Genius of Place (49 page)

As a first step, Hall started teaching himself all about landscape architecture. He obtained Olmsted and Vaux's reports on Central Park and Prospect Park and read them religiously. Once he summoned the nerve, Hall wrote directly to Olmsted. “Please excuse the liberty I take in addressing you without being even an acquaintance,” Hall began. He then requested that Olmsted send him a list of books that might aid him in his work. Hall closed by writing that he had “visited and carefully studied and noted the principal parks and grounds about London, Paris, and the United States; particularly have I roamed through your Central Park . . . and the Brooklyn [park] ... to say nothing of those beautiful spots on the Hudson with which that gentleman of great taste, Mr. Downing, and yourself too I am told, had so much to do.”

That Hall had actually visited all these spots was a stretch, at best. And Olmsted hadn't designed any “beautiful spots” along the Hudson. But the reverent tone was duly noted. And the reference to Downing was a touch guaranteed to win Olmsted's favor. Olmsted wrote back with a long list of titles that Hall might consult. Among them, Olmsted suggested works by John Claudius Loudon, Humphry Repton, and Uvedale Price, an author that he had read as a boy in the Hartford library. Olmsted ended his letter with a word of caution: “I have given the matter of pleasure grounds for San Francisco some consideration and fully realize the difficulties of your undertaking.... But the conditions are so peculiar and the difficulties so great that I regard the problem as unique and that it must be solved if at all by wholly new means and methods. It requires invention, not adaptation.”

The indefatigable Hall approached the task in exactly this spirit. The land chosen for Golden Gate Park was a rectangle roughly three miles
long and a half mile wide, the exact shape and nearly the same size as Central Park. At its western edge a large portion of land was entirely given over to barren dunes. Stiff winds blew sand over the rest of the land, making parklike plantings virtually impossible. Hall believed the solution lay in a technique he'd read about known as plant succession. He decided to start with yellow broom, a hardy shrub that might grow in the dunes. This shrub could act as an anchor, making it possible to grow larger plants and eventually trees. But the yellow broom wouldn't take.

Then a fortunate accident occurred. Hall and some colleagues were riding over the dunes on horseback, studying them. They fed their horses barley. Some scattered barley seeds sprouted in the sand. Hall had found his anchor. With some tweaking, he figured out that a sequence of barley, lupine, and then maritime pine would still the shifting sands. It then became possible to landscape Golden Gate Park after the fashion of Central Park or Prospect Park. In doing so, Hall consulted the various titles that Olmsted had recommended.

Throughout the early 1870s, during the initial construction of Golden Gate Park, Hall carried on a vigorous correspondence with Olmsted. He asked Olmsted to recommend a gardener; Olmsted suggested Frederick Poppey, a man who had worked on Prospect Park. To create various rustic structures, Hall hired Anton Gerster, the Hungarian craftsman who had worked with Vaux on Central Park.

People often mistakenly credit Golden Gate Park to Olmsted and Vaux. The design is all Hall. It's more accurate to view Olmsted as a kind of mentor, offering encouragement, suggesting pertinent books, steering talented employees Hall's way. Olmsted is the man behind the man who created Golden Gate Park.

 

On June 21, 1872, Olmsted was nominated in absentia as vice president of the United States by a small group of prominent citizens. This was a political
splinter
group in the sheerest sense. Incumbent Ulysses Grant was the presumptive nominee for the Republican Party. A dissident faction of Liberal Republicans was instead backing Horace Greeley as its candidate. A group of twenty-two men who favored neither Grant nor Greeley met at New York's Fifth Avenue Hotel.

Among those present was James McKim, one of the financial backers of the
Nation
, and Robert Minturn, a New York philanthropist instrumental in the original call for Central Park. They proposed a ticket featuring Olmsted as VP, and as president William Groesbeck, a former U.S. representative from Ohio who had served as a counsel to Andrew Johnson during his 1868 impeachment trial. The party dubbed itself the National American Democratic Republicans, a name that “seems to have nearly a word for each member,” as Greeley's own
New York Tribune
sneered.

Olmsted immediately quashed his own nomination. He took out a card in the
New York Post
that read, “My name was used without my knowledge in the resolutions of the gentlemen who met on Friday at the Fifth Avenue Hotel ... but, while thanking them sincerely for their very good opinion, I must express my regret they should have thought it expedient to take up as a representative of their requirements one who is so completely separated from the political field, and so much absorbed in professional and official duties as I am.”

Secretly, Olmsted was pleased by the VP nod. In a private note to McKim, he wrote, “I am surprised & gratified that it is so well received.” This was yet another episode that served to underscore what an estimable public figure Olmsted had grown to be.

 

Olmsted's high profile intensified the long-simmering tensions with Vaux. On the one hand, Vaux had coaxed Olmsted back from California by insisting that he required Olmsted's unique palette of skills. At the same time, Vaux resented Olmsted's prominence. Vaux was particularly thin-skinned about even the barest insinuation that Central Park wasn't an equal collaboration. For his part, Olmsted was forever correcting journalist friends who referred to him in articles as Central Park's “creator” or its “prime mover.” Then again, more recent collaborations between the two were unequal. Olmsted truly had acted as the driving force behind the jobs in Buffalo and Riverside.

On October 18, 1872, Olmsted and Vaux dissolved their partnership. The pair's relationship had always been heavy on squabbles. Even impersonal discussions—on design philosophy, say—were quick to devolve into personal arguments. Olmsted would later say, “Mr. Vaux's ways are not
my ways and I could not fit mine to his,” adding, “... [I]t was a relief to me to part company with him.” Underneath it all, however, Olmsted and Vaux shared a deep bond of loyalty and friendship. They even respected one another as artists, although they couldn't be in the same room together for long. What's more, Olmsted would always gratefully remember that it was Vaux who first approached him about collaborating on Central Park. Without Vaux, Olmsted once said, “I should have been a farmer.”

Of course, none of this flavor appears in the bland official statement issued by Olmsted and Vaux, stating that their break was for “reasons of mutual convenience.” They agreed to jointly handle any lingering business involving earlier projects such as Prospect Park. Going forward, the two would still collaborate when it suited them, notably on New York City's Riverside and Morningside parks. But Olmsted, Vaux & Company was no more. A partnership that stretched back fourteen years—with a few sidelines by Olmsted along the way—was at an end.

The timing was right for Vaux. For his separate architectural practice, he had recently landed a pair of huge and prestigious commissions to design the buildings for New York's Museum of Natural History and Metropolitan Museum of Art. Rather than working as a
landscape
architect, designing bridges and refectories in parks that were increasingly Olmsted creations, he saw the potential to establish himself as one of the nation's leading architects. Olmsted's immediate prospects were less promising.

 

The very first job Olmsted took on sans Vaux was McLean Asylum. This was a modest job, especially when compared to his erstwhile partner's Museum of Natural History, slated to be the largest building in America. But Olmsted—as a reformer and out of a special empathy, too—was always drawn to mental-institution commissions. He approached this latest job, like all his work, with a winning combination of earnestness and intensity.

The McLean Asylum had opened in 1818 in Charlestown (now Somerville), a town right outside Boston. By 1872, Charlestown had grown into an industrial center, and McLean's bucolic grounds had been completely transformed. The air hung thick with smoke and foul odors, wafting from such nearby businesses as a slaughterhouse, tannery, and a
bleach-and-dye works. Four separate railway lines skirted the property. This was no longer a restful place for a person suffering from mental illness.

McLean's trustees hired Olmsted to identify a piece of land suitable for building a new hospital. He visited several sites before settling on a 114-acre property in Belmont, Massachusetts. In a letter to the trustees, Olmsted described this property as having a “decided advantage in the great numbers of well-grown trees and in local picturesque interest.” A natural spring flowed though the property, ensuring a supply of fresh water for the patients.

Olmsted also suggested a building scheme for the new hospital. He proposed that the patients be housed in a small collection of cottages. This would create a setting that was more domestic in feel, less institutional. It would also make it possible to separate patients by degree of affliction. Unruly and agitated patients could be grouped together, while the “worried well” (as people with less severe mental illness were known) could have separate accommodations.

Olmsted's proposal was a departure from the Kirkbride plan, the standard for mental institutions in the mid-1800s. This design scheme, named for Philadelphia psychiatrist Thomas Kirkbride, was all about maximizing control. Patients were housed in vast wings that could be locked down quickly in the event of some kind of disturbance. But such an arrangement had considerable disadvantages: Fires could advance quickly through the wings, diseases traveled easily among the crowded patients, and the lack of fresh air, the result of poor ventilation, was not exactly conducive to improved mental health. Olmsted's proposed cottage plan addressed all these issues by spreading out the patient population. Once again, he was very explicit that the cottages be positioned so as to receive ample sunlight.

McLean's trustees accepted Olmsted's recommendation on a site for the new hospital. They purchased the Belmont property. But it would be many years before there were sufficient funds to build a new facility. When the new McLean was finally built, it would depart in many significant ways from Olmsted's cottage plan.

 

Two months after the split with Vaux, Olmsted received a letter from his half-brother Albert, casually informing him that his father had
slipped on the ice and broken his hip. Olmsted caught the next train to Hartford.

John Olmsted was surprised and pleased to see his son. Olmsted sat at his bedside, and they had a pleasant talk until his father drifted off. The next morning Olmsted returned to New York. The following day, Albert sent a telegraph with the news that John Olmsted had taken a turn for the worse. Olmsted rushed back to Hartford. He arrived to find his father sleeping. He also noticed that his father looked terribly much older than the day before. When he awoke and saw his son, he smiled and said, “Who's this? Fred? So you've come back!”

John Olmsted was feverish and in great pain. He appeared to be failing fast. At the nurse's urging, he was given Dr. McMann's Elixir, an opium-laced sedative. He slept fitfully for a while. Olmsted wet his father's lips. The old man awoke briefly at one point and gasped, “Air—give me all the air you can.” Olmsted's stepmother, his half-sister Bertha, and his half-brother Albert gathered around the bedside in vigil. John Olmsted died at one o'clock on the morning of January 25, 1873. He was eighty-one.

Olmsted was deeply moved when he happened upon the little business diary that his father had maintained his entire adult life. The final neat pencil notation, spelling out some mundane matter, was only a few days old. Olmsted was also touched when he opened a drawer, only to find it packed with newspaper clippings going back twenty years, all about his parks and books and sundry endeavors. “He was a very good man and a kinder father never lived,” Olmsted wrote to Kingsbury. “It is strange how much of the world I feel has gone from me with him. The value of any success in the future is gone for me.”

CHAPTER 25

AT THE TIME of his father's death, Olmsted was about halfway moved into a brownstone in Manhattan. Besides providing a home for his own large family, the dwelling was meant to serve a couple of other purposes as well. Now that he'd split with Vaux, Olmsted needed a professional office, and Staten Island was just too far off the beaten path. The new quarters were also meant to provide a place to care for his father and stepmother in their old age. Olmsted had bought the place figuring some of the rooms could be set aside for them as a kind of apartment. Sadly, his father wouldn't be joining him.

The brownstone was located at 209 West 46th Street, right off Longacre Square (now known as Times Square). It was four stories plus a basement. Olmsted converted the first-floor dining room into an office. As with the Vaux partnership, the new company would be a lean outfit, this time operating out of Olmsted's home. He'd hire mostly part-timers to meet shifting workloads, and many of his charges would remain in the field. Two large north-facing windows in the dining room converted into an office provided abundant light. Olmsted placed a drafting table in front of them. (For professional-quality drafting, he'd turn to assistants, as always. He was a big-idea person; his own drafting skills were limited.) On a mantelpiece in the office, he placed some photos, including ones of Ruskin and Vaux. A large map of New York City hung in a hallway that connected the office and a bathroom. Otherwise, Olmsted's home office was pretty spare of ornament. Another small ground-floor room was turned into a reception area for clients.