Genius of Place

by Justin Martin

  White, Richard Grant

  Whitmore, Zolva

  Whitney, Elizabeth Baldwin. See Baldwin, Elizabeth

  Whittier, John Greenleaf

  Whittredge, Worthington

  Wikoff, Henry

  Williams, Andrew

  Wilson, Edmund

  Wilson, Henry

  Wine making and FLO as consultant to upstart industry

  Wisedell, Thomas

  Wm. C. Bryant & Company

  Women volunteers

  on Civil War hospital ships

  provide food, clothing to USSC

  Women’s Central Association of Relief

  World’s Fair of 1893 (Chicago)

  background

  boats for fairgoers

  building architecture, construction

  Ferris wheel

  grounds designed, constructed, by FLO

  Wooded Island with Japanese pavilion

  Wormeley, Katharine Prescott

  Wright, Frank Lloyd

  Wright, Frank Lloyd, Jr.

  Yale University

  brother John Hull Olmsted attends

  confers honorary degree on FLO

  encounter with John’s classmate, Allison

  FLO’s brief enrollment

  stepson John Charles attends

  and uncommon set of friends

  Yeoman (pseudonym for F. L. Olmsted)

  Yosemite

  FLO’s first glimpse

  history and early representations in art

  local Indians

  Olmsted family trip

  FLO serves on Yosemite preservation commission

  becomes national park

  Zimmermann, Johann Georg

  Zouave regiments in Civil War

  Zuckerman, Mary Ellen

  APPENDIX

  The Olmsted Views

  I enjoyed visiting all these incredible sites while researching this book. For each, I’ve selected choice spots, some of which are remarkably unsullied and have changed little in appearance since Olmsted’s day. Of course, you’ll have to use your imagination to shut out cars and people using cell phones.

  OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA

  Mountain View Cemetery

  Go to the highest point on the hill. Legend has it that Olmsted stood here, lifted his finger, and pointed down toward the bay, declaring, “This is the spot.” In his day, one would have had an incredible view of two bustling boomtowns, Oakland and San Francisco. Your view today is of the same two cities, now all grown up. Notable people buried here include chocolate baron Domingo Ghirardelli and Julia Morgan, architect of the Hearst Castle at San Simeon.

  PALO ALTO, CALIFORNIA

  Stanford University

  The layout of the university’s grounds was the result of a compromise—more like a showdown really—between Olmsted and iron-willed Leland Stanford. Visit the Main Quad, the area of the campus most true to Olmsted’s vision. Stanford wanted this space covered in grass, but Olmsted fought to pave it and include the round oases filled with flowers and palms. The idea for the quad itself was Olmsted and Stanford’s jointly.

  Olmsted pushed for the arcades that unify the buildings. As someone who came to landscape architecture circuitously—as a sailor then farmer then journalist—Olmsted believed in mixing disciplines. The Main Quad was intended as a common space where students pursuing diverse studies could meet and mingle their ideas.

  YOSEMITE, CALIFORNIA

  Olmsted was an environmentalist before the term even existed. He led the early efforts to preserve this natural wonder. One of his favorite spots here is Yosemite Falls, where water cascades over three separate tiers, plummeting a total of 2,425 feet. Olmsted put great effort into positioning the tents of his large camping parties so that everyone would have a view of the falls.

  GUILFORD, CONNECTICUT

  Sachem’s Head Farm Site

  From Guilford, drive three miles south to Sachem’s Head, a little spit of land jutting into Long Island Sound. Park on Chimney Corner Circle. You are now at the approximate site of Olmsted’s seaside Connecticut farm. The farmhouse is long gone, but the view out across the sound remains. Meanwhile, if you visit Staten Island, New York, Olmsted’s farmhouse remains, but the view is long gone. Unfortunately, the house is situated on a busy modern thoroughfare, lined with shops. Address: 4515 Hylan Boulevard. The New York Parks Department purchased Olmsted’s old farmhouse in 2006. During my visit it was under renovation, surrounded by scaffolding.

  CHICAGO, ILLINOIS

  Jackson Park

  Stand on the Clarence Darrow Bridge. During the 1893 Columbian Exposition, the Brazilian Bridge occupied this same site. The big building you see: That was once the Palace of Fine Arts. It’s the only large structure from the White City that remains. Today, it’s the Museum of Science and Industry. The water flowing under the bridge: It is one of the languid waterways Olmsted designed for the fair. Continue over the bridge onto the Wooded Island, a natural-looking place that Olmsted built out with dredged lakeshore muck. It was intended to provide a respite from the bustle of the fair. Enjoy a stroll on the Wooded Island, which remains a calm spot in hectic modern Chicago.

  RIVERSIDE, ILLINOIS

  This model suburb was designed by Olmsted, Vaux & Company. Go to the intersection of Fairbank and Barrypoint roads. Looking in one direction, note the long stretch of green. Ample communal spaces such as this are the hallmark of Riverside’s design. Now, find 100 Fairbank, a gray two-story house with Gothic accents. This is the work of Calvert Vaux. Sadly, it’s one of the few houses designed by this exceptional architect that’s still standing.

  BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS

  Arnold Arboretum

  This is a unique piece of the Emerald Necklace, an ambitious park system that Olmsted created for Boston. It’s a tree museum jointly maintained by Harvard University and the city. Walk along the path; it follows nearly the same course that Olmsted laid out. The trees are still planted in the same order prescribed by Olmsted and his friend and founder of the arboretum Charles Sprague Sargent. Some of these trees are original plantings such as a cucumber magnolia (1880) and a silver maple (1881).

  Back Bay Fens

  Your ideal view is from the Boylston Street Bridge. This monumental structure, hewn of Cape Ann granite, was designed by Olmsted’s friend architect H. H. Richardson. Take a look at all the rushes and other aquatic plants growing along the creek bank. Believe it or not, this was once a fetid swamp where Bostonians dumped their garbage. Olmsted turned it into a marsh, a type of landscape that he remembered fondly from growing up in Connecticut. In Olmsted’s day, this was a saltwater marsh. Today, it’s freshwater, thanks to the damming of the Charles River in 1910. But the landscape looks generally the same. It’s fair to say that Olmsted’s work here was America’s first act of wetland restoration.

  Franklin Park

  Franklin Park and Back Bay Fens are also segments of the Emerald Necklace. Walk through the Ellicott Arch, designed by stepson John Olmsted. Follow the path, and very soon you’ll come to the 99 Steps, a wonderful and whimsical Olmsted touch. The steps are made of Roxbury puddingstone and lead up into a wilderness area grown thickly with trees. Listen carefully. You may not even be able to hear traffic noises. It’s hard to fathom, but you are right in the middle of Boston right now.

  BROOKLINE, MASSACHUSETTS

  Fairsted

  Olmsted worked out of this home office at 99 Warren Street from 1883 to 1895, one of the most productive stretches in his career. As a landscape architect, Olmsted was sometimes required to design grounds to be secondary to structures. (His design for the grounds surrounding the Capitol building in D.C. is a good example.) Not at Fairsted. Here, foliage trumped structures. Note how the south face of the house is utterly blanketed in vines. The house is a National Historic Site, open to the public for tours. But make sure and walk around Olmsted’s “yard,” too. Look for the cucumber magnolia, a gift from Charles Sargent, his Brookline neighbor. (Olmsted and Sargent collab
orated on the Arnold Arboretum, discussed above.) Olmsted loved trees, especially elms, as they reminded him of his childhood. Check out the “Olmsted elm,” estimated at roughly 150 years old.

  BUFFALO, NEW YORK

  Delaware Park

  Olmsted and Vaux dreamed up the park system, a set of connected parks. How do you connect parks? Why, with “parkways,” a phrase the pair coined. In Buffalo, they got their first real opportunity to put the idea into practice. Delaware Park is the jewel of the Buffalo system. Enter it via Olmsted and Vaux’s parkways. Here’s an ideal route: Follow Chapin Parkway onto Lincoln Parkway under a canopy of trees the whole way and down a now-paved old bridal path and right into Delaware Park. Walk around the lake. Appreciate its lovely, meandering shoreline, and realize that it’s entirely man-made, designed by Olmsted and Vaux.

  NEW YORK, NEW YORK

  Central Park

  Enter at Fifth Avenue and 59th Street. The diagonal roadway gets you quickly out of the bustling city and into the peaceful heart of the park, per Olmsted and Vaux’s design. Walk the quarter-mile length of the Mall to Bethesda Terrace. Note Jacob Wrey Mould’s wildly imaginative stone carvings. Walk down the steps, past Bethesda Fountain, to the Lake. When the park opened in 1858, this was the most popular feature. Some winter days, thousands of people skated on it. A nineteenth-century engineering marvel, it was possible to raise the water level in the warmer months for boating. Follow the Lake’s shore westward to the Bow Bridge. This is Vaux’s masterpiece. Cross the Bow Bridge into the Ramble. This is Olmsted’s wild garden, his favorite part of the park. He tinkered with its plantings endlessly, like a mad botanist.

  Prospect Park

  Start at Grand Army Plaza. This is Olmsted and Vaux’s original park entrance, though the monument dates to 1892, after their involvement in the project. Head into the park and pass through Endale Arch, a subtle, rustic stonework designed by Vaux. Emerging from Endale Arch you’ll be in the Long Meadow. It remains one of Olmsted and Vaux’s finest creations, nearly a mile of stretching, rolling, invitingly green lawn. Note the sunken pathways. They’re a canny original touch that keeps the view across the Long Meadow unbroken. When the park first opened, visitors were intrigued by the fact that, thanks to the sunken pathways, one couldn’t see people’s feet moving as they walked. A woman in one of those long nineteenth-century dresses would appear to glide across the meadow.

  NIAGARA FALLS, NEW YORK

  As an environmentalist, a role separate but related to his better-known work as a landscape architect, Olmsted was deeply involved in the preservation of this place. The plan he and Vaux drew up covered more than just Niagara Falls. Olmsted especially loved the islands in the headwater rapids before the water plunges over the falls. Visit Goat Island. You might also want to stop at the nearby Three Sisters Islands, which are especially unspoiled. In 1875, Olmsted took a trip here with H. H. Richardson. Together, they spent many hours enjoying the scenery on these headwater islands. This was Olmsted’s idea: He knew the falls would be like an exclamation point, overwhelming anything else they might see. So he wanted to work his way to them by way of some quieter, gentler scenery.

  ROCHESTER, NEW YORK

  Highland Park

  One of Olmsted’s favorite concepts was “passages of scenery.” Highland Park features one of his greatest passages. Enter at the Lamberton Conservatory. Walk down the stairs and then proceed to wend your way through a series of “rooms” of trees. Each room is a small, open space surrounded by groupings of the same species, or visually complementary species of trees. The tree rooms have various gaps. Think of these gaps as doors. What’s on the other side, you naturally wonder? That’s just what Olmsted wanted. Walk through a door and you’ll be in another, different, room of trees. Repeat. Repeat again. Pretty soon, you’ll have experienced “passages of scenery.”

  Seneca Park

  Olmsted was drawn to the idea of building a park along the bank of a river, and he thought this stretch of water—sometimes called the “cannon of the Genesee”—was perfect. Go past the zoo, and near the Trout Lake, pick up one of the wooded paths. Walking along, trees all around, great view of the Genesee River below, you might half expect to see someone paddle by on a wooden raft. This is a little slice of the nineteenth century right in downtown Rochester.

  ASHEVILLE, NORTH CAROLINA

  Biltmore Estate

  Enjoy the meandering three-mile approach road, incredibly faithful to Olmsted’s original route. The lush planting scheme—rhododendrons, white pines, even bamboo—is also faithful. Olmsted designed the approach to be full of visual variety, while shutting out all distant vistas. He wanted to save those for the house itself. Once inside, proceed to the loggia for an amazing view. Incredibly, much of the woodland you see stretching for miles didn’t exist when George Vanderbilt bought the land. It was scruffy, abused for generations. Vanderbilt agreed to Olmsted’s idea to plant trees as part of America’s first experiment in managed forestry. Today, much of Vanderbilt’s original acreage has become Pisgah National Forest. But the estate’s 8,000 acres still contain plenty of woodland. Make your way down through the Olmsted-designed gardens on the hillside beneath the South Terrace. At the base of the hill, you can pick up the Woodland Trail for a short walk through forest planted by FLO.

  MONTREAL, QUEBEC

  Mount Royal

  Enter the park at the intersection of Rue Peel and Avenue des Pins, at the edge of McGill University’s campus. Make the brief walk to Chemin Olmsted. When the park opened, this was a carriage road. Olmsted was furious that it didn’t follow his intricate scheme. But it still turned out plenty winding, plenty Olmstedian, and nowadays, it’s for pedestrians only. Follow Chemin Olmsted to the chalet, requiring a winding gentle-grade climb of roughly a mile and a half. From here the view is amazing. You immediately grasp why Olmsted was so taken with this mountainpark site. Montreal is arrayed below, and in the distance, across the St. Lawrence River, Mont St. Bruno and Mont St.-Hilaire are visible. From the chalet, you can return via Chemin Olmsted or take a shortcut, marked sentier de l’escarpment—a steep stairway that will take you quickly and dramatically down the mountainside.

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  Capitol Grounds

  Coming off the Mall, enter the Capitol grounds via Pennsylvania Avenue. Walk up the hill until you find the Summerhouse. Olmsted devoted a great deal of thought and energy to this little gem, making sure it was just so. The Summerhouse is a great place to sit down and rest after a long day of seeing the sights. Make sure and explore the rest of the grounds, too, still nearly exactly as Olmsted designed them. Take a look at the photo insert in this book, where Olmsted’s 1874 plan and a modern aerial shot are presented side by side for comparison.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Justin Martin is the author of two other biographies, Greenspan: The Man Behind Money and Nader: Crusader, Spoiler, Icon. As one of the few journalists to gain access to Greenspan, Martin produced a best-selling biography of the secretive Fed chairman that was also selected as a notable book for 2001 by the New York Times Book Review. Martin’s Nader biography served as a primary source for An Unreasonable Man, an Academy Award–nominated documentary. Martin’s articles have appeared in a variety of publications, including Fortune, Newsweek, and the San Francisco Chronicle. Martin is a 1987 graduate of Rice University in Houston, Texas. He was married in Central Park, Olmsted’s masterpiece. He lives with his wife and twin sons in Forest Hills Gardens, New York, a neighborhood designed by Frederick Law Olmsted Jr.

  Copyright © 2011 by Justin Martin

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. For information, address Da Capo Press, 11 Cambridge Center, Cambridge, MA 02142.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Martin, Justin.

/>   Genius of place : the life of Frederick Law Olmsted / Justin Martin.—1st Da Capo

  Press ed.

  p. cm.

  “A Merloyd Lawrence book.”

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  eISBN : 978-0-306-81984-1

  1. Olmsted, Frederick Law, 1822–1903. 2. Landscape architects—United States—

  Biography. 3. Social reformers—United States—Biography. 4. City

  planning—United States—History—19th century. I. Title.

  SB470.O5M37 2011

  712.092—dc22

  2011002246

  Published as a Merloyd Lawrence Book by Da Capo Press

  A Member of the Perseus Books Group

  www.dacapopress.com

  Da Capo Press books are available at special discounts for bulk purchases in the U.S. by corporations, institutions, and other organizations. For more information, please contact the Special Markets Department at the Perseus Books Group, 2300 Chestnut Street, Suite 200, Philadelphia, PA 19103, or call (800) 810-4145,ext. 5000, or e-mail special.markets@perseusbooks.com.