Genius of Place (23 page)

Olmsted and Vaux called their design the Greensward plan,
greensward
being an English term for an unbroken swath of land. They wrote an accompanying text, featuring detailed descriptions of the various design touches and discussion even of the philosophy underlying their choices.

Whereas fellow contestants frequently accompanied their ten-foot blueprints with the barest annotations, Olmsted and Vaux crafted a kind of park maker's manifesto. A particular theme, one that they sounded again and again in the Greensward text, was the necessity of delivering a design that would hold up for posterity. “Only twenty years ago Union Square was ‘out of town'; twenty years hence, the town will have enclosed the Central Park,” they wrote. “Let us consider, therefore, what will at that time be satisfactory, for it is then that the design will have to be really judged.”

By late in the afternoon of March 31, 1858, the due date, Olmsted and Vaux were still putting the finishing touches on their submission. They rushed to the Arsenal, an old munitions depot on the park grounds being used as an office by the commissioners. The doors were locked. But they were able to get the attention of a janitor by pounding on the door. Olmsted and Vaux left their entry with the janitor. The board had already received the other thirty-two submissions but wouldn't receive theirs until the next day. Technically, they had missed the deadline.

 

Olmsted and Vaux still won. Their plan, logged in as entry number 33, received first-place votes from seven of the eleven commissioners.

Among historians, a convention holds that Olmsted and Vaux came out of nowhere to win a public design competition. This is far from the truth. Obviously, they were already an extremely accomplished team, even if—in Olmsted's case—the accomplishments were in completely different fields. Clearly, they devised a unique and compelling design. But they helped their cause still further with a highly polished submission.

In the ten-foot blueprint, Vaux's skill as a draftsman shines through. Then there are the before and after images, something no other contestant thought to do. Here, they enlisted the aid of McEntee, the Hudson River School painter, and the talented Jacob Wrey Mould. There's also the rich and descriptive text, accompanying the Greensward plan. Olmsted and Vaux even went so far as to have this document professionally printed by Wm. C. Bryant & Company, a press owned by the
New York Post
editor.

Olmsted and Vaux had the best plan and the best presentation by far. Their rivals didn't stand a chance. One of the competing plans proposed to turn Central Park into a living map, composed of meadows shaped like the world's continents. The problem of representing the vast oceans would be solved by filling in a few swamps and dubbing them “Atlantic,” “Pacific,” and so on. Another plan was a collection of little green spaces named after founding fathers, including Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, and Adams.

There was a heavy emphasis on fountainry among the competing entries. The centerpiece of a plan dubbed “The Eagle” was a stack of thirteen
star-shaped basins, representing the original U.S. colonies. On top perched a huge statuary eagle, water ushering from its beak and cascading from basin to basin, like a tower of champagne glasses at a wedding. Another plan proposed a grand fountain spewing a jet of water 125 feet into the air.

Viele simply resubmitted his existing plan without making a single change. “Commonplace and tasteless” is how Clarence Cook, a critic for the
New York Times
, described it at the time. There was also a mysterious submission, logged as entry number 2. Tucked inside an envelope was a single piece of paper, unsigned and featuring a drawing of a pyramid. Almost certainly, this was a second, anonymous, submission by Viele. After Viele died, he was laid to rest in the graveyard at West Point inside a large pyramid-shaped mausoleum of his own design.

The contest guidelines contained a laundry list of mandatory features: the prospect tower, exhibition hall, three separate playgrounds, and so on. Another mistake, made by most of the contestants, was following this prescription to the letter. This resulted in frenetic park plans, with the grounds chopped up into many different sections for discrete activities. Olmsted and Vaux simply ignored elements they didn't wish to include in their plan. As a result, they achieved a cleanness and continuity of design utterly lacking in the competing submissions. The pair found all kinds of creative ways to excuse their omissions.

For example, they didn't want a prospect tower. In the Greensward plan's text, they proposed tabling the design of any such feature until some grand historic event presented a tie-in opportunity. “If, as is not improbable, the transatlantic telegraph is brought to a favorable issue while the park is in an early stage of construction,” they wrote, “many reasons could, we think, be urged for commemorating the event by some such monument.” Olmsted and Vaux's refusal to include all the mandatory elements had zero consequences. And a prospect tower was never built in Central Park.

The contest rules also called for a parade ground of 20 to 40 acres. The Greensward plan included one that occupied just 25 acres, near the minimum. For this feature, some of the competitors—particularly those with a military background—set aside the maximum 40 acres. Viele went
above and beyond, allotting roughly 50. Among other things, a parade ground would furnish a place where soldiers might drill. Olmsted felt strongly that a park would be a great showcase for the civility that prevailed in the nonslaveholding North. But if tensions continued, if war broke out, as was looking increasingly likely, he resolutely did not want the park to be a training ground for troops.

Olmsted and Vaux split the $2,000 purse. They had won the competition by laying out an uncompromising vision, and now they were ready to bring that vision to life.

 

But this was New York, and in New York nothing ever gets done easily. Just one week after Olmsted and Vaux were declared the winners, they encountered serious objections from two members of the Central Park board. Robert Dillon was a politician who had recently served two terms as New York City's corporation counsel. August Belmont, the newest member of the board, had earlier served as American representative of the Rothschild banking empire and had built a vast fortune in his own right. Both men were Democrats, and per the party's political leanings in this era, both were deeply conservative.

Dillon and Belmont proposed seventeen separate amendments to the Greensward plan. The pair proposed scrapping Olmsted and Vaux's masterstroke, the sunken transverses, on the grounds that they might fill up with snow during the winter. They also demanded that more ample equestrian paths be added to the design. This was at the behest of Belmont, in particular, as he was a horse racing aficionado. The Belmont Stakes, the third leg of thoroughbred racing's Triple Crown, is named after him.

Dillon and Belmont's most far-reaching suggestion was replacing Olmsted and Vaux's modest walkway with a truly grand promenade, running nearly the entire length of the park. Along the way, a wire suspension bridge would connect the tops of the two receiving reservoirs, features Dillon and Belmont described as “jewels of the Park.” In their conception, the reservoirs, as engineering marvels, would become the focal point.

A full-on aesthetic clash was under way. Olmsted and Vaux had designed a rural-style park, in keeping with enduring notions that extended
from the founding fathers to Emerson to Andrew Jackson Downing to the Hudson School painters, namely, that the countryside was the source of the soul's replenishment. By contrast, cities were morally suspect. “Cities are great sores,” Thomas Jefferson once said. A proper city park, then, should provide escape from the city.

“It is one great purpose of the Park,” declared Olmsted, defending the Greensward plan before the board, “to supply to the hundreds of thousands of tired workers, who have no opportunity to spend their summers in the country, a specimen of God's handiwork that shall be to them, inexpensively, what a month or two in the White Mountains or the Adirondacks is, at great cost, to those in easier circumstances.”

Dillon and Belmont had very different ideas. They thought that a city park should celebrate the wonders of city life. What's more, they worried that the transition from urban New York to a rural-style park would be jarring. “The contrast will be sudden and violent,” they argued, “—the effect, we apprehend, will be grotesque.” Dillon and Belmont were powerful men, used to getting their way. They purchased “cards”—a forerunner of the advertorial—in papers such as the
New York Post
. They used their space to take swipes at the Greensward plan.

Olmsted fought back. His journalism experience may have rendered him too impractical for an ideal park super, but as a park designer it came in handy. Olmsted had influential friends. Olmsted invited Henry Raymond (his
Times
editor for the Southern dispatches) and Charles Dana (a
Tribune
editor who had been one of
Putnam
's secret staffers) to meet him at a large boulder in the southern end of the park. The two editors fired up cigars. Olmsted then proceeded to point out elements of his and Vaux's design that would be damaged by Dillon and Belmont's plan. Both papers ran articles sympathetic to Olmsted's point of view.

Olmsted gave a personal park tour to Richard Grant White, another onetime
Putnam's
employee, now editor of the
New York Courier and Enquirer
. Afterward, White wrote a staunch defense of the Greensward plan: “It is not only so beautiful in its grand outlines and its details, but so complete, symmetrical, and consistent with itself, that it can hardly be changed in any essential point.” And he added a word in Olmsted's defense: “Once a practical farmer, he has traveled extensively . . . and has
seen and carefully studied all the great parks in the world. He presents the rare spectacle of the right man in the right place.”

When the article ran, Olmsted dashed off a letter to White, thanking him for the help. This article, along with many others Olmsted placed with his contacts in the “literary republic,” convinced the board—seven of whom had voted for the Greensward plan anyway—that it was time to move forward. Olmsted had won this nineteenth-century public relations battle, besting Dillon and Belmont. The park plan could now proceed.

Olmsted was hired at $2,500 a year and was handed the title architect in chief, despite the fact that he had no training as an architect. The press battle appears to have fixed the idea that he was the prime mover behind the park.

Vaux—advocate of standards for the nascent architecture profession in America—was named Olmsted's assistant at $5 per day. But Vaux didn't mind, or at least he didn't let it show ... yet. His goal was to get art done, and he had obviously chosen a ramrod for a partner.

Viele was fired.

CHAPTER 12

ONCE OLMSTED AND Vaux received the nod to proceed with their design for Central Park, the commissioners pressed them to move quickly. By 1858, the issue of a large park in New York had dragged on for many years. Millions had been spent obtaining the land; thousands more had been spent clearing it. To justify all this expenditure, some progress needed to be shown.

The plan was to open the park to the public in stages. The board asked Olmsted and Vaux to have certain sections ready by winter so the park could receive its very first visitors, ice skaters.

There was a vast amount to be done. Olmsted hired another 1,000 men, and Central Park, already the largest public works project in New York, instantly doubled in size. While designing the Greensward plan involved careful thought and drafting skills, bringing it to life would prove a rawer task, centering on things like detonation and drainage. Huge amounts of rock had to be blown to smithereens. This was Manhattan bedrock, the source of unshakable foundations for future Midtown skyscrapers. By a quirk of geology, the rock didn't lie deep underground in the park, as in other parts of the city. A stratum ran just beneath the surface of the ground.

Roughly 250 tons of gunpowder were used in the making of Central Park, more than would be used at the battle of Gettysburg. This was dangerous work, earning blast foremen an extra 25¢ a day. A red flag flying from a tower was the signal that a blast was imminent. Workers were given two full hours to clear the area. Even so, during the first year
of construction, a blast caused the very first fatality. Four more men would die, from other types of accidents, during the construction of Central Park.

Massive rock outcroppings were reduced to rubble. Channels and tunnels were blasted to create the sunken transverse roads—and still the rock, so much rock, burst through the turf. Olmsted and Vaux chose to keep some of the more striking rock formations, appropriating them into their design. Sometimes they even excavated farther, removing soil from the base of a formation to increase its size. Bold crags of stone became architectural touches, looming above gentle man-made glades.

Thousands of trees were planted. Tons of grass seed were scattered. To ensure proper drainage, a series of trenches were dug at forty-foot intervals throughout the park. The trenches were laid with clay pipes.

Carts rattled to and fro, bearing loads of dirt and rock. Virtually none of this material was removed from the grounds. Instead, it was simply shifted from one place to another. Enough earth was moved, Olmsted later estimated, to fill 10 million “one-horse cart loads,” and if said carts were lined up, the procession would stretch for 30,000 miles. Marshes were filled in with soil in order to create meadows. Low-lying areas were bulked up into rolling hillocks. The natural look of Central Park was thus achieved in no small measure through artifice. The park was full of “undignified tricks of disguise,” as Olmsted called them, used in the service of “simplicity, tranquility, and unsophisticated naturalness.”