Genius of Place

by Justin Martin

  Olmsted met with Samuel Parsons, a Queens, New York, nurseryman who was in England on a tree-buying mission for Central Park. He dropped by a bookseller and purchased four titles: Forest Planter, Parks of London, Sowerby’s Farms and Farm Allies, and John Ruskin’s The Two Paths: Being Lectures on Art and Its Application to Decoration and Manufacture . As an ardent admirer of Ruskin, the celebrated British social critic, Olmsted was pleased to get a copy of The Two Paths, hot off the presses, and based on lectures Ruskin had delivered during the previous two years.

  Olmsted also commissioned pioneering photographer Roger Fenton to take some pictures. Fenton’s images of the recent Crimean War had shocked the British public, just as Mathew Brady’s of the Civil War would shock Americans. Fenton’s spare Valley of the Shadow of Death—featuring no soldiers, only spent cannonballs in the aftermath of battle—is considered the seminal war photo. For Olmsted, Fenton took forty-eight pictures of Regent’s Park.

  After a visit to Dublin for one last flash of green, Phoenix Park, Olmsted traveled to Cork, where he boarded a Cunard liner headed home.

  During his earlier 1850 trip, Olmsted had been a rambling farmer. He had returned as a park maker, viewing the landscape through fresh eyes. The mass of ideas he gathered would swirl around in his fertile brain for years to come, furnishing creative sparks for future designs.

  Olmsted arrived home just before Christmas, 1859. He brought a dress from Paris for Mary and a silver spoon for Vaux’s infant daughter, Julia—a gift from Vaux’s sister, who lived in London. “I return with greatly improved health,” announced Olmsted.

  Back at Central Park, Olmsted waited for the other shoe to fall. Green was the new comptroller, but that didn’t seem to have any consequences just yet. Olmsted returned to work, drawing on the one part of his new store of park knowledge that had immediate application—policing. This had long been an area of focus—some would say obsession—for Olmsted. As he had once told the board: “A large part of the people of New York are ignorant of a park, properly so-called. They will need to be trained in the proper use of it, to be restrained in the abuse of it.” Olmsted may have envisioned Central Park as a haven of democracy. But a public park, as he was keenly aware, also needed to be protected against the public.

  Before his Europe trip, Olmsted had organized a security detail known as the park keepers. More than fifty of them were hired, and their $1.50-a-day salaries were paid directly out of the Central Park budget. Olmsted’s force, derisively called “sparrow cops,” wore gray uniforms with brass buttons and gloves, distinguishing them from New York City police officers, who wore blue. The keepers maintained strict discipline, not speaking to the public unless spoken to first.

  During 1859, Central Park had an estimated 2 million visitors. The park keepers made 228 arrests for infractions ranging from drunkenness to loitering to assault. No murders happened in the park in 1859; there would be only a couple during the first three decades of the park’s history. Still, despite crime’s relative rarity, anyone apprehended by a park keeper faced severe punishment. One of the first arrests was a man who had stolen a pair of ice skates. To make an example of him, a judge sentenced the man to thirty days in jail.

  After conferring with an assortment of English constables during his trip, Olmsted appears to have opted for a complete turnabout to a more passive policing strategy. He returned to America convinced that the keepers’ hostile demeanor toward the public had actually been counterproductive. The mere presence of the keepers in the park should serve as a crime deterrent. Beyond that, Olmsted concluded, it probably made more sense for the keepers to concentrate on something like community outreach—call it park outreach. The force’s new responsibilities, as spelled out in a notice Olmsted posted, were to “direct strangers to different parts of the park, to instruct them as to distances, size, purposes, costs &c. of different objects in the park.”

  Making arrests was downplayed; there would be fewer than 100 in each of the next five years. Park keepers were now closer to park rangers. Olmsted even devised quizzes for his force to make sure they were properly versed in the park’s latest features and aware of arcane trivia—just in case they were asked.

  How, then, to make sure rules were enforced? Signs. Olmsted installed signs, hundreds of signs. One of the most ubiquitous was the following:Central Park Visitors are Warned

  Not to walk upon the grass; (except of the Commons)

  Not to pick any flowers, leaves, twigs, fruits or nuts;

  Not to deface, scratch or mark the seats or other constructions;

  Not to throw stones or other missiles;

  Not to annoy the birds;

  Not to publicly use provoking or indecent language;

  Not to offer any articles for sale.

  Disregard of the above warnings, or any acts of disorder, subject the offender

  to arrest and fine or imprisonment.

  Olmsted was finding that he had a knack for park administration just as much as park making. He posted speed limits: five miles per hour for carriages, six for horses. And he also set aside designated spots where visitors could leave carriages, an innovation that he was among the first to employ. In fact, the innovation was so cutting-edge that no term for it yet existed, so Olmsted called these spots “carriage rests.” During the twentieth century, planners would also need a place where an automobile could be left, and some anonymous wordsmith finally dreamed up a suitable term—parking space.

  Green began to growl again. Olmsted had known that it would be only a matter of time, and soon enough his nemesis was all over him. Green stripped Olmsted of his $200 a week in discretionary spending and instituted a new rule that any proposed expenditures had to first be run past him.

  When Olmsted requested $28 for a new red signal ball for ice skating, Green questioned the expense. When Olmsted requested money for some additional rock blastings, Green asked whether such work was necessary or “merely desirable.” Soon their never-easy friendship had devolved into a series of petty memo battles, such as the following exchange.

  Green composed a memo, complaining that some willow trees had been cut down without his approval: “It is quite expensive to get trees on the Park, and I hope nothing in shape of a tree will be cut.”

  “None were cut except as I had designated—worthless of course,” wrote Olmsted.

  Then Green again: “I recollect the willows very well, and do not agree with you that they were worthless. I think they should have been preserved.”

  Green was actually a very able administrator. Years in the future, he would serve as comptroller for the City of New York, helping untangle the financial mess left behind by the notorious Tweed administration. He was also a tireless advocate for consolidating outlying communities such as Brooklyn and Staten Island into New York City proper, something that happened in 1898. Green had also backed up Olmsted in his fight against Dillon and Belmont. Though Olmsted refused to see it, Green truly had in mind the best interests of the park, an undertaking currently headed for a budget cliff. But it was Green’s manner that irritated Olmsted mightily.

  Olmsted was aware that he was creating something grand—the reviews were rolling in, and the park was packed with visitors—and he didn’t appreciate having some bureaucrat pinching pennies. Green, in turn, picked up on this attitude and was bent on teaching Olmsted a real-world lesson. Green was all for art. Run out of money, though, and you could say good-bye to art.

  When a paycheck was erroneously issued to a Central Park employee who had actually been absent from work, Green dashed off yet another memo: “Although an error is not a crime, yet in money matters it is a very serious affair.” To Olmsted, this was just one more piece of galling Green pedantry.

  A welcome diversion arrived on June 14, 1860. “Just in the earliest flush of dawn,” Olmsted wrote his father, “—the birds all singing—the boy came, with a great cry.”

  Although Mary already had a child named John Charles (Charley), the newborn was ch
ristened John Theodore, after Olmsted’s brother. He weighed ten and a half pounds, huge for a tiny woman like Mary. This was Fred’s first child, and he was delighted that the baby had “a three cornered nose and other ‘Olmsted’ marks, which Mary sees better than I do.”

  John Theodore was delivered at home with a doctor in attendance. The extended family at Mount St. Vincent—Vaux’s children, too—were delighted by the new addition, well, all except Charlotte, who had been counting on a baby sister. It had been far and away Mary’s hardest labor. She rested comfortably now. She described her newborn as a “young pugilist.”

  With a new baby in the household, Olmsted began casting about for additional work besides Central Park. He had another mouth to feed, but the far greater motivator seems to have been his innate restlessness. Even in the midst of a vast undertaking, even with a newborn, Olmsted had a surfeit of capacity, and he simply had to find an outlet. What’s more, he was drawn to the prospect of working with someone, anyone, besides Green.

  Vaux joined Olmsted in looking for extra work. Throughout the Central Park project, he had maintained his architectural office on Broadway, though his practice had gone moribund. In pursuing new commissions, the pair worked out of this office rather than the Central Park office so as to avoid any impropriety. As a moonlighting job, Olmsted and Vaux designed the grounds of the Hillside Cemetery in Middletown, New York. They also did some work for a government commission, providing recommendations on how the streets above 155th (a part of Manhattan left off the 1811 grid) should be laid out. Their report was never even published. But the project is notable because in correspondence the client refers to Olmsted and Vaux as “landscape architects.”

  Working on Central Park, they had certainly acted in this capacity. But so far—during a two-year association featuring thousands of pieces of correspondence and thousands of newspaper articles—Olmsted and Vaux had never once been referred to as “landscape architects.” This was a first. Several more years would pass—and there would be some serious convolutions along the way—before the two settled into a formal partnership working in this capacity.

  There was also the prospect of park work in Brooklyn. Vaux accompanied James Stranahan, a businessman and civic booster, to look at sites. New York City had its Central Park, and Stranahan was keen on keeping pace in the nearby but separate city of Brooklyn. He and Vaux visited a number of potential sites, but Vaux didn’t find any of them suitable for a park.

  Yet another sideline was designing the grounds surrounding a couple of mental institutions, the Retreat for the Insane in Hartford, Connecticut, and the Bloomingdale Asylum in New York City, on the current site of Columbia University. Olmsted and Vaux partnered on both these, but the designs reflect Olmsted’s singular vision. This was an area of special interest for him.

  As a boy, Olmsted had read Solitude, a book by Swiss physician Johann Georg Zimmermann that discussed the powerful ability of scenery to ease a person’s melancholy. Growing up in Hartford, Olmsted had also been exposed to the ideas of the Reverend Horace Bushnell. Bushnell frequently preached about something called “unconscious influence.” This was the reverend’s term for the striking ways that people’s spiritual states can be shaped by their environments. Bushnell had been the Brace family’s minister, though not the Olmsteds’—stepmother Mary Ann Olmsted considered his views too radical. But Olmsted was familiar with Bushnell and even once asked Brace to send him some of the minister’s writings on “unconscious influence.”

  Now, called upon to landscape a couple of mental institutions, Olmsted drew on the ideas he’d been exposed to in youth. The Hartford Retreat had been just the third asylum in the United States when it opened in 1824. John Olmsted had donated money to help get it started. Over the years, the grounds had become overgrown with trees and shrubbery.

  Olmsted’s plan called for clearing the grounds to create a wide-open meadow that rolled gently down toward the Connecticut River in the distance. Unlike Central Park, he aimed for a minimum of drama—no passages of scenery, no hulking specimen trees, branches snaking out, leaves vibrating with color. To enclose the meadow, he proposed a simple scrim of trees. This would shut out sights and sounds from the nearby city.

  John Butler, the Hartford Retreat’s superintendent, was thrilled when he received the plan. He grasped immediately that the design was meant to, as Butler put it, “Kill out the Lunatic Hospital and develop the Home.”

  As an avowed social reformer, Olmsted took the plight of the mentally ill very seriously, a stark contrast to many of his nineteenth-century contemporaries. And as a person who suffered a variety of torturous mental states, Olmsted had a deep empathy for fellow sufferers. This, in turn, lent him preternatural insight when designing asylum grounds.

  In the years ahead, Olmsted would frequently take on mental-institution commissions. Invariably, his designs would seek to provide a sense of calm, a feeling so sorely lacking in his own life.

  CHAPTER 14

  Swans

  ON AUGUST 6, 1860, Olmsted took a ride in an open buggy through upper Manhattan, accompanied by Mary and the baby, John Theodore. His buggy was harnessed to a horse that he was looking to buy.

  Exhausted from overwork, per usual, Olmsted fell asleep. The reins slipped from his hands. The horse bolted. Olmsted snapped to and seized the reins, but as the buggy whipped around a corner, one of its wheels rolled over the base of a lamppost. The buggy upended, and all three passengers were thrown clear. Mary landed on her back, clutching the baby to her chest. Miraculously, both were unharmed. But Olmsted was dashed against an outcropping of rock.

  He lay in the road, writhing in pain, his shattered left thighbone jutting through a tear in his pants. Mary raced to a nearby house for help. In a bizarre coincidence, the house belonged to Charles Trask, fifth wheel of the “uncommon set.” Olmsted hadn’t seen him in years. Trask’s wife removed a large shutter from her house’s window, and the shutter was carried out to the street where Olmsted lay. Bystanders lifted him onto the shutter, an improvised stretcher, and carried him into the Trask house.

  Doctors were summoned, among them Willard Parker, a onetime teacher of Olmsted’s brother John, yet another coincidence. It quickly became clear that this was a very serious injury. Olmsted’s left thigh was broken in three places. Amputation was an option, but after conferring, the doctors agreed that his condition was too precarious. The procedure would surely kill him. Left alone, he might live for a week. The next morning, Olmsted, carried into the Trask house on a shutter, was carried out on a bier and back to Mount St. Vincent to die. Dr. Parker put Olmsted’s odds of survival at one in one hundred.

  But he lived through a day. Then another and another. On the eighth day following the accident, little John Theodore died. The date—August 14, 1860—was his three-month birthday. The official cause was infant cholera. In Fred’s and Mary’s minds, these two events—the carriage crash and the death of their baby—would forever be linked. How could they not be? Mary was inconsolable. She took to her bed and remained there for days, racked by excruciating headaches and incalculable grief.

  Within ten days of his accident, just two days after John Theodore’s death, Olmsted was back on the job. Following the loss of his brother, work had proved a balm for Olmsted, and so it would again, following the loss of his brother’s namesake. Slowly, painfully, he arranged himself into a sitting position on the floor of his bedroom. Then he pored over a set of Central Park maps, arrayed before him.

  Very soon, Olmsted was moving around in the world again. His left leg—so severely damaged that it would remain two inches shorter for the rest of his life—was set with a splint and bandaged tightly from hip to toe. Employees carried him from place to place in Central Park on a makeshift litter. Sometimes it was necessary for Olmsted to examine a park feature not so easily accessed in a litter. The attendants would lower him to the ground. Then Olmsted would use his hands and his one good leg to propel himself awkwardly through the underbrush, his woun
ded and bandaged leg outstretched and dragging behind. It was an arduous, excruciating form of locomotion.

  Olmsted was doubly anxious to get back to work because Green had assumed his responsibilities following the accident. Olmsted didn’t want to lose control of Central Park. Green, for his part, was remarkably unsympathetic to everything Olmsted had just endured. Friends sent Olmsted bottles of wine and books and awkward notes of condolence. “Whilst expressing my deep regret for the Calamity which has again befallen you,” begins a note from an engineer employed at the park.

  There is no record of Green sending anything. By now, thanks to the memo battles, the park’s precarious finances, and the ceaseless sniping, their friendship had simply imploded, and grace and civility were no longer possible. Olmsted and Green had each lost all sense of perspective where the other was concerned. As winter came on, Green refused to honor a requisition for coal to keep Olmsted’s office warm. Green insisted on several separate meetings before he agreed to reimburse an outlay of twelve and a half cents! To Vaux, Olmsted later described Green’s manner as “a systematic small tyranny, measured exactly to the limit of my endurance.” To a friend, Olmsted wrote, “Not a cent is got from under his paw that is not wet with his blood & sweat.”

  As 1860 came to an end, things came to a head. Going into the year, the board had asked Olmsted to prepare careful estimates for the cost of park construction. Now, at year’s end, it became clear that actual costs had drastically outstripped the estimates. At Green’s urging, Olmsted went over and over the numbers, but try as he might, he was unable to arrive at an exact number for the cost overrun. (For the record, the main period of construction in Central Park cost $8 million, more than five times the original appropriation.)