Genius of Place

by Justin Martin

  Instead, Mary Ann chose to contest the will and hired a lawyer. The lawyer went on the attack, trying to have Fred and Albert removed as trustees. Albert sent Fred regular updates from Hartford of the probate proceedings, in one describing Mary Ann as “the enemy/mother” and in another warning, “I write that you may be prepared for an attack from any quarter.” Meanwhile, Mary Ann sent a series of letters to Fred, containing everything from grave accusations—in one, she claimed he was cheating her out of her rightful share—to small jibes, such as a demand that he return to Hartford at once to pick up some old copies of the Nation stored in the house. Invariably, she signed these letters: “I remain your affectionate, Mother.”

  Things grew progressively more ugly. Settlement of the estate, something that should have taken weeks, dragged on for months. Mary Ann even went so far as to claim that Olmsted and his half-brother had bribed the probate judge. At this point, Olmsted sent a letter to Central Park. Even in the best of times, Olmsted’s longtime consulting role with the park was fraught with tension, and given his current family blowup, he felt that he needed to be “relieved of responsibilities which under present circumstances I can not satisfactorily meet.” Back came a telegram insisting that he stay on.

  But then, just when the legal wrangle was beginning to look unending, the matter settled. John Olmsted’s will was upheld. Per its terms, Mary Ann was to receive the Hartford house and a modest allowance. There was a portfolio of stocks and bonds sufficient to provide each of his children roughly $1,500 a year. This was nothing to scoff at, but it meant that Olmsted couldn’t really pursue his occasionally voiced desire to slow down. The will proceedings also had another result: The acrimony left Fred’s relationship with his stepmother in ruins. They would never manage to patch things up. And she would also not be coming to live at 209 West 46th Street.

  Olmsted fell into genuine despair. His father’s death had brought pain and consequences beyond anything he could have imagined. He wondered whether he really could go it alone without Vaux. Now, more than ever, it was necessary to strike out and find fresh clients.

  Instead, Olmsted went blind. A doctor examined him and concluded that nothing was physically wrong. He was simply overcome with anxiety and needed to rest his eyes. Olmsted appears to have been suffering from something like hysterical blindness. The whole episode has echoes of the sumac poisoning that spread to his eyes as a teenager, preventing him from going to college.

  During the late autumn of 1873, Olmsted was confined to a darkened bedroom, doctor’s orders, unable to work, unable even to read, just alone with his thoughts. Letters from potential clients piled up. P. T. Barnum wrote inquiring whether Olmsted might be interested in landscaping the grounds surrounding his mansion in Bridgeport, Connecticut. The Board of Education in Elmira, New York, sent a worrying note: “I hope you have not forgotten our school grounds.”

  Even after Olmsted regained his eyesight, his mood remained black. In December 1873, he sent a rambling letter to Brace. Olmsted attempted to summon the spirit that had first bound the two in friendship—argument, endless argument—but his tone was so bleak that this came off as pessimism rather than provocation. Olmsted even took a few tired swipes at religion. “Do you suppose that it is a much smaller misfortune for a Chinese child to lose its Pagan mother than for an English child to lose its Christian mother?” he asked. “Do you suppose there is a whit more tenderness toward her child in an English mother than in a Digger Indian mother?”

  But religion was a matter he’d settled long ago. Olmsted had made his peace with the rigid Congregationalist faith of his upbringing and the years spent with cruel country parsons. Over time, Olmsted had become what might best be called an agnostic. He frequently described himself in such terms, though he didn’t use the word agnostic. No matter: In this letter to Brace, it seems clear, Olmsted’s real anger was directed not so much at religion as at his puritanical stepmother. He also made an oblique reference to his recent medical condition: “Suppose a man who sees things so far differently than the mass of ordinary healthy men is thereby classified as of defective vision, as of diseased brain. Thus I have not a doubt that I was born with a defect of the eye, with a defect of the brain.”

  As the year ended, Olmsted pulled himself together, as he somehow always seemed to do. In previous months, during the ugly inheritance battle, he’d carried on a sporadic correspondence with Justin Morrill, senator from Vermont. Morrill was chairman of the Senate Committee on Public Buildings and Grounds. In the new year, matters took on increased urgency. Congress had just obtained some land that expanded the grounds surrounding the Capitol in Washington, D.C. Senator Morrill asked Olmsted to prepare a preliminary design.

  Olmsted traveled to Washington twice in January 1874. He was shocked anew by the shabbiness of the Capitol. When he lived here during the Civil War, the building’s dome was under construction, girded with scaffolding. The dome was finally finished, but the surrounding grounds were a disgrace: 58 acres of incoherence, unplanned, unloved, dotted here and there with scraggly trees and marred by large patches of wind-whipped dirt. “In short, the capital of the Union manifests nothing so much as disunity,” he wrote Senator Morrill.

  To Olmsted, this chaos spelled a great opportunity. Transforming the misbegotten grounds was exactly the kind of high-profile project he’d been seeking. It had the potential to be so far beyond whatever eccentric demands P. T. Barnum had for his private estate, a commission Olmsted now chose not to pursue. The job also represented a new type of challenge for Olmsted. Ordinarily, the emphasis of his landscape designs was the landscape: compositions of foliage, water effects. To succeed here, he perceived, the landscape needed to be secondary to the Capitol itself. Olmsted’s task was to create a design that would enhance people’s view of that great marble pile, symbol of democracy. This was noble work, to Olmsted’s mind, a chance “to form and train the tastes of the Nation.”

  In March 1874, Congress appropriated $200,000 for work on the grounds. Olmsted was officially hired at a salary of $2,000 a year. He’d remain in New York but travel frequently to Washington. As usual, there would be an army of people on-site to execute his plan.

  One of the first orders of business was clearing the existing scraggly trees. He left a few, such as an elm planted by George Washington, at least according to legend. But the bulk weren’t worth saving. Better to start over with trees such as sweet gum, mulberry, and magnolia, species he chose for their ability to survive Washington’s harsh summers. Starting from scratch allowed Olmsted to pursue a tour-de-force planting scheme. Olmsted envisioned discrete stands of tightly bunched trees. The open space between them would provide sight lines. By carefully arranging the stands of trees, it would be possible to treat someone walking over the grounds to the very best views of the Capitol from the best-chosen angles. The building was always the star here; in planting trees, Olmsted wanted always to adhere to this guiding principle. Foliage was just a frame.

  Clearly, the Capitol grounds were nothing like a park. Thousands of people visited each day, including tourists, those on official business, and members of Congress and staff. Generally, they could be expected to move quickly over the grounds en route to the Capitol. This posed a thorny circulation challenge. As it stood, twenty-one different streets touched the Capitol grounds. Carriage drives and footpaths entered at forty-six different places. Olmsted puzzled over this mightily before devising a system that fed visitors, regardless of the point where they entered the grounds, into just a handful of main thoroughfares. These thoroughfares were laid out in gentle curves, Olmsted’s signature.

  His most ambitious idea involved the Capitol building itself. This was not something that Senator Morrill and his committee had requested. But as Olmsted saw it, if he was going to create a landscape to accentuate a building, well, that building had better be flawless. It wasn’t. The Capitol featured two wings that were recent additions. Work had begun on them in the 1850s, a time when Congress had outgrown it
s quarters, thanks to all the senators and representatives from newly admitted states such as California and Texas. The new wings doubled the length of the building, a circumstance that necessitated that new dome. It was 288 feet tall where the original had been 140 feet tall.

  To Olmsted, these changes were aesthetically unnerving: the Capitol was now an overlong building with an overhigh dome, the whole structure looking like it might topple over at any moment. As a metaphor for American democracy, it was frightening to contemplate.

  Olmsted proposed a massive marble terrace that would surround the building on three sides, grounding it visually on Capitol Hill. As he put it, “The building will appear as standing on a much firmer base, and thus gain greatly in the supreme qualities of stability, endurance, and repose.” The terrace would also serve a second, equally important, purpose. It would restore the Capitol’s original aspect. L’Enfant’s eighteenth-century plan had called for the building to face west. But the Capitol was built facing east, owing to the idea that Washington was bound to grow in that direction. As it turned out, the White House, the Treasury and Commerce buildings, and the Mall all wound up to the west. The terrace would serve to reorient the Capitol. “The larger part of the city,” Olmsted argued, “the Executive Mansion and the other government buildings will no longer appear to tail off to the rear of the Capitol, but what has been considered its rear will be recognized as its more dignified and stately front.”

  Though Olmsted’s Capitol plan involved a mere 58 acres, there was a momentousness about it. It would take many years to complete and would require drastic measures such as importing tons of bat guano from Peru to enrich Capitol Hill’s nitrogen-starved soil.

  His design was also meticulous, packed with thoughtful little surprises. Olmsted hired architect Thomas Wisedell, who had done some wonderful sandstone carvings in Prospect Park, to design benches and trellises and lampposts. Olmsted himself designed a small structure, discretely tucked into the side of Capitol Hill and meant to serve as a way station for weary people coming off the Mall. He sweated every last detail of this so-called Summerhouse. He commissioned Tiffany and Company to custom build a carillon, a set of bells, that was ingeniously triggered by the flow of water. When a thirsty tourist stopped in the Summerhouse for a drink from its water fountain, the carillon would play a few tinkling notes.

  Of course, getting all these features built required epic determination on Olmsted’s part. He’d found various Central Park boards difficult enough, but now the client was Congress. “I heard that it was a house for some man’s monkey,” sneered Senator James Beck of Kentucky in an attempt to strike monies earmarked for the Summerhouse. The exorbitant marble terraces proved a particular sticking point. Year upon year, Congress refused to grant the funding necessary to begin construction. At one point, Olmsted hand-delivered pamphlets to members of Congress, explaining the rationale for the terraces. He even went so far as to put up scaffolding to provide an idea of what they would look like.

  The project would drag on many years into the future. Along the way, Olmsted would even manage one last round with Egbert Ludovicus Viele—Congressman Viele. Olmsted had bested Viele on Central Park and again on Prospect Park, but he’d never been able to quite shake his vainglorious onetime boss. Viele had a knack for coming back. Years after being fired by the Central Park board, he had mounted a lawsuit for wrongful termination against the City of New York. He actually won and was awarded $8,625. Viele put his own spin on the verdict, treating it as validation that he was actually the park’s rightful author. Ever after, he claimed that Olmsted and Vaux stole his design. As a congressman masquerading as Central Park’s creator, Viele was a vocal critic of Olmsted’s design for the Capitol grounds. Fortunately, Viele managed only a single two-year term and was voted out of Congress before he could do much damage.

  In the end, the terraces got built. The whole thing got built. Amazingly, the grounds surrounding the Capitol today are remarkably true to Olmsted’s original plan. Even the lovely Summerhouse remains, though sadly the carillon never worked properly and was removed long ago.

  In the autumn of 1874, during the early stages of the work in Washington, Olmsted received another large commission. The city of Montreal wanted a public park. Oddly, this was his first proper park job since the break with Vaux. As with the Capitol grounds, Olmsted would bring a sense of vision to this project that was intense, bordering on incandescent. Sadly, this time he’d be in some measure thwarted by forces far beyond his control.

  Olmsted made his first official visit to the site in November 1874. The future park’s overriding feature was a hump of trap rock, one mile long by a half mile wide, and 764 feet high. Montreal, then a city of 120,000, had grown up at the base of—indeed, derives its name from—this “mountain.” In his first communiqué to the park commissioners, Olmsted proposed to draw out “the genius of the place.” The phrase dates to Roman times (genius loci). “Consult the genius of the place in all,” Alexander Pope famously exhorted in his poem Epistle IV to Richard Boyle. The ever-literary Olmsted planned to follow Pope’s counsel and find the natural essence of this particular landscape.

  To accomplish this, Olmsted devised one of the most outré designs of his career. He proposed to plant different types of trees at different points along the mountain slope, creating distinct regions of vegetation. This is exactly how trees grow in nature up the sides of a majestic, snowcapped peak. By imposing the same growth pattern on this 764-foot demipeak, Olmsted hoped to craft an illusion capable, as he told the commissioners, of “making your mountain more mountain-like.”

  At the base, Olmsted proposed to plant the kind of trees one might see in a valley, such as butternut and cherry. Further up, he suggested deciduous trees native to lower elevations, such as hemlock and moose maples. At the highest point, he envisioned scrubby pines and thorny bushes, planted in spare little clumps so as to leave large outcroppings of rock clearly visible. A key feature was a carriage road to the top, periodically curving whether it needed to or not, giving the impression of a demanding climb.

  As always, Olmsted’s design was not confined to mere artistry but was also meant to confer societal benefits. Perhaps because this park site was particularly dramatic, Olmsted had a vivid, almost mystical, sense of what his landscape could accomplish. In his first report to the commissioners, he described how beleaguered city dwellers would benefit from the “power of their scenery to counteract conditions which tend to nervous depression or irritability.” At another point he suggested that his park would be a “prophylactic and therapeutic agent of vital value.”

  And it would be accessible to all. Because the park would in reality be the most modest of mountains, imposing only in appearance, it would invite use by people who weren’t exactly physically rugged. His plan called for a children’s playground in an area that was supposed to feel like a high mountain meadow. He designed a walking path with a grade so gentle that it would be possible to meander all the way to the top of the mountain without encountering a single set of stairs. The path could even be used by what Olmsted termed “the feebler sorts of folks”—the elderly, handicapped, even people in wheelchairs. These visitors, too, would be able to conquer Mount Royal’s awesome summit. Olmsted knew a thing or two about feeble folk. His father had recently died following a fall in which he broke his hip. Olmsted still walked with a limp, thanks to the carriage accident that had shattered his thigh many years back.

  Olmsted was joined on the Montreal project by his eldest stepson. John Charles, newly graduated from Yale, signed on as an assistant in the autumn of 1875. He was charged with various clerical duties. Because he had a talent for drawing, he learned quickly from the other draftsmen whom Olmsted hired on a part-time basis. Soon John would develop into a skilled draftsman in his own right.

  In the autumn of 1875, Olmsted got a bite from a prospective client that had the potential to be huge. Charles Dalton was commissioner of the newly formed Boston parks commission. He was al
so a onetime USSC executive and a McLean Asylum trustee—again those incestuous interrelationships.

  As a fast-growing city of roughly 300,000, vital cultural center, and civic rival of New York, Boston was a natural for a new park project. But like Chicago, the city’s aspirations had been slowed by a great fire, in 1872. Now, Dalton invited Olmsted to travel to Boston and visit some sites. There was discussion of a possible park system. But everything was still at a preliminary stage. When work might begin and how many parks would be needed, such details were unclear—as was the most crucial issue of all, whether Olmsted would be tapped for the job.

  Meanwhile, construction began on Mount Royal that winter. This was an unusual season to break ground on a park. But Canada had fallen into a terrible economic depression. The commissioners were anxious to launch a public project that would employ people. Unfortunately, the work was commenced hastily, without consulting Olmsted and without much fidelity to his plan. The carriage road failed to follow the route he’d meticulously mapped out, gracefully winding past specific rock outcroppings and other interesting natural features that he’d identified on the site.

  Olmsted was furious. He fired off a letter to the commissioners, describing the road that had been built as something that “any boy who had been a year with a surveying party might have laid out & any intelligent farmer might have constructed.” Twisting the knife, he added that the “opportunity of making such an attractive way up the mountain as I had designed, has been lost forever.”

  Problems mounted as the work progressed. It turned out that the commissioners had requested Olmsted’s plan before they knew whether they could purchase certain parcels of land at the base of the mountain. As that became clearer, they asked him repeatedly to redo parts of his plan to reflect ever-fluctuating boundaries. Then the commissioners sprang on Olmsted that a reservoir was planned in the middle of his mountain meadow. There was also talk of building a smallpox hospital on the park’s grounds.