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

by Rybczynski, Witold

  Mary is fifty-five, Olmsted sixty-three. He has let his hair and his beard go long. His blue eyes gaze evenly at the camera. He has a slight smile, and his face is ruddy from days spent outside. He looks healthy and relaxed. More than that, he looks at ease—with himself, and with the world.

  And his world is uncommonly rich. There are Monday nights at Richardson’s, when the architect gathers his apprentices and former pupils for talk, music, and plenty of food and drink. Sargent, who owns one of the largest estates in the town, has introduced the Olmsteds to Brookline society, and Norton has done the same in academic Cambridge. Olmsted has been elected to the exclusive Saturday Club, a Boston institution that convenes once a month for dinner and conversation. The members include such figures as Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russell Lowell, William Dean Howells, and William James. Such men appreciate Olmsted’s accomplishments as an editor, writer, abolitionist, and public servant. His Boston parks are known to all. Working close to home has meant less travel, and more time to spend at Fairstead, especially working in the garden. He has not had a proper garden of his own since Tosomock Farm (he does not count the tiny plot behind his brownstone in Manhattan). It is only two years since they moved here and everything is still raw. However, the fast-growing creepers and vines that he and John have planted are beginning to cover the fence and the walls of the house. The “wildness and disorder” that he favors will appear soon enough.

  * * *

  1. The first use of the meadow for golf occurred as early as 1890. Ironically, the 1989 refurbishment of the golf course initiated the modern revival of Franklin Park, which during the previous three decades had been largely abandoned by middle-class users and had fallen into disrepair.

  2. The 1885 master plan had no water bodies. Following a citizens’ petition, Olmsted added a series of brooks and pools flowing into a small pond.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  Olmsted Meets the Governor

  OLMSTED AND JOHN PRESENTED their plan of Franklin Park to the park commission, but before a decision was made a new city government, composed for the first time of Irish Democrats, took office. Yankee patricians such as Norton feared the worst. The city council appointed a new park commission, which immediately annulled Olmsted’s contract. However, they were merely flexing their political muscles, for a few weeks later Olmsted was reinstated under the old terms. The following year his plan was officially adopted.

  Olmsted’s success was marred by tragedy. Richardson had been diagnosed with Bright’s disease (chronic nephritis), which affected his kidneys and contributed to his great weight. The prognosis was not good. In March 1886, recuperating from a recent attack of tonsilitis, he went to Washington. Olmsted, who was there on Capitol business, visited him in his hotel and found his friend in an alarming state. “His eyes were bloodshot, his face red, his forehead studded with beads of sweat,” Olmsted recalled. “He spoke feebly, hesitatingly, and with a scarcely intelligible husky utterance.” Olmsted urged him to return home immediately. Then a client of Richardson’s came in. During the next hour, as he explained his drawings, Richardson became animated and seemed to regain his usual energetic demeanor. As he was leaving, Olmsted said, “Eidlitz asked me to let him know how I found you. I shall have to tell him, never better in your life.” Both men laughed, but it was a hollow joke, and they knew it. When Richardson came back to Brookline, he took to his bed. Olmsted went to see him, but the doctor advised that he was too weak to receive visitors. A fortnight later Richardson was dead. “He passed away so quietly and softly that no one present knew when death occurred,” recalled Olmsted. The funeral was held in Trinity Church. Olmsted noted that more than fifty of Boston’s architects attended, as well as McKim, White, and Saint-Gaudens from New York. Richardson was only forty-seven. “He never had as much to do; never had such assurance of his leadership and the public’s grateful acceptance of it, never had been as strong and happy in his art as in his last days,” Olmsted wrote Mariana Van Rensselaer. He could not get used to thinking of him as gone.

  • • • •

  Henry Codman introduced Olmsted to Francis A. Walker, the dynamic president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Codman’s alma mater. Walker was currently advising Leland Stanford, the wealthy California railroad magnate. Two years earlier, Stanford’s fifteen-year-old son had died of typhoid fever, and Stanford and his wife, Jane, had decided to found a university in memory of their only child. They had toured several Eastern universities, including Yale, Cornell, and Harvard. At MIT, Stanford tried to recruit Walker as his president. Walker declined but agreed to act as a consultant and now approached Olmsted. Would he be the planner of the new university? After an exchange of letters with Stanford, a deal was struck. Olmsted asked for—and received—the unprecedented sum of ten thousand dollars for preparing a preliminary plan. In late August 1886, accompanied by Codman and young Rick, Olmsted set out to meet Walker and Stanford in California, where the new university was to be built.

  They took the train to Portland, Oregon, and then a stagecoach to San Francisco. Codman and Rick accompanied Olmsted to the Mariposa Big Tree Grove and stayed with Galen Clark, who, still hale, was now officially known as the “Guardian of the Yosemite Valley and Big Tree Grove.” Since Stanford was busy, they made a train excursion to Los Angeles. Olmsted described the countryside to John. “The daylight part of the journey here is through the Mohavi desert, the most forbidding region I ever saw,” he wrote. “The most interesting objects to us being forests of the yuccas, as large as our larger apple trees. But mainly, for hundreds of miles, great mountains, canons [sic] & plains almost bare of vegetation, waterless, hot—mercury nearly all day above 100°. There is nothing tropical in the general aspect of the country here and it appears barren except when cultivated, planted & watered.” When they returned to San Francisco, Olmsted sent Rick and Codman on a tour of Santa Cruz and the Napa Valley and himself went to Palo Alto, Stanford’s estate in the Santa Clara Valley.

  Leland Stanford was a U.S. senator who had been governor of California, but he was best known for pushing to completion the first transcontinental railroad. An impressive, bearlike figure, he had amassed money, power, and land—over eight thousand acres on which he planned to build the university. The first order of business was to decide on a site for the future campus. Palo Alto rose from a flat plain into the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains. Olmsted recommended a hilly spot, imagining a larger and more picturesque version of Lawrenceville in the rolling landscape. Stanford would have none of it. He insisted that the university should be built on the plain. The willful railroad builder knew exactly what he wanted: not an academic village but something monumental and grand. “There is not any word half big enough for his ideas of what it is to be,” Olmsted complained. But he went along. “The site is settled at last,” he wrote John, “not as I had hoped.”

  A few days later Olmsted, Codman, and Rick left San Francisco. At Salt Lake City they split up, Codman and Rick continuing home and Olmsted making a long detour north, to Montana. His destination was his dead stepson Owen’s property: the Running Water Ranches of the Lacotah Company, for which Olmsted had put up the money. He was dismayed by what he found. “It was a high interest speculation,” he wrote John, “& the luck has not been with us.” The cattle ranch was worth less than when it had been bought, although Olmsted hoped that a mild winter and better markets might increase its value.

  Farther east he made another stop: the Niagara Falls commission in Buffalo. Much had happened since he and Norton had organized an international petition to create a reservation around the falls. After the petition failed to persuade the state legislature, they formed the Niagara Falls Association. This lobbying campaign finally led, in 1883, to the passing of a state bill and two years later a million-dollar bond issue to purchase land. Since William Dorsheimer had been appointed president of the board overseeing the project, Olmsted had every expectation of getting the job. But there was a snag. One of the five
commissioners was none other than his old adversary Andrew Haswell Green. Green had vetoed Olmsted and proposed his own candidate: Calvert Vaux! Olmsted, smarting from Green’s criticism, had been driven to write to Governor Hill of New York objecting to the insinuation that Vaux was the chief creative force behind Central and Prospect Parks—“our responsibility for the design of both parks is precisely equal.” He had also bristled at Green’s description of Vaux as Downing’s student—“he was never a pupil in the ordinary sense,” Olmsted correctly pointed out. To break the deadlock Dorsheimer had suggested that Olmsted and Vaux work together, but Green would not budge. Vaux had asked Olmsted if he would consider taking a subordinate role as “Consulting Landscape Architect.” Olmsted, who was unwilling to play second fiddle, had remained noncommittal.

  Now Olmsted was in Buffalo to assess the situation. He paid a “pleasant official call” on one of the commissioners, the state senator Sherman S. Rogers. Rogers told him that a plan would have to be prepared soon so that it could be included in the annual water legislation, but it was still unclear who would be given the commission. “I am sorry I don’t see how I can give any time to it,” Olmsted wrote John. He had been gone from Brookline for close to two months and was looking forward to returning home. In any event, he thought he had enough on his plate. “The Stanford matter will be a perplexing study,” he cautioned his partner.

  At this time Olmsted’s “shop,” as he called it, was reduced to three persons: himself, John, and Henry Codman. Charles Eliot, his apprenticeship complete, had left the previous year to travel in Europe. As he had with John, Olmsted provided him with the names of parks and gardens to visit, and with personal introductions. In return, Eliot dutifully sent a steady stream of letters containing reports and observations. He traveled all over Europe, including Scandinavia and Russia, for a year. On his return he declined to rejoin Olmsted’s office to work on Stanford University; he was bent on striking out on his own. Olmsted, who had a high regard for his young pupil, wished him well and gave him the following useful advice: “You write easily, fluently, and in a critical way that is in demand. What you wrote offhand about the Italian Gardens—and about the Baltic parks, (in that last letter), and on various other matters you saw, would make a capital series of magazine articles, with a very little modification to the scale of a popular audience. . . . And, perhaps a book. Anything of the sort (to speak of the indirect profits) will be worth much more to you than advertising in the Nation, for example.”

  Olmsted and Walker each wrote a preliminary report for Stanford. Olmsted stressed the need to adapt the university to its unique climate. He knew that Stanford, who was born in Watervliet, New York, wanted a New England–style campus with large buildings set among lawns and trees. “If we are to look for types of buildings and arrangements suitable to the climate of California it will rather be in those founded by the wiser men of Syria, Greece, Italy, and Spain,” Olmsted warned. Walker’s report described the educational program. He recommended a “cottage system” for student housing, on the Lawrenceville model. His most novel suggestion was that the university be housed in one-story structures. “Mr. Olmsted and myself are fully agreed that, with proper architectural treatment, buildings of this character, made of massive stone, connected by an arcade, may be made singularly effective and picturesque.”

  As yet no architect had been chosen. Walker recommended Richardson’s firm, now known as Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge. In his will, Richardson had directed that his practice be carried on by his young protégé Charles A. Coolidge, George F. Shepley (who was engaged to Richardson’s daughter), and Charles H. Rutan, an engineer. Since Coolidge and Shepley were both MIT men (and Coolidge’s mother was Walker’s cousin), Walker’s endorsement is easy to understand. Olmsted, who was on intimate terms with Coolidge and the others, strongly approved. He and Coolidge thus worked out the details of the master plan.

  In the end the Stanford plan bore no resemblance to Lawrenceville School or to any of Olmsted’s earlier campus layouts. Stanford and his wife, who also influenced the design, admired French neoclassical architecture, and they clearly expected a formal plan. Olmsted and Coolidge placed the arcaded buildings around a large quadrangle, positioning the memorial church (containing Leland Stanford Jr.’s tomb) on one side and the library on the other. They softened the all-over formality by opening the quadrangle to the south to provide a vista of the far-off foothills.

  Coolidge took the models and plans to California, where he met with a cool reception. “The very quietness and reserve which we like so much in it is what they want to get rid of,” Coolidge wrote Olmsted after a week of meetings with the Stanfords. As usual, Stanford was insistent. He wanted the quadrangle turned to offer its long, impressive side to the approach road; he wanted the church to be given pride of place opposite the entrance to the quadrangle, never mind the vista to the hills; lastly, he wanted a memorial arch marking the entrance, an arch huge enough to be seen from the beginning of the long approach road. Stanford had already scheduled the cornerstone-laying ceremony two weeks hence (on what would have been his son’s birthday); he ordered Coolidge to revise the plans on the spot. Coolidge protested. “The 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.”

  In Brookline, Olmsted was furious. “There is a story to be told about the Stanford University which can be deferred until you come here,” he informed Mariana Van Rensselaer. “The matter is going not very well.” Nevertheless, the university was an extraordinary commission. At eight thousand acres, and with a budget that eventually exceeded $30 million, this was the largest project Olmsted had ever undertaken; indeed, it was the largest building project of its kind in the country. Stanford intended to create an entire town adjoining the university, with residential neighborhoods for the students and staff, as well as an arboretum. There promised to be work for years to come.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  Olmsted and Vaux, Together Again

  WHILE COOLIDGE WAS in California trying to satisfy Leland and Jane Stanford, Olmsted was working on the Niagara Falls project. The board had finally overruled Green and appointed Olmsted and Vaux jointly as landscape architects. Olmsted was pleased that after seventeen years the Niagara reservation was to become reality. He did not feel ill will toward his old partner; he knew that Vaux had been manipulated by Green, as had happened before about Central Park. He was also aware that Vaux’s career had not prospered since their breakup. Vaux had hoped that the simultaneous construction of the American Museum of Natural History and the Metropolitan Museum of Art would lead to greater things. He completed the first phases of the buildings, but when it came time to continue, his master plans were set aside and the jobs were given to others. In the case of the Metropolitan, the original design exhibited Mould’s flamboyant touch, but for budgetary reasons the finished building was rather dull and was not well received. Mould and Vaux had broken up, and over the years Vaux’s practice had dwindled. In the mid-1880s, Charles Loring Brace commissioned him to design a series of lodging houses and industrial schools for the Children’s Aid Society. It was honorable work, honorably executed, but a far cry from the days when moneyed clients and great institutions had sought his services.

  One of Vaux’s last prominent clients was Green’s friend Samuel J. Tilden, the former governor of New York and presidential candidate. When the Tilden house on Gramercy Park was complete, it was reviewed by the Art Amateur. “Mr. Vaux is a very good landscape architect,” the critic wrote, “but he has apparently not been awake to what has been going on in domestic architecture in New York during the last few years.” What had been going on was a flowering of styles that were explicitly historical and monumental: Richardson’s muscular Romanesque, Hunt’s imposing French Renaissance, and McKim, Mead, and White’s new classicism. Vaux’s brand of High Victorian architecture had become old-fashioned.

  The Niagara commissioners wanted the plan and r
eport for their next year’s February meeting, so Olmsted and Vaux got down to work. By the end of the year they had the main outline of the plan. Letters, drawings, and memoranda flew back and forth between Brookline and New York. It was like old times. “He helped me and I helped him” is how Olmsted described the process, “and at some points each of us crowded the other out a little.” At the beginning of February, Vaux came to Fairstead to complete the drawings. Olmsted kept changing the text so often that Vaux worried they would not finish in time. “He can’t take writing easily,” John explained. “He must worry over it till the moment when it is delivered and he can alter it no more.”

  Olmsted worried over the report because he considered Niagara Falls “the most difficult problem in landscape architecture to do justice to, it is the most serious—the furthest above shop work—that the world has yet had.” He believed that the overall natural context, the linked “passages of natural scenery,” not any single dramatic feature, made Niagara—like Yosemite—special. Olmsted and Vaux wanted the visitor to experience not merely the spectacle of a mighty waterfall but also the “incomparable greater beauty of a kind in which nearness to the eye of illumined spray and mist and fleeting waters, and of the intricate disposition of leaves, with infinitely varied play of light and shadow, refractions and reflections, and much else that is undefinable in conditions of water, air, and foliage, are important parts.”