Genius of Place

by Justin Martin

  Vaux approached Olmsted about teaming up for the competition. It wasn’t the Downing association—that forgettable encounter in Newburgh years earlier—that drew Vaux to Olmsted. Neither was it his profile as a journalist, though Vaux had read Olmsted’s work and admired it. No, Vaux’s main reason for seeking out Olmsted was this: Viele’s topographic map was rumored to be highly inaccurate. As superintendent, Olmsted was intimately familiar with the terrain of the park, and that might just provide an edge in the competition.

  Olmsted was hesitant. He worried about the consequences if he entered a design contest that pitted him against Viele, his boss. Olmsted decided to consult him first. Viele merely shrugged. With that small, dismissive gesture, the partnership of Olmsted and Vaux was launched.

  For now, Olmsted kept his job as superintendent, and Vaux maintained his architectural practice downtown, at 358 Broadway. After the day was over, the pair worked into the night, frequently riding on horseback over acre upon acre of parkland. The grounds looked especially barren by moonlight. It was clear that they weren’t working with a proverbial blank canvas. No, this was something vastly inferior, a scarred and scraggly landscape that posed quandaries at every turn. “It would have been difficult to find another body of land,” Olmsted later recalled, “ . . . which possessed less of what we have seen to be the most desirable characteristics of a park.”

  Olmsted and Vaux began to puzzle out the first inklings of a design. Often, in what was to be a pattern throughout their long association, their discussions slid into heated argument. They made quite a team, a kind of diminutive duo: Vaux under five feet and Olmsted at five feet six inches (according to the crew manifest of the Ronaldson, the ship he sailed to China). Vaux was the trained architect (specializing in structures rather than landscapes). Olmsted was a jack of many, many trades.

  Though Olmsted hadn’t been aware of it, hadn’t had the ghost of a plan, his whole life to this point had been a sort of apprenticeship, preparation for this grand act. As a small boy, Olmsted had perched on his father’s saddle, enjoying “loitering journeys” through the Connecticut countryside. He had read the work of esoteric landscape theorists like William Gilpin and Uvedale Price at the tender age of nine. As a farmer, Olmsted had imported thousands of trees from Europe and developed an appreciation for plants in all their variety. His book Walks and Talks had shown him to be a keen observer of English parks, especially from the perspective of a visitor, a user of parks, if you will.

  Even his experience traveling through the South would inform his approach to the design contest. He’d concluded, as mentioned earlier, that an almost perfect correlation existed between slavery and cultural atrophy. Seeing the decrepitude of the South had prompted Olmsted to write the prescient letter, urging his friend Brace to “go ahead with the Children’s Aid and get up parks, gardens, music, dancing schools.” Now Olmsted was actually trying to “get up” a park. At a time of increased tension with the South, a park could showcase the superiority of the North.

  Most of all, Olmsted would approach this task as a social reformer. Park making was another opportunity for the activism that Olmsted had earlier applied to scientific farming or writing about the South. From the outset, he saw Central Park as a place of tranquillity for all the residents of the crowded metropolis. “The Park is intended to furnish healthful recreation,” he asserted, “for the poor and the rich, the young and the old, the vicious and the virtuous.”

  Olmsted had proved surprisingly able at the job for which he’d originally been hired—park superintendent. But designing a park was where his deepest talents lay.

  A large improvised table sat in the parlor of Vaux’s home at 136 East 18th Street. The table had been created by sliding several smaller tables together. When Olmsted and Vaux weren’t out surveying the real park, a proxy awaited them here, a ten-foot-long plan in progress. Deep into the night, Olmsted and Vaux pored over this plan obsessively, thinking about where to place certain features and details.

  Because of Central Park’s unfortunate shape, a rigid rectangle, it was desirable to convey visitors away from its sides. For their design, Olmsted and Vaux decided on a main entrance running from Fifth Avenue diagonally toward the middle of the park. They placed the promenade, the main stretch for strolling, on a further diagonal. Such touches were meant to subtly but firmly push visitors into the heart of the park as quickly as possible.

  Olmsted and Vaux also proposed to make the promenade really short, just one-quarter of a mile long. The pair wanted to avoid a classic grand promenade, stretching past formal gardens and traveling under marble archways. Such opulent touches smacked of European-style royalty. A short walkway would achieve an intimate scale, proper to the common person “who in the best sense is the true owner” of the park, as Olmsted put it.

  Olmsted and Vaux also planned a distinctly rural treatment for Central Park, a massive challenge. It meant utterly transforming this battered piece of land. Everywhere their plan called for trees, trees, and more trees. The short promenade was to be overhung by a canopy of elms. On the tops of hills, thick groves would stand. A screen of trees was to be planted around the entire periphery of the park. Tiny individual trees were drawn on the ten-foot plan in order to communicate this rural feel. These trees were generic, of no discernible breed, but thousands of them had to be sketched to fill up the blueprint, just as thousands would need to be planted to fill up the park.

  Whenever Vaux’s friends dropped by his home, they were invariably drafted into tree-drawing service. One of these was Jacob Wrey Mould, a fellow English-born architect. Mould was a flamboyant figure who managed to scandalize many in his circle by living with a woman out of wedlock. As an architect, he described himself as “Hell on Color.” His bold design for New York’s All Souls Church, featuring alternating stripes of red and yellow brick, earned his creation the sniggering nickname “Church of the Holy Zebra.” After Vaux designed the Fifth Avenue mansion of park commissioner John Gray, Mould had done the interior in a riot of color. In the future, Mould would play a huge role in the creation of Central Park. But at this juncture, he wasn’t sold on Olmsted and Vaux’s prospects for winning and confined his involvement mostly to sketching little trees.

  Along with Viele’s topographic map, every design contestant had been furnished with photographs of various points in the park to use for reference. These came from the studio of Mathew Brady, renowned for his photos of such American icons as John Audubon and Daniel Webster and later for his Civil War portraits.

  Olmsted and Vaux had a great idea. Why not include before and after images as part of their submission? The Brady photos, washed-out daguerreotypes of unlovely little tufts of land, perfectly captured the grim look of the current park. Vaux, in turn, did some studies in pencil and watercolor, suggesting what the same views would look like in the future if his and Olmsted’s plan was executed. Jervis McEntee—the notable painter and Vaux’s brother-in-law—also did some works in oil under Olmsted and Vaux’s direction. Mould created some images as well for the submission.

  The highlight of Olmsted and Vaux’s design was the treatment of the four mandatory roads that cut across the park. Supposedly, inspiration struck as the pair witnessed a horse-drawn ambulance cart, racing across Manhattan, bell furiously ringing. An innovation was needed, they realized, that would allow people to amble through the park without constant intrusion from the city in the form of traffic. Olmsted and Vaux proposed to sink the roads below ground level in eight-foot-deep channels. Fences would prevent pedestrians from falling into the channels, and scrims of hedges could, in turn, hide the fences. The upshot: Traffic could cross the park via invisible subterranean routes.

  In certain places, Olmsted and Vaux’s plan called for bridges of land across the roadway channels. This ensured that Central Park—already disrupted by two reservoirs and countless bursts of mica schist—wouldn’t be further carved up by roads. The sunken transverses were a brilliant solution, providing Olmsted and Vaux�
��s design with a sense of flow. Long stretches of meadow and broad vistas were now possible. Visitors could circulate more easily through the park, without having their view disrupted or mood punctured by a clattering dung cart. On top of everything, there was a practical benefit. The park could be closed at night, yet traffic could continue to use the sunken transverse roads.

  Olmsted and Vaux called their design the Greensward plan, greensward being an English term for an unbroken swath of land. They wrote an accompanying text, featuring detailed descriptions of the various design touches and discussion even of the philosophy underlying their choices.

  Whereas fellow contestants frequently accompanied their ten-foot blueprints with the barest annotations, Olmsted and Vaux crafted a kind of park maker’s manifesto. A particular theme, one that they sounded again and again in the Greensward text, was the necessity of delivering a design that would hold up for posterity. “Only twenty years ago Union Square was ‘out of town’; twenty years hence, the town will have enclosed the Central Park,” they wrote. “Let us consider, therefore, what will at that time be satisfactory, for it is then that the design will have to be really judged.”

  By late in the afternoon of March 31, 1858, the due date, Olmsted and Vaux were still putting the finishing touches on their submission. They rushed to the Arsenal, an old munitions depot on the park grounds being used as an office by the commissioners. The doors were locked. But they were able to get the attention of a janitor by pounding on the door. Olmsted and Vaux left their entry with the janitor. The board had already received the other thirty-two submissions but wouldn’t receive theirs until the next day. Technically, they had missed the deadline.

  Olmsted and Vaux still won. Their plan, logged in as entry number 33, received first-place votes from seven of the eleven commissioners.

  Among historians, a convention holds that Olmsted and Vaux came out of nowhere to win a public design competition. This is far from the truth. Obviously, they were already an extremely accomplished team, even if—in Olmsted’s case—the accomplishments were in completely different fields. Clearly, they devised a unique and compelling design. But they helped their cause still further with a highly polished submission.

  In the ten-foot blueprint, Vaux’s skill as a draftsman shines through. Then there are the before and after images, something no other contestant thought to do. Here, they enlisted the aid of McEntee, the Hudson River School painter, and the talented Jacob Wrey Mould. There’s also the rich and descriptive text, accompanying the Greensward plan. Olmsted and Vaux even went so far as to have this document professionally printed by Wm. C. Bryant & Company, a press owned by the New York Post editor.

  Olmsted and Vaux had the best plan and the best presentation by far. Their rivals didn’t stand a chance. One of the competing plans proposed to turn Central Park into a living map, composed of meadows shaped like the world’s continents. The problem of representing the vast oceans would be solved by filling in a few swamps and dubbing them “Atlantic,” “Pacific,” and so on. Another plan was a collection of little green spaces named after founding fathers, including Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, and Adams.

  There was a heavy emphasis on fountainry among the competing entries. The centerpiece of a plan dubbed “The Eagle” was a stack of thirteen star-shaped basins, representing the original U.S. colonies. On top perched a huge statuary eagle, water ushering from its beak and cascading from basin to basin, like a tower of champagne glasses at a wedding. Another plan proposed a grand fountain spewing a jet of water 125 feet into the air.

  Viele simply resubmitted his existing plan without making a single change. “Commonplace and tasteless” is how Clarence Cook, a critic for the New York Times, described it at the time. There was also a mysterious submission, logged as entry number 2. Tucked inside an envelope was a single piece of paper, unsigned and featuring a drawing of a pyramid. Almost certainly, this was a second, anonymous, submission by Viele. After Viele died, he was laid to rest in the graveyard at West Point inside a large pyramid-shaped mausoleum of his own design.

  The contest guidelines contained a laundry list of mandatory features: the prospect tower, exhibition hall, three separate playgrounds, and so on. Another mistake, made by most of the contestants, was following this prescription to the letter. This resulted in frenetic park plans, with the grounds chopped up into many different sections for discrete activities. Olmsted and Vaux simply ignored elements they didn’t wish to include in their plan. As a result, they achieved a cleanness and continuity of design utterly lacking in the competing submissions. The pair found all kinds of creative ways to excuse their omissions.

  For example, they didn’t want a prospect tower. In the Greensward plan’s text, they proposed tabling the design of any such feature until some grand historic event presented a tie-in opportunity. “If, as is not improbable, the transatlantic telegraph is brought to a favorable issue while the park is in an early stage of construction,” they wrote, “many reasons could, we think, be urged for commemorating the event by some such monument.” Olmsted and Vaux’s refusal to include all the mandatory elements had zero consequences. And a prospect tower was never built in Central Park.

  The contest rules also called for a parade ground of 20 to 40 acres. The Greensward plan included one that occupied just 25 acres, near the minimum. For this feature, some of the competitors—particularly those with a military background—set aside the maximum 40 acres. Viele went above and beyond, allotting roughly 50. Among other things, a parade ground would furnish a place where soldiers might drill. Olmsted felt strongly that a park would be a great showcase for the civility that prevailed in the nonslaveholding North. But if tensions continued, if war broke out, as was looking increasingly likely, he resolutely did not want the park to be a training ground for troops.

  Olmsted and Vaux split the $2,000 purse. They had won the competition by laying out an uncompromising vision, and now they were ready to bring that vision to life.

  But this was New York, and in New York nothing ever gets done easily. Just one week after Olmsted and Vaux were declared the winners, they encountered serious objections from two members of the Central Park board. Robert Dillon was a politician who had recently served two terms as New York City’s corporation counsel. August Belmont, the newest member of the board, had earlier served as American representative of the Rothschild banking empire and had built a vast fortune in his own right. Both men were Democrats, and per the party’s political leanings in this era, both were deeply conservative.

  Dillon and Belmont proposed seventeen separate amendments to the Greensward plan. The pair proposed scrapping Olmsted and Vaux’s masterstroke, the sunken transverses, on the grounds that they might fill up with snow during the winter. They also demanded that more ample equestrian paths be added to the design. This was at the behest of Belmont, in particular, as he was a horse racing aficionado. The Belmont Stakes, the third leg of thoroughbred racing’s Triple Crown, is named after him.

  Dillon and Belmont’s most far-reaching suggestion was replacing Olmsted and Vaux’s modest walkway with a truly grand promenade, running nearly the entire length of the park. Along the way, a wire suspension bridge would connect the tops of the two receiving reservoirs, features Dillon and Belmont described as “jewels of the Park.” In their conception, the reservoirs, as engineering marvels, would become the focal point.

  A full-on aesthetic clash was under way. Olmsted and Vaux had designed a rural-style park, in keeping with enduring notions that extended from the founding fathers to Emerson to Andrew Jackson Downing to the Hudson School painters, namely, that the countryside was the source of the soul’s replenishment. By contrast, cities were morally suspect. “Cities are great sores,” Thomas Jefferson once said. A proper city park, then, should provide escape from the city.

  “It is one great purpose of the Park,” declared Olmsted, defending the Greensward plan before the board, “to supply to the hundreds of thousands of tired workers, who h
ave 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.”

  Dillon and Belmont had very different ideas. They thought that a city park should celebrate the wonders of city life. What’s more, they worried that the transition from urban New York to a rural-style park would be jarring. “The contrast will be sudden and violent,” they argued, “—the effect, we apprehend, will be grotesque.” Dillon and Belmont were powerful men, used to getting their way. They purchased “cards”—a forerunner of the advertorial—in papers such as the New York Post. They used their space to take swipes at the Greensward plan.

  Olmsted fought back. His journalism experience may have rendered him too impractical for an ideal park super, but as a park designer it came in handy. Olmsted had influential friends. Olmsted invited Henry Raymond (his Times editor for the Southern dispatches) and Charles Dana (a Tribune editor who had been one of Putnam’s secret staffers) to meet him at a large boulder in the southern end of the park. The two editors fired up cigars. Olmsted then proceeded to point out elements of his and Vaux’s design that would be damaged by Dillon and Belmont’s plan. Both papers ran articles sympathetic to Olmsted’s point of view.

  Olmsted gave a personal park tour to Richard Grant White, another onetime Putnam’s employee, now editor of the New York Courier and Enquirer . Afterward, White wrote a staunch defense of the Greensward plan: “It is not only so beautiful in its grand outlines and its details, but so complete, symmetrical, and consistent with itself, that it can hardly be changed in any essential point.” And he added a word in Olmsted’s defense: “Once a practical farmer, he has traveled extensively . . . and has seen and carefully studied all the great parks in the world. He presents the rare spectacle of the right man in the right place.”