Genius of Place

by Justin Martin

  Soon an intriguing opportunity came Olmsted’s way, courtesy of Leland Stanford. Stanford had built the western portion of the transcontinental railroad; he’d driven the famous golden spike during the ceremony when the two sections were connected. During the 1860s, he’d served as California’s governor. Stanford was iron-willed and ursine and wore a perpetual scowl. As one of the age’s foremost rail barons, he’d amassed a fortune and also an ample list of enemies, such as journalist Ambrose Bierce, who insisted on writing his name: “£eland $tanford.”

  Stanford had recently lost his only child, Leland Stanford Jr. While the family was traveling in Europe, the fifteen-year-old boy had died in Florence of typhoid fever. Stanford and his wife, Jane, were devastated. The couple consulted mediums and conducted séances, hoping to contact the boy’s spirit. But even in grief, there was a limit to Stanford’s tolerance for the ethereal realms. He soon hit on the idea of founding a university in his dead son’s honor. And not just any university: This would be on the grandest scale conceivable, akin to an opera aria that keeps rising and swelling because there’s no other place for such great sorrow to go.

  Stanford traveled east to discuss his big plans with educators at universities such as Harvard, Yale, and Cornell. Stanford was especially taken with General Francis Walker, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. MIT was still a young institution (just a couple decades old), and it had recently almost gone under. Walker had stepped in to turn the school around; he was Stanford’s kind of can-do man. As it happened, Walker was acquainted with Henry Codman, a recent MIT graduate who also happened to be one of Olmsted’s young apprentices.

  It was Codman who forged the connection between Olmsted and Stanford. He also urged Olmsted to ask Stanford for $10,000 for a preliminary plan, an unheard-of amount. Olmsted was resistant; demanding a huge fee was a technique he sometimes used to drive away clients he didn’t wish to engage. To his surprise, Stanford readily agreed to the $10,000. Clearly, this was quite a project. “There is not any word half big enough for his ideas of what it is to be,” marveled Olmsted, wryly adding that the only fitting term was “Universitatory.”

  In August 1886, Olmsted set off for California accompanied by Codman. He also brought along his youngest child, Frederick Jr., whom he called Rick. Olmsted figured such a trip would benefit the sixteen-year-old. The three traveled by train to Portland, Oregon, then south to San Francisco by stagecoach. From there, they took a trip to the Mariposa Grove of Big Trees. Olmsted visited Galen Clark, seventy-two now but still voluble and still acting as “doorkeeper of Yosemite.” Olmsted also paid his first visit to Golden Gate Park. He’d traded letters with its designer, William Hammond Hall, and offered him much useful advice, but had never actually seen the park.

  The California trip was mostly devoted to studying a 7,000-acre tract of land set aside for Leland Stanford Jr. University. It was in Palo Alto, the senior Stanford’s sprawling estate. MIT’s Walker came out as well. Olmsted expected to go far beyond simply designing the campus grounds. As the U.S. pioneer of landscape architecture, he’d worked relentlessly to expand the scope of his field. Projects like the Buffalo park system and Boston’s Emerald Necklace were exercises in urban planning as much as landscape design. Olmsted had ample experience with campus jobs besides. At the time, he was working on a plan for the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey, and he had done discrete design tasks on existing campuses, including Amherst and Yale. He also had some failed college commissions in his past: Early in his career he devoted a huge amount of time and thought to a never-executed plan for the Maine College of Agriculture and the Mechanic Arts. But that only meant that he was brimming with unrealized ideas.

  Olmsted spent more than a month in close consultation with Stanford, Walker, and Codman. In far-ranging discussions, Olmsted began to hone his concept for the campus grounds, but he also had ideas for the architecture of the buildings—and even about how thoughtful design could promote a better educational experience.

  No shrinking violet himself, Olmsted also got his first experience with the immovable object that was Leland Stanford. The Palo Alto estate included a stretch of hills, an ideal spot, thought Olmsted, for placing the university. The hills’ rolling topography would allow him to create a unique naturalistic campus design. But Stanford was adamant: The school belonged on the broad plain at the base of the hills. He pointed out that his son had enjoyed riding his horse across this plain. “The site is settled at last—not as I had hoped,” wrote Olmsted to his stepson John.

  In September 1886, Olmsted set off for home. Once there, he’d draw up a formal plan for the university. At Salt Lake City, Rick and Codman continued east, while Olmsted split off for a deeply personal errand. Olmsted and Stanford were temperamentally unalike, but they had a shared bond in loss. Olmsted headed north to Montana, where he visited the ranch once run by Owen, his deceased stepson. He’d never seen this place before. But he had helped finance the venture, and he still held a considerable stake. With sadness, he noted the ranch was in poor shape. It was proving to be a pitiful investment, and not exactly a fitting tribute to Owen’s life and work.

  Back in Brookline, Olmsted got to work on the university plan. Olmsted agreed with Stanford that it ought to be organized around quadrangles, starting with a single main quad. As the university grew, it would be possible to add more quads, equivalent to lining up dominoes end to end. Olmsted also pushed for arcades on all the buildings. Such arcades provide shelter from both sun and rain. They would suggest an orderly path for students to follow. Arcades would also give the buildings, regardless of height, a consistent feature.

  The quads and arcades were meant to create unity, architecturally, but they also served a subtler social-engineering goal. Olmsted was intent on providing ample common space, where students in diverse fields of study—literature, mathematics, philosophy—could meet and mingle their ideas. This was a hallowed Olmsted notion; he’d even coined a term for it: communitiveness. Mixing disciplines was the key to his professional success and the crux of his plan for Leland Stanford Jr. University. To bump up this concept further, Olmsted suggested that the students live in cottages. Intermingled with the student housing would be cottages available to people who weren’t attending the university, forming a still larger sense of community. This was an idea revived from Olmsted’s long-ago, shelved-then-lost plan for the university that became Berkeley.

  As for planting, Olmsted urged Stanford to go with a scheme suited to an arid climate. Thanks to his recent tour of schools such as Harvard, Stanford had other ideas. “I find Governor Stanford bent on giving his University New England scenery, New England trees and turf, to be obtained only by lavish use of water,” complained Olmsted.

  He suggested that the campus grounds be paved in brick as much as possible. In his report, he pointed to the example of Rome, a place with a Mediterranean climate similar to Palo Alto, adding that the grounds of St. Peter’s Basilica features “not a tree, nor a bush, nor a particle of turf.” The paved campus grounds, however, should be periodically broken by little oases, discreet areas planted with palms and other flora suitable to an arid climate.

  Olmsted submitted his report. Stanford seemed pleased. Meanwhile, General Walker lined up an architecture firm to design the campus’s buildings: Shepley, Rutan & Coolidge. Stanford simply rubber-stamped this choice. Shepley, Rutan & Coolidge was a brand-new outfit formed after Richardson’s death by three of his young associates. The university would be the firm’s first major commission. Olmsted was thrilled. Working with these architects would be almost like a posthumous collaboration with his old friend Richardson.

  In the spring of 1887, Charles Coolidge traveled to California with a master plan of the university. Stanford took one look and immediately started demanding changes. This was not unexpected; he was the client, after all. The challenge was the time constraint he suddenly introduced. He wanted to lay the cornerstone in two weeks, on a date corresponding with his decease
d son’s birthday. Young Coolidge made the mistake of arguing with Stanford. He said Stanford’s changes would disrupt the plan—and to give this view weight, he summoned Olmsted’s name. It was to no avail. “Gov. replied a Landscape Arch’t and an Arch’t might be disappointed but he was going to have the buildings the way he wanted them,” wrote Coolidge to Olmsted, adding: “The Gov. means business.”

  Stanford insisted that Coolidge race to redo the design. One of the new features Stanford demanded was a huge memorial arch to serve as a formal entry into the main quad. This disrupted the intimate human scale of the quad in Olmsted’s view. At the same time, if there was ever an architect with a grasp of the monumental, it had been Richardson. Under time pressure, Coolidge and his colleagues simply cribbed one of their deceased boss’s designs, from an arch in Buffalo. They did the same thing with a number of other buildings designed for the campus.

  Coolidge traveled up to San Francisco, where he hired a band and purchased a silver spade. On the prescribed date, Stanford dug up a clod of dirt and laid the cornerstone. Work was officially under way.

  But Stanford kept making changes. Initially, he’d agreed to Olmsted’s cottages—or at least appeared to. Instead, he decided he wanted a tall dormitory modeled after a building he’d seen during a vacation in Switzerland. He okayed Olmsted’s plan for an arboretum featuring native California trees. Then he abruptly pulled the plug. Not only was he capricious, but he was nearly impossible to reach. He was constantly traveling. The governor placed his wife’s brother, Ariel Lathrop, in charge of the project and asked that all inquiries now be directed to this man. Lathrop promptly fired the superintendent that Olmsted had installed in Palo Alto as the firm’s on-site representative. To Olmsted, this was a serious breach. What’s more, he felt reduced. Where before he’d had Stanford’s ear, now he was forced to deal with this Lathrop. Olmsted protested directly to Stanford, writing, “We are now compelled to make a formal remonstrance.” Stanford didn’t even bother to reply.

  Feeling stymied, Olmsted would taper off his involvement in the project over time. When the university opened, he wasn’t even invited to the ceremony. Nonetheless, he wrote Stanford a letter of congratulations. Back came a terse note that included: “We are gradually improving the grounds in accordance with your plans.”

  This was partly true. Stanford’s main quad, one of the great pieces of university architecture, still retains such Olmsted touches as the arcades and the oasis plantings. But the idea of a connected row of quads was abandoned. Stanford made all manner of other changes, many of them sensible but also at odds with Olmsted’s original plan. After the governor died, his wife was equally demanding, but even more fickle in her architectural whims. Stanford University is best viewed as a collaboration—with a very headstrong client.

  CHAPTER 29

  Big House in the Big Woods

  THIRTY YEARS HAD PASSED since Olmsted began work on Central Park. For the past twenty, he’d built a career as a landscape architect. Olmsted was sixty-six now, well past the age when his father and most other people retired. His shaggy mane and beard were starting to speckle gray to white. It made his eyes appear that much bluer, but they weren’t filled with peace. Although he had received great acclaim, he worried about the lasting impact of every last work he’d ever done. He need only look at his most recent project, Stanford University. Or he could go back to his very first, Central Park, or most anything in between. All served as painful reminders that there was always someone eager to meddle with his designs. Olmsted wanted to leave a legacy. He wanted to elevate the profession of landscape architecture. He wanted to leave a thriving business to John and Rick. But he’d witnessed so much tragedy that he had a keen sense—beyond morbid—of his own impending demise.

  During the years left to him, Olmsted would greedily seize on commissions, building a large book of far-flung projects that would send him careening across the United States in late-night railcars. This was the most successful stretch for his firm. But two particular commissions would stand out as being sufficiently lofty to provide what he craved. On these, he would expend massive energy and endure terrible anxiety. He’d race against time. He’d endeavor to outrun his fast-declining health. In the end, he would struggle against his own mind, would battle against the failure of memory itself, the very seat of his creative power. Those are losing fights, always. But with fate on the threshold, Olmsted would deliver a pair of spectacular triumphs.

  In August 1888, Olmsted traveled to North Carolina to meet with George Washington Vanderbilt. As grandson of the Commodore himself, George had inherited a fortune worth $13 million. But he was also the first Vanderbilt heir not to take an active interest in building a business empire. He was twenty-five, and Olmsted described him as a “delicate, refined, and bookish man.”

  For the past several years, Vanderbilt had been traveling to Asheville with his mother, who suffered from malaria. Because of its mountain setting and clean air, smallish Asheville (population 10,000) had earned a national reputation by the late nineteenth century as a spot for rest cures. He came to know the surrounding area by taking horseback rides. During one, he’d discovered a particularly comely spot, a hill looking down on the French Broad River and in the distance, Mount Pisgah, one of the highest peaks in the Blue Ridge range. Vanderbilt decided he wanted to build a country estate here and started buying up parcels of land, anonymously, through an agent. If anyone learned that a Vanderbilt was in the market, property values would soar. Because Asheville was a renowned resort, rail service already existed from Vanderbilt’s home in New York. It was a twenty-four-hour trip.

  Vanderbilt wanted to be associated only with the best for this princely undertaking. For a landscape architect, Olmsted was the obvious choice. While living on Staten Island forty years earlier, Olmsted had done his very first landscaping job on the farm of William Vanderbilt, George’s father. The Vanderbilts were well acquainted with Olmsted. In the past two years, he had begun projects with two of George’s four siblings, designing the grounds of their private estates in Lenox, Massachusetts, and Lake Champlain in Vermont. The other two would soon commission Olmsted to work on estates in Madison, New Jersey, and Newport, Rhode Island.

  For an architect, Vanderbilt turned to Richard Morris Hunt. French trained with a talent for elegant, formal designs, Hunt was one of the few Americans who could execute a house that would be at home in the vast spread Vanderbilt contemplated, one that would be suitably imposing and grandiose. Hunt was sixty-one and at the height of his career. He was somewhat of a court architect to New York high society, designing Fifth Avenue mansions and Newport redoubts. As described earlier, Vaux had clashed with Hunt years back over a proposal to place a series of monumental entryways into Central Park. Vaux won that one. But Hunt got the last laugh (metaphorically, as he rarely even smiled), by seizing the job to design the façade of the Metropolitan Museum after Vaux fumbled the commission. Hunt had also designed the Vanderbilt family mausoleum on Staten Island. Olmsted had collaborated with him on that project. Each man was old enough to be George Vanderbilt’s grandfather. On matters of art and taste, the young scion would defer to both to an unusual degree. Vanderbilt’s wealth was on par with Governor Stanford’s, but his temperament couldn’t be more different.

  During their initial consultation, Vanderbilt sought Olmsted’s advice on how best to utilize his land. He’d already purchased 2,000 acres and planned to buy tens of thousands more. The hilltop Vanderbilt had chosen for his house was striking. The distant views of the mountains were awesome. But Olmsted was shocked by the pitiful condition of the surrounding acreage. Generations of tenants had abused the land, cutting down the trees to build homes and fences. Entire stretches of forestland had been burned away to create pasturage for hogs. It was reminiscent of nothing so much as the barren rectangle once slated for Central Park.

  “What do you imagine you will do with all this land?” asked Olmsted, according to an account of the meeting that he wrote to
Kingsbury.

  “Make a park of it, I suppose,” answered Vanderbilt.

  But Olmsted counseled him that a vast private park would be expensive to build and challenging to maintain. Better to set aside just a small portion for gardens and perhaps a small deer park. The rest could be restored to forest. Olmsted was more familiar with the varied U.S. landscape than just about anyone. During recent travels, he had grown conscious of a myth: America the primeval, land of limitless forest. From train-car windows and stagecoaches, he’d noted what big timber was doing, clear-cutting huge stretches of land. The proto-environmentalist in Olmsted, the same side that led him to become involved in Yosemite and Niagara Falls, drew him to this issue.

  In Europe, where land was viewed as finite, forest management was a centuries-old practice. But Olmsted was one of only a tiny group of Americans who were thinking about the subject, and he was intimately familiar with the other players. A few months earlier, his Brookline neighbor Charles Sargent had launched a new magazine, Garden and Forest, which focused on this very subject. This was also a topic of concern for Horace Cleveland. Cleveland, who worked with Olmsted on Prospect Park and Chicago’s Washington Park, had built up about the only American landscape architectural practice to rival FLO’s. He’d recently written a pamphlet, The Cultivation and Management of Our Native Forests for Development as Timber or Ornamental Wood.

  Olmsted even had some specific knowledge of the area surrounding Asheville. During the third leg of his Southern travels, the journey through the backcountry, Olmsted had spent an entire month meandering through the forests of North Carolina. “There is no experience of my life to which I could return with more satisfaction,” he told Vanderbilt. He knew what had once been here; he saw now what had been lost. And Olmsted was intent on re-creating what he had enjoyed so mightily on a visit back in 1854.