Olmsted immediately quashed his own nomination. He took out a card in the New York Post that read, “My name was used without my knowledge in the resolutions of the gentlemen who met on Friday at the Fifth Avenue Hotel ... but, while thanking them sincerely for their very good opinion, I must express my regret they should have thought it expedient to take up as a representative of their requirements one who is so completely separated from the political field, and so much absorbed in professional and official duties as I am.”
Secretly, Olmsted was pleased by the VP nod. In a private note to McKim, he wrote, “I am surprised & gratified that it is so well received.” This was yet another episode that served to underscore what an estimable public figure Olmsted had grown to be.
Olmsted’s high profile intensified the long-simmering tensions with Vaux. On the one hand, Vaux had coaxed Olmsted back from California by insisting that he required Olmsted’s unique palette of skills. At the same time, Vaux resented Olmsted’s prominence. Vaux was particularly thin-skinned about even the barest insinuation that Central Park wasn’t an equal collaboration. For his part, Olmsted was forever correcting journalist friends who referred to him in articles as Central Park’s “creator” or its “prime mover.” Then again, more recent collaborations between the two were unequal. Olmsted truly had acted as the driving force behind the jobs in Buffalo and Riverside.
On October 18, 1872, Olmsted and Vaux dissolved their partnership. The pair’s relationship had always been heavy on squabbles. Even impersonal discussions—on design philosophy, say—were quick to devolve into personal arguments. Olmsted would later say, “Mr. Vaux’s ways are not my ways and I could not fit mine to his,” adding, “... [I]t was a relief to me to part company with him.” Underneath it all, however, Olmsted and Vaux shared a deep bond of loyalty and friendship. They even respected one another as artists, although they couldn’t be in the same room together for long. What’s more, Olmsted would always gratefully remember that it was Vaux who first approached him about collaborating on Central Park. Without Vaux, Olmsted once said, “I should have been a farmer.”
Of course, none of this flavor appears in the bland official statement issued by Olmsted and Vaux, stating that their break was for “reasons of mutual convenience.” They agreed to jointly handle any lingering business involving earlier projects such as Prospect Park. Going forward, the two would still collaborate when it suited them, notably on New York City’s Riverside and Morningside parks. But Olmsted, Vaux & Company was no more. A partnership that stretched back fourteen years—with a few sidelines by Olmsted along the way—was at an end.
The timing was right for Vaux. For his separate architectural practice, he had recently landed a pair of huge and prestigious commissions to design the buildings for New York’s Museum of Natural History and Metropolitan Museum of Art. Rather than working as a landscape architect, designing bridges and refectories in parks that were increasingly Olmsted creations, he saw the potential to establish himself as one of the nation’s leading architects. Olmsted’s immediate prospects were less promising.
The very first job Olmsted took on sans Vaux was McLean Asylum. This was a modest job, especially when compared to his erstwhile partner’s Museum of Natural History, slated to be the largest building in America. But Olmsted—as a reformer and out of a special empathy, too—was always drawn to mental-institution commissions. He approached this latest job, like all his work, with a winning combination of earnestness and intensity.
The McLean Asylum had opened in 1818 in Charlestown (now Somerville), a town right outside Boston. By 1872, Charlestown had grown into an industrial center, and McLean’s bucolic grounds had been completely transformed. The air hung thick with smoke and foul odors, wafting from such nearby businesses as a slaughterhouse, tannery, and a bleach-and-dye works. Four separate railway lines skirted the property. This was no longer a restful place for a person suffering from mental illness.
McLean’s trustees hired Olmsted to identify a piece of land suitable for building a new hospital. He visited several sites before settling on a 114-acre property in Belmont, Massachusetts. In a letter to the trustees, Olmsted described this property as having a “decided advantage in the great numbers of well-grown trees and in local picturesque interest.” A natural spring flowed though the property, ensuring a supply of fresh water for the patients.
Olmsted also suggested a building scheme for the new hospital. He proposed that the patients be housed in a small collection of cottages. This would create a setting that was more domestic in feel, less institutional. It would also make it possible to separate patients by degree of affliction. Unruly and agitated patients could be grouped together, while the “worried well” (as people with less severe mental illness were known) could have separate accommodations.
Olmsted’s proposal was a departure from the Kirkbride plan, the standard for mental institutions in the mid-1800s. This design scheme, named for Philadelphia psychiatrist Thomas Kirkbride, was all about maximizing control. Patients were housed in vast wings that could be locked down quickly in the event of some kind of disturbance. But such an arrangement had considerable disadvantages: Fires could advance quickly through the wings, diseases traveled easily among the crowded patients, and the lack of fresh air, the result of poor ventilation, was not exactly conducive to improved mental health. Olmsted’s proposed cottage plan addressed all these issues by spreading out the patient population. Once again, he was very explicit that the cottages be positioned so as to receive ample sunlight.
McLean’s trustees accepted Olmsted’s recommendation on a site for the new hospital. They purchased the Belmont property. But it would be many years before there were sufficient funds to build a new facility. When the new McLean was finally built, it would depart in many significant ways from Olmsted’s cottage plan.
Two months after the split with Vaux, Olmsted received a letter from his half-brother Albert, casually informing him that his father had slipped on the ice and broken his hip. Olmsted caught the next train to Hartford.
John Olmsted was surprised and pleased to see his son. Olmsted sat at his bedside, and they had a pleasant talk until his father drifted off. The next morning Olmsted returned to New York. The following day, Albert sent a telegraph with the news that John Olmsted had taken a turn for the worse. Olmsted rushed back to Hartford. He arrived to find his father sleeping. He also noticed that his father looked terribly much older than the day before. When he awoke and saw his son, he smiled and said, “Who’s this? Fred? So you’ve come back!”
John Olmsted was feverish and in great pain. He appeared to be failing fast. At the nurse’s urging, he was given Dr. McMann’s Elixir, an opium-laced sedative. He slept fitfully for a while. Olmsted wet his father’s lips. The old man awoke briefly at one point and gasped, “Air—give me all the air you can.” Olmsted’s stepmother, his half-sister Bertha, and his half-brother Albert gathered around the bedside in vigil. John Olmsted died at one o’clock on the morning of January 25, 1873. He was eighty-one.
Olmsted was deeply moved when he happened upon the little business diary that his father had maintained his entire adult life. The final neat pencil notation, spelling out some mundane matter, was only a few days old. Olmsted was also touched when he opened a drawer, only to find it packed with newspaper clippings going back twenty years, all about his parks and books and sundry endeavors. “He was a very good man and a kinder father never lived,” Olmsted wrote to Kingsbury. “It is strange how much of the world I feel has gone from me with him. The value of any success in the future is gone for me.”
CHAPTER 25
Blindness and Vision
AT THE TIME of his father’s death, Olmsted was about halfway moved into a brownstone in Manhattan. Besides providing a home for his own large family, the dwelling was meant to serve a couple of other purposes as well. Now that he’d split with Vaux, Olmsted needed a professional office, and Staten Island was just too far off the beaten path. The new quarters
were also meant to provide a place to care for his father and stepmother in their old age. Olmsted had bought the place figuring some of the rooms could be set aside for them as a kind of apartment. Sadly, his father wouldn’t be joining him.
The brownstone was located at 209 West 46th Street, right off Longacre Square (now known as Times Square). It was four stories plus a basement. Olmsted converted the first-floor dining room into an office. As with the Vaux partnership, the new company would be a lean outfit, this time operating out of Olmsted’s home. He’d hire mostly part-timers to meet shifting workloads, and many of his charges would remain in the field. Two large north-facing windows in the dining room converted into an office provided abundant light. Olmsted placed a drafting table in front of them. (For professional-quality drafting, he’d turn to assistants, as always. He was a big-idea person; his own drafting skills were limited.) On a mantelpiece in the office, he placed some photos, including ones of Ruskin and Vaux. A large map of New York City hung in a hallway that connected the office and a bathroom. Otherwise, Olmsted’s home office was pretty spare of ornament. Another small ground-floor room was turned into a reception area for clients.
Having Olmsted’s office on the first floor necessitated placing the dining room on the second. The kitchen was in the basement. Thanks to a dumbwaiter, it was possible to communicate between the kitchen and dining room. There was also a second-floor parlor; its walls were lined with Carleton Watkins’s photos of Yosemite, scene of some of the family’s happiest times together. Mary placed a piano in the parlor and enjoyed playing and singing. The top two floors were bedrooms for the family.
Everywhere, all over the house, there were books. The office had reference works such as Augustus Mongredien’s Trees and Shrubs for English Plantations, G. M. Kern’s Practical Landscape Gardening, and Gardening for Ladies by Jane Loudon. Elsewhere, books simply overflowed their cases; stacks grew on every available surface, and tottering piles were arrayed on the floor. According to a rough inventory, he owned about 2,000 books. The titles reflected his eclectic interests and concerns: Principals of Political Economy by John Stuart Mill and Darwin’s Origin of Species, collections of poems by Browning and Burns, Macaulay’s History of England, Hawthorne’s Marble Faun, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, and Short Sermons to News Boys by Brace. There was also a work on insomnia, Sleep and Its Derangements, by William Hammond.
The brownstone had a backyard, short and sixteen feet wide. It had been many years since Olmsted had lived in a home surrounded by so little land. But he made the best of it, using his well-honed perspective tricks to plant the tiny yard so as to give the illusion of space—as much as was possible.
In a new home now, Olmsted slipped back into his accustomed domestic relationships, ones that bore a marked similarity to those of his late father. As a widower with two small boys, John Olmsted had been in a hurry to wed Mary Ann Bull back in 1827. The couple had fallen into a relationship that was largely practical, hardly passionate. Over time, Olmsted and Mary had also achieved a kind of mutuality, an essential element of love, to be sure. But there seemed to be something muted about their feelings for one another, a lack of spark. Theirs was a love born of obligation—the death of Olmsted’s brother—and deepened through successive sorrows.
Years earlier, Olmsted had confided to Brace that he feared he might have to settle in marriage and be left “believing that the ‘highest element of love’ is not of earth.” That’s precisely what had come to pass. In another confession, Olmsted once told Vaux that Central Park had been his grand passion and that while working on it, “a great deal of disappointed love and unsatisfied romance and down trodden pride fastened itself to that passion.” Disappointed love and unsatisfied romance are curious choices of phrase, more so when one considers that Olmsted wed Mary while work on Central Park was under way.
As for his relationship with his children, Olmsted was capable of great affection, as his own father had been. Both often showed a genuine sweetness toward their children that wasn’t so common among fathers in nineteenth-century America. But both men also maintained some distance from their offspring. Work required Olmsted often to be absent from home; his father had sent him away to school for long stretches of his childhood. But here’s where the two differed: Olmsted could at times be remarkably underindulgent—something for which his father could never be accused. His father was a comfortable Hartford burgher; Olmsted was a hard-driven and pioneering artist. Olmsted had high expectations when it came to parenting as well, and when these expectations weren’t met, the results could be chilling.
Olmsted was fifty-one now; Mary was forty-three. Between his brother’s three children, whom he had adopted, and two natural offspring, he had five children. His father also had five who lived to maturity.
John Charles, age twenty, was the oldest in the Olmsted brood. He’d grown into a deadly serious and painfully shy person. Because he was the firstborn, perhaps, he had an intense, overdeveloped sense of duty. As a boy, Olmsted had called him “Charley,” but the nickname proved entirely too lighthearted. By 1873, when the family moved into the brownstone, Charley had come to be known as John and was studying at Yale’s Sheffield Scientific School. John had a talent for rendering. He was thinking about becoming a painter or an architect, perhaps even following his father into landscape architecture. John had also recently grown a beard, though not for the usual reasons. He’d slammed into a stone wall while sledding with the Brace children. His chin was left so scarred that he wore a beard the rest of his life.
Among the various children, Charlotte, age eighteen, provoked the most concern for Olmsted and his wife. She was a bright young woman, who was studying at a boarding school in Massachusetts. Her dream was to run a kindergarten. She was tiny, like her mother, but given to violent mood swings. Charlotte’s nickname was Chatty, though that seems like a euphemism for far darker personality traits. Olmsted once described how Charlotte “on the least provocation turns down almost to the bottom, pale, thin, blue, and hysterical.”
Owen, age fifteen, continued to look unsettlingly more like his father—Olmsted’s dead brother, Mary’s dead husband—with each passing year. He also shared John’s casual, winning disposition as well as his fragile physical makeup. Owen was attending boarding school in Plymouth, Massachusetts, along with the Vaux boys. At one point, Olmsted wrote the headmaster, trying to ensure that Owen was receiving a rigorous outdoor training to go along with book learning. Perhaps exposure to the rougher side of life would fortify his delicate constitution. The letter is a litany—a form in which Olmsted excelled—detailing all the skills that Owen might properly be taught:To saddle & bridle a horse—to harness him. ... To ride, drive, pack, clean, feed, bleed & physic a horse.... To make a fire, & cook under difficulties. To swim, with & without support; to aid others in swimming, to rescue drowning persons.... To make and understand common signals & signs of seamen & woodsmen. To measure distances by the eye—by pacing—by trigonometry without instruments.... To ford a river. To kill animals without cruelty; to preserve meat. To preserve life & health under difficulties when ordinary provisions are lacking—from cold, from heat, hunger & thirst—fatigue, debility, nervous prostration, excessive excitements. To make slight repairs in & run a steam engine safely. To take care of a watch; to preserve clothing from moths....
That’s not even the half of it. On and on goes the letter, though it appears that Owen mostly learned the standard reading and math at his boarding school. At home, he showed a talent for tinkering. Owen cobbled together some telegraph equipment and strung lines between the brownstone and the homes of four friends, one more than ten blocks away.
Marion, age eleven, was Olmsted’s first child with Mary to survive infancy. She was energetic, a tomboy who enjoyed outdoor activities like hiking. There was also something incredibly stolid and dependable about Marion. “Just the nicest girl—little old maid—possible; patient; happy, indefatigable” is how Olmsted once described her.
An
d then there was Henry, the baby of the family, now two. At age seven, in a truly bizarre turn, he’d be rechristened as Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. By that point, Olmsted and Mary figured that he had a real chance of surviving, of carrying that name—and all that went with it—into adulthood. For now, Henry, née Boy, future FLO Jr., delighted in traveling from floor to floor in the dumbwaiter.
Throughout the mid-1870s, the Olmsteds would have a lively household on West 46th Street, and many people would come to visit. The Braces were regular guests, as was architect H. H. Richardson, critic Clarence Cook, the Putnams, and the Perkins cousins. Poet and Post editor William Cullen Bryant was a frequent visitor at a time when he was preparing a translation of the Odyssey. He read from the original Greek text in a stentorian voice, making quite an impression on the youngest Olmsteds.
But 1873, the first year spent in the new brownstone, proved most of all to be a difficult time. Within days of John Olmsted’s funeral, Mary Ann Olmsted, Fred’s stepmother, began questioning the terms of the will. She had always left financial matters entirely in her husband’s hands, and when he died, she was stunned by how little money was left. She had assumed he had sizable real estate holdings, or maybe a large portfolio of investments. But chronic overindulgence of his children had left John Olmsted’s estate quite diminished.
In the will, Fred was designated as a trustee along with his half-brother Albert, who was a banker in Hartford. The pair was left with the unenviable task of convincing Mary Ann that, given financial exigencies, she’d need to cut back. Fred suggested she sell one of the two horses and downsize from a double to a one-person carriage.
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