Genius of Place (27 page)

Vaux joined Olmsted in looking for extra work. Throughout the Central Park project, he had maintained his architectural office on Broadway, though his practice had gone moribund. In pursuing new commissions, the pair worked out of this office rather than the Central Park office so as to avoid any impropriety. As a moonlighting job, Olmsted and Vaux designed the grounds of the Hillside Cemetery in Middletown, New York. They also did some work for a government commission, providing recommendations on how the streets above 155th (a part of Manhattan left off the 1811 grid) should be laid out. Their report was never even
published. But the project is notable because in correspondence the client refers to Olmsted and Vaux as “landscape architects.”

Working on Central Park, they had certainly acted in this capacity. But so far—during a two-year association featuring thousands of pieces of correspondence and thousands of newspaper articles—Olmsted and Vaux had never once been referred to as “landscape architects.” This was a first. Several more years would pass—and there would be some serious convolutions along the way—before the two settled into a formal partnership working in this capacity.

There was also the prospect of park work in Brooklyn. Vaux accompanied James Stranahan, a businessman and civic booster, to look at sites. New York City had its Central Park, and Stranahan was keen on keeping pace in the nearby but separate city of Brooklyn. He and Vaux visited a number of potential sites, but Vaux didn't find any of them suitable for a park.

Yet another sideline was designing the grounds surrounding a couple of mental institutions, the Retreat for the Insane in Hartford, Connecticut, and the Bloomingdale Asylum in New York City, on the current site of Columbia University. Olmsted and Vaux partnered on both these, but the designs reflect Olmsted's singular vision. This was an area of special interest for him.

 

As a boy, Olmsted had read
Solitude
, a book by Swiss physician Johann Georg Zimmermann that discussed the powerful ability of scenery to ease a person's melancholy. Growing up in Hartford, Olmsted had also been exposed to the ideas of the Reverend Horace Bushnell. Bushnell frequently preached about something called “unconscious influence.” This was the reverend's term for the striking ways that people's spiritual states can be shaped by their environments. Bushnell had been the Brace family's minister, though not the Olmsteds'—stepmother Mary Ann Olmsted considered his views too radical. But Olmsted was familiar with Bushnell and even once asked Brace to send him some of the minister's writings on “unconscious influence.”

Now, called upon to landscape a couple of mental institutions, Olmsted drew on the ideas he'd been exposed to in youth. The Hartford Retreat
had been just the third asylum in the United States when it opened in 1824. John Olmsted had donated money to help get it started. Over the years, the grounds had become overgrown with trees and shrubbery.

Olmsted's plan called for clearing the grounds to create a wide-open meadow that rolled gently down toward the Connecticut River in the distance. Unlike Central Park, he aimed for a minimum of drama—no passages of scenery, no hulking specimen trees, branches snaking out, leaves vibrating with color. To enclose the meadow, he proposed a simple scrim of trees. This would shut out sights and sounds from the nearby city.

John Butler, the Hartford Retreat's superintendent, was thrilled when he received the plan. He grasped immediately that the design was meant to, as Butler put it, “Kill out the Lunatic Hospital and develop the Home.”

As an avowed social reformer, Olmsted took the plight of the mentally ill very seriously, a stark contrast to many of his nineteenth-century contemporaries. And as a person who suffered a variety of torturous mental states, Olmsted had a deep empathy for fellow sufferers. This, in turn, lent him preternatural insight when designing asylum grounds.

In the years ahead, Olmsted would frequently take on mental-institution commissions. Invariably, his designs would seek to provide a sense of calm, a feeling so sorely lacking in his own life.

CHAPTER 14

ON AUGUST 6, 1860, Olmsted took a ride in an open buggy through upper Manhattan, accompanied by Mary and the baby, John Theodore. His buggy was harnessed to a horse that he was looking to buy.

Exhausted from overwork, per usual, Olmsted fell asleep. The reins slipped from his hands. The horse bolted. Olmsted snapped to and seized the reins, but as the buggy whipped around a corner, one of its wheels rolled over the base of a lamppost. The buggy upended, and all three passengers were thrown clear. Mary landed on her back, clutching the baby to her chest. Miraculously, both were unharmed. But Olmsted was dashed against an outcropping of rock.

He lay in the road, writhing in pain, his shattered left thighbone jutting through a tear in his pants. Mary raced to a nearby house for help. In a bizarre coincidence, the house belonged to Charles Trask, fifth wheel of the “uncommon set.” Olmsted hadn't seen him in years. Trask's wife removed a large shutter from her house's window, and the shutter was carried out to the street where Olmsted lay. Bystanders lifted him onto the shutter, an improvised stretcher, and carried him into the Trask house.

Doctors were summoned, among them Willard Parker, a onetime teacher of Olmsted's brother John, yet another coincidence. It quickly became clear that this was a very serious injury. Olmsted's left thigh was broken in three places. Amputation was an option, but after conferring, the doctors agreed that his condition was too precarious. The procedure would surely kill him. Left alone, he might live for a week. The next
morning, Olmsted, carried into the Trask house on a shutter, was carried out on a bier and back to Mount St. Vincent to die. Dr. Parker put Olmsted's odds of survival at one in one hundred.

But he lived through a day. Then another and another. On the eighth day following the accident, little John Theodore died. The date—August 14, 1860—was his three-month birthday. The official cause was infant cholera. In Fred's and Mary's minds, these two events—the carriage crash and the death of their baby—would forever be linked. How could they not be? Mary was inconsolable. She took to her bed and remained there for days, racked by excruciating headaches and incalculable grief.

 

Within ten days of his accident, just two days after John Theodore's death, Olmsted was back on the job. Following the loss of his brother, work had proved a balm for Olmsted, and so it would again, following the loss of his brother's namesake. Slowly, painfully, he arranged himself into a sitting position on the floor of his bedroom. Then he pored over a set of Central Park maps, arrayed before him.

Very soon, Olmsted was moving around in the world again. His left leg—so severely damaged that it would remain two inches shorter for the rest of his life—was set with a splint and bandaged tightly from hip to toe. Employees carried him from place to place in Central Park on a makeshift litter. Sometimes it was necessary for Olmsted to examine a park feature not so easily accessed in a litter. The attendants would lower him to the ground. Then Olmsted would use his hands and his one good leg to propel himself awkwardly through the underbrush, his wounded and bandaged leg outstretched and dragging behind. It was an arduous, excruciating form of locomotion.

Olmsted was doubly anxious to get back to work because Green had assumed his responsibilities following the accident. Olmsted didn't want to lose control of Central Park. Green, for his part, was remarkably unsympathetic to everything Olmsted had just endured. Friends sent Olmsted bottles of wine and books and awkward notes of condolence. “Whilst expressing my deep regret for the Calamity which has again befallen you,” begins a note from an engineer employed at the park.

There is no record of Green sending anything. By now, thanks to the memo battles, the park's precarious finances, and the ceaseless sniping, their friendship had simply imploded, and grace and civility were no longer possible. Olmsted and Green had each lost all sense of perspective where the other was concerned. As winter came on, Green refused to honor a requisition for coal to keep Olmsted's office warm. Green insisted on several separate meetings before he agreed to reimburse an outlay of twelve and a half cents! To Vaux, Olmsted later described Green's manner as “a systematic small tyranny, measured exactly to the limit of my endurance.” To a friend, Olmsted wrote, “Not a cent is got from under his paw that is not wet with his blood & sweat.”

As 1860 came to an end, things came to a head. Going into the year, the board had asked Olmsted to prepare careful estimates for the cost of park construction. Now, at year's end, it became clear that actual costs had drastically outstripped the estimates. At Green's urging, Olmsted went over and over the numbers, but try as he might, he was unable to arrive at an exact number for the cost overrun. (For the record, the main period of construction in Central Park cost $8 million, more than five times the original appropriation.)

Green's goading was maddening, but deep down what really smarted for Olmsted was the inability to arrive at a precise number. He prided himself on achieving a rare combination, both artist and administrator. This required a grasp of the data: 288 park keeper arrests in 1859, $30 to be paid to a contractor for each transplanted elm that survives three years. Numbers are the currency of the practical realm, and with Green as his witness, Olmsted had busted an annual budget and couldn't even account for the discrepancy.

Given the situation, Olmsted opted for the only suitable course. He decided to resign. He didn't want to go, but he took comfort at least in the fact that the bulk of the work was complete. Of course, Central Park wasn't finished, never really would be in the final way of a Vermeer or the Beatles'
Sgt. Pepper
. It is, after all, a kind of living artwork. But by the end of 1860, Olmsted and Vaux had placed their stamp on Central Park, inexorably. As Olmsted had recently written to his father, “I have fixed what I most cared for on the park beyond reconsideration.”

Olmsted's resignation letter was forty-one pages long, full of selflaceration, grand claims, petty excuses, and digressions about art, finance, and god-knows-what. Although the letter was meant for the entire board, it repeatedly employed the salutation “Sir,” as in: “It is humiliating to me, Sir, to be dealt with in this way.” Perhaps this was a rhetorical device, intended by Olmsted to create a sense of intimacy, as if he was addressing a single person rather than an entire board. Maybe Olmsted was addressing a single person—Green.

Olmsted's resignation is a wild and woolly document. Just as Vaux's bumbling manner somehow managed to convey a passion for art, something also shone through these forty-one rambling pages. “I love the park,” Olmsted wrote. “I rejoice in it and am too much fastened to it in every fibre of my character to give up. ... I don't care a copper for myself, Sir, or for what becomes of me, but I do care for the park, which will last long after I'm dead and gone, years & years, I hope.”

The board talked Olmsted down. Even Green appears to have been moved. Olmsted was persuaded to stay on, and it was even agreed that his resignation letter would be stricken from the minutes of the meeting at which it was considered. The board needed this man who had designed and then executed a masterpiece out of stone and turf and trees.

 

The winter of 1860–1861 was another severe one for New York City. When the snow finally melted, a reporter for the
New York World
decided to visit Central Park. The reporter was surprised to see virtually no one there.

It was the middle of the week in a kind of in-between season. The skaters, the people who came by the thousands to ride horse-drawn sleighs, the Scottish immigrants who enjoyed the sport of curling on a frozen corner of the Lake—all had departed with the first thaw. The horseback riders, Dodworth concertgoers, Ramble perambulators, and baseball players were yet to arrive.

The previous summer, Central Park had already seen its first baseball games, and there's even a newspaper account of a game where the Atlantic, a team from Brooklyn, bested the Liberty, hailing from New Brunswick, New Jersey. “The pitching appeared to get the best of the batting,” laments the account. The final score: 15–10.

On this particular day, however, the reporter from the
World
noted only the first crocuses poking up out of the ground. And he saw that there were swans on the Lake. There had been swans the previous year, though they had died, perhaps victims of foul play. Many people suspected that they had been poisoned. But now there were new ones. The reporter counted about forty.

Over the same lake so recently a glaze of ice, tracing and retracing the same paths where the skaters had glided and tumbled and laughed, the swans now traveled ... silent, intent.

IV

“Heroes Along with the Rest”

CIVIL WAR SERVICE, 1861–1863

CHAPTER 15

APRIL 12, 1861, 4:30 a.m.: Rebels open fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor. Civil war, long a threat hanging over the nation, has broken out.

 

Olmsted immediately started searching for a way to contribute. Because his leg was still terribly damaged from the carriage accident the previous year, because he was still on crutches, Olmsted watched in frustration as his underlings at Central Park enlisted and headed down to Washington.

Olmsted hungered to be involved, even though this was such a turnabout from the task he was just then completing. Central Park was a rarefied artwork of utmost majesty; war promised to be brutal and soulscarring. Yet for Olmsted, the two were strangely similar. Olmsted viewed the world as a social reformer, first and foremost. Designing a pleasure ground to edify the citizens of a growing metropolis was a noble cause in peacetime. Now it was war. Pleasure grounds were soon to give way to battlegrounds, and joining the cause was the proper course.