Shortly after arriving, Olmsted received disturbing news about Vaux. Vaux had recently managed to get reappointed to the Central Park board, a promising development professionally. During a meeting, a fellow member asked Vaux the scientific name for the flower rose of Sharon. Vaux wasn’t sure. The man pursued him, demanding to know why he lacked this knowledge. Increasingly agitated, Vaux sputtered and fumed and toyed with his glasses.
Of course, Vaux was an architect of bridges and buildings, not a designer of foliage compositions. For that matter, Olmsted most likely didn’t know the scientific name of rose of Sharon, either. Still, Vaux was deeply humiliated, and he sensed that his standing with the board had been badly damaged. After receiving news of Vaux’s latest setback, Olmsted didn’t sleep for forty-eight hours.
Dr. Rayner did his best to shield Olmsted from other excitements. He fed Olmsted a steady diet of sedatives. After many weeks in Hampstead Heath, Olmsted began to feel terribly constrained. “You know that I am practically in prison here,” he wrote to Codman. Yet he gradually started to show improvement and was finally released from Dr. Rayner’s care.
As was his habit, following a period of inactivity, Olmsted exploded into action. He spent a couple days traveling along the Thames from London to Hurley, trying out two different electric launches along the way. During this trip, he also took the opportunity to closely observe the foliage that grew along the riverbank. He was struck anew by the bounteousness that nature could achieve, even in temperate England. He was overwhelmed by the sheer variety, the mystery—willows jutting out over the water at unexpected angles, vines snaking this way and that. He knew that at the fair he would need to capture that elusive, lush, almost tropical quality that he was forever chasing in places like Central Park’s Ramble. “A most capital school is found on the Thames banks for the study of what we want at Chicago in the lagoon banks,” Olmsted wrote in a letter addressed jointly to his partners, John and Codman.
In September 1892, Olmsted sailed back to the United States. The ship encountered severe weather, and the return voyage can only be described as a rough passage. For Olmsted, it always was.
October found Olmsted back in Chicago. Less than a year remained before the fair was scheduled to open. He was surprised to see how much had been accomplished during the time he’d been away. Many of the buildings were well under way, rising up from the ground, as if they were living, growing things. Great progress had been made even on the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building. Designed by architect George Post, it was slated to be the largest building in history with an exhibit space covering 44 acres.
But Olmsted was also disturbed by how much still remained to be done. He was especially critical of his own firm’s efforts. Waterways had been dredged; the fairgrounds themselves had been created with compacted muck and thousands of tons of manure carted in from the Union stockyards. Still, he wondered, how could all the remaining planting and filling and grading possibly get done in time? “I am tired and have a growing dread of worry and anxiety,” he wrote to John.
Olmsted headed down to the Biltmore Estate but was back in Brookline in time for Christmas. Reports trickled in indicating that Chicago was grappling with a particularly ferocious winter. And then in early January, a telegram arrived at Fairsted. Codman was dead. He had succumbed to complications following a routine appendectomy. He was twenty-eight years old.
There was a sad symmetry to Codman’s death, as Burnham had also lost his business partner during the course of the project. Root had died of pneumonia. The night Root died, someone claimed to have overheard Burnham muttering, “I have worked, I have schemed and dreamed to make us the greatest architects in the world—I have made him see it and kept him at it—and now he dies—Damn! Damn! Damn!”
Olmsted could well have said the same, substituting landscape architect for architect. Actually, what Olmsted said about Codman’s death was: “I am as one standing on a wreck and can hardly see when we shall get afloat again.” He rushed back to Chicago. At his firm’s field office at the Rookery, he sat down at Codman’s desk and began riffling through the various letters and memorandums. But it was hard to make sense of anything. Better to assess matters out on the grounds—the frigid grounds. The temperature on February 4, 1893, was minus 8°F, Olmsted noted, and the ground was frozen three feet deep. Olmsted directed men to use dynamite to loosen earth that needed to be moved. Then he oversaw teams as they pressed and molded this godforsaken dirt to build up the fairgrounds and build out the lagoon banks until they appeared suitably varied and mysterious.
So much was left to do. Olmsted felt overwhelmed, and his health was suffering once again. He had a new ailment, an ulcerated tooth. And he faced an old demon, insomnia. Olmsted was staying at the Wellington Hotel. He wrote to John back in Brookline, begging him to send a new pair of Pulitzer’s-brand earplugs to replace a pair that he had simply worn out. He couldn’t possibly quiet the noise inside his head, but at least he could silence the clangs and clatters and other street sounds coming from without.
Olmsted intended to throw everything into a final sprint in Chicago, but he wondered whether it would kill him. Most certainly, he’d have nothing left for the ever-expanding practice. He wrote a hopeless letter to John that included: “It looks as if the time has come when it is necessary to count me out.”
He needed sleep. He needed help. If he added a new partner, perhaps that person could pick up some of the slack on all the other projects—all over America—that were weighing on him. Olmsted decided to bring Charles Eliot, his onetime apprentice, into the partnership. Eliot had been pursuing his own landscape architecture practice in Boston. In March 1893, the firm became Olmsted, Olmsted & Eliot.
By now, Burnham had 12,000 men on the grounds, working around the clock. This was possible due to a recent invention, electric lights. A large crew set to painting the massive structures white. This was done with the aid of another innovation, the world’s first spray-painting apparatus.
As spring drew on, the ice gave way to hard rain. Olmsted continued to work outdoors, exposed to the elements, directing the last of the plantings. Often, he even took his meals outside, alongside the other workers. “The dirt of the provisional mess table, the noise & scurry and the puddles and rain do not leave a dilapidated old man much comfort,” he wrote to John.
The ulcerated tooth bothered him more than ever. In another letter, he confided: “I am living on toast & tea.”
But he kept going. Olmsted was frustrated because he had to wait for buildings to be completed before he could plant around their bases. Elsewhere on the grounds, he directed the last of the plantings, supplementing what had taken root in the two previous seasons of work. Everywhere he pushed to turn up the volume—thicker, lusher, greener—per his recent trip along the Thames.
When it became clear that the fair was truly going to happen, that gala event was held at New York’s Madison Square Concert Hall, forerunner of the current Gardens. Several hundred guests were present, including a generous sampling of the fairgrounds’ creators: architects and painters and sculptors. The press was there along with a smattering of politicians. Two of Olmsted’s old friends, Edwin Godkin and Charles Eliot Norton, had traveled down from Boston for the event.
Following a two-hour dinner, there was a show of stereoscopic images, projected onto a large screen. It was an incredible display: Hunt’s Administration Building, featuring a dome larger than the U.S. Capitol’s, followed by Daniel Chester French’s Statue of the Republic—massive, gilded, Lady Liberty-like, given pride of place at the head of the Court of Honor. Olmsted’s Wooded Island met with high approbation. The stereoscopic show closed with an image of Daniel Burnham, director of the fair.
Hunt, hobbled by gout, slowly took the stage and presented Burnham with a silver loving cup. Burnham filled it with wine, took a big swig, and then sent it circulating through the crowd. Burnham then launched into that memorable speech, quoted earlier, reflecting glory away from himself and
onto Olmsted, describing Olmsted as an artist who “paints with lakes and wooded slopes,” thanking him for “what his brain has wrought and his pen has taught for half a century,” and calling him “our constant mentor” and “the planner of the Exposition” and a “genius.”
Meanwhile, the loving cup continued to make the rounds. It was engraved with the names of the event’s 272 attendees. Among those names was Olmsted’s, of course. But there was one small matter. Olmsted wasn’t actually there. He had taken the opportunity to slip down to Asheville to work on the Biltmore Estate.
Press accounts made the natural mistake of assuming Olmsted was present for his own fulsome tribute. In the aftermath of the event, both Harvard and Yale announced they planned to confer honorary degrees on him. What a turnabout: high recognition from two preeminent universities for a man who had attended one of them for all of three months. In an odd twist, both ceremonies were set for the same date. Olmsted accepted the honors but wrote letters explaining that he’d have to receive both in abstentia. He was just too busy. “I doubt if a man ever came to such honor before as to have L.L.D. [doctor of laws] from both Yale and Harvard the same day,” remarked an astonished Kingsbury, “and I suspect that nobody ever cared so little about it.”
Olmsted had his priorities. He was back in Chicago on May 1, 1893, for the opening ceremonies of the World’s Columbian Exposition. That day, an estimated 500,000 people were packed along the Court of Honor to hear President Grover Cleveland deliver an address. Shortly after noon, the president touched a gilded telegraph key, which sent a signal traveling through the fairgrounds. In perfect sync, banners unfurled from the buildings, jets of water rose from Frederick MacMonnies’s Columbia Fountain, a shroud fell revealing the Statue of the Republic, two hundred doves were released, and a band struck up “America.” Olmsted ignored the hullabaloo. He was busy making one last tour of the grounds, making sure everything was just so.
But he didn’t stick around for long. At last, he felt comfortable turning the project entirely over to a superintendent, per his usual practice. Of course, it wasn’t as if work ended now just because the fair had opened. What’s more, there was rework to be done. Every day, visitors trampled the landscape, and people uprooted plants to take home as souvenirs. Mercifully, these concerns would now fall on someone else.
Olmsted knew he had made a mockery of his 50 percent rule during that mad-dash period leading up to the fair. He felt the press of the Biltmore and all his other business. Soon he hit the rails once more, making his most ambitious business trip yet, one that would carry him through sixteen states.
Unfortunately, the fair got off to a slow start, due to poor weather. Attendance was far below expectations. As Olmsted traveled, he interviewed fellow rail passengers about the fair, a throwback to his long-ago days as a reporter for the New-York Daily Times. Even from a distance of hundreds of miles, Olmsted still couldn’t entirely disengage from events in Chicago. He concluded that many people planned to visit the fair, but they were waiting for better weather. Some people were holding off because they expected the event to be at its height closer to its autumn closing date. “Everywhere there is growing interest in the Exposition,” Olmsted reported to Burnham. “Everywhere I have found indications that people are planning to go to it.” In his letter, Olmsted also suggested some ways to liven up the fair. Maybe there could be wandering banjo players, for example. Burnham had given in to Olmsted on his boats. But banjo players—no way!
As part of Olmsted’s travels, he visited Atlanta, which was planning its own Cotton States Exposition as an answer to Chicago’s Columbian Expo. In the year ahead, he would make several more visits to the city. During one, the Atlanta Constitution would treat his mere presence as front-page news. “Mr. Olmstead Talks,” reads the headline, followed by: “He says the grounds can be made very beautiful. His visit for consultation only.” Note that the paper misspelled Olmsted’s name. As often happened, he lost out on the commission to someone who agreed to do it for less.
Meanwhile, the Columbian Expo turned out to be an outsize success. Paid attendance just kept growing through the summer and early autumn, eventually passing the 20-million mark. The big sensation, the feature that managed to upstage even the Eiffel Tower, was the world’s first Ferris wheel. It was placed on the Midway Plaisance, that narrow connecting strip from the original plan. Also relegated to this spot were Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, Hagenback’s circus, a replica Hawaiian volcano, and the World’s Congress of Beauty, promising “40 Ladies from 40 Nations.” Thanks to this memorable and colorful section of the Expo, the term midway, coined by Olmsted and Vaux, entered the language. It’s used to refer to the more raucous part of a fair, featuring sideshows and other more blueish entertainments.
But more than the Ferris wheel, more than any single attraction, what visitors took away from the fair was a general feeling, an ambience. People were awed by the massive buildings set on the banks of winding lagoons, little brightly colored boats gliding languidly past. These elements were potentially discordant, yet they achieved a strange harmony. The fairgrounds were not of this world. They were laid out according to the logic of dreams. “Words fail,” declared a kindergarten teacher, visiting from Kankakee, Illinois. “The magic splendor of that sight can never be excelled on earth.”
At night, the sense of otherworldliness was greater still. The buildings were lined in electric lights, an innovation many visitors had never before seen. The Chicago Tribune referred to the “graceful outlines of the White City.” And that was the name that stuck: the White City.
Even Olmsted’s Wooded Island achieved its aim, providing an oasis of calm. Irascible architect Louis Sullivan declared it the very best feature of the fair, high praise since he had designed one of the buildings. Sullivan’s young assistant spent many hours wandering around the island and was especially taken with the Japanese Ho-O-Don. The assistant’s name: Frank Lloyd Wright.
It’s estimated that somewhere in the neighborhood of 5 percent of the U.S. population attended the fair. And then: curtains. On October 31, 1893, the gates closed for all time. Within the space of a few years, almost all of the buildings would come down. A large number burned, quite possibly due to arson, during a violent Pullman workers’ strike. Left behind was a landscape, Chicago’s Jackson Park, designed by Olmsted and Vaux back in 1871.
Clever Olmsted; he’d figured out a way to make real a long-ago dream.
CHAPTER 31
“Before I Am the Least Prepared for It”
DOWN IN NORTH CAROLINA, work was progressing. In fact, it had never missed a beat, thanks to Olmsted’s slipping off to Asheville at every opportunity. Hunt, too. For the past two years, Hunt’s mansion for Vanderbilt had kept growing, just as surely as the architect’s supersize Administration Building in the White City. The Biltmore Estate was starting to take discernible shape, rising from the hilltop like a huge sand castle. When complete, it would be 175,000 square feet, featuring 250 rooms, 43 of them bathrooms.
Olmsted’s plan for a model forest had also moved forward at startling speed. Vanderbilt had gone on a buying binge, and his North Carolina holdings had grown to a size that was simply mind-boggling. He now owned around 100,000 acres, and his holdings would ultimately grow to roughly 125,000 acres (equal to nearly 200 square miles). Some of this was hearty, old-growth woods, but much of it was scraggly and abused like the land Olmsted had seen during that first visit.
While Vanderbilt’s property grew exponentially, Olmsted had come to realize that forest-management acumen far beyond his own was required. He had personally recommended that Vanderbilt hire a young man named Gifford Pinchot. Vanderbilt had agreed. Pinchot hailed from a wealthy New York family and was of French descent. He was one of the first Americans to attend the École Nationale Forestière in Nancy, France. While there, he had studied under the school’s leading theorists. He had toured England, Germany, and Switzerland and returned to America versed in the latest European thinking on fo
restry.
Upon going to work for Vanderbilt, Pinchot immediately began putting these methods into practice. He had even made a contribution to North Carolina’s exhibit at the Columbian Exposition, a forty-nine-page pamphlet detailing his revolutionary forest-management plan for the Biltmore. Pinchot’s pamphlet was awarded an “honorable mention” during the Chicago festivities.
Olmsted was impressed by how much Pinchot was accomplishing at Biltmore. With the fair finally behind him, Olmsted seized the opportunity to renew his own focus on the estate. Still, lavishing exclusive attention on any one project felt alien, and he couldn’t shut out the creeping suspicion that he was neglecting others. He’d been in a state of emergency for so long that it had become his normal state. “Am I needed at Kansas City? It is so long since I have been at Louisville that I shall be lost if I go alone,” he wrote to John back in Brookline. “You must send me the names of the people whom I shall need to renew acquaintance with. At this moment I cannot recall one.” In another letter, Olmsted worried that if he took a trip to visit various clients, it would kill him: “My health is extremely frail and I may be tipped out any day.”
John assured Olmsted that matters were under control. His stepfather could cut back his travel. That’s why Eliot had been brought into the partnership. With projects that were sufficiently advanced, that’s what superintendents were for. Olmsted slowed down, but not surprisingly, he couldn’t resist making certain trips. It was reminiscent of his youth, when he’d pinballed from infatuation to infatuation. There was so much yet to be done, and he was aware that the time left him was limited. Olmsted was especially likely to slip off to jobs near Asheville, such as the Atlanta suburb or the Louisville park system.
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