Gumption: America's Gutsiest Troublemakers

by Nick Offerman

  In a manner of speaking, Olmsted’s report clearly proved that, in addition to its obviously onerous qualities on the level of human rights, slavery also just didn’t make sense economically. As a farming system it contained myriad inefficiencies in both labor and production. This unique criticism, based solely upon his empirical observation, made an influential splash among the members of the abolitionist movement, whose appeals were more emotional and purely sympathetic. Olmsted scientifically proved that, because of the dehumanizing nature of the work a slave was required to perform, there was very little initiative for that oppressed person to make use of any gumption, and without gumption, the halfhearted labors cost the slave owners money.

  As these observations were gradually published, the Southern plantation owners naturally came to be aware of the negative appraisals therein, making the southern climate decidedly less friendly for Olmsted. It took a lot of grit to continue reporting on what had become a very moral issue to him, but it paid off handsomely. His dispatches were widely praised in the United States and overseas, where he had made fans of great thinkers like Charles Dickens, Charles Darwin, and Karl Marx, among others. When he eventually published the collected pieces in his book A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States, he won accolades from the press, like this from the New York Post: “This remarkable book . . . is certainly the most minute, dispassionate, and evidently accurate description of the persons, places, and social institutions of the southern portion of our confederacy, that we have yet seen.” Pretty good for a Staten Island pear farmer.

  Okay, let’s take a moment to update our Olmsted vocational scorecard. After the brief stint at the silk shop, he made varying degrees of headway as a sailor, a farmer, a journalist, and an author. He’d published two books. At this juncture, he was thirty-five years of age. With such an array of experience under his belt, it should come as no surprise what happened next: Sipping tea at a seaside inn in Morris Cove, New Haven, Connecticut, he struck up a conversation with Charles Eliot, who happened to be a board member on a new project in New York City that had as its objective the creation of a sizable public green space on Manhattan Island. Eliot let slip to our boy that the board would be requiring a superintendent.

  Despite very little experience to qualify him on paper, as you may have guessed, Olmsted got the job. A little exposition: In 1857, Manhattan was still mostly farmland and pasture above Midtown, peppered by impoverished shantytowns, peopled by immigrants and newly freed slaves; wee stinky hamlets with monikers like Dutch Hill, Dublin Corners, and Seneca Village. At the time of Olmsted’s hiring, the land also housed noxious businesses like tanneries and match manufacturers, as well as two plants for processing animal carcasses into charcoal filters and glue. Not exactly the ideal spot to place a carousel and an ice-skating pond.

  The foresight of the city planners, and, ultimately, the park’s designers, in comprehending the fact that before long the urban sprawl would cover the entirety of the island, was most impressive. At a time when the actual city covered only the forefoot of Manhattan’s stocking, these farseeing planners had the clarity to name the new space “Central Park.” The terrain looked nothing like it does today; it had very swampy areas, with fewer large trees and more scrub brush.

  Olmsted oversaw seven hundred employees, who had their hands full draining swamps and removing stones in preparation for the park’s imminent construction. Lending an air of suspense to the proceedings was an open contest to win the commission to design this enormous new park. The park’s main engineer was a rather uncouth and colorful character bearing an excellent name for an antagonist: Colonel Egbert Ludovicus Viele (pronounced Vee-lay). His lack of decorum preceded him, as he was commonly known to employ foul language in the presence of ladies. Most enjoyably, Viele was fixated upon the occult, particularly the conjuring powers of eldritch symbols. I’m not saying this guy was not a Freemason.

  Viele entered himself in the park’s design competition and undoubtedly gave himself a leg up with his intimate knowledge of the intended land features and their existing topography. Meanwhile, Olmsted’s crew plugged away, shoulders to the wheel at the treacherous chore of clearing the grounds for the impending face lift. One portion of the crew was struck down with an outbreak of malaria, while another fell severely and mysteriously ill, with fevers and terrible itching. Apparently they had set a patch of poison ivy vines ablaze in their clearing efforts, the resultant smoke of which will afflict the body just as virulently as direct contact, except the vapors can be even worse when inhaled. I shouldn’t have been surprised to learn that some of Olmsted’s crew were students about to be exiled to college, thus taking a page out of their superintendent’s escape book.

  The park’s commissioners laid down a very specific set of rules and requirements for the design entries, including a tower, a grand hall, playgrounds, and a formal garden, as well as four roads crossing the park, and a parade ground of twenty to forty acres in expanse. On top of these requirements, the winning plans would also need to be executable within the dictated budget of 1.5 million dollars.

  Enter Calvert Vaux. (I recommend this title by Francis R. Kowsky for more on this underappreciated but fantastic artist: Country, Park & City: The Architecture and Life of Calvert Vaux.) Vaux had worked with some of the brass involved in the park commission and had not only previously met Olmsted, but he also had read and admired his writing. Calvert Vaux was a talented architect from London whom one would think possessed all the necessary chops to execute a winning design on his own, but he knew better. It was rumored that the topographical map created by the odious Colonel Viele was highly inaccurate—a great disadvantage to those hopeful entrants designing features for that particular area of land and its specific peccadilloes.

  Vaux (the French would say Voh, but everyone I met pronounced it Vawx) cunningly sought out Olmsted, the superintendent of the park, who would likely have an even greater working knowledge of the lay of the land than Viele. Little could he have known that our Mr. Olmsted was a ready-made, ideal partner for just such a design project, well schooled as he was in all varieties of planting and particularly obsessed with trees, of which they would need thousands. Beyond his acumen as a farmer and landscaper, Olmsted possessed two further qualities that proved to dovetail perfectly with the talents of Vaux: common sense and gumption.

  The duo relied on their clear foresight to understand that the winning park design should, above all, maintain its integrity for generations to come. As Olmsted wrote, “Only twenty years ago, Union Square was ‘out of town’; twenty years hence, the town will have enclosed the Central Park. Let us consider, therefore, what will at that time be satisfactory, for it is then that the design will have to be really judged.” Another important factor to recommend their design entry was simply their sense of taste. Thus, they chose to flout the hodgepodge of requirements set forth by the board, which paid off in a design that was all of a piece, putting the other more eclectic designs to shame.

  In the final decision of the competition board lies a very satisfying lesson. Olmsted and Vaux continued to fine-tune their design until the final day, fussing at such length that the contest office had closed by the time they arrived with their submission. They were able to hand it off to a janitor and hope for the best. Despite their tardiness, despite their disdain for the prescribed requirements of the competition, among thirty-three submissions, theirs was the clear winner, by a tally of seven first-place votes out of eleven commissioners. The lesson that I would like to draw from this sequence is as follows: If you don’t like the rules as they apply to your art, then break the rules. This won’t always work out in your favor, as it also requires a degree of perspicacity on the part of the adjudicators; but if they are able, as Olmsted’s and Vaux’s were, to look at the broken rules and say, “Oh, this is better. Why did we make that dumb rule?,” then taste and good design can win the day.

  Before proceeding, I must make mention of another humoro
us and sad entry in the competition, a certain “envelope #2,” which contained only a single, anonymous drawing of a pyramid. It was roundly held that this curious offering could only have been proffered by Colonel Viele, who was later laid to rest in a pyramidal mausoleum of his own design, at West Point, no less. Now, I am definitely not saying he was not a Freemason.

  I can’t help but think that the winning twosome found the path to victory through a great talent for design in nature, sure, but also their insistence that this park be used for the good of all, in as humanitarian a way as possible. “It is one great purpose of the park,” Olmsted pronounced, “to supply the hundreds of thousands of tired workers, who have no opportunity to spend their summers in the country, a specimen of God’s handiwork that shall be to them, inexpensively, what a month or two in the White Mountains or the Adirondacks is, at great cost, to those in easier circumstances.”

  Touring Central Park with my esteemed guides lent a great first-person quality to experiencing the intended effects of the designers’ intentions. Before we even entered, Sara pointed out that each of the park’s eighteen different entry gates has its own special name, as designed by Olmsted and Vaux, carved into the stone wall next to its specified opening—openings, I should point out, for which wealthy New Yorkers requested grand, ornate gates like those found in the urban parks of London and Paris. Olmsted and Vaux instead opted for low sandstone open gateways to symbolize an accessible city refuge, open to all comers, rich and poor alike.

  The gate names themselves have a charming sense of working-class history and creativity: Artisans’, Artists’, Engineers’, Farmers’, Hunters’, Mariners’, Merchants’, Scholars’, and Woodmen’s. Also observing the disparate gender and age strata of the day, there were gates marked Boys’, Girls’, and Women’s, as well as one marked Children’s. Apparently nineteenth-century anthropologists had not yet unearthed the mystery of what sorts of creatures comprised “children” (namely, “boys” and “girls”).

  The Women’s Gate, located at Seventy-Second Street and Central Park West, is very convenient for reaching Strawberry Fields, but it must be a bummer, particularly for women across the park’s expanse on the Upper East Side, to have to walk all the way around the park to access their gate. Perhaps someday women will find a loophole by tricking men into hiring them as miners or scholars, so that they may more easily enter the park from numerous other points.

  On a more poetic note, there were also gates assigned to more figurative groups—All Saints’, Pioneers’, Warriors’, and my favorite for the enigmatic image it evokes: Strangers’ Gate. Located at 106th Street and Central Park West, the Strangers’ Gate opens immediately onto a wide slate staircase that leads one upward into a shadowy pass between stone bluffs beneath the romantic canopy of hornbeam and black cherry trees, as though by ascending the steps, you are stepping into a fairy tale. Clearly designed as the preferred entrance should Aragorn, or Strider, if you prefer, ever step out from the pages of Tolkien and into the park from Central Park West, which, o ho, also happens to be known a few blocks to the north as Frederick Douglass Boulevard. Watch me tie this entire son of a bitch together.

  My guides from the Central Park Conservancy fervently explained the methods by which the park had been entirely man-made, much the same as Disneyland, except it had been built with stone and soil and trees and shrubs. In excavation, it reportedly required more gunpowder than the Battle of Gettysburg. Olmsted and Vaux wanted the public to begin to experience the park immediately upon entering, again, just like a Disney park. (I suppose I should be thankful that I can enter Central Park without being accosted by a person dressed as a giant mouse.) To achieve their desired effect, the landscape artists ordered a great deal of modification in the elevation of the pathways. Using hills, valleys, walkways, and bridges instead of paints and clay, the duo created what Sara Cedar Miller insists was “the greatest work of American art of the nineteenth century,” an estimation I am disinclined to dispute. In fact, Olmsted and Vaux openly stated that their goal was to fabricate a three-dimensional version of a painting like those of the Hudson River School, with the then innovative new style of presenting scenes of nature with romantic realism. Another defining quality of those with gumption often seems to entail getting the trappings of “progress” out of the way and letting nature do the talking.

  One of the philosophical bents aligning Olmsted and Vaux on the same artistic path was a penchant for serving all classes of people with their park. Like any successful collaboration, they each had their specialties within a shared overall aesthetic. For example, Vaux designed the park’s structures, like the storybook Dairy, originally intended to serve as a refuge where children could enjoy a fresh glass of milk, “warm from the cow.” The safe practice of pasteurizing milk had not yet come into use, and New York City was lousy with nefarious purveyors of “dirty” milk that had been thinned out and cut with fillers to stretch out the seller’s supply. The Dairy provided a type of official milk dispensary where your little nipper could freely slake his or her thirst in the nurturing bosom of Central Park.

  Olmsted, on the other hand, specialized in sculpting what he referred to as “passages of scenery,” meaning the meadows and glades that showed off his extraordinary gifts. He developed a signature hourglass shape to these features, making the open area narrow in the middle, then flaring out at each end to create a sense of narrative. As Justin Martin surmised, “Someone standing in such a meadow . . . would be naturally drawn toward the narrow middle. It presented an allure and a mystery. What was on the other side? After walking through the passage, there was a release, like walking through a tunnel into a stadium.”

  Another of my favorite plebian victories scored by the designers was in the egalitarian nature of the pathways themselves. August Belmont, of horse racing fame, was one of the park’s commissioners, and he insisted that the finest sections of the park should be serviced by carriage roads and bridle paths, so that the wealthy would be favored in viewing the scenes. Olmsted and Vaux nipped that idea in the bud by ensuring that all the most pleasant vistas and grottoes were accessible only by pedestrians, so that citizens from every class could use the park with equal opportunity.

  Despite their primary focus on beautifully choreographed, “natural” scenery, some buildings and bridges were required. Olmsted insisted on simplicity, but Vaux was able to have his way with a few exceptions, most notably the Bethesda Fountain, which remains an absolute masterpiece to this day. I was taken aback when my guides pointed out to me the beautifully intricate stone carvings in the structure all around the fountain and pavilion, telling the allegorical story of the four seasons of the year in accord with the seasons of a human life. The reason for my shame was that I had visited the fountain many times without fully noticing these gorgeous and painstaking details. It was a valuable lesson in letting one’s vision fully relax from the information of the busy world when enjoying the park and the works of Olmsted and Vaux. It hearkens back to the quote that began this chapter, that a surplus of information creates a paucity of attention for features like the fountain. Perhaps my former myopia just means that I’m more of an Olmsted man. Trees and a waterfall for me, thank you very much.

  During the twelve years of construction that the park required, a little skirmish known as the Civil War broke out. In those days, the reason a park would feature a parade ground was not for public parades, like the one Macy’s throws every Thanksgiving. Parades of that stripe require streets. No, the parade ground in a park was designed as a large open field in which military divisions could assemble and drill, both for practicality’s sake and for public display.

  Olmsted despised the thought of his open meadow being used as a utility of wartime, for, as he asserted, the park was designed to serve as a refuge from such unpleasantness. He and Vaux wanted the worries of the world to be left behind when a person strolled into their park. Imagine, then, his delight when he and the park administrat
ors elected to populate the parade ground with a large flock of sheep. The sheep proved to be too much of an inconvenience for the soldiers but caught on immediately with the public and became a permanent fixture for many years, so that since that time the parade ground has been known much more pastorally as the Sheep Meadow. A stone building was constructed on the west end of the meadow in which the sheep would slumber at night. This building eventually became a pub and restaurant that is still open today called Tavern on the Green.

  To see their combined vision realized, Olmsted and Vaux slogged through countless battles with the park commissioners and the corrupt politicians of Tammany Hall, not to mention each other. At one point Olmsted grew so aggravated that he fled the city, indeed, he fled the Eastern Seaboard altogether to oversee a gold mine in California, and then took part in an early commission to convince the government that Yosemite should be preserved indefinitely by federal funds.

  Rubbing elbows with our old pal Theodore Roosevelt in their mutual epiphany that the government should be urged to preserve the most spectacular instances of wilderness in the West, Olmsted became one of our first outspoken environmentalists. His Yosemite address of 1865 was instrumental in getting that particular ball rolling, stating, “The establishment by the government of great public grounds for the free enjoyment of the people . . . is thus justified and enforced as a political duty.”

  He eventually had to be coaxed back to New York by Vaux, who dangled the carrot of a new park commission, this time in Brooklyn. Newly inspired by his travels in the West, Olmsted envisioned a small ravine and waterfall in what became known as Prospect Park, to mirror the epic splendor of Yosemite. Once again, the team had to completely fabricate the sense of a partially wooded, hilly terrain that would seem as if it has always been there. One specific display of gumption on the part of John Culyer, a lieutenant of Olmsted’s through many chapters, was his invention of a tree-moving machine that had the ability to grasp the tree trunk near its base and pull up on it, like one pulls a weed. Apparently, enough of a root ball would be retained to allow the trees to survive being moved to new locations. This allowed some of the more magnificent old growth to persevere, a most worthy cause indeed.