A Clearing In The Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the 19th Cent

by Rybczynski, Witold

  Another element in Olmsted’s discontent was the new type of consulting practice that he had established in Brookline. It was making heavy demands on his time. In the same letter to Brace, he complained:

  I keep working as close to my possibilities as ever, my possibilities, never large, growing perceptively smaller with every year. John takes more & more off and I have two good young men as “pupils,” but the character of my business becomes smaller & brings a greater multitude of diverse concerns to me & I get very weary of turning so often from one thing to another and of so many long & short expeditions.

  The character of my business becomes smaller. He did not have less to occupy him than before. Quite the opposite. But instead of working on a small number of large commissions, as he had in the past, his practice now included a large number of small commissions. In the year 1884, for example, the Olmsted firm was involved in no fewer than sixteen private estates. It may appear odd for the designer of some of the largest public parks in the nation to be advising individuals, but he could not afford to turn down such work. Moreover, he had a real interest in domestic landscapes and paid as much attention to them as to the parks. One of the few magazine articles he wrote at this time described the landscaping of a small residential plot in a Western city.

  He was experiencing the dilemma of running a consulting firm: he needed assistants to ease the burden of work, but he had to find more work to keep the assistants busy. Yet he refused to cut corners. He would not merely provide plans. His normal procedure for small domestic projects was to charge one hundred dollars (about three thousand dollars in modern dollars) for a visit and preliminary advice. “If what I advise is in a general way acceptable and it is desired that I should go further, I undertake a general guidance of the work to be done.” There were additional charges for preparing drawings, purchasing plants, and overseeing the work, with intermittent visits over the following two or three years.

  Not all these projects made the same claims on Olmsted’s time, of course, but as senior partner he made most of the site visits; John, assisted by Eliot and Codman, managed the office. A business trip in May 1884 illustrates the demands of his far-flung practice. On Thursday he was in New York to meet the architect Charles McKim, who was now in partnership with William Rutherford Mead and Stanford White. McKim had a “capital client,” a prominent New York banker with a country property near Ossining. They spent the day there; that evening Olmsted had a late supper with McKim in New York. On Friday he traveled to Trenton, New Jersey, where his firm was building a park. The man he had come to see was away, but Olmsted visited the suburban nursery where the plants for the park were being grown. He then went to nearby Lawrenceville, “where building seemed very backward and there was much apparent confusion,” and met the head master. He was back in New York in time to catch the night train to Detroit, whose city council had just voted more than sixty thousand dollars to begin work on Belle Isle. He expected his stay to be brief; instead, he found a small crisis. The newspapers had reported that his proposed pier could not accommodate the draft of large ferryboats. Despite high winds, Olmsted personally accompanied a lumbering boat to the proposed location. “I was ill-treated,” he complained, “the Ferry Company gave me their heaviest & deepest & most unwieldy boat.” He proved that his plan was sound. From Detroit he went to Washington, D.C., to inspect the Capitol grounds, which were finally nearing completion. Withal, he still found time to send John planting instructions for a part of the Back Bay Fens. “Temple [a nurseryman] will probably be able to get but little periwinkle or moneywort & if so it had better be concentrated near the bridge where it will be looked down upon. The large-leafed sedum which grows in great patches at various points (as at North Easton, Cohasset & Wenham Lake) may be crowded—cheaply—upon all the rocks except close to the Commonwealth Bridge.”

  • • • •

  Olmsted may have complained to Brace about the character of his business, but as his letter to John suggests, private work served as an important testing ground for his ideas. Wenham Lake was an estate that he had been working on since 1880. The large property was on Wenham Great Pond in Beverly, Massachusetts, near Salem. For the house, a large informal affair built of fieldstone, brownstone, and shingles by Peabody and Stearns, Olmsted created a great platform overlooking the pond. The platform was part paved terrace and part lawn, edged by a curving wall of fieldstone and surrounded by heavy planting of shrubs and trees. The lawn extended two hundred feet to the south where a summer house overlooked a sunken flower garden.

  When Olmsted visited the property in September 1881, initial landscaping had begun. He was unhappy with the general appearance. He wrote his client a long, forthright letter. “As the house was not in itself disappointing I finally conclude that the trouble lay in the suggestion of a quality of smugness in its surroundings.” In short, the new landscape looked too genteel. He urged a simple solution: seed the entire area with pine and larch and then thin them out in a few years. The effect Olmsted aimed for was a “proper summer lodge, so placed in the midst and near the edge of a forest as to command an opposite forest over a sheet of water, with an oasis of ladies’ ground strongly but rudely and in a forest fashion built in to the wild hillside with it.”

  Olmsted planned the entire 275-acre site of what would be called Moraine Farm. He designed the curving approach road, creating alternating views of meadows and forestland. He laid out three carriage drives through the picturesque wooded part of the site and beside the lakeshore. Drawing on his scientific-farming background, he installed forty acres of underground drainage pipes to improve the fields. The rest of the land was unsuited to farming. He planted conifers for future logging, experimenting with various species—European larch, Scotch and Austrian pine, and Norway spruce. White pines did well, and about sixty thousand were planted. Moraine Farm is now surrounded by suburban buildings, but the forest that Olmsted planted is still there; the fields that he drained continue to produce crops. The graceful approach road and the sweeping terrace and lawn likewise remain, a testament to their makers’ skill and foresight and to their owners’ diligent care.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  The Sixth Park

  THE FENS AND THE MUDDY river improvement were part of a continuous park system. East of the Fens was Commonwealth Avenue, built in 1856 when a large portion of the Charles River was filled to create the Back Bay. The hundred-foot-wide avenue with a pedestrian mall running down the center terminated a mile away at the Public Garden and Boston Common, a colonial town green. West of the Muddy River Improvement was Jamaica Pond, a lovely seventy-acre body of water and a favored recreation spot for boating and skating. In time, the city acquired a narrow belt of land surrounding the pond. Half a mile away, to be linked by a parkway, was the hilly Arnold Arboretum, which, thanks to Sargent and Olmsted’s efforts, was now included in the park system. And half a mile from the arboretum was the 527-acre site of what would soon be named Franklin Park (in honor of Boston’s native son).

  Boston’s seven-mile-long park system became known as the Emerald Necklace. In 1884 the Park Commission asked Olmsted to turn his attention to the design of Franklin Park, the Emerald Necklace’s brilliant pendant. He responded by spelling out his terms. This would be his sixth major park; he wanted to make sure that his responsibilities were understood. In Central Park he and Vaux were municipal employees, and in Prospect Park they managed the workforce. On the other hand, when they designed Chicago’s South Park, they acted in an advisory capacity, as Olmsted also did in Montreal and Detroit. The latter arrangement secured independence from political pressures, but at the cost of giving up control over day-to-day implementation. With Franklin Park he hoped to combine the freedom of an external adviser with the authority of an architect-in-chief. He suggested that the city hire a superintending gardener who would be an employee of the city but “should receive orders for carrying on the work only from or through my office and reports of the gardening force to the Board should
pass through my office.” (Olmsted had someone in mind: William L. Fischer, the experienced head gardener of Central Park.) He demanded that “the question of the division of duty between the engineering force and the gardening force should be at all times subject to my decision.” He asked the parks department to establish—and staff—a field office. His fee for preparing the plan was five thousand dollars, and he requested an additional thousand dollars a year for a renewable three-year engagement to “secure unity of design and be responsible for the final character of the work.”

  That was not a large design fee for a major park. Olmsted was aware that the Boston Park Commission was worried about costs. Franklin Park would be as large as Prospect Park, where the land had cost $4 million. Boston spent only $600,000 on land and wanted the construction cost to be similarly modest. Prospect Park had cost $5 million to build; Olmsted promised that the construction cost of Franklin Park would not exceed $1.5 million.

  He did not see the strict economy demanded by the frugal Boston commissioners as a drawback. The artlessness that he had been perfecting since Mount Royal here came to the fore. There would be no complicated Adirondack ravines in Franklin Park, no elaborate rambles, no expensive lakes or lagoons.1 Structures were few and unpretentious—there would be no Bethesda Fountain or Belle Isle gallery. Below Scarboro Hill there would be a small dairy; on Schoolmaster’s Hill, Olmsted proposed a shelter for picnickers and a trellis-covered terrace. The buildings were rustic, with pudding-stone walls and thatched roofs. “Eccentric and quaint” was how he described them. The largest building in the park, likewise conceived by Olmsted himself, was a sprawling shelter with a huge overhanging roof.

  The singularity of this park was to emerge from the site itself, which Olmsted described as having “the usual characteristics of the stony upland pasture, and the rocky divides between streams commonly found in New England, covered by what are called ‘second growth’ woods . . . not beautiful individually, but, in combination forming impressive masses of foliage. It not only contains no lake, permanent pool or stream of water, but it commands no distant water view. It includes no single natural feature of distinguished beauty or popular interest.” This made it sound banal, but it was precisely the peaceful character of this scenery that appealed to him. The problem, as he saw it, was not to transform this undramatic landscape, but to enhance it. Just as he had made Mount Royal more mountainous, he would make this homely landscape more pastoral. He called it the Country Park.

  To sustain the designed character of the Country Park, the urban elegance generally desired in a small public or private pleasure ground is to be methodically guarded against. Turf, for example, is to be in most parts preferred as kept short by sheep, rather than by lawn mowers; well known and long tried trees and bushes to rare ones; natives to exotics; humble field flowers to high-bred marvels; plain green leaves to the blotched, spotted, and fretted leaves, for which, in decorative gardening, there is now a passing fashion. Above all, cheap, tawdry, cockneyfied garden toys, such as are sometimes placed in parks incongruously with all their rural character, are to be eschewed. But a poor, shabby, worn, patchy, or in any way untidy rurality is equally to be avoided with fragments of urban and suburban finery. In this respect the park is designed to be an example of thoroughly nice, though modest and somewhat homespun housekeeping.

  The Country Park was two-thirds of Franklin Park; the rest he called the Ante Park. It was divided into several parts: the Playstead was a thirty-acre athletic field suitable for civic parades; the Little Folks’ Fair was a children’s area; in addition there were ball and tennis grounds, a refectory, a music amphitheater, a deer park, and a small zoological garden. The focus of the Ante Park was the Greeting, a long, formal promenade or alameda that resembled the Central Park Mall but was twice as long—half a mile—and combined pedestrian walks with carriage drives and bridle paths. Olmsted’s study of European parks had convinced him that public parks and nighttime activities were not incompatible, and he suggested that the Greeting and the Playstead were to be “without underwood, and adapted, with electric lighting, for night as well as day use.”

  Public parks now had a variety of functions. Olmsted dealt with this by isolating areas for active recreation. The reason he gave was functional: the thin, hard soil of the Country Park did not lend itself to intensive use and “cannot, therefore, be prepared to resist the wear of athletic sports without undue expense.” Yet the fundamental purpose was to preserve intact the character of the Country Park: “To provide opportunity for a form of recreation to be obtained only through the influence of pleasing natural scenery upon the sensibilities of those quietly contemplating it.”

  Franklin Park, Boston (1891).

  Olmsted was no aesthete. In his report to the Boston Park Commission, after quoting several famous writers on the effects of rural scenery, he acknowledged that “there are some who may be inclined to question if a considerable degree of refined culture, such as is common only to the more worldly fortunate, is not necessary to enable one to enjoy the charm of rural scenery sympathetically with Wordsworth, Emerson, Ruskin, and Lowell.” His answer was unambiguous. “To enjoy it intellectually, yes; to be affected by it, made healthier, better, happier by it, no.” For Olmsted, the curative power of natural scenery was universal. Perhaps recalling the solitary and comforting rambles of his boyhood, he speculated that there was such a thing as “unconscious recreation.” “The highest value of a park must be expected to lie in elements and qualities of scenery to which the mind of those benefiting by them, is liable, at the time the benefit is received, to give little conscious cogitation,” he wrote. He had moved away from Vaux’s narrow conception of landscape architecture as art. Artistry there was, certainly, but it was combined with city planning, urban management, public education, and public health.

  It is difficult to judge Olmsted’s Franklin Park today. The Ante Park as he designed it has disappeared. The Greeting was never built due to a lack of funds. A zoo was installed in the deer park and eventually spread over more than eighty acres. The Overlook shelter burned down and was never replaced; the Playstead has become the site of a large stadium. Heathfield, a meadow in the Country Park, was turned over to the Massachusetts Department of Public Health for a hospital; and what was originally a nursery has become the Boston Parks Department’s central maintenance yard. All in all, 120 acres of parkland have been lost.

  The vast meadow that was the centerpiece of the Country Park remains, but at a cost. It has been turned into an eighteen-hole public golf course.2 Golfers are hardly as picturesque as the herd of sheep that grazed there until the early 1900s. On a brisk March afternoon, before the golfing season had begun, the meadow does show something of its earlier pastoral quality. The trees are still bare, the turf is only starting to turn green, yet the effect, while melancholy, is not unpleasant. Judging from old photographs, the planting around Scarboro Pond is not as lush as it used to be, but the gentle, framed view of the stone bridge designed by Richardson’s firm remains. Still, Olmsted would be disappointed in our stewardship, I think. He worked so hard to convince his clients that they were building for posterity. In his report on Franklin Park he pointedly included the following quote from John Ruskin (ellipsis in the original):

  Let it not be for present delight, nor for present use alone; let it be such work as our descendants will thank us for, and let us think . . . that a time is to come when . . . men will say, “See! this our fathers did for us.”

  Fairstead, Brookline, Massachusetts

  Monday, July 20, 1885

  It is midday, and the family is gathered in the garden behind the house. John, an avid amateur photographer, is crouched behind a camera mounted on a tripod. He is squinting at the upside-down image on the back plate. Satisfied, he stands up and lets the black cloth drop.

  “I’m ready. Please, nobody move. This is going to be an eight-second exposure.”

  The shutter clicks, time stops. He has posed his subjects reclin
ing on the lawn under a tree. Rick is in the center of the little group. He is wearing a dark shirt and knickerbockers. His head has been shorn for the summer, which makes his protruding ears more prominent. Rick is attending Roxbury Latin School, preparing for Harvard. It will be his fifteenth birthday in four days but he looks glum. Marion sits to her brother’s left. She is a serious young woman of twenty-three who already wears the grim pall of Victorian spinsterhood. There are two unidentified women—visitors or neighbors—a mother and daughter, perhaps. Olmsted, summery in seersucker jacket and pith helmet, lounges propped on one elbow. He wears glasses and is holding a letter. Mary is in the rear, leaning against the tree trunk. She is swathed in a long checkered dress, her face framed in a white scarf that is tied in a large bow under her chin. She is the apex of John’s carefully arranged triangular composition, and her small figure completes this decorous New England Déjeuner sur l’herbe.

  There is a second click followed by an audible sigh. Rick jumps up, the women brush the grass clippings off their skirts, and Olmsted slowly eases himself upright.

  “Now I want one with John,” orders Mary. “Show Rick how to operate the camera. Let’s stand up for this one. Frederick, take that hat off, it makes you look like David Livingstone. Marion, you stand over here; John, you’re on the other side.”

  John moves the camera and rearranges the setting according to his mother’s instructions. He is a slender young man of thirty-two. He has grown a trim beard that emphasizes his long, delicate face and makes him resemble a figure in an El Greco painting, the effect now emphasized by his clasped hands. He, too, is wearing a seersucker jacket. He and Olmsted look like members of the same club or team, which, in effect, they are. Last year John became a full partner in what is now called F. L. & J. C. Olmsted, Landscape Architects. Olmsted stands in the center, flanked by the two female visitors. Mary has placed herself in front of her husband. She is the smallest figure, but with her tablecloth of a dress and her arms determinedly akimbo, she dominates the picture. She appears good-humored, capable, entirely in control.