• • • •
On Thursday, August 27, 1903, the McLean Asylum telephoned Fairstead with the news that Olmsted, now eighty-one, was unconscious and breathing heavily. Death was imminent. Mary, John, and Rick rushed to Waverly. They were told it was a question of a few hours at most. When Olmsted’s state remained unchanged, John took his mother home. Frederick Olmsted died at two o’clock the next morning with Rick at his bedside.
Two days later the New-York Times published a full-column article under the headline “F. L. OLMSTED IS DEAD: End Comes to Great Landscape Architect at Waverly, Mass.” It was eight years since he had dropped out of public life, but he was not forgotten. Soon letters and telegrams would arrive in Fairstead from friends, colleagues, and clients: André, Kingsbury, Burnham, Vanderbilt. When Charles Eliot Norton, who was at his summer house, heard about it, he wrote Rick a tender note:
I have felt much for you during the past week. Though the death of your Father comes as a relief in its freeing him from all that made his last years sorrowful to himself and sad to those who loved him, it brings home to you the sense of loss and change. . . . You can, however, have nothing but happiness in looking back on the years of his life. Few men have done better service than he, service beneficent not only to his own generation, but to generation after generation in the long future.
The funeral was held at Fairstead the following Monday. Only family members attended: John and Rick; Olmsted’s half brother Albert and his wife; Charlotte’s husband, John, and their two children; and Olmsted’s cousin Fanny. “It was a meager unsatisfactory service in proportion to the few who came to it,” noted John Olmsted sadly. Mary had wanted it that way. She herself stayed away; her farewells had been said long ago.
Prospect Park, Brooklyn
Thursday, August 7, 1997
It is mid-afternoon. The trees throw long shadows across the rolling surface of the Long Meadow. There are a few small groups of people sitting under the clumps of trees that break up the green sward. A woman and a man, deep in conversation, are walking across the meadow toward Swan Boat Lake. The woman is the administrator of the park. I am the man. She is showing me around.
We reach a path that skirts the lake—a pond, really—and enter the trees. It is quiet, and we can hear the sound of falling water. A dozen paces later, through an opening in the trees, I glimpse a little tableau. At the far end of a still pool a spring gushes out of a rocky outcropping. The outcropping is only a few feet above the water’s level, creating a little cataract that splashes noisily onto a large boulder. From the pool a stream rushes beneath the rustic footbridge on which we are standing. Just before the stream tumbles into the pond, it swirls around a vertical rock.
We continue down the curved path beside the pond. The shimmering expanse is bordered by trees on one side and the meadow on the other. A turn brings us once more into the dark woods. We cross another footbridge over a gurgling stream. The path turns into a mountain track, carved into an almost vertical, rock-strewn slope. We stop to look down where the slope descends to the stream, which has widened as it courses through a deep glen. “That’s the Ambergill,” she says. “Olmsted loved these old English names.”
We pass a row of potted shrubs ready for planting, a reminder that this entire section of the park is being restored. Over the years it had fallen into disrepair, the spring dried up, the brook silted solid, the pond overgrown with weeds. Now, boulder by boulder, seedling by seedling, tree by tree, it is being rebuilt. I can see stacks of pipes and piles of crushed stone among the trees. The site must have looked much the same during its construction 130 years ago.
The path turns sharply right, bringing us to the edge of a ravine. The water is not yet running in this part of the restoration. When it does, the Ambergill will course through a narrow defile and fall eight feet into the ravine. At the far end, the torrent will disappear beneath huge boulders that appear to have tumbled into the cleft of the ravine. The boulders form a cyclopean bridge that carries the path farther into the forest. In the other direction, a flight of roughly dressed stone steps rises steeply up the hill.
This entire sequence—the spring, the pond, the glen, the ravine—occupies a tiny space; the straight-line distance that I have walked is barely a thousand feet from beginning to end. Yet so skillfully did Olmsted and Vaux lay out the path, engage the senses, mask distances, and direct attention from one event to another, that I have entirely forgotten that just over the brow of the hill lies Long Meadow and beyond it Flatbush Avenue.
We retrace our steps through the dark glade and alongside the shimmering water until we reach the comforting green swathe of the meadow, a clearing in the distance. The administrator is describing the work that yet needs to be done. I am glad that the park is in such good hands. But half my mind is elsewhere, still in the man-made little piece of Adirondack mountains, hearing the forest sounds, walking the sun-dappled path among the swaying trees.
I have visited many Olmsted parks. Most, like this one, are being tended, cared for, restored. That pleases me for these really are precious, historic places—as precious and historic in their way as Chartres Cathedral or the Acropolis. Unlike old buildings, however, these places are not historical relics. Timeless, I want to say. But I well know that they are rooted in a particular time and place, and in the minds of particular men. What ambition, what effort, what devotion.
See! this our fathers did for us.
* * *
1. Before returning to the United States, Mary traveled to France, stayed in Paris, and visited John Hull Olmsted’s grave in Nice.
2. Biltmore Forest did fulfill Olmsted’s hopes. It was the location of the first forestry school in the United States and eventually became Pisgah National Forest.
3. The guiding force behind this project was Senator James McMillan of Michigan, who, twenty years earlier, had approached Olmsted to design Belle Isle.
OLMSTED’S DISTANT EFFECTS
Frederick Law Olmsted making notes in the snow, c. 1890.
Distant Effects
THE FIRST BIOGRAPHY of Frederick Law Olmsted appeared while he was still alive. Written by Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer, it was published in the October 1893 issue of the popular Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine. Van Rensselaer had the advantage of a long friendship with her subject, and she was an astute critic of the arts; her Henry Hobson Richardson and His Works (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1888) is both appreciative and insightful. Unfortunately she never undertook a full-length biography of Olmsted. No other biographer came forward in the years following Olmsted’s death. Between February and July 1906, Wilson Eyre’s House and Garden magazine published four illustrated articles on selected Olmsted projects (including Mount Royal). They were written by John Nolen, then studying landscape architecture under Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. at Harvard and soon to become one of the country’s most accomplished town planners.
The closest thing to an Olmsted biography was edited by Rick together with Theodora Kimball, who was then the librarian of Harvard’s department of landscape architecture, where Rick continued to teach until 1914. Frederick Law Olmsted, Landscape Architect, 1822–1903, which carried the long subtitle, Forty Years of Landscape Architecture; Being the Professional Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted, Senior (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Son’s, 1922), was followed by a companion volume, Central Park as a Work of Art and as a Great Municipal Enterprise, 1853–1895 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Son’s, 1928). For many years this collection of correspondence, reports, biographical fragments, and chronological highlights remained the chief source of firsthand information about Olmsted’s life.
In 1931 the writer and architectural critic Lewis Mumford published The Brown Decades (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1931) in which he devoted much of a chapter to Olmsted. Mumford’s perceptive appreciation of Olmsted’s position in nineteenth-century America was not widely shared. In fact, by then the man whom Mumford described as having “almost single-handed laid the foundations for a better or
der in city building” had slipped into almost total obscurity. Part of the reason, paradoxically, was Rick’s success. After replanning Washington, D.C., he helped found the National Park Service and advised on the management of Yosemite. He came to dominate the planning field, serving as president of both the American Society of Landscape Architects and the American Institute of Planners. His Brookline firm (John died in 1920) laid out world’s fairs, college campuses, urban parks, private estates, and residential suburbs across the United States. He had long since dropped the “Junior” from his name—he was now the famous Olmsted.
Olmsted had resisted attempts to reprint The Cotton Kingdom, yet for the first half of the twentieth century if he was remembered at all, it was as a chronicler of the antebellum South. A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States, with Remarks on Their Economy (including a biographical sketch by Rick) was republished by G. P. Putnam’s Sons in two volumes in 1904; Putnam’s reprinted A Journey in the Back Country in 1907. A Journey Through Texas was reprinted much later (Austin, Texas: Von Boeckmann-Jones Press, 1962). The first serious reassessment of Olmsted’s Southern reporting was Broadus Mitchell’s Frederick Law Olmsted, a Critic of the Old South (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1924). Although Mitchell’s work has factual errors, it remains a perceptive appraisal. Edmund Wilson’s profile of Olmsted as a critic of the South in Patriotic Gore (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962) is likewise worth reading. But the breakthrough, as far as Olmsted reaching a broader audience, occurred earlier with the appearance of a new edition of The Cotton Kingdom (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953), edited with a thoughtful introduction by the noted historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr. This version remained in print for twenty years and was reissued in slightly altered form in 1984. Incidentally, the availability of The Cotton Kingdom has directed attention away from Olmsted’s original newspaper accounts. That is a shame, for the reports that appeared in the New-York Daily Times (and a few in the New York Daily Tribune) are fresher and more vivid than the heavily augmented and twice-summarized (and overwritten) versions that make up The Cotton Kingdom.
When Schlesinger was writing his introduction, he consulted a previously unavailable source of information. In 1947–48 Rick had given his father’s personal and business correspondence and other family records to the Library of Congress. The approximately twenty-four thousand items formed the basis of the Frederick Law Olmsted Papers and were later augmented by additional material from the Olmsted office (Rick continued to practice until 1950; he died in 1957). It is a remarkable archive. Olmsted, to put it mildly, was a pack rat. He saved everything: personal and business letters, travel diaries, ticket stubs, clippings, expense sheets, drafts of reports, fragments of writing. Sadly, no correspondence exists before he was eighteen; it was probably lost in the fire that destroyed the barns at Tosomock Farm, where Olmsted had stored many of his possessions while he was in Bear Valley. Nor are there significant surviving personal or business papers of Calvert Vaux. In 1977 the Frances Loeb Library of Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design acquired the papers of John C. Olmsted (from his daughter Carolyn), including many letters that throw interesting new light on the relations between father and stepson.
A register of the Frederick Law Olmsted Papers was prepared in 1963, but not until 1975 was the entire collection microfilmed (on no fewer than sixty reels). By then America was well on its way to rediscovering Frederick Law Olmsted. In 1967 Henry Hope Reed and Sophia Duckworth’s Central Park: A History and a Guide (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1967) and Clay Lancaster’s Prospect Park Handbook (New York: Greensward Foundation, 1967) appeared. These popular works both underlined the pivotal roles of Olmsted and Vaux. Edited collections of Olmsted’s landscaping and planning reports were published, notably Landscape into Cityscape: Frederick Law Olmsted’s Plans for a Greater New York City (ed. Albert Fein, Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1967) and Civilizing American Cities: Writings on American Landscapes (ed. S. B. Sutton, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971). The sesquicentennial of Olmsted’s birth—1972—was marked by an exhibition organized and directed by William Alex at the Whitney Museum of American Art titled “Frederick Law Olmsted’s New York.” The exhibition, and an accompanying book of the same name by Elizabeth Barlow and Alex (New York: Praeger, 1972), further heightened public awareness. The first full-length life of Olmsted appeared the following year, FLO: A Biography of Frederick Law Olmsted (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973) by Laura Wood Roper. Roper had written several articles on Olmsted, including “Frederick Law Olmsted and the Western Texas Free-Soil Movement” (American Historical Review, October 1950), the excellent “Frederick Law Olmsted in the ‘Literary Republic’ ” (Mississippi Valley Historical Review, December 1952), and “ ‘Mr. Law’ and Putnam’s Monthly Magazine” (American Literature, March 1954). Her book is a model of the scholarly biography. Roper had the added benefit of talking with Rick at length and was the first researcher given access to the Olmsted papers by the family. A second biography, Elizabeth Stevenson’s Park Maker, a Life of Frederick Law Olmsted (New York: Collier Macmillan, 1977), was published a few years later.
The availability of the Frederick Law Olmsted Papers has given rise to an extraordinary project of the Johns Hopkins University Press: The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted. The intention of the editors is to publish the most significant of Olmsted’s letters, writings, and reports. Twelve volumes are projected; seven have appeared at the time of writing: The Formative Years, 1822–1852 (ed. Charles Capon McLaughlin, 1977); Slavery and the South, 1852–1857 (ed. Charles E. Beveridge and Charles Capon McLaughlin 1981); Creating Central Park, 1857–1861 (ed. Charles E. Beveridge and David Schuyler, 1983); Defending the Union, 1861–1863 (ed. Jane Turner Censer, 1986); The California Frontier, 1863–1865 (ed. Victoria Post Ranney, 1990); The Years of Olmsted, Vaux & Company, 1865-1874 (ed. David Schuyler and Jane Turner Censer, 1992); and Writings on Public Parks, Parkways, and Park Systems (ed. Charles E. Beveridge and Carolyn F. Hoffman, 1997). Begun by a redoubtable Olmsted scholar, Charles Capon McLaughlin, and now under the overall editorship of Charles E. Beveridge, this monumental series, intelligently annotated and exhaustively researched, represents an invaluable aid to anyone interested in Olmsted, including this author.
Exhibitions and books are one thing, but what revived Olmsted’s reputation among the general public was the rehabilitation of Central Park. During the years after World War II, the park steadily deteriorated: the grounds became overgrown, buildings were abandoned, the Bethesda Terrace was neglected and covered in graffiti. The general dilapidation—as well as fear of crime—kept the public away, and Central Park became an embarrassing eyesore. In December 1980 Mayor Edward Koch announced the formation of the Central Park Conservancy, a private fund-raising body. Together with park administrator Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, this group was responsible for rebuilding and restoring the park. The restoration was done with as much historical accuracy as possible, and a new generation of New Yorkers rediscovered the beauty of Greensward. The renewal of other parks followed: not only the ravine area of Prospect Park, but also Boston’s Franklin Park and the Louisville park system.
The entire story of Central Park is told in Roy Rosenzweig and Elizabeth Blackmar’s The Park and the People: A History of Central Park (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992), which is particularly good on the origins and early days of the park. David Schuyler’s The New Urban Landscape: The Redefinition of City Form in Nineteenth-Century America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986) is a review of the impact of Olmsted’s planning ideas, and the same author’s Apostle of Taste: Andrew Jackson Downing 1815–1852 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996) is a useful biography of Olmsted’s chief predecessor. William Alex’s Calvert Vaux: Architect and Planner (New York: Ink, Inc., 1994) is a good source of visual material on the park projects that Olmsted and Vaux designed together; Francis Kowsky’s Country, Park, & City: The Architecture and Life of Calvert Vaux
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1998) provides a sympathetic view of the Olmsted–Vaux partnership. Melvin Kalfus’s psychobiography, Frederick Law Olmsted: The Passion of a Public Artist (New York: New York University Press, 1990), is highly speculative but contains some interesting background research. Lee Hall’s Olmsted’s America: An “Unpractical” Man and His Vision of Civilization (Boston: Bulfinch Press, 1995) sheds little new light on its subject.
A Clearing In The Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the 19th Cent Page 46
