Genius of Place (22 page)

One of their first commissions was to renovate a house near Newburgh owned by Warren Delano II, a wealthy merchant. Shortly after, a daughter, Sara Delano, was born into the household. Sara Delano, in turn, was the mother of FDR.

Downing and Vaux began to receive increasingly prestigious jobs, such as a commission to design a house in Newport, Rhode Island. The client was Daniel Parish, a clothing magnate-turned-financial speculator and one of the richest men in America. There was even a commission from President Millard Fillmore, who called upon Downing's firm to design a park in Washington, D.C. For this, Vaux appears to have helped design a suspension bridge (never built) and an arch (same fate). One cannot be sure, as the architectural sketches are signed only by Downing. It is also believed that Vaux suggested modifications (ignored) to Robert Mills's Washington Monument, then under construction. Neither he nor Downing liked this obelisk. They didn't appreciate having to work around it in their park plan. When Downing drowned, a shaken Vaux identified the body. Following his mentor's death, Vaux carried on the architectural practice and remained in Newburgh.

Mid-nineteenth century, Newburgh was a seat for painters of the so-called Hudson River School. These painters had taken up Ralph Waldo Emerson's call to “ignore the courtly Muses of Europe.” Rather than city scenes or royal portraits, they made the landscape of America—verdant, untrammeled, awe-inspiring—the central subject of their paintings. Figures of people, when they appear at all, are dwarfed by the scenery, an assertion
of egalitarianism:
We are mere specks, and our best selves are found in an outward-looking apprehension of nature's grandeur.

Vaux became friendly with a number of Hudson School painters, including Worthington Whittredge, Frederic Church, and, most especially, Jervis McEntee. McEntee favored a melancholic palate, creating hushed hymns of brown and gray and tan. He was renowned as a master at depicting autumnal scenes. In exchange for a painting, Vaux designed a little board-and-batten studio for McEntee. Then Vaux married the artist's sister, Mary Swan McEntee.

In 1856, Vaux moved to New York, source of an increasing number of his commissions. Shortly after arriving, he helped found the American Institute of Architects. There were no architecture schools then in the United States. Neither was there any form of licensing or accreditation. Owning a hammer was about the only prerequisite for designing a house or building, and that's pretty much how it went. Vaux was aiming to create some standards for his upstart profession.

Vaux was a tiny man—standing four feet ten inches tall—and anxious, too. He constantly pushed his spectacles up on his nose. He was easily flustered, stumbling and stammering, losing his train of thought. In spite of this manner, Vaux managed to communicate one thing loud and clear: He burned with a white flame for pure art.

Summer of 1857 found Vaux in a state of agitation. At this juncture, Viele's plan was still the plan for Central Park, and Vaux couldn't believe it. Why, Vaux wondered, on a civic undertaking of such vital import, was the plan to go with a design, never debated, never discussed, simply rubber-stamped years back by two provisional park commissioners who had since moved on? “Being thoroughly disgusted with the manifest defects of Viele's plan,” Vaux later recalled, “I pointed out whenever I had a chance, that it would be a disgrace to the City and to the memory of Mr. Downing.”

Vaux voiced his concerns to a couple of members of the Central Park board, urging them not to be so hasty. He had made inroads into this powerful body, having recently designed the Fifth Avenue mansion of one of its members, John Gray. What's more, Vaux was the living emissary of Downing, America's Apostle of Taste. Vaux even had a little son
named Downing Vaux. Utterly persuaded, the commissioners agreed to table Viele's plan. He continued to lobby the park commissioners in his bumbling, but strangely effective, way. How about a design competition? In England, where he had received his training, competitions were a wellestablished method for ensuring that architectural jobs were doled out on merit. Once again, the commission took up Vaux's suggestion.

In the autumn of 1857, the board announced a competition for the design of Central Park, open to the general public. Though Viele's plan had been tabled, he was welcome to submit it for consideration against the other plans. He was also given the option of making changes to it or drawing up an entirely new design.

For all submissions, the following design elements were mandatory: a prospect tower, exhibition hall, formal garden, large fountain, and three playgrounds. Contestants were required to include at least four separate roads crossing the park. They would also need to provide for a parade ground, 20 to 40 acres in expanse. Not only did all plans need to include these elements, but all plans had to be executable within a budget, set at $1.5 million.

The contest participants would have access to a topographic map, executed by Viele, to aid them in their work. Designs were to be done in a scale of one hundred feet to an inch. That meant contestants would need to execute large and detailed plans that were roughly ten feet long by two feet wide. It was an odd shape, awkward and unwieldy, just like the park. First prize was $2,000, and there would be prize money for second through fourth places, as well. The due date was March 31, 1858.

Vaux approached Olmsted about teaming up for the competition. It wasn't the Downing association—that forgettable encounter in Newburgh years earlier—that drew Vaux to Olmsted. Neither was it his profile as a journalist, though Vaux had read Olmsted's work and admired it. No, Vaux's main reason for seeking out Olmsted was this: Viele's topographic map was rumored to be highly inaccurate. As superintendent, Olmsted was intimately familiar with the terrain of the park, and that might just provide an edge in the competition.

Olmsted was hesitant. He worried about the consequences if he entered a design contest that pitted him against Viele, his boss. Olmsted
decided to consult him first. Viele merely shrugged. With that small, dismissive gesture, the partnership of Olmsted and Vaux was launched.

 

For now, Olmsted kept his job as superintendent, and Vaux maintained his architectural practice downtown, at 358 Broadway. After the day was over, the pair worked into the night, frequently riding on horseback over acre upon acre of parkland. The grounds looked especially barren by moonlight. It was clear that they weren't working with a proverbial blank canvas. No, this was something vastly inferior, a scarred and scraggly landscape that posed quandaries at every turn. “It would have been difficult to find another body of land,” Olmsted later recalled, “ . . . which possessed less of what we have seen to be the most desirable characteristics of a park.”

Olmsted and Vaux began to puzzle out the first inklings of a design. Often, in what was to be a pattern throughout their long association, their discussions slid into heated argument. They made quite a team, a kind of diminutive duo: Vaux under five feet and Olmsted at five feet six inches (according to the crew manifest of the
Ronaldson
, the ship he sailed to China). Vaux was the trained architect (specializing in structures rather than landscapes). Olmsted was a jack of many, many trades.

Though Olmsted hadn't been aware of it, hadn't had the ghost of a plan, his whole life to this point had been a sort of apprenticeship, preparation for this grand act. As a small boy, Olmsted had perched on his father's saddle, enjoying “loitering journeys” through the Connecticut countryside. He had read the work of esoteric landscape theorists like William Gilpin and Uvedale Price at the tender age of nine. As a farmer, Olmsted had imported thousands of trees from Europe and developed an appreciation for plants in all their variety. His book
Walks and Talks
had shown him to be a keen observer of English parks, especially from the perspective of a visitor, a
user
of parks, if you will.

Even his experience traveling through the South would inform his approach to the design contest. He'd concluded, as mentioned earlier, that an almost perfect correlation existed between slavery and cultural atrophy. Seeing the decrepitude of the South had prompted Olmsted to write the prescient letter, urging his friend Brace to “go ahead with
the Children's Aid and get up parks, gardens, music, dancing schools.” Now Olmsted was actually trying to “get up” a park. At a time of increased tension with the South, a park could showcase the superiority of the North.

Most of all, Olmsted would approach this task as a social reformer. Park making was another opportunity for the activism that Olmsted had earlier applied to scientific farming or writing about the South. From the outset, he saw Central Park as a place of tranquillity for all the residents of the crowded metropolis. “The Park is intended to furnish healthful recreation,” he asserted, “for the poor and the rich, the young and the old, the vicious and the virtuous.”

Olmsted had proved surprisingly able at the job for which he'd originally been hired—park superintendent. But designing a park was where his deepest talents lay.

 

A large improvised table sat in the parlor of Vaux's home at 136 East 18th Street. The table had been created by sliding several smaller tables together. When Olmsted and Vaux weren't out surveying the real park, a proxy awaited them here, a ten-foot-long plan in progress. Deep into the night, Olmsted and Vaux pored over this plan obsessively, thinking about where to place certain features and details.

Because of Central Park's unfortunate shape, a rigid rectangle, it was desirable to convey visitors away from its sides. For their design, Olmsted and Vaux decided on a main entrance running from Fifth Avenue
diagonally
toward the middle of the park. They placed the promenade, the main stretch for strolling, on a further diagonal. Such touches were meant to subtly but firmly push visitors into the heart of the park as quickly as possible.

Olmsted and Vaux also proposed to make the promenade really short, just one-quarter of a mile long. The pair wanted to avoid a classic grand promenade, stretching past formal gardens and traveling under marble archways. Such opulent touches smacked of European-style royalty. A short walkway would achieve an intimate scale, proper to the common person “who in the best sense is the true owner” of the park, as Olmsted put it.

Olmsted and Vaux also planned a distinctly rural treatment for Central Park, a massive challenge. It meant utterly transforming this battered piece of land. Everywhere their plan called for trees, trees, and more trees. The short promenade was to be overhung by a canopy of elms. On the tops of hills, thick groves would stand. A screen of trees was to be planted around the entire periphery of the park. Tiny individual trees were drawn on the ten-foot plan in order to communicate this rural feel. These trees were generic, of no discernible breed, but thousands of them had to be sketched to fill up the blueprint, just as thousands would need to be planted to fill up the park.

Whenever Vaux's friends dropped by his home, they were invariably drafted into tree-drawing service. One of these was Jacob Wrey Mould, a fellow English-born architect. Mould was a flamboyant figure who managed to scandalize many in his circle by living with a woman out of wedlock. As an architect, he described himself as “Hell on Color.” His bold design for New York's All Souls Church, featuring alternating stripes of red and yellow brick, earned his creation the sniggering nickname “Church of the Holy Zebra.” After Vaux designed the Fifth Avenue mansion of park commissioner John Gray, Mould had done the interior in a riot of color. In the future, Mould would play a huge role in the creation of Central Park. But at this juncture, he wasn't sold on Olmsted and Vaux's prospects for winning and confined his involvement mostly to sketching little trees.

Along with Viele's topographic map, every design contestant had been furnished with photographs of various points in the park to use for reference. These came from the studio of Mathew Brady, renowned for his photos of such American icons as John Audubon and Daniel Webster and later for his Civil War portraits.

Olmsted and Vaux had a great idea. Why not include before and after images as part of their submission? The Brady photos, washed-out daguerreotypes of unlovely little tufts of land, perfectly captured the grim look of the current park. Vaux, in turn, did some studies in pencil and watercolor, suggesting what the same views would look like in the future if his and Olmsted's plan was executed. Jervis McEntee—the notable painter and Vaux's brother-in-law—also did some works in oil under
Olmsted and Vaux's direction. Mould created some images as well for the submission.

The highlight of Olmsted and Vaux's design was the treatment of the four mandatory roads that cut across the park. Supposedly, inspiration struck as the pair witnessed a horse-drawn ambulance cart, racing across Manhattan, bell furiously ringing. An innovation was needed, they realized, that would allow people to amble through the park without constant intrusion from the city in the form of traffic. Olmsted and Vaux proposed to sink the roads below ground level in eight-foot-deep channels. Fences would prevent pedestrians from falling into the channels, and scrims of hedges could, in turn, hide the fences. The upshot: Traffic could cross the park via invisible subterranean routes.

In certain places, Olmsted and Vaux's plan called for bridges of land across the roadway channels. This ensured that Central Park—already disrupted by two reservoirs and countless bursts of mica schist—wouldn't be further carved up by roads. The sunken transverses were a brilliant solution, providing Olmsted and Vaux's design with a sense of flow. Long stretches of meadow and broad vistas were now possible. Visitors could circulate more easily through the park, without having their view disrupted or mood punctured by a clattering dung cart. On top of everything, there was a practical benefit. The park could be closed at night, yet traffic could continue to use the sunken transverse roads.