Genius of Place (26 page)

During the voyage, Olmsted was bemused by the mundane way passengers passed their time, mostly playing cards. He remained in his cabin, working on the index of his book
A Journey in the Back Country
. But he did go above deck occasionally to study the sea and to watch the sailors at work. This was work with which he was quite familiar.

Olmsted sent Mary a letter from the
Persia
, addressed “Dear little woman at home,” and included an account, meant for Charley's benefit, of the ocean life he'd spotted: “Tell Charly [
sic
] I saw five whales, altogether, snorting and turning somersets (so it looked) in the water. Lots of birds, floating and flying, and once, a little sparrow, several hundred miles from land, too tired to move more, dropped on deck and allowed itself to be caught. It is alive—and the sailors keeping it.”

On October 11, Olmsted arrived at Liverpool. He visited Birkenhead Park, a place he had first seen during his 1850 walking tour of England and one that influenced the design of Central Park.

Then Olmsted, so recently languishing on a sofa, went off like a slingshot. He visited the Derby Arboretum, the gardens at Chatsworth, the Forest of Windsor. He went to Aston Park and the Birmingham Botanical Gardens. Over the next few weeks, he would visit dozens of parks and gardens in six different countries, taking in some of Europe's finest examples of landscaping.

Olmsted didn't confine his activities to mere grounds walking. In Birmingham, he met with an engineer and arranged for a tour of the sewerage and filtering works. Birmingham's mayor furnished Olmsted with details and statistics on policing the city's parks. In London, he conducted a lengthy interview with Sir Richard Mayne, commissioner of the police force. Once again, Olmsted obtained details on the methods for policing a large city park.

Word of Olmsted's Central Park feat had reached England. As a consequence, the superintendents of all of London's public parks were placed
at his disposal. He visited Hyde Park, St. James's Park, and the other West End parks, some of them again and again. He obtained the plans for all of them.

The weather was terrible; it rained virtually nonstop. After a day's delay, waiting for gale-force winds to subside, Olmsted crossed the Channel to France, where rain continued unabated. He visited parks in Versailles and Saint-Cloud, along with the Jardin du Luxembourg. He met with Jean-Charles Adolphe Alphand, an engineer playing a crucial role in Napoléon III's renovation of Paris. Among other things, Alphand had overseen the recent transformation of the Bois de Boulogne from a forest into a landscaped park. During two weeks in Paris, Olmsted visited the Bois de Boulogne on eight separate occasions. He then went to Brussels and Munich and Lille, an industrial town in northern France, known for it boulevards and squares.

Then it was back to England, where news of Central Park awaited. While Olmsted was abroad, Mary had completed the planned move, and his new family was now living at Mount St. Vincent. Something else had happened during his trip: On October 6, while Olmsted was traveling on the
Persia
, the board had elected Andrew Green to the newly created position of comptroller. It would fall to Green to get the park's runaway budget under control.

Even in Olmsted's absence, bachelor Green had continued his practice of fortnightly dining at the Olmsted household. With his recent promotion, Mary found him more insufferable than ever. “I must confess he frets me with his manner of thinking himself so much more efficient than you or anybody else,” she wrote in a letter that reached Olmsted in England. Another letter from Mary, dated exactly two weeks later and following another Green dinner, stated simply, “Green here.... He growled a great deal.”

Olmsted also received a letter from Vaux. “Upon my word Olmsted,” wrote Vaux, “I will
not
forgive you if you do not make a better show.” He chided Olmsted for lately cutting such a “lugubrious sallow bloodless figure,” before adding a curious line: “I consider that the only thing to be really regretted in our last two years operations is the absence of jollity.”

Absence of jollity
. While creating something of beauty, Vaux seemed to imply, Olmsted hadn't experienced any joy himself. Why, he hadn't even gone ice skating on the Lake. But now matters were spinning out of control. Green was ascending, and Olmsted would need to be focused for a possible battle ahead.
Buck up
was the message of Olmsted's worried partner.

News of Green's power grab disturbed Olmsted. But there was nothing to be done at 3,500 miles' remove, so he continued his tour full-tilt, visiting Biddulph Grange, Elvaston Castle, and Stoneleigh Abbey, followed by the Crystal Palace, Charlecote Park, and Trentham, which featured what he deemed the “best private garden in England.”

Olmsted met with Samuel Parsons, a Queens, New York, nurseryman who was in England on a tree-buying mission for Central Park. He dropped by a bookseller and purchased four titles:
Forest Planter
,
Parks of London
,
Sowerby's Farms and Farm Allies
, and John Ruskin's
The Two Paths: Being Lectures on Art and Its Application to Decoration and Manufacture
. As an ardent admirer of Ruskin, the celebrated British social critic, Olmsted was pleased to get a copy of
The Two Paths
, hot off the presses, and based on lectures Ruskin had delivered during the previous two years.

Olmsted also commissioned pioneering photographer Roger Fenton to take some pictures. Fenton's images of the recent Crimean War had shocked the British public, just as Mathew Brady's of the Civil War would shock Americans. Fenton's spare
Valley of the Shadow of Death
—featuring no soldiers, only spent cannonballs in the aftermath of battle—is considered
the
seminal war photo. For Olmsted, Fenton took forty-eight pictures of Regent's Park.

After a visit to Dublin for one last flash of green, Phoenix Park, Olmsted traveled to Cork, where he boarded a Cunard liner headed home.

During his earlier 1850 trip, Olmsted had been a rambling farmer. He had returned as a park maker, viewing the landscape through fresh eyes. The mass of ideas he gathered would swirl around in his fertile brain for years to come, furnishing creative sparks for future designs.

 

Olmsted arrived home just before Christmas, 1859. He brought a dress from Paris for Mary and a silver spoon for Vaux's infant daughter, Julia—a
gift from Vaux's sister, who lived in London. “I return with greatly improved health,” announced Olmsted.

Back at Central Park, Olmsted waited for the other shoe to fall. Green was the new comptroller, but that didn't seem to have any consequences just yet. Olmsted returned to work, drawing on the one part of his new store of park knowledge that had immediate application—policing. This had long been an area of focus—some would say obsession—for Olmsted. As he had once told the board: “A large part of the people of New York are ignorant of a park, properly so-called. They will need to be trained in the proper use of it, to be restrained in the abuse of it.” Olmsted may have envisioned Central Park as a haven of democracy. But a public park, as he was keenly aware, also needed to be protected against the public.

Before his Europe trip, Olmsted had organized a security detail known as the park keepers. More than fifty of them were hired, and their $1.50-a-day salaries were paid directly out of the Central Park budget. Olmsted's force, derisively called “sparrow cops,” wore gray uniforms with brass buttons and gloves, distinguishing them from New York City police officers, who wore blue. The keepers maintained strict discipline, not speaking to the public unless spoken to first.

During 1859, Central Park had an estimated 2 million visitors. The park keepers made 228 arrests for infractions ranging from drunkenness to loitering to assault. No murders happened in the park in 1859; there would be only a couple during the first three decades of the park's history. Still, despite crime's relative rarity, anyone apprehended by a park keeper faced severe punishment. One of the first arrests was a man who had stolen a pair of ice skates. To make an example of him, a judge sentenced the man to thirty days in jail.

After conferring with an assortment of English constables during his trip, Olmsted appears to have opted for a complete turnabout to a more passive policing strategy. He returned to America convinced that the keepers' hostile demeanor toward the public had actually been counterproductive. The mere presence of the keepers in the park should serve as a crime deterrent. Beyond that, Olmsted concluded, it probably made more sense for the keepers to concentrate on something like community outreach—call it park outreach. The force's new responsibilities, as
spelled out in a notice Olmsted posted, were to “direct strangers to different parts of the park, to instruct them as to distances, size, purposes, costs &c. of different objects in the park.”

Making arrests was downplayed; there would be fewer than 100 in each of the next five years. Park keepers were now closer to park rangers. Olmsted even devised quizzes for his force to make sure they were properly versed in the park's latest features and aware of arcane trivia—just in case they were asked.

How, then, to make sure rules were enforced? Signs. Olmsted installed signs, hundreds of signs. One of the most ubiquitous was the following:

Olmsted was finding that he had a knack for park administration just as much as park making. He posted speed limits: five miles per hour for carriages, six for horses. And he also set aside designated spots where visitors could leave carriages, an innovation that he was among the first to employ. In fact, the innovation was so cutting-edge that no term for it yet existed, so Olmsted called these spots “carriage rests.” During the twentieth century, planners would also need a place where an automobile could be left, and some anonymous wordsmith finally dreamed up a suitable term—
parking space
.

 

Green began to growl again. Olmsted had known that it would be only a matter of time, and soon enough his nemesis was all over him. Green
stripped Olmsted of his $200 a week in discretionary spending and instituted a new rule that any proposed expenditures had to first be run past him.

When Olmsted requested $28 for a new red signal ball for ice skating, Green questioned the expense. When Olmsted requested money for some additional rock blastings, Green asked whether such work was necessary or “merely desirable.” Soon their never-easy friendship had devolved into a series of petty memo battles, such as the following exchange.

Green composed a memo, complaining that some willow trees had been cut down without his approval: “It is quite expensive to get trees on the Park, and I hope nothing in shape of a tree will be cut.”

“None were cut except as I had designated—worthless of course,” wrote Olmsted.

Then Green again: “I recollect the willows very well, and do not agree with you that they were worthless. I think they should have been preserved.”

Green was actually a very able administrator. Years in the future, he would serve as comptroller for the City of New York, helping untangle the financial mess left behind by the notorious Tweed administration. He was also a tireless advocate for consolidating outlying communities such as Brooklyn and Staten Island into New York City proper, something that happened in 1898. Green had also backed up Olmsted in his fight against Dillon and Belmont. Though Olmsted refused to see it, Green truly had in mind the best interests of the park, an undertaking currently headed for a budget cliff. But it was Green's manner that irritated Olmsted mightily.

Olmsted was aware that he was creating something grand—the reviews were rolling in, and the park was packed with visitors—and he didn't appreciate having some bureaucrat pinching pennies. Green, in turn, picked up on this attitude and was bent on teaching Olmsted a real-world lesson. Green was all for art. Run out of money, though, and you could say good-bye to art.

When a paycheck was erroneously issued to a Central Park employee who had actually been absent from work, Green dashed off yet another
memo: “Although an error is not a crime, yet in money matters it is a very serious affair.” To Olmsted, this was just one more piece of galling Green pedantry.

 

A welcome diversion arrived on June 14, 1860. “Just in the earliest flush of dawn,” Olmsted wrote his father, “—the birds all singing—the boy came, with a great cry.”

Although Mary already had a child named John Charles (Charley), the newborn was christened John Theodore, after Olmsted's brother. He weighed ten and a half pounds, huge for a tiny woman like Mary. This was Fred's first child, and he was delighted that the baby had “a three cornered nose and other ‘Olmsted' marks, which Mary sees better than I do.”

John Theodore was delivered at home with a doctor in attendance. The extended family at Mount St. Vincent—Vaux's children, too—were delighted by the new addition, well, all except Charlotte, who had been counting on a baby sister. It had been far and away Mary's hardest labor. She rested comfortably now. She described her newborn as a “young pugilist.”

With a new baby in the household, Olmsted began casting about for additional work besides Central Park. He had another mouth to feed, but the far greater motivator seems to have been his innate restlessness. Even in the midst of a vast undertaking, even with a newborn, Olmsted had a surfeit of capacity, and he simply had to find an outlet. What's more, he was drawn to the prospect of working with someone, anyone, besides Green.