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

by Rybczynski, Witold

  Unlike Yosemite, which was a vast and relatively inaccessible area with a small number of visitors (about three thousand a year at that time), the reservation around Niagara Falls had as many as ten thousand visitors in a single day. Much of Olmsted and Vaux’s report was devoted to planning the reservation so that the crowds of people could enjoy an intimate and natural experience. The reservation, as recommended by Olmsted’s report to the New York State Survey, consisted of Goat Island, lying between the American Falls and the Canadian Horseshoe Falls, as well as a strip of land on the American side of the river. They laid out a carriage drive around the island, hidden in the trees and a hundred feet or so away from the water’s edge. They believed that the best way to see the falls was on foot, and a system of pathways provided access to sites of particular interest—the Cave of the Winds, Luna Island, Porter’s Bluff. They located a visitors’ center and shelters for picnickers on the mainland (on the site of what had been an amusement park). No structures were to be on the three-hundred-acre island save for two forest pavilions.

  “We are far from thinking that all that is required to accommodate the designed end is to ‘let Nature alone,’ ” Olmsted and Vaux wrote. They discussed public safety, handicapped access, guide boards for walkers, and even ways to reduce vandalism. They proposed an inexpensive horse omnibus to take visitors around the island. They specified ways to protect the riverbanks from erosion and to conserve selected natural areas. In sum, they described a coherent and unified approach to planning a public nature preserve that was a pioneering model of sensible, balanced, and realistic environmentalism.1

  • • • •

  In October 1887 Olmsted returned to California. The design of the university had become increasingly formal. A long avenue led from the railroad station to the mammoth memorial arch. Olmsted tried unsuccessfully to convince Stanford to hire Saint-Gaudens to sculpt the frieze of the arch; Stanford had never heard of Saint-Gaudens and was not interested. The Governor also had his own ideas about the grounds. Although he conceded to paving the quadrangle as Olmsted wanted, he insisted that elsewhere there be lawns rather than shrubbery. He did approve Olmsted’s proposal to create a large arboretum that would be a showplace of native California trees as well as drought-resistant species from other parts of the world. Olmsted hired a forester, who established a nursery and transplanted thousands of seedlings. Then, after a year, Stanford had a change of heart and work on the arboretum stopped. As for the town to be planned north of the university, that project, too, was abandoned.

  Stanford University, California (1888).

  Stanford paid handsomely, yet he and his wife were the worst kind of clients: opinionated, willful, capricious. They brought back photographs of a Swiss hotel from a European vacation and instructed the architects to use them as the model for a men’s dormitory instead of the student cottages that Olmsted and Walker had planned. Coolidge, by now thoroughly browbeaten, went along. Jane Stanford’s pet project was the university museum, which had been given pride of place at the entrance to the quadrangle. She decided that she wanted a replica of a building that her son had once admired in Athens, ignoring that a three-story, neoclassical structure would be out of place in the low, Romanesque quadrangle. Eventually, the museum grew too large for its site and had to be relocated elsewhere on the grounds.

  A modern visitor may wonder at the incongruous mosaic mural adorning the main facade of Coolidge’s memorial church. The mural was the result of yet another European visit by the Stanfords, this time to St. Mark’s in Venice. This particular “improvement” was carried out without the architect’s approval, since by then Shepley, Rutan, and Coolidge had been fired. Stanford gave the responsibility for carrying out their design to his wife’s brother, Ariel Lathrop. Lathrop was also to oversee the landscaping work. Olmsted protested that his verbal agreement with Stanford was that the landscape superintendent, an experienced engineer named MacMillan, would answer directly to him. Lathrop ignored the objection. Matters came to a head in May 1890 when Lathrop summarily dismissed MacMillan. Olmsted wrote a long and conciliatory letter to Lathrop but to no avail. He then addressed Stanford: “I am too old a man to be reasonably asked to put aside all that I have learned of my business, because a man of Mr. Lathrop’s training and habits has not learned as much.” His complaint went unanswered. The impasse effectively marked the end of Olmsted’s involvement with the project. Neither he nor Codman visited the building site again. When the university formally opened the following year, Olmsted, who had not been invited to the ceremony, wrote Stanford a congratulatory letter nevertheless. The latter responded coolly, “We are gradually improving the grounds in accordance with your plans.”

  It is easy to understand why Olmsted lost interest. Despite the agreeable effect of the low, arcaded buildings, the mating of Richardsonian architecture and excessively formal planning is awkward. What little remains of Olmsted’s landscaping is not a success either. The eight large planted circles in the paved quadrangle struck me as clumsy—a rare case of an Olmsted landscape that appears contrived. He tried hard to accommodate himself to his client’s wishes, but his heart wasn’t in it. When Jane Stanford completed the campus—after her husband’s death—she had an inscription carved conspicuously across the facade of the church below her mosaic mural: ERECTED TO THE GLORY OF GOD AND IN LOVING MEMORY OF MY BELOVED HUSBAND LELAND STANFORD.2 That was pretentious but accurate. The university had been the Governor’s monument all along.

  * * *

  1. The report and plan were submitted in 1887 and forwarded by the board to the state legislature. However, work did not begin for several years; it was overseen by Vaux. Vaux’s biographer has speculated that Olmsted withdrew from later involvement with Niagara so that Vaux, who was financially strapped, might have a source of income.

  2. When the church was rebuilt after an earthquake, the inscription was not restored (it survives today as a small plaque). The 1906 earthquake also destroyed the enormous memorial arch and Jane Stanford’s museum. All the buildings erected under Coolidge’s direct supervision remained standing.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  “Make a Small Pleasure Ground and Gardens”

  OLMSTED WITHDREW from Stanford without undue concern; he was in a position to be choosy. He had emphasized this in his last letter to Ariel Lathrop: “I am at this time (with my partners) the landscape architect of twenty works of considerable importance; that is to say, I do not include in that ordinary private grounds.” He had also made sure Lathrop understood that Governor Stanford was not Olmsted’s only wealthy client, mentioning that he was doing no fewer than three commissions for the Vanderbilt family. Lest Lathrop imagine that he was unduly impressed by the size of Palo Alto, Olmsted pointedly added that one of these commissions was an estate of six thousand acres.

  The estate belonged to George Washington Vanderbilt. He was the son of William H. Vanderbilt, Olmsted’s neighbor on Staten Island forty years earlier, who had recently died, leaving an estate of $200 million (6 billion in modern dollars). George, the youngest of eight children, inherited $10 million. In August 1888 he and Olmsted traveled to Lone Pine Mountain, outside Asheville, North Carolina, where Vanderbilt planned to build his country retreat. “I came to Asheville with my mother. We found the air mild and invigorating and I thought well of the climate,” he told Olmsted. “I took long rambles and found pleasure in doing so. In one of them I came to this spot under favorable circumstances and thought the prospect fairer than any other I had seen.” Vanderbilt explained that he had bought the land and over the years had amassed two thousand acres. “Now I have brought you here to examine it and tell me if I have been doing anything very foolish.”

  Olmsted agreed that the air was fresh and the views across the French Broad River to Mount Pisgah and the Great Smokies were splendid. “But the soil seems to be generally poor,” he pointed out. “The woods are miserable, all the good trees having again and again been culled out and only runts left. The topo
graphy is most unsuitable for any thing that can properly be called park scenery,” he concluded with characteristic bluntness. Vanderbilt, somewhat crestfallen, asked what he should do. Olmsted, drawing on his experience at Moraine Farm, had a ready answer. “My advice would be to make a small park into which to look from your house; make a small pleasure ground and gardens; farm your river bottoms chiefly to keep and fatten livestock with a view to manure; and make the rest a forest, improving the existing roads and planting the old fields.”

  Vanderbilt trusted Olmsted, who was also landscaping the family mausoleum on Staten Island, advising all three of Vanderbilt’s sisters on improving their country estates, and laying out the grounds of his brother Frederick’s summer house in Newport. George Vanderbilt, unlike his three brothers, had stayed out of railroading. Olmsted described the twenty-six-year-old bachelor as “a delicate, refined and bookish man, with considerable humor, but shrewd, sharp, exacting and resolute in matters of business.” The suggestion that commercial forestry represented a good investment, that it was a dignified business for a gentleman, and could moreover serve as a national example appealed to Vanderbilt. After several months of deliberation, he happily agreed to Olmsted’s proposal. Indeed, his enthusiasm for forestry was such that he soon expanded his holding—hence the “six thousand acres.”

  A tree nursery was started, topographic surveys of the property were commissioned, and plans were laid for a gravel plant and for a railroad spur to transport materials to the site. Superintendents were hired to oversee the construction, landscaping, and the nursery. These men were employed by Vanderbilt but answered directly to Olmsted. The grand plan that he had so quickly sketched out began to take shape.

  Vanderbilt chose Richard Morris Hunt as his architect. Hunt had worked with Olmsted on the Vanderbilt family mausoleum. He had also built a mansion and a summer house for George’s brother William and renovated George Vanderbilt’s house in New York. Hunt is best remembered as the favorite architect of Gilded Age socialites, but his practice was varied. At this time, he had just completed the base for the Statue of Liberty and would shortly be chosen to supplant Vaux as architect for the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He had reached the pinnacle of his profession.

  Hunt’s first design was a conventional brick country house in the colonial revival style. The second version was larger, a rambling Tudor mansion of rough-hewn stone. “I very much like your new plan,” Olmsted observed, “and your suggestions as to position, etc. satisfy.” Hunt had not yet visited the site, and the busy architect had probably not paid the small commission much attention. This changed. Three months later, Hunt took Vanderbilt on a whirlwind tour of great houses in England and France. Evidently both men had set their sights higher.

  Meanwhile Olmsted wrote a thirty-six-page report describing the chief landscape elements of Biltmore, as Vanderbilt would name his estate.1 Olmsted discussed water supply, forestry, agriculture, a nursery, and an arboretum. A separate section was devoted to the three-mile carriage drive that would lead from the main road to the house. Olmsted intended the approach road to be an integral part of the landscape experience. It should have a “natural and comparatively wild and secluded character, its borders rich with varied forms of vegetation, with incidents growing out of the vicinity of springs and streams and pools, steep banks and rocks, all consistent with the sensation of passing through the remote depths of a natural forest.”

  Hunt and Vanderbilt returned from Europe in July, and in October Hunt delivered a large wooden model of the final design. The country mansion had become a palace with a banquet hall, a winter garden, and an indoor swimming pool; 250 rooms in all! The steeply pitched roofs and picturesque turrets and chimneys were inspired by châteaux such as Chambord, Chenonceaux, and Blois. Olmsted’s challenge was to marry the degree of formality demanded by the French Renaissance architecture with the natural character of the approach road and the rest of the estate. It was not an easy task. “There are one or two points about which I am nervous,” he confessed, “and this is because I am not quite at home when required to merge stately architectural work with natural or naturalistic landscape work.” Nevertheless, he faced the challenge. He worked closely with the self-assured Hunt, five years his junior. Olmsted could be diplomatic and theirs was a smooth collaboration. “He has accepted every single suggestion that I have made and I have accepted every single suggestion that he has made,” Olmsted observed, “and I do not think that in the end there will be a note of discord in the combined work.”

  Biltmore Estate, Asheville, North Carolina.

  The design of the Biltmore grounds is unusual, both in the Olmsted oeuvre and in the history of landscape architecture. It is a successful—and entirely original—combination of two great landscaping traditions: French and English. The entrance court, for example, is a conventional neoclassical composition. The rectangle of grass, with a circular basin in its center, is bounded on two sides by rows of tulip trees; at one end the court is terminated by the main facade of the house, and at the other by a retaining wall with rampes-douces, gently ascending ramps, which lead to an upper terrace. Yet the arrival in the court is anything but conventional. The traveler, having negotiated the three-mile-long approach road, comes around a curve and is suddenly thrust into bright sunlight. He is at one end of the court, but not facing the house. Only after turning does the visitor see Hunt’s impressive facade framed by the rows of tulip trees.

  Stretching south from the end of the house is a vast rectangular platform resembling a bastion—Olmsted’s idea. The surface of this terrace is gravel; there are no plants (originally there was a bowling green). In the far corner is a small, high-roofed pavilion. It looks like an afterthought. Olmsted argued hard to convince Hunt and Vanderbilt of the wisdom of this small architectural gesture. In fact, it is a masterstroke. The contrast between the domestic garden-house and the huge château is both unexpected and poignant. From this little aerie one looks out on the rolling pastures of the deer park, the forest (artfully improved by Olmsted), and the dramatic panorama of the Great Smoky Mountains.

  Against the tall retaining wall of the terrace, facing east to the gardens, is a long arbor shaded by Japanese wisteria. The arbor overlooks a hillside on which Olmsted has created an unusual landscape. “A place out-of-doors is wanted which, attractive at all times in a different way from the terrace, will be available for a ramble” is what he told Hunt. The result does not resemble the Central Park Ramble, however; it is a manicured garden—part wild, part cultivated—with curving paths and evergreen shrubs. There are no flowers. (There is a four-acre walled garden for fruits, vegetables, and flowers nearby.) The function of the so-called Shrub Garden is to be a transition between the formal terraces and the increasingly naturalistic landscape that unfolds the farther one walks from the house. A series of paths leads through a forested vale and into a wooded glen. The gurgling sound of several rills adds to the charm. The footpaths crisscross the streams over bridges and stepping-stones. Eventually one arrives at a pond formed by a dam that creates a waterfall at the far side, almost hidden among the hemlocks. In only half an hour, one has passed from the French Renaissance to the dark primeval forest of the New World.

  • • • •

  If Olmsted saw anything ironic about Yeoman returning to the South to lay out an estate for a wealthy Northerner, he did not comment on it. “We have a good deal of work now in the Slave States and it is most interesting to review the field of my former travels, as I often have an opportunity to do,” he observed. “The revolution has been a tremendous one and I am well satisfied with the present results.” Asheville was an example of this revolution, the town’s development fueled by Northern investment in resort hotels. Vanderbilt’s presence added to the prosperity. The construction of Biltmore employed hundreds of local laborers and craftsmen—many of them black. Vanderbilt founded a Young Men’s Institute in Asheville and built Biltmore Village for the estate workers, where he would subsidize the schools (one for
whites, one for blacks) and the churches.

  Olmsted described Biltmore as “a private work of very rare public interest in many ways.” He was thinking of the scientifically managed forest. Olmsted brought in Gifford Pinchot to oversee Biltmore’s forest operations. He was a young American graduate of the École Nationale Forestière at Nancy and the first trained forester ever to hold such a position in the United States. Under Pinchot’s direction Vanderbilt bought more than one hundred thousand acres of land to create Biltmore Forest.

  Biltmore may have had aspects of “rare public interest,” but it was chiefly the personal indulgence of a millionaire. There is no reason to apologize for Olmsted’s involvement—there is no evidence that he ever did. The great seventeenth-century landscape architect André Le Nôtre created his masterpiece, the grounds of Vaux-le-Vicomte, for one of the richest men in France. Vanderbilt, hardly the richest man in the United States but surely among the most magnanimous, offered Olmsted the opportunity to build a great and uncompromising work of landscape art. Olmsted gratefully accepted. He oversaw the work personally, traveling to Biltmore several times each year. Once there he often spent five and six hours at a stretch in the saddle, put up with uncomfortable accommodations, and suffered from the altitude. He obviously thought that it was worth it.

  * * *

  1. Olmsted devoted a section of his report to naming the estate. He discarded French Broad and suggested Broadwood; Vanderbilt toyed with Bilton but settled on Biltmore (Bildt was his ancestral town in Holland).

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE