Genius of Place

by Justin Martin

  It would require seven years and $5 million, on top of the $4 million spent acquiring the land, before Prospect Park could be officially declared finished. But even early on, one thing became abundantly clear: Olmsted and Vaux had done it again. In this, their sophomore effort, they had created another masterpiece.

  But for Olmsted, the experience was marred. While a refreshing sense of ease surrounded the creation of Prospect Park—Stranahan wasn’t meddlesome, Vaux wasn’t combative, the design just seemed to coalesce—turmoil found its way into other parts of his life just the same. As was so often the case for Olmsted, professional triumph was intertwined with personal tragedy.

  On November 24, 1866, Mary gave birth to a baby boy who lived for only six hours. Olmsted and his wife never even gave the baby a name. Mary was crushed. For months afterward, she lived like an invalid, remaining in bed for long stretches, visiting friends in the country in search of peace, just some peace. She was thirty-six now, and getting pregnant again was going to be terribly difficult. Mary was tough, but she was reaching her limit.

  More than ever, Olmsted’s relationship with his wife seemed forged in sorrow. The couple had gotten married after John’s death had left Mary a widow. Three of the four children the couple was raising were Olmsted’s brother’s natural offspring. The eldest, John Charles, was fourteen now and the namesake of John Hull Olmsted. Meanwhile, Owen, age nine, bore a striking physical resemblance to his natural father. Even his temperament and mannerisms were eerily similar. With each passing year, Owen seemed more like the carefree young man who used to shoot a smirk at Kingsbury while Fred and Charley Brace argued. For Olmsted, his two adopted sons were a constant reminder of love tied closely—so achingly close—with loss.

  To deal with the death of the newborn, Olmsted fell back on his now familiar way of managing grief. He lost himself in work. Of that, there was plenty. While Olmsted and Vaux referred to Prospect Park simply as “The Park” in their correspondence, their primary focus at this time, the partners had many other jobs as well. Most notably, Olmsted and Vaux had revived their association with Central Park in an official capacity as consulting landscape architects.

  For all intents and purposes, the park was complete. But maintenance was perpetual and demanding. Bridges needed to be fixed, paths refurbished, dead trees taken down and new ones planted in their place. There was also the issue of clarifying certain sections of Central Park and developing these sections for the benefit of visitors. During this time, Olmsted and Vaux focused in particular on developing the children’s district at the southern end of Central Park. It was a poignant choice, given that Olmsted had lost two babies, the first during the park’s initial construction. Olmsted suggested that the children’s section would benefit from a shelter where mothers and tots could congregate. So Vaux designed one of his most inspired rustic wooden structures, a large octagonal pavilion (one hundred feet in diameter) featuring a roof that was wildly atwist with interlaced branches.

  This same children’s district would later become home to the Dairy. This Gothic-style stone building (designed by Vaux in 1869) is one of the most beautiful edifices ever conceived for the benefit of cattle. It was meant as a place where a child could get a glass of milk “warm from the cow.” This was no mere novelty. Pasteurizing milk wasn’t a practice yet; New York City was full of unscrupulous purveyors who sold tainted milk or even cut it with various additives to stretch out their supply. Due to these practices, children frequently became sick or died. The Dairy was intended as a kind of certified milk station, a place where a child could get a free drink in the safe confines of Central Park.

  If Olmsted wished to lose himself in work, there were plenty of other tasks demanding his attention. In early 1867, he was named recording secretary of the Southern Famine Relief Commission (SFRC). The outfit was based in New York, and its board included J. P. Morgan and Theodore Roosevelt, a wealthy reformer and father of the future president. During the nearly two years since the Civil War ended, the South had been stricken by a terrible famine. The disaster resulted from the collision of a number of unfortunate variables: Many Southern farmers turned soldiers were now dead or dispersed, farmland had been damaged during the war, there had long been an overreliance on cotton over food crops, the system of slave labor had ended, and sealing the deal—just a grim coincidence, courtesy of Mother Nature—much of the region was starved for rain.

  The SFRC was remarkably similar to Olmsted’s USSC. During the Civil War, the USSC had coordinated the activity of local women’s groups, making sure everything from shoes to preserved peaches was routed to the Union soldiers who most needed the items. Now, the SFRC coordinated efforts among various famine-relief organizations such as church groups and various benevolent societies. Thousands of Northerners wished to help, both out of simple human decency and also as a way of extending an olive branch to Southerners.

  Olmsted helped gather information about which regions of the South were most afflicted. He also prepared handbills and circulars requesting aid. Due to his wealth of journalism connections, he was very successful at getting these pleas printed in newspapers. There’s a particularly striking exchange between Olmsted and Edward Bright, a fellow SFRC executive, in regard to a circular titled Famine at Home. Bright contributed a passage in which he suggested that aid would help restore the South to “the wealth in which she once luxuriated.” Olmsted disagreed with this conceit. He’d traveled to the antebellum South and found it anything but opulent: “Judging from my own experience, therefore, I think the appeal would be forcible perhaps if the idea of abounding wealth among the people were not emphasized.” Olmsted prevailed; the phrase in question did not appear in the printed version of the circular.

  By November 1867, the crisis had ended, and the SFRC disbanded. Olmsted wrote the organization’s final report, which recorded that 169,316 bushels of corn had been sent to the South, enough to feed a half-million people for six months. The SFRC had also distributed clothing, potatoes, beans, flour, and money for medicine. He concluded the report with this: “It remains to be seen whether the war, which has cost us so much, has, after all, brought us nearer in our public or our private life to the divine requirement: ‘Do unto others as ye would that they should do unto you.’”

  Olmsted’s service with the SFRC is notable because the outfit saved untold numbers of lives during its brief ten-month existence. It is also notable because it marks the last time that Olmsted would participate in a substantial way in an endeavor outside the field of landscape architecture.

  “Where your talents and the needs of the world cross, there lies your vocation,” said Aristotle. Olmsted’s talents were many and various. He’d been a sailor, farmer, journalist, and abolitionist—and that’s just a partial list. As for what the world needed, it was parks, more parks. Olmsted and Vaux now found themselves inundated with requests from various cities around the United States. It was quite a turnabout, given that only a few years earlier Olmsted had wondered whether there was sufficient demand for landscape architecture to make a living.

  Much had changed. By now, Olmsted and Vaux had created showpiece parks—Central Park and Prospect Park—in two of the nation’s three largest cities. The post–Civil War economy was on an upswing, and other cities were eager to build parks of their own. Olmsted, Vaux & Company was contracted to provide designs for Philadelphia; Newark, New Jersey; and Fall River, Massachusetts. In Bridgeport, Connecticut, the firm designed Seaside Park using land donated by one of the town’s leading citizens, P. T. Barnum. And the demand wasn’t confined to park making. Olmsted, Vaux & Company was also called upon to do other landscape architecture work such as creating a campus plan for the new Maine College of Agriculture and the Mechanic Arts. The firm also designed the grounds of a summer cottage in Long Branch, New Jersey, later owned by Ulysses Grant.

  Olmsted grew so busy that he couldn’t have pursued one of his assorted sidelines had he wanted to. He was forced to give up the idea—subject of th
e lively exchange with Vaux—that he was more an administrator than an artist, that his greatest talents lay in supervising gold mines and battlefield relief outfits. Even journalism—long a shadow career of sorts—fell by the wayside. He would rarely write articles, and when he did, they would usually be about landscape architecture. A big book on the drift of civilization, which he’d been tinkering with for years—that would be abandoned. Olmsted was done working as an editor, too. At the age of forty-five, Olmsted had finally found his vocation, or, rather, it had found him.

  Going forward, as a landscape architect exclusively, he would draw on the varied interests and experiences of his earlier life to craft a series of inspired designs that would literally change the face of America. As always, his professional heights would exist in a queer close blend with devastating personal events.

  CHAPTER 23

  City Planning Buffalo and Chicago

  TWO MORE CITIES came calling, Chicago and Buffalo. In 1868, representatives of proposed projects in both communities approached Olmsted, Vaux & Company. The fact that two separate groups contacted the firm at virtually the same time says a lot about Buffalo and Chicago. Both were booming and both had emerged as preeminent American cities, and with their runaway growth came a need for green space. Naturally, it made sense to turn to the nation’s foremost landscape architecture firm.

  In the course of a few decades, Buffalo had transformed—as one contemporary observer put it—into a “commercial Constantinople,” a place that handled countless tons of grain, iron, coal, and timber as it was transported from the West back East. Chicago was quite simply the fastest-growing city in America. Its population had shot from around 100,000 in 1860 to nearly 300,000 by 1868. It now ranked as the nation’s fifth-largest city and was fast gaining on St. Louis. Such urban density demanded some kind of relief.

  In mid-August 1868, Olmsted set out by train from New York, planning stops in Buffalo and Chicago. In Buffalo, he took a Sunday horseback ride into the countryside just beyond the city limits, scouting for possible park locations. Olmsted was accompanied by William Dorsheimer, a prominent lawyer and leader in the drive to build a park for Buffalo. Olmsted and Dorsheimer were on slightly familiar terms, both having served on the USSC during the Civil War.

  Then it was on to Chicago. Olmsted traipsed out to view a stretch of prairie nine miles west of town. The site was called Riverside. The plan was to develop the property into a parklike suburb, meant to be a haven from bustling Chicago.

  On the return train trip to New York, Olmsted made another stopover in Buffalo. He was met with quite a surprise. As he wrote to his wife, “What was my horror on arriving here to find that a public meeting had been called for this evening. Mr. Fillmore to preside, special invitations to over 200 leading citizens sent out, to hear an address on the matter of a public park from the distinguished Architect of the N.Y.C.P. [New York Central Park] Fred Law Olmsted Esq. There was no help for it.”

  Mr. Fillmore was Millard Fillmore, the former president now settled in his hometown of Buffalo. He was a longtime park booster. During his administration, recall, President Fillmore had hired Andrew Jackson Downing to landscape the Mall in Washington, D.C. Downing had enlisted the aid of his young assistant, Vaux. But Downing’s death had brought the project to an abrupt end.

  The meeting in Buffalo was held at the home of Sherman Jewett, a man who had earned a fortune manufacturing stoves. No transcript exists, nor has so much as a quotation survived from Olmsted’s comments to the assembled two hundred leading citizens. But apparently, he held forth spontaneously for roughly an hour, laying out a whole-cloth vision for parkland in Buffalo.

  Olmsted was a talented speaker, a fact that’s often overlooked. Of course, his written park proposals are full of winning ideas and persuasive arguments. But landing—and hanging on to—a design commission required a great deal of communication. That’s one of the reasons that Vaux, a gifted artist but stumble-tongued speaker, was so eager to team up with Olmsted.

  Olmsted could be an eloquent and convincing salesman, as evidenced by this account from a participant in one of his many park pitches during this era: “Mr. Olmsted has a mastery of language commensurate with the magnitude of his plans. Nothing short of upsetting the entire status quo is worthy of being considered in his gigantic schemes; and then his fluent dissertations overwhelm the astonished listener, and drown the natural objections to such revolutionary changes and extravagant ‘improvements.’”

  Olmsted emerged from the Buffalo meeting feeling confident. He sent another letter to Mary that concluded on a note of optimism: “I think it will go.” Back in New York, he quickly drew up proposals for both Buffalo and Riverside. He worked without Vaux, who was on a lengthy inspiration-gathering trip to Europe, visiting assorted architectural treasures. Olmsted managed to wow both clients with the proposals. Both hired Olmsted, Vaux & Company.

  Riverside got under way first. As a suburban development, at a time when very few true suburbs existed in the United States, this was a novel undertaking. Cities were densely built and teeming, but as a general rule, right beyond their limits, the land almost instantly took on a rural character. Country living provided the antidote, with clean air and open space, but there was little infrastructure and services were nonexistent. Want running water? Run and fetch some from the well.

  Riverside was meant to combine the best of both modes of living. The setting was scenic, 1,560 acres along the banks of the Des Plaines River. Critically, the land was also near a stretch of track recently laid by the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy Railroad. The plan was to build a station, the first stop on the line, making commuting to Chicago easy.

  Building a model suburb in Riverside was not Olmsted’s idea. Rather, the idea originated with the Riverside Improvement Company. The RIC was a consortium of eastern investors that had recently purchased the property. Its president was Emery Childs, a manic and jowly business promoter. Upon first meeting with Childs and his crew, Olmsted was reminded of another consortium of eastern investors, Mayor Opdyke and his Mariposa cronies. He had sent a letter to Vaux in Europe, describing the Riverside enterprise as a “big speculation.” But it seemed like the RIC was in earnest—and in a hurry as well. In a letter to Mary, he marveled, “They want to go to work at once & employ 2000 men.”

  This was a private effort in contrast to the public works in which Olmsted and Vaux had been involved, such as Central Park and Prospect Park. No legislative approval was needed; there just wasn’t the same level of bureaucracy as in a public-sector job. By autumn of 1868, work was under way.

  Childs had hired Olmsted assuming he’d approach suburb design with the keen artistry on display in his firm’s park making. From the outset, Olmsted was adamant that the highest priority for Riverside was something crushingly mundane: serviceable roads. He was wearing his farmer’s hat. Olmsted had done his share of country living; he’d ridden over enough rutted, ill-graded, miry rural roads to know that such matter had the potential to sink this suburban experiment, no matter how comely the grounds. Roads, Olmsted stressed, must “be the first consideration” in planning a suburb, and he added, “Let them cost what they will.”

  For Riverside’s roads, the solution Olmsted suggested was macadamization, a process where a foundation of large stones is overlaid with layers of successively smaller stones progressing to gravel. The layers are tamped down with heavy rollers. When Scottish engineer John Loudon McAdam dreamed up the idea in the early 1800s, it was the biggest innovation in road construction since Roman times. Even in 1868, it was still a pretty newfangled approach. Per McAdam’s model, the surfaces of Riverside’s roads were to be cambered, that is, given a convex shape that allowed rain to run off. State-of-the-art paved gutters would be installed to carry water by underground pipes into the Des Plaines River.

  Yet Olmsted didn’t skimp on beauty. Laying out Riverside’s streets on unsullied farmland provided a rare opportunity to get away from the dreaded grid plan. Olmsted d
esigned the streets to travel in sweeping, generous curves. This was meant to impart an unhurried vibe to the future residents of Riverside. The intention was to place their domestic life in stark relief to nearby Chicago, where the street scheme was angular and the mood frenzied. The “absence of sharp corners” in Riverside’s streets, as Olmsted put it, was meant to “imply leisure, contemplativeness, and happy tranquility.”

  Olmsted also named many of Riverside’s streets. There are Michaux and Nuttall roads, for example, named after a couple of Olmsted’s dendrology heroes. François André Michaux came to the United States from France in the early 1800s and produced an exhaustive three-volume study of America’s trees. Englishman Thomas Nuttall picked up where Michaux left off, traveling extensively in the States before writing his landmark North American Sylva: Trees Not Described by F. A. Michaux. Carlyle Road was named in honor of the author of Sartor Resartus, the novel that provoked so much philosophical pondering by Olmsted in his youth. As one might expect, the voraciously read Olmsted opted for a variety of other literary references. There are Akenside and Shenstone roads named after English poets. Of course, there’s a Downing Road.

  Probably the most significant concept Olmsted brought to Riverside was that of communal spaces. Roughly 40 percent of the 1,560 acres was set aside as greens and commons. This decision, too, has its roots in an earlier Olmsted experience. While traveling in the South, he’d observed the cultural vacuum that resulted from people living great distances apart. Ample shared spaces were meant to ensure that Riverside’s residents connected socially, traded information, discussed the issues of the day. Riverside was meant to be a community; Olmsted wanted to promote civic discourse.