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

  Frederick Law Olmsted, c.1885.

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  CONTENTS

  FOREWORD

  EPIGRAPH

  SCHEMES

  1. “Tough as nails”

  2. Frederick goes to school

  3. Hartford

  4. “I have no objection”

  5. New York

  6. A year before the mast

  7. Friends

  8. Farming

  9. More farming

  10. A walking tour in the old country

  JOSTLING AND BEING JOSTLED

  11. Mr. Downing’s magazine

  12. Olmsted falls in love and finishes his book

  13. Charley Brace intervenes

  14. Yeoman

  15. A traveling companion

  16. The Texas settlers

  17. Yeoman makes a decision

  18. “Much the best Mag. in the world”

  19. Abroad

  HITTING HEADS

  20. A change in fortune

  21. The Colonel meets his match

  22. Mr. Vaux

  23. A brilliant solution

  24. A promotion

  25. Frederick and Mary

  26. Comptroller Green

  27. King Cotton

  28. A good big work

  29. Yeoman’s war

  30. “Six months more pretty certainly”

  31. A letter from Dana

  32. Never happier

  33. Olmsted shortens sail

  34. A heavy sort of book

  35. Calvert Vaux doesn’t take no for an answer

  36. Loose ends

  A MAGNIFICENT OPENING

  37. Olmsted and Vaux plan a perfect park

  38. Metropolitan

  39. A stopover in Buffalo

  40. Thirty-nine thousand trees

  41. Best-laid plans

  42. Henry Hobson Richardson

  43. Olmsted’s dilemma

  44. Alone

  45. “More interesting than nature”

  46. Olmsted in demand

  47. “I shall be free from it on the 1st of January”

  STANDING FIRST

  48. An arduous convalescence

  49. Fairstead

  50. The character of his business

  51. The sixth park

  52. Olmsted meets the Governor

  53. Olmsted and Vaux, together again

  54. “Make a small pleasure ground and gardens”

  55. Olmsted drives hard

  56. The fourth muse

  57. Dear Rick

  58. Sunset

  OLMSTED’S DISTANT EFFECTS

  Distant Effects

  A Selected List of Olmsted Projects

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  PHOTOGRAPHS

  ABOUT WITOLD RYBCZYNSKI

  NOTES

  INDEX

  ILLUSTRATION AND PHOTOGRAPH CREDITS

  In memoriam

  Witold Kazimierz Rybczynski

  (1908–1996)

  FOREWORD

  THE ISLAND OF MONTREAL in the St. Lawrence River is more or less flat, except for a pronounced hill roughly in the center. The French explorers christened it Mont Réal—Mount Royal. Its dark bulk is the city of Montreal’s most distinctive feature, visible from afar, and looming over the streets and buildings that surround its steep flanks. Actually, what is most distinctive about the mountain is that most of it is a public park. Not that anyone ever referred to it as a park, it was always just the “Mountain.”

  I spent a year in a college dorm located high up one slope of Mount Royal; later, from the upper floor of my first apartment you could see the illuminated cross on top of the mountain. My last home in Montreal was a flat on a street called Esplanade, directly facing the east slope. All in all, I’ve lived about twenty years in Montreal, always within walking distance of the Mountain. It was where we ran our dogs, went on picnics in the summer, tobogganed in the winter. A long, winding gravel road zigzagged up the forested slope until it reached a grassy bowl overlooking a small lake. Only one city street went through the park. It was not really a shortcut, but when I was not in a hurry, I often took this route; it was like taking a drive in the country. At one point the road went through a defile. At the far end, a breathtaking vista of the whole city stretched out to the river. On a clear day you could see all the way to the Green Mountains of Vermont.

  Being on the Mountain was always a surprise. One minute you were walking on a busy city street, the next you were in a landscape of dense trees and rugged outcroppings. At first, the sound of traffic was audible, but soon it was replaced by the stillness of a primeval forest.

  I remember as a college student being told that the Mountain was the work of someone called Frederick Law Olmsted, the same man who designed Central Park. I was impressed that he had come all the way from New York City, but what the work consisted of I couldn’t imagine. Like most people, I took the landscape of the Mountain for granted; I thought that it was simply a nature preserve. Here was the most significant man-made object in Montreal—arguably the city’s most important cultural artifact—and I thought of it as “natural.” How wrong I was.

  Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia

  November 1995–November 1998

  I have all my life been considering distant effects and always sacrificing immediate success and applause to that of the future.

  —FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED

  Le génie n’est qu’une plus grande aptitude à la patience. (Genius is no more than a greater aptitude for patience.)

  —GEORGE LOUIS LECLERC, Comte de Buffon

  SCHEMES

  New Haven, 1846. (from left to right) Charles Trask, Charles Loring Brace, Frederick J. Kingsbury, Frederick Law Olmsted, and John Hull Olmsted.

  They never get disheartened. I think Fred will be one of that sort. Many of his favorite schemes will go to naught—but he’ll throw it aside and try another and spoil that and forget them both while you or I might have been blubbering over the ruins of the first.

  —FREDERICK J. KINGSBURY TO JOHN HULL OLMSTED (1847)

  CHAPTER ONE

  “Tough as Nails”

  WITH HIS HIGH FOREHEAD, wide-set blue eyes, and unruly hair, the young Frederick Olmsted made a strong impression. A boyhood friend described him as “a vigorous, manly fellow, of medium height, solidly built with rather broad shoulders and a large well formed head. If athletics had been in fashion he would have been high up in foot-ball and base-ball.” In midlife he suffered a carriage accident that left him with a pronounced limp, but he remained a skilled small-boat sailor and an experienced horseman. He was a seasoned outdoorsman who hunted and fished, though not for sport. Later photographs usually show him pensive. He rarely looks directly at the camera, which gives him an air of self-containment, almost detachment. “His face is generally very placid,” wrote his colleague Katharine Wormeley, “with all the expressive delicacy of a woman’s, and would be beautiful were it not for an expression which I cannot fathom,—something which is, perhaps, a little too severe about it.” But she added, “I think his mouth and smile and the expression of his eyes at times very beautiful . . . there is a deep, calm thoughtfulness about him which is always attractiv
e and sometimes—provoking.”

  An odd choice of word—“provoking.” Olmsted’s close friend Charles Eliot Norton likewise discerned this quality. “All the lines of his face imply refinement and sensibility to such a degree that it is not till one has looked through them to what is underneath, that the force of his will and the reserved power of his character become evident.” When I asked the landscape architect Laurie Olin how he would characterize Olmsted, his immediate answer was “Tough as nails.” Olin is right, of course. Although the modern image of Frederick Law Olmsted is of a benevolent environmentalist, a sort of Johnny Appleseed scattering beautiful city parks across the nation, he had indomitable energy and iron determination. As a mine manager in California, he once faced down a crowd of striking miners. (They were understandably upset because he had reduced their wages.) “They tried a mob but made nothing of it,” he laconically wrote to his father, “and I have lost no property only time. I shall hold out till they come to my terms and dismiss all who have been prominent in the strike.” He did just that. His obstinacy often got him in trouble. Many times he chose to resign positions rather than continue on a course of action he disapproved. His most famous resignations—there were several—occurred during the long and often frustrating construction of Central Park. But there were others. Leland Stanford, the railroad magnate, engaged him to lay out the grounds of what would become Stanford University. Olmsted prepared the plans on the understanding that, as was his practice, he would also hire his own staff to supervise the work. When Stanford, who had been governor of California and was used to getting his own way, reneged on the agreement, Olmsted walked away from the job. The university was completed without him.

  Another battle of wills occurred during his tenure with the United States Sanitary Commission. The Commission, a precursor to the Red Cross, was a private organization established after the outbreak of the Civil War to administer volunteer relief efforts to the Union troops. Olmsted spent two years as its first general secretary, in charge of day-to-day operations. As fund-raising efforts intensified, hundreds of thousands of dollars flowed to the Commission, whose board felt the need to exert more direct supervision over the activities of its chief executive officer. He characteristically bridled at any attempt to curtail his freedom, and a sometimes bitter struggle ensued. One of those with whom he had run-ins was the treasurer of the Commission, George Templeton Strong. Strong, best known as the author of an exceptional set of diaries, was a prominent Wall Street lawyer and civic leader. He knew Olmsted well: both men were involved in the Union League Club and in the establishment of The Nation magazine. Some six months before Olmsted’s resignation, Strong noted in his journal: “He is an extraordinary fellow, decidedly the most remarkable specimen of human nature with whom I have been brought into close relations.” Then, in obvious exasperation, he added: “Prominent defects, a monomania for system and organization on paper (elaborate, laboriously thought out, and generally impracticable), and appetite for power. He is a lay-Hildebrand.”

  The last strikes me as a shrewd characterization. Hildebrand, or Gregory VII, was an eleventh-century pope who is remembered for his lifelong attempt to establish the supremacy of the papacy within the Church—and the authority of the Church over the state. Olmsted, too, was trying to establish an ascendancy. He was doing it with what sometimes seemed to others religious zeal, but he did not seek personal aggrandizement. Strong commented on his colleague’s “absolute purity and disinterestedness”; he recognized that Olmsted wasn’t empire-building. The supremacy that Olmsted was trying to establish was that of the technician—the organizer; the authority was that of The Plan. But he was ahead of his time. His obsession with organization and planning on paper may sometimes have been clumsy, and it was certainly laborious—this was before telephones and typewriters, let alone computers and fax machines. But it was not, as Strong thought, ineffective. Olmsted successfully coordinated the operations of the Sanitary Commission, with its thousands of contributing private aid societies, and its scores of nurses and doctors. He deployed convalescent shelters, field hospitals, and hospital ships and distributed food and medical supplies over a battlefront that extended for hundreds of miles. Strong had also forgotten that it was precisely “monomania” that had enabled Olmsted to organize the labors of several thousand workers in what was then the largest public works project in the nation: Central Park.

  Olmsted was one of the first people to recognize the necessity for planning in a large, industrializing country—whether in peace or war. This recognition was not yet widely shared, which is why he was often misunderstood. “He looks far ahead, & his plans & methods are sometimes mysterious,” wrote Rev. Henry Whitney Bellows, founder and president of the Sanitary Commission, of his willful protégé. “[His critics] think him impracticable, expensive, slow—when he is only long-headed, with broader, deeper notions of economy than themselves, & with no disposition to hurry what, if done satisfactorily, must be thoroughly.” Long-headed is good. It was the future that concerned him, and he had the rare patience to successfully project his plans years ahead. I think that was one of the things that finally attracted him to landscape architecture. It is a field where a long time—sometimes generations—is required for the full realization of the designer’s goal.

  A small incident illustrates his foresight. Once, five years after the end of the Civil War, when he was already an established landscape architect in New York, he received a letter from the quartermaster general of the U.S. Army, Montgomery Meigs. Meigs had a high regard for Olmsted, with whom he had worked during the war. The general wrote to ask advice on the landscaping of national cemeteries, for which purpose Congress had just appropriated funds. Olmsted was preoccupied with the construction of Prospect Park in Brooklyn; nevertheless it took him less than a week to draft a careful and detailed reply. As to the general design, he wrote, “the main object should be to establish permanent dignity and tranquillity.” He warned Meigs that any attempts at elaborate gardening should be avoided. “Looking forward several generations, the greater part of all that is artificial at present in the cemeteries must be expected to have either wholly disappeared or to have become inconspicuous and unimportant in the general landscape.” Olmsted recommended doing only two things: building a simple enclosing wall, and planting trees. The effect would be of a “sacred grove” for the war dead. What a beautiful idea!

  Olmsted’s artistry was always underpinned by sensible considerations, and this was no exception. Since the war cemeteries would be built in different parts of the country, he advocated using trees indigenous to each region. He also warned against the temptation to plant fast-growing species (they would be short-lived) and listed those to be avoided. Instead of buying expensive large trees, he suggested establishing nurseries next to the cemeteries where seedlings could be cultivated and transplanted after ten years or so. What if land for a nursery was unavailable? His novel suggestion: “nursery rows could be planted between the tiers of graves. They would be harmless for the time being and would disappear after a few years” as the trees matured and were relocated.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Frederick Goes to School

  OLMSTED WAS AN ORGANIZER when organization was considered a symptom of “monomania,” and a long-range planner in a period that thought of planning as “mysterious.” He was a landscape architect before that profession was founded, designed the first large suburban community in the United States, foresaw the need for national parks, and devised one of the country’s first regional plans. Above all, he was an artist who chose to work in a medium that then—even more than now—lacked public recognition. He was an innovator and a pioneer largely by chance. But, as Louis Pasteur, an exact contemporary of Olmsted, once observed, “Chance favors only the mind that is prepared.” Olmsted’s preparation was not based on formal training or education. What laid the groundwork for his later achievements was an amalgam of sensibility and temperament, coupled with an unusual set of formative experie
nces.

  He was born in Hartford, Connecticut, on April 26, 1822. His family circumstances were comfortable. His father, John Olmsted, a local dry-goods merchant, and his mother, Charlotte Hull, a farmer’s daughter, had married the year before. John was thirty-one, she was twenty-two. They christened their first child Frederick, in memory of John’s older brother who had died a few years earlier. Following the new fashion among genteel Americans in the early nineteenth century, the infant was given a middle name—Law—after Jonathan Law, who was married to Charlotte’s older sister, Stella.

  Three years later, Charlotte bore a second son, named John Hull. The Olmsteds lived in a rented house on College Street, not the best part of town, but conveniently close to the store. The household help consisted of a cook, a handyman, and two maids. The little family seemed well on its way, but fate—which was to play a big role in Olmsted’s life—had it otherwise. “When I was three years old I chanced to stray into a room at the crisis of a tragedy therein occurring,” Olmsted later recalled, “and turned and fled from it screaming in a manner adding to the horror of the household. It was long before I could be soothed and those nearby said to one another that I would never forget what I had seen.” Even as an adult, he could not bring himself to specify the nature of the tragedy he had witnessed. When Frederick was three, Charlotte accidentally took an overdose of laudanum while suffering from a toothache and died. It would be hard to pick a worse age to lose one’s mother. One can only imagine the feelings that roiled in the boy’s head: loss, pain, fear, guilt, anxiety. It was the pivotal event of his childhood.

  John Olmsted grieved, but with his business to attend to and two young children to rear, he needed a spouse. Fourteen months later he married Mary Ann Bull, the daughter of a prominent Hartford druggist, and a close friend of Charlotte’s. The union turned out to be solid, lasting forty-seven years until John’s death. They would have six children together. Many years later, reminiscing about his father, Olmsted recalled a loving parent but a reserved and even taciturn man. “He was at bottom a rarely meek, modest, affectionate and amiable man. He had also a strong sense of justice. He was very nervous, impulsive and in a way ambitious but was crippled by . . . a very meager & unsuitable education, and mainly by excessive shyness.” Frederick’s tall, broad-shouldered father was a self-made man without formal education, which probably contributed to his closemouthedness. But one thing was certain: he had a good head for business. He was one of seven children, raised on a farm in East Hartford—his father had been a ship’s captain. At sixteen he was apprenticed to a relative who was a merchant in Hartford. After only eight years with H. B. Olmsted & Company, he opened his own store. The prominent location on Main Street was opposite the State House and near the Congregational church and Hartford’s old burying ground. The store carried a wide variety of dry goods: woolens, cottons, silks, so-called fancy goods, and carpeting. (Dry-goods stores were the immediate ancestors of the large “departmentalized” stores that opened in the 1860s.) Despite formidable competition (in 1825 Hartford had more than twenty dry-goods emporia) he prospered.