Genius of Place

by Justin Martin

  Olmsted suggested that park work was unattractive because it would necessarily subject him to meddlers such as Andrew Green. “A scheme that can be upset by a Green is sure to be upset, for men of his caliber are to be found everywhere,” answered Vaux.

  Why, Olmsted demanded, didn’t Vaux simply plan to do the Brooklyn park by himself? Vaux’s response: “Your objection to the plan is I believe at heart because it involves the idea of common fraternal effort. It is too republican an idea for you, you must have a thick line drawn round your sixpen’ worth of individuality. . . . Well! Well!”

  Eventually, Vaux grew weary of Olmsted’s heel dragging. As the correspondence carried on, he couldn’t resist a few zingers. He called Olmsted a “stubborn cemetery maker in California.” In another, Vaux dubbed him “Frederick the Great, Prince of Park Police.” Even these jibes were carefully crafted—sly, remarkably candid, designed to get what he wanted. He saw Olmsted clearly. Moreover, he knew how Olmsted preferred not to see himself. Vaux let fly: “If I go on and do Brooklyn alone, well or ill, you suffer because the public naturally will say, if Olmsted really was the prime mover in the C. P., why is he not ready to go forward in the path that he started in.”

  Right in the middle of this epistolary slugfest, another letter arrived from a man of whom Olmsted had never heard: William B. Scott. Olmsted received it in late July 1865. Apparently, the Mariposa Company had reorganized; Scott was the new president. It was the first message Olmsted had received from New York in nearly six months. And it was far simpler and clearer than that earlier Bunsbyish telegram. Under the new management, Scott explained, Olmsted’s services were no longer needed. Just like that, any lingering hopes Olmsted had about renewing his work as a gold-mine supervisor were extinguished.

  Scott’s tenure as president would last just one month. He was replaced, then his replacement replaced, and so it would go. The Mariposa Estate would stagger on for decades to come. No end of people were beguiled by the promise of riches. There was always someone willing to try where others had failed, and soon a company would be formed and investors found, but never much gold, and so the Mariposa mines kept on through endless iterations right up to the eve of World War II. “Its business history,” as historian Allan Nevins once wrote, “is a thorny and profitless maze.”

  As for Frémont, he’d go down as one of the nineteenth century’s greatest riches-to-rags story. Within a few years, he’d be forced to look to the kindness of his few remaining friends for his next meal and a place to lay his head at night. Once worth $10 million, he died nearly penniless.

  The seesaw rhythm of Olmsted’s life—and indeed of his times—continued. Hot on the heels of Scott’s letter came news from Vaux. He had landed a commission to submit a preliminary design for the Brooklyn park. Not only that, but the Central Park board had requested that he and Olmsted return as landscape architects. These were two real jobs offering real money—the kind of opportunity that might prompt someone to uproot his family again and move back across the continent.

  Olmsted replied at once, agreeing to return to New York. In a subsequent letter, Olmsted would rather imperiously ask Vaux to find him a horse and locate suitable housing for his family. There could be no doubt as to the terms of this partnership: It would be Olmsted and Vaux, never Vaux and Olmsted. Vaux didn’t mind. There was art to be done, and he knew that he needed Olmsted.

  Before leaving California, Olmsted had one last act, one that would reverberate through the centuries ahead. It involved his role as chairman of the commission on Yosemite and the Mariposa Grove. In a local paper, he had seen a mention that Schuyler Colfax was planning to visit Yosemite. Colfax was the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. Back in 1860, when an overland mail route across the United States was completed, Colfax had planned to commemorate the event with a cross-country trip, ending with a visit to Yosemite. But his plan, like so many other plans, had been interrupted by the Civil War.

  At last, Colfax had embarked on his journey. He planned to arrive in the Sierra Nevada in early August. Several journalists were accompanying Colfax, among them reporters for the New York Tribune and Chicago Tribune, as well as Samuel Bowles. Bowles was the much-respected editor of the Springfield (Mass.) Republican and an advocate of brevity when bloated passages were the rule. Olmsted greatly admired Bowles and considered the Republican one of the best papers in America.

  Olmsted arranged to meet up with the Colfax party to accompany them on the Yosemite leg of their journey. In preparation, Olmsted wrote an 8,000-word treatise about Yosemite.

  On August 8, 1865, Colfax and his entourage of journalists entered the valley. Olmsted had managed to round up several of his fellow commissioners such as William Ashburner and Galen Clark. The party had swelled to nineteen people, likely the largest group to visit Yosemite since that first battalion pursued the Ahwahneechee. The Colfax party hiked and swam, hunted and fished. At night, they sang rollicking versions of Civil War anthems such as “John Brown’s Body” and “Marching Through Georgia.”

  On August 9, Olmsted gathered everyone together for an impromptu reading of his treatise. The work sounded many of Olmsted’s long-held concerns. There was Olmsted as reformer, urging that Yosemite must be made available to everyone in a democratic society: “Yosemite should be held, guarded and managed for the free use of the whole body of the people forever.”

  There was also Olmsted the futurist, though that was then a term that lay ahead in, well, the future. It’s apt nevertheless; Olmsted often demonstrated a surprising capacity to see where the world was headed. Back in 1858, Olmsted had cautioned the Central Park commissioners that any viable park design must take into account the built-up Manhattan of 1878 and beyond. Now he applied the same idea to Yosemite, telling his small audience that—believe it or not—masses of people would one day descend on the place. “Before many years,” he declared, “if proper facilities are offered, these hundreds will become thousands and in a century the whole number of visitors will be counted in the millions. An injury to the scenery so slight that it may be unheeded by any visitor now, will be one of deplorable magnitude when its effect upon each visitor’s enjoyment is multiplied by these millions.”

  Yosemite needed to be protected for posterity. Olmsted was addressing the gathering as a kind of proto-environmentalist. The masses would visit Yosemite—and they should—but this land must be preserved for their benefit, something that no private interest could be counted on to do. It was the rightful role of government. And it was a role, he said, that should be expanded to other wild spaces as well: “The establishment by the government of great public grounds for the free enjoyment of the people under certain circumstances, is thus justified and enforced as a political duty.”

  His address concluded with a request that California set aside $37,000. These monies would be used to manage Yosemite and also to build the carriage circuit and campgrounds for tenderfoots that he envisioned. Following the trip, Olmsted tried to submit his treatise to the legislature. While Conness’s bill had deeded the land to the state, there was no provision for any funding. Olmsted’s request, and the entire fifty-twopage report that accompanied it, was promptly put aside. Fortunately, however, Olmsted had already read this treatise to the Colfax party, many of whom were journalists. Several of them wound up writing books about the cross-country excursion, expending much ink on Yosemite. Even Congressman Colfax—a journalist by training, later to become the first journalist to serve as vice president, under Grant—produced a tome. Bowles wrote a travel classic, Across the Continent: A Summer’s Journey to the Rocky Mountains, the Mormons, and the Pacific States.

  Earlier written accounts of Yosemite had dutifully related the valley’s wonders. Paintings and photos had captured its beauty. But the Colfax party’s various books differed in that they also included calls for conservation, echoing Olmsted. Not only should Yosemite be passively appreciated by visitors, but the valley also required active protection by an enlightened government.
Bowles even listed some other sites deserving the same consideration, such as Niagara Falls and parts of Maine.

  Famously, the idea for a national park system was born in 1870 around a campfire in Yellowstone. But that campfire gathering was picking up on a notion that had been building for some time: There was steamship executive Raymond’s original letter to Senator Conness, followed by Olmsted’s address to the Colfax party, followed by a collection of books that sent the idea of wilderness preservation ricocheting through American culture.

  Things came full circle in 1906, when after years of mismanagement by the State of California—and following the tireless efforts of Galen Clark and John Muir—Yosemite became a national park. With his August 1865 address, Olmsted played a key early role in the conservation of America’s wild spaces.

  Olmsted’s work in California was done. He and his family returned to New York by way of Nicaragua—the cheap route.

  VI

  “Where Talents and the Needs of the World Cross”

  SHAPING THE NATION, 1865–1877

  CHAPTER 22

  New Prospects

  ON NOVEMBER 21, 1865, Olmsted and his family began their approach into New York Harbor aboard the steamer Ericson. Passage from California had taken exactly forty days. But then came a hitch. A fierce storm prevented the Ericson from docking. The family passed an anxious night drifting in the water, riding the storm out.

  Next day, when they finally arrived in New York, they were met by a small group of people. Vaux was waiting on the pier along with a couple of employees from his architectural firm. Godkin, editor of the Nation, was also there. Olmsted and his family moved into a boardinghouse at 167 East 14th Street—a temporary arrangement. Meanwhile, most of their California possessions had been shipped separately and were making a slow circuit around Cape Horn.

  Olmsted and Vaux got directly to work on the Brooklyn park. They were charged with creating a new design for a project that predated their involvement and had been bouncing around for about five years. Back in 1860, a newly formed Brooklyn park commission had obtained a 300-acre tract of undeveloped land, the future site of what was then known as Mount Prospect Park. Brooklyn was a separate community from New York. It was, in fact, the third-largest city in the nation after New York and Philadelphia. Brooklyn’s civic leaders were intent on building a grand park, a suitable equivalent to Central Park in their rival community just across the East River. What they sorely lacked was an attractive site. The property slated for the park was broken by an existing thoroughfare, carving it into two pieces. One parcel featured Mount Prospect—in actuality, more of a steep hill than a mountain, but a difficult piece of topography to integrate into a park plan nonetheless. At the top of the hill sat a reservoir, holding Brooklyn’s drinking water.

  The original design commission fell to none other than Colonel Egbert Viele, Olmsted’s old nemesis. Viele had drawn up a profoundly uninspired plan. He had simply done his best to work with Mount Prospect. To connect the two sections of parkland, he had proposed a couple of ungainly looking overpasses. In an accompanying written report, Viele attempted to obscure his design choices behind bloated sentiments about the beauty of nature, such as this description of a tree: “Whether bursting the fast of winter, it opens its buds in spring-time, or yielding to the chilling blasts it scatters its autumn leaves.” The park commissioners were thoroughly underwhelmed. Viele’s plan was tabled. Then, with the onset of the Civil War, progress on the park came to a halt. It wasn’t until it became clear that the conflict was nearing an end that the subject was revisited.

  In January 1865, James Stranahan, president of the Brooklyn park commission, invited Vaux to stroll over the proposed parklands. Vaux immediately saw that the two mismatched pieces of land—one flat, one a steep hill—broken by an existing road, pretty much guaranteed an awkward park design. He urged that Mount Prospect should be removed from the park scheme. Instead, he suggested that the commissioners should purchase some undeveloped land that bordered the second parcel. That would create a single contiguous stretch of land.

  The commissioners followed Vaux’s suggestion. They also asked him to draw up a new park design. At that point Vaux started pursuing Olmsted about returning east from California. Now, the two partners were together again. They launched an instant business, Olmsted, Vaux & Company, using Vaux’s existing offices at 110 Broadway. During Olmsted’s West Coast sojourn, Vaux had been working as an architect, mostly designing houses. Vaux would maintain this architectural practice as a separate business. The new Olmsted, Vaux & Company would be devoted to landscape architecture. In a delicious twist, the reunited team was once again stepping in where the arrogant Viele had failed. And again, they had a grand canvass on which to work.

  Prospect Park, as it was now known—the Mount had been dropped from its name—was 526 acres (60 percent of the size of Central Park) and roughly the shape of an arrowhead. Olmsted and Vaux saw opportunities to learn from their earlier experience. Skating mania, for example, had drawn throngs of people to Central Park, filling the Lake beyond its capacity. This time, they proposed to build an artificial lake more than twice the size of the one in Central Park. And they suggested that it include a concert island. Olmsted’s experiments with across-the-water acoustics led him to plan a permanent aquatic concert venue.

  During the autumn of 1866, Olmsted and Vaux devoted their days to crisscrossing the parkland, getting to know its features. They noted that the highest point was 168 feet above sea level—no Mount Prospect. Still, given how low-rise Brooklyn was in this era, the view was breathtaking. From this point, it was possible to see New York, its harbor, the bluffs of the New Jersey Palisades, and, way in the distance, the city of Newark. Some days, it was even possible to catch a whiff of salt breeze blowing in from the ocean. They dubbed this spot the Look-Out and planned to create a formal viewing area here.

  Fresh from the West Coast, Olmsted proposed that Prospect Park should include a ravine and waterfall, both wholly man-made features. These would provide a small-scale echo of Yosemite’s grandeur. He and Vaux also paced out a vast meadow. It was labeled “The Green,” “The Green,” “The Green”—three times due to its extent—on the blueprint in progress.

  Because Prospect Park was an unbroken piece of land, uncut by even a single transverse road, traffic circulation was going to be less of a challenge than in Central Park. Once again, Olmsted and Vaux opted for a tripart separation of ways, featuring paths for carriages, horseback riders, and pedestrians. This time, they also proposed that dedicated multilane roads should extend from Prospect Park to other smaller parks then being contemplated for Brooklyn. Perhaps it would even be possible to lay down one of these roads from Prospect Park to the East River. From there, people could take a ferry across to Manhattan. Then they could connect with Central Park via another dedicated multi-laned road. Olmsted and Vaux envisioned a network of these special roads connecting the various green spaces within the metropolitan area—an idea both grand and forward-looking.

  By December 1865, Olmsted and Vaux were scrambling to complete their proposal. They spent their days on the parklands and then worked deep into the night at Vaux’s home in Manhattan. Vaux drafted a polished, submission-ready version of the plan. Olmsted enumerated their ideas in an accompanying written report for the commissioners. Where Viele’s earlier report had read like a purple nature poem, Olmsted played up the social-reform attributes of his and Vaux’s design. This would be a place of refuge for all classes of people in Brooklyn. It would provide fresh air and open space to the city’s residents. “Here is a suggestion of freedom and repose,” he wrote, “which must in itself be refreshing and tranquilizing to the visitor coming from the confinement and bustle of crowded streets.”

  Olmsted and Vaux finished their plan in January 1866. Vaux hosted a party at his home where they celebrated with claret and orange-juice punch. And then they ... waited. The partners had been commissioned only to create a design for Prospect Park. Whethe
r their design was accepted and what firm would actually construct the park—those questions rested with the commissioners. Construction couldn’t begin during the cold winter months, in any case.

  While awaiting word from the commissioners, Olmsted turned to the speculative projects he’d drummed up while in California. These had become part of Olmsted, Vaux & Company’s book of business, though Olmsted appears to have worked on them without input from his partner. He also worked on them relying solely on maps and memory. Olmsted was happy to be back East, and he wasn’t about to make the lengthy trip out to California to revisit the sites.

  The city supervisors in San Francisco had expressed a desire for a West Coast version of Central Park, only larger and grander. But this had struck Olmsted as a wrongheaded approach. First, there was the matter of the city’s climate. Certain trees and plants just weren’t going to be possible; he thought it best to go with greenery suited to an arid, Mediterranean-style climate. For inspiration, he drew on more memories—really old memories, in this case—of his trip to Italy a decade earlier, on which he’d been accompanied by the three young women. At that time, as he put it, he had “no more thought of being a landscape architect than of being a Cardinal.”

  There was also the wind to consider. The land he’d walked over with Mayor Coon, as Olmsted recalled, was whipped by cold winds coming in off the ocean. So he dreamed up a radical solution. He suggested several separate smaller parks, set up in parcels of land well removed from the Pacific. To connect the parks, he envisioned a promenade sunken twenty feet below ground level. In his proposal, he described this promenade as being like a dried-up creek bed along which people could travel from park to park. Steep embankments would provide a break against the relentless winds.