Genius of Place

by Justin Martin

  To achieve this involved radically rethinking Central Park’s circulation system. Olmsted and Vaux laid out intricate exchanges where riding paths swung clear of carriage roads, and pedestrian walkways traveled over and underneath them both. This system benefited all visitors, but especially pedestrians. It meant a person could meander through the park, absentmindedly or caught up in an idyll, without any possibility of coming upon a horse.

  To create this separation of ways, Vaux had to design a slew of new structures. The original Greensward plan called for just nine bridges. Now he embarked on a series of thirty-four bridges and archways, completed between 1859 and 1865. Vaux’s designs were stunning and stunningly varied: Some were rustic and some classical; some used cast iron and others marble. He gave particular consideration to the way pedestrians might experience these creations.

  Walking underneath a bridge, a person is in a dark tunnel looking out into a lighted area. Ahead, the opening forms a kind of frame. Vaux oriented his bridges and shaped their arches to play off the surrounding scenery. Many of the framed views were designed to be reminiscent of vivid Hudson River School landscapes, only fitting, given Vaux’s personal credo: “Nature first, second, and third—architecture after a while.”

  The Central Park board also demanded that a bridge be built across the Lake. To cross this body of water required a long bridge, a suspension bridge, though nothing like the wire behemoth that Dillon and Belmont had proposed. Vaux created his Bow Bridge, so gloriously low-slung that it nearly kisses its own reflection in the water below.

  Around this time, Central Park began to receive its first reviews. The press treated the project like the debut of a symphony or the unveiling of a painting. This was a major artwork, and the reviews, as they began to roll in, tended to be unqualified raves. “Vast and beautiful ... majestic,” said the New York Times. “A royal work . . . the beau-ideal of a people’s pleasure ground,” announced the Atlantic. But Olmsted and Vaux felt that the most satisfying assessment was contained in a comment by Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune. On first visiting Central Park, he took one look around and pronounced: “Well, they have let it alone a good deal more than I thought they would.”

  As Central Park evolved, people besides Olmsted and Vaux became intimately involved. Ignaz Pilat was the park’s head gardener. Born in Austria, Pilat had served as director of Vienna’s botanical gardens and worked in Venice as a gardener before fleeing to the United States during the political troubles of 1848. Olmsted had a great eye for picking what tree or flower should go where. He was a master at foliage composition. But Pilat’s talent was the actual planting. Pilat was skilled at maintaining soil and pruning limbs and killing weeds, everything necessary to ensure these trees and flowers grew. Incredibly, between 1859 and 1863, Pilat oversaw the planting of an estimated 240,000 trees in Central Park.

  Anton Gerster was a Hungarian carpenter who executed Vaux’s designs for wooden structures in the park. Vaux sketched these by the dozen: fences, birdhouses, boat landings, and pergolas. Gerster gave these a raw and rustic treatment, selecting gnarly pieces of wood, only partially stripping away the bark. But there was intent behind everything this master carpenter did. Many of the designs featured trellises, and soon Vaux and Gerster’s structures were hung thickly with vines—wisteria, honeysuckle, and wild grape.

  Jacob Wrey Mould, who drew trees and contributed some images to the original Greensward submission, signed on as Vaux’s assistant once the park got under way. Like Olmsted, Mould was multitalented. He was an organist, spoke several languages, and translated a number of opera librettos into English.

  Where Vaux was a study in understatement, Mould was like an unchecked id, and in select parts of the park’s design, he was allowed to run free. Mould designed a bandstand for Dodworth’s orchestra that was so maniacally polychromatic that a contemporary guidebook’s attempt to recount his color choices—“red-brown line; indigo-blue moulding; gilt moulding; red-brown line; green line”—drags on for a full fat paragraph. (The bandstand was torn down in 1922.)

  Mould’s greatest work in Central Park would come a couple years hence, during the early 1860s, when he contributed a set of stone carvings to the terrace that leads down to the Bethesda fountain. The carvings are seemingly boundless in their variety—an open Bible, a sheath of wheat, pine cones, a witch on a broomstick—and each renders a little story in stone that is, by turn, naturalistic, allegorical, or merely whimsical. A rooster on the east side of the terrace corresponds to an owl on the west, an allegory of day and night. A pair of ice skates hidden among the carvings alludes to the skating frenzy.

  And then, there’s Andrew Green. Unlike Pilat, Gerster, and Mould, Green was neither an artist nor an artisan. But his influence on the park’s creation would prove equally profound. Green was a prominent New York lawyer and member of the Central Park board. He was also an unmarried teetotaler who loved Milton and read the Bible every day. Despite being one of the more conservative commissioners, Green had pushed hard for the adoption of the Greensward plan. Olmsted and Green had even developed a kind of uneasy friendship. Every other week, bachelor Green was in the habit of joining Olmsted for Sunday-evening dinner. Secretly, Olmsted thought Green something of a ponderous windbag. Green liked to hold forth on politics, a subject on which he and Olmsted couldn’t be further apart. Olmsted had the distinct sense that Green was schooling him, spooling out political discourse meant to instruct him on how the world really worked. First Viele, now Green: Olmsted was ever on the alert for the mere hint that someone thought him too much the aesthete, not sufficiently a pragmatist.

  Over time, the tension between these two would only grow. Green began to have serious issues with how the project was taking shape. Olmsted’s unslakable demand for trees, Vaux’s twenty-five extra bridges, a color-crazed bandstand—all of this cost money, and by the summer of 1859, the construction of Central Park had already run double the original $1.5 million budget. By some estimates, the project was going to come in at upwards of $8 million.

  What of Mary? What about Mary Perkins Olmsted, brother John’s widow? In the years since John’s death, she had been traveling in a vast geographic spiral, slow and sad, stretching across two continents and an ocean. That first winter, Mary and her three small children had gone to Switzerland. Then it was on to Boston for a while, to live with her relatives, and to Hartford, visiting Olmsted’s father. From there, she moved to Staten Island, returning to Tosomock Farm, where she had spent her years as a newlywed. But there were too many old memories and ahead loomed another winter and the possibility of being stranded on a farm, so Mary just kept on moving, her spiral growing ever tighter.

  Mary was a tiny woman, less than five feet. She was sharp-witted, per the knives poem, and there was also a marked toughness about her. Mary had dealt with great loss before—she had been orphaned as a child—and she was nothing if not a survivor.

  She moved to Manhattan and took a place on 79th Street, one of the only paved streets that far uptown back then. It was right down the way from Wagstaff House, where Olmsted worked. Mary signed a lease agreement, and Olmsted served as a witness.

  Olmsted had had a curious quasi flirtation with Mary before she had married his brother. “Just the thing for a rainy day” is how he once described her to Kingsbury, “not to fall in love with, but to talk with.” After a string of youthful setbacks, Olmsted had resigned himself to never getting married.

  But things had a way of coming to Olmsted. Now came Mary, borne on sadness. John’s dying words to him had been: “Don’t let Mary suffer while you are alive.”

  On June 13, 1859, Frederick Law Olmsted and Mary Perkins Olmsted were married in Central Park. The small ceremony took place in a house on Bogardus Hill. She brought three children to the marriage, John Charles (age six), Charlotte (age four), and Owen (nearly two). Olmsted would adopt his brother’s children and raise them as his own.

  Olmsted asked the board to allow him and his new fami
ly to move into Mount St. Vincent, a recently vacated Catholic convent at roughly 109th Street, in what then as now was the northern less-developed section of Central Park. Vaux and his family planned to move in, too. The convent had several large, glass-enclosed galleries where the children could play, even on a chilly day. There were so many children now: Mary’s three and Vaux’s three, Downing, Bowyer, and the infant, Julia.

  Olmsted and Vaux had created Central Park, and now they intended to live in their own majestic creation.

  CHAPTER 13

  Growling Green

  FOR OLMSTED, EVEN newlywed bliss proved fleeting. He was thirty-seven years old, and Mary twenty-nine, with the weight of recent sorrow and children thrown into the bargain, so even at the outset their union was no frolic. They didn’t take a honeymoon—a tradition that was only just beginning at this time. Instead, they spent their first months together tending their brood through constant illness. “There is not one of us in moderate health,” Olmsted wrote his father, “and never less than three that need careful nursing & bolstering.” Charley (Olmsted’s nickname for little John Charles) was suffering from some kind of eye condition. Charlotte developed a rash and was covered in sores. Mary, he reported, was distracted by a “multitude of anxieties.” But he tried to put the best face on his account, adding: “We have a good deal of happiness between the drops; that’s a fact.”

  By September 1859, Olmsted had fallen ill as well, suffering from a crushing bout of insomnia and depression. Two years of ceaseless effort on Central Park, and he had worked himself into a state. “I feel just thoroughly worn-out, used up, fatigued beyond recovery, an older man than you,” he wrote his father. He went to Saratoga Springs for a week of recuperation but returned feeling no better. For another week, he simply lay on a sofa, doing nothing. Mary read to him. And he ingested a variety of substances including mercury, quinine, “bitters,” and “effervescents”—the last two items being lingo of the day for medicinal spirits.

  It’s curious—perhaps telling—that Olmsted suffered this breakdown only months into his marriage. It’s also tempting to tag Olmsted with a mental-illness diagnosis. The periods of frantic activity followed by stuporous lows are in keeping with the condition now known as bipolar disorder. Then again, he suffered from so many different conditions during his lifetime: chronic insomnia, hypochondria, crippling anxiety, a periodic and unexplained ringing in his ears. There’s also the puzzling poisonsumac blindness incident from age fourteen, which would be echoed later in his life. Taken together, Olmsted was a bouillabaisse of symptoms.

  Because notions about mental health were so different, Olmsted is best understood in the context of his times. He was a person who periodically slipped into a variety of tumultuous emotional states. During the nineteenth century, this was understood as the wages of life, especially for people of a sensitive, artistic temperament. There were even conventions in place for managing such tumult. Society allowed people to have full-on breakdowns in which they temporarily retreated from life (to a sanitarium, if they had the means) and then returned to the world, renewed.

  The Central Park commissioners voted to send Olmsted on a trip to Europe and even advanced him $500 for expenses. The board’s motive was hydra-headed. The trip was meant as a rest cure to ensure that Olmsted could complete Central Park. It was also a bonus, a reward for the excellent job he had done so far. Officially, the trip was billed as an ideagathering mission, a chance for Olmsted to visit various European parks and collect insights for use back home. Of course, the construction of Central Park was well along, and what hadn’t been done had been planned. The time for gathering design inspiration was long past.

  In addition to all that, a lengthy trip furnished the opportunity for a palace coup. The board was considering some changes in the way the park project was managed. They were the final authority: They could do as they pleased, when they pleased. Still, the planned changes would be easier to accomplish while Olmsted was deposed from Central Park, even if only temporarily.

  On September 28, 1859, Olmsted set sail from New York for Liverpool aboard the Persia. Three people—Mary, Vaux, and Olmsted’s father—accompanied him to the pier. After seeing him off, the three boarded a Staten Island-bound ferry, and Mary convinced the captain to break from his usual course, instead steering the ferry in a wide arc around Olmsted’s ship as it headed out to sea. Mary could see passengers arranged along the ship’s railing, tiny specks, and she spotted one she thought might be Olmsted. She waved.

  During the voyage, Olmsted was bemused by the mundane way passengers passed their time, mostly playing cards. He remained in his cabin, working on the index of his book A Journey in the Back Country. But he did go above deck occasionally to study the sea and to watch the sailors at work. This was work with which he was quite familiar.

  Olmsted sent Mary a letter from the Persia, addressed “Dear little woman at home,” and included an account, meant for Charley’s benefit, of the ocean life he’d spotted: “Tell Charly [sic] I saw five whales, altogether, snorting and turning somersets (so it looked) in the water. Lots of birds, floating and flying, and once, a little sparrow, several hundred miles from land, too tired to move more, dropped on deck and allowed itself to be caught. It is alive—and the sailors keeping it.”

  On October 11, Olmsted arrived at Liverpool. He visited Birkenhead Park, a place he had first seen during his 1850 walking tour of England and one that influenced the design of Central Park.

  Then Olmsted, so recently languishing on a sofa, went off like a slingshot. He visited the Derby Arboretum, the gardens at Chatsworth, the Forest of Windsor. He went to Aston Park and the Birmingham Botanical Gardens. Over the next few weeks, he would visit dozens of parks and gardens in six different countries, taking in some of Europe’s finest examples of landscaping.

  Olmsted didn’t confine his activities to mere grounds walking. In Birmingham, he met with an engineer and arranged for a tour of the sewerage and filtering works. Birmingham’s mayor furnished Olmsted with details and statistics on policing the city’s parks. In London, he conducted a lengthy interview with Sir Richard Mayne, commissioner of the police force. Once again, Olmsted obtained details on the methods for policing a large city park.

  Word of Olmsted’s Central Park feat had reached England. As a consequence, the superintendents of all of London’s public parks were placed at his disposal. He visited Hyde Park, St. James’s Park, and the other West End parks, some of them again and again. He obtained the plans for all of them.

  The weather was terrible; it rained virtually nonstop. After a day’s delay, waiting for gale-force winds to subside, Olmsted crossed the Channel to France, where rain continued unabated. He visited parks in Versailles and Saint-Cloud, along with the Jardin du Luxembourg. He met with Jean-Charles Adolphe Alphand, an engineer playing a crucial role in Napoléon III’s renovation of Paris. Among other things, Alphand had overseen the recent transformation of the Bois de Boulogne from a forest into a landscaped park. During two weeks in Paris, Olmsted visited the Bois de Boulogne on eight separate occasions. He then went to Brussels and Munich and Lille, an industrial town in northern France, known for it boulevards and squares.

  Then it was back to England, where news of Central Park awaited. While Olmsted was abroad, Mary had completed the planned move, and his new family was now living at Mount St. Vincent. Something else had happened during his trip: On October 6, while Olmsted was traveling on the Persia, the board had elected Andrew Green to the newly created position of comptroller. It would fall to Green to get the park’s runaway budget under control.

  Even in Olmsted’s absence, bachelor Green had continued his practice of fortnightly dining at the Olmsted household. With his recent promotion, Mary found him more insufferable than ever. “I must confess he frets me with his manner of thinking himself so much more efficient than you or anybody else,” she wrote in a letter that reached Olmsted in England. Another letter from Mary, dated exactly two weeks later and f
ollowing another Green dinner, stated simply, “Green here.... He growled a great deal.”

  Olmsted also received a letter from Vaux. “Upon my word Olmsted,” wrote Vaux, “I will not forgive you if you do not make a better show.” He chided Olmsted for lately cutting such a “lugubrious sallow bloodless figure,” before adding a curious line: “I consider that the only thing to be really regretted in our last two years operations is the absence of jollity.”

  Absence of jollity. While creating something of beauty, Vaux seemed to imply, Olmsted hadn’t experienced any joy himself. Why, he hadn’t even gone ice skating on the Lake. But now matters were spinning out of control. Green was ascending, and Olmsted would need to be focused for a possible battle ahead. Buck up was the message of Olmsted’s worried partner.

  News of Green’s power grab disturbed Olmsted. But there was nothing to be done at 3,500 miles’ remove, so he continued his tour full-tilt, visiting Biddulph Grange, Elvaston Castle, and Stoneleigh Abbey, followed by the Crystal Palace, Charlecote Park, and Trentham, which featured what he deemed the “best private garden in England.”