Genius of Place (59 page)

On January 10, 1891, the architects from out of town met in Chicago and traveled to look at the Jackson Park site. Landscape architect Olmsted was present, too. The temperature was frigid, the sky overcast, and Lake Michigan roiled and pitched. Far from providing a striking backdrop, the lake merely looked ominous. The architects were soon overcome with pessimism.

Peabody walked out onto a pier. He turned to Burnham. “Do you mean to say that you really expect to open a fair here by '93?”

“Yes,” answered Burnham, “we intend to.”

“It can't be done,” said Peabody.

“That point is settled,” rejoined Burnham.

That evening, the skeptical architects convened at the University Club. Olmsted was present once again. Lyman Gage, president of the
fair's board, sat at the head of the main table, Olmsted and Hunt in places of honor on either side of him. The architects were no doubt happy just to be somewhere warm. Burnham plied his guests with vintage Madeira, fine cigars, and green-turtle consommé. When the moment was right, he delivered a rousing speech: “Gentlemen, 1893 will be the third great date in our country's history. On the two others, 1776 and 1861, all true Americans served, and so now I ask you to serve again!” Burnham's patriotic appeal reached the architects, just as Ellsworth's earlier one had reached Olmsted. They committed to the project.

Olmsted no longer required such goading. By now, he had a clear idea of what was possible on the soupy piece of land slated for the fair, and his vision grew more intense with each passing day. One of his principal features, captured in Root's lightning sketch, was a wooded island. Creating it would involve taking an existing lonely hillock and bulking it up with dirt dredged in the course of making the lagoons. Despite being man-made, it would serve as the primary naturalistic feature at the fair. The event was sure to be crowded and hectic. Olmsted conceived his wooded island as “a place of relief from all the splendor and glory and noise and human multitudinousness of the great surrounding Babylon.”

Because water was such a key element in his landscape, Olmsted also came up with the idea of offering boats for hire. Most people could be expected to traverse the fair on foot, but this would provide an elegant alternative. Olmsted was downright obsessive about these boats. Not just any type would do. They needed to be small craft, geared to intimate groups of passengers. He was also dead-set on using the new breed of electric launches rather than boats powered by steam. These would glide over the water, almost silently. Olmsted even had strong notions about the boats' appearance. They should feature brightly colored awnings, modeled on the sampans that he remembered from his voyage to China, half a century before.

On February 24, 1891, another architects' meeting was held in the library on the top floor of the Rookery. This time everyone was present: the out-of-towners and the local architects such as Sullivan and Jenney. They gathered to present their designs for the major buildings such as the exhibition halls.

Olmsted watched as each architect walked to the front of the room and unfurled his blueprint. Weeks before, the architects had agreed to work in the same style, giving them a kind of common visual vocabulary. They had lit upon classical architecture, a fitting choice. Many of the architects were either French trained or devotees of the beaux arts, a neoclassical style then in vogue. From a practical standpoint, the choice guaranteed a unity of design. Even so, the buildings showed dazzling variety. “You're dreaming, gentlemen, dreaming,” said Expo president Lyman Gage. “I only hope that half the vision may be realized.”

The buildings were huge, big as the architects' egos. Yet the plan was to make these structures out of simple skeletons of wood and chicken wire, overlaid with staff. Staff is a kind of glorified papiermâché. It's durable, thanks to its hemp content, yet highly malleable. It can be shaped to mimic a marble column or a terra-cotta frieze. Almost all the major buildings were to be painted white. When the fair ended, almost the whole set of them was meant to come down. There was one last consistent feature, and it pleased Olmsted mightily. Each building featured two entrances, one by land, the other by water to accommodate his boats.

 

As the weather grew warmer, Olmsted began working on a planting scheme. He intended to line the banks of his waterways thickly with foliage. But to survive Chicago's climate, Olmsted knew he'd need to go with indigenous plants, throwing in a few exotics. Under his direction, foraging parties were dispatched to lakes and rivers throughout Illinois and Wisconsin to gather cattails and rushes and willows. The plants arrived at the grounds by the trainload. Olmsted also planted honeysuckle and other fragrant plants so that fairgoers would have something to smell as well as see. He was contemplating a full sensory experience.

Rick, preparing to be “leader of the van,” came out from Harvard after his freshman year to spend a summer working on the grounds. He'd spend the next summer here, too, finding it a great experience.

As the fair drew closer, Olmsted engaged in assorted battles, as per usual. Everyone wanted a piece of the Wooded Island. It represented 16 pristine acres in the center of what was certain to be a very crowded fairgrounds.
Participating countries wanted to place their pavilions on the island. Companies thought it an ideal spot for promotions. Burpee Seed suggested a display garden of marigolds and petunias. Olmsted's response to this request is unknown but can probably be summed up as
Perish the thought!

Even Theodore Roosevelt had designs on Olmsted's island. He wanted to build a model hunting camp to demonstrate the woodsmanship of his Boone and Crockett Club. Olmsted gave a flat no to the future president. Still, the clamor eventually grew so intense that Olmsted had to relent. He agreed to share his island with the Japanese government, which proposed to build something called the Ho-O-Den, a replica of a temple near Kyoto. The temple would be modest, low-rise, and integrated into the scenery.

Olmsted also got into scrapes over the boats. No one seemed to grasp his small-quiet craft fixation, not even his staunch ally Burnham. Olmsted was troubled when he learned that Burnham had entertained an offer from a steamship company that promised to cheaply convey large numbers of fairgoers. “I suspect that even Codman is inclined to think that I make too much of a hobby of this boat question,” he wrote Burnham in a memo, “and give an amount of worry, if not thought, to it that would be better expended on other more critical matters, and I fear that you may think me a crank upon it.”

In a follow-up memo to Burnham, Olmsted laid out his objections. Yes, a big, honking steamboat could convey the masses. True, small boats could carry only a handful of people at a time. But watching small, colorful boats glide over the lagoons would create a memorable experience for
everyone
. What's more, he proposed that if small boats proved a big attraction, if more people started lining up for them, it would make sense to hike the fares. Counterintuitive though it was, Olmsted's premise was curiously democratic since it promised to extend the greatest benefit—enjoying the ambience of a small collection of boats—to the largest number of people. He reminded Burnham that his aim—the aim of all the great artists working on the fair—was to create something of beauty: “You know that if boats are to be introduced on these waters, it would be perfect nonsense to have them of a
kind that would antagonize this poetic object.” Burnham was convinced and agreed to give Olmsted his boats.

 

The major points were now settled. In the spring of 1892, with Codman holding down the Chicago project, Olmsted set off on an ambitious business trip that took him from the Biltmore to Knoxville, Louisville, and Rochester, among other places, and on to Brookline. He was nearly seventy. He covered nearly 3,000 miles.

He returned in terrible health, racked by conditions old and new. He was suffering from insomnia and neuralgia, and there was a constant ringing in his ears. He'd also had a recent bout of what he thought was arsenic poisoning. He believed that the culprit was the new “Turkey red” wallpaper in his Brookline home. For Olmsted, about the only good health development was that his damaged left leg, an ancient injury, was feeling better. During one of his constant trips, the train on which he'd been traveling got into a minor accident, and this, bizarrely, appeared to be the cause of the improvement. He was walking with greater ease now, feeling less pain. It wasn't exactly a medical diagnosis, but Olmsted thought perhaps the crash had succeeded in stretching out some of his tendons. Otherwise, he felt wretched.

Olmsted decided to make a trip to England and France. He could visit various sites and gather ideas, while regaining his health in the process. At least, that was the plan. On April 2, 1892, Olmsted sailed to Liverpool accompanied by Rick, Marion, and Philip Codman, Henry's younger brother. He stayed briefly with relatives of his wife in Chislehurst, on the outskirts of London. Then he traveled to Paris with the two young men. Marion remained behind in Chislehurst.

In Paris, Olmsted walked over the grounds of the recent Exposition Universelle. He soaked up every last detail, as was his wont. The ornamental gardens left him unimpressed, and he wrote a letter to John back in Brookline, containing a strong reminder that such “petty effects and frippery” must be avoided in Chicago. But the fact that the Paris buildings made ample use of color intrigued him. In fact, it left him downright worried. He wondered whether the Chicago buildings were too severe, too bound up in “grandiloquent pomp,” too ... white.

He grew more aware that he was the fair's color man. He'd selected the site, and on a clear day Lake Michigan would offer a sea of blue. Any other colors would flow from him as well. At the same time, Olmsted had a well-honed aesthetic that didn't conscience gaudy palates. He valued subtlety. Green, in the form of impossibly lush greenery—that was the way, he was certain, to offset the unremitting whiteness of the architecture.

Almost as an afterthought, Olmsted went up in the Eiffel Tower. Then he left Paris for the Loire Valley, where he visited some châteaus, gathering ideas for the Biltmore Estate.

Then it was back to England, where his health took a bad turn. He had a flare-up of facial neuralgia. Insomnia, his old foe, returned with a vengeance. He tossed in bed deep into the night, worrying about the Expo and the Biltmore and other jobs and his legacy and the future and ... as the sun rose, he would snatch a few hours sleep, if he was lucky. That was his pattern.

Henry Rayner, a friend of Mary's London relatives, dropped by the house in Chislehurst. He simply wanted to meet the great Olmsted, celebrated American landscape architect. By sheerest coincidence, he also happened to be a doctor who specialized in nervous disorders. Dr. Rayner was astounded by Olmsted's haggard appearance. He asked if Olmsted would submit to a physical. The examination found no “organic trouble,” Olmsted reported, but the doctor also concluded that “it is a peculiarity of my case that over-exertion does not produce the sensation of fatigue.” Dr. Rayner suggested that Olmsted stay at his home in Hampstead Heath, where he could personally oversee his care.

Shortly after arriving, Olmsted received disturbing news about Vaux. Vaux had recently managed to get reappointed to the Central Park board, a promising development professionally. During a meeting, a fellow member asked Vaux the scientific name for the flower rose of Sharon. Vaux wasn't sure. The man pursued him, demanding to know why he lacked this knowledge. Increasingly agitated, Vaux sputtered and fumed and toyed with his glasses.

Of course, Vaux was an architect of bridges and buildings, not a designer of foliage compositions. For that matter, Olmsted most likely
didn't know the scientific name of rose of Sharon, either. Still, Vaux was deeply humiliated, and he sensed that his standing with the board had been badly damaged. After receiving news of Vaux's latest setback, Olmsted didn't sleep for forty-eight hours.

Dr. Rayner did his best to shield Olmsted from other excitements. He fed Olmsted a steady diet of sedatives. After many weeks in Hampstead Heath, Olmsted began to feel terribly constrained. “You know that I am practically in prison here,” he wrote to Codman. Yet he gradually started to show improvement and was finally released from Dr. Rayner's care.

As was his habit, following a period of inactivity, Olmsted exploded into action. He spent a couple days traveling along the Thames from London to Hurley, trying out two different electric launches along the way. During this trip, he also took the opportunity to closely observe the foliage that grew along the riverbank. He was struck anew by the bounteousness that nature could achieve, even in temperate England. He was overwhelmed by the sheer variety, the mystery—willows jutting out over the water at unexpected angles, vines snaking this way and that. He knew that at the fair he would need to capture that elusive, lush, almost tropical quality that he was forever chasing in places like Central Park's Ramble. “A most capital school is found on the Thames banks for the study of what we want at Chicago in the lagoon banks,” Olmsted wrote in a letter addressed jointly to his partners, John and Codman.

In September 1892, Olmsted sailed back to the United States. The ship encountered severe weather, and the return voyage can only be described as a rough passage. For Olmsted, it always was.

 

October found Olmsted back in Chicago. Less than a year remained before the fair was scheduled to open. He was surprised to see how much had been accomplished during the time he'd been away. Many of the buildings were well under way, rising up from the ground, as if they were living, growing things. Great progress had been made even on the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building. Designed by architect George Post, it was slated to be the largest building in history with an exhibit space covering 44 acres.