. In the same letter Olmsted told his son that he had arranged for him to complete his apprenticeship at Biltmore.
A Clearing In The Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the 19th Cent Page 44