Genius of Place (53 page)

On returning to New York, Olmsted also received another piece of discouraging news. The Boston commission was going forward with plans for a park. It was just one park; there wasn't sufficient funding at this point for a whole system, which was what he had earlier discussed. What's more, the chosen site for this lone park was a swamp in Boston's Back Bay section, a place where city residents dumped their sewage. One contemporary account described it as “being without a single attractive feature. A body of water so foul that even clams and eels cannot live in it.”

This was one nasty spot for a park. Uglier still, from Olmsted's standpoint, was the fact that the commissioners had not chosen him for the job. Rather, they had decided to hold a design competition. Adding to the slight, Olmsted received a letter in which commission head Charles Dalton inquired whether he would act as a judge in the contest. He shot back an angry reply, flatly refusing.

The competition received twenty-three entries. First prize went to Hermann Grundel, a florist. Ignoring the realities of the site, Grundel simply designed a pretty ornamental garden—somehow to be superimposed onto the swamp. The
American Architect and Building News
declared Grundel's design “childish.”

For Olmsted, there had been plenty of unhappy endings of late. It would have been hard for him to believe that a fresh beginning was to be found in all this mess.

CHAPTER 27

OLMSTED'S ANGRY LETTER to Charles Dalton had an unexpected result. “They must have you and they would have you,” architect H. H. Richardson wrote to Olmsted in May 1878. Olmsted's friend and onetime Staten Island neighbor had moved to Boston after receiving a prestigious and lucrative commission, designing Trinity Church. He knew Dalton and some of the other park commissioners. He knew, too, that they had quickly grown disenchanted with Grundel's design. The commissioners paid the florist the $500 prize he was due and sent him packing. True to Richardson's word, an offer soon came Olmsted's way. The commissioners wanted him to prepare a preliminary design for the Back Bay park.

For the summer of 1878, Olmsted and his family left New York and moved in with the Godkins on Kirkland Street in Cambridge. This temporary arrangement made it possible for Olmsted to visit the site daily, familiarizing himself with the project's dimensions and demands.

The future Back Bay park was a thin strip of land, roughly 100 acres, containing a swampy stretch of water that connected with the Charles River. In the 1800s, this section of the Charles River was a tidal estuary. As a consequence, the swampy stretch often backed up during high tide, overflowing its banks. During low tide, the water receded, leaving behind a fetid plain strewn with the waste of the city's residents. “Offensive exudations arise from the mud,” Olmsted noted, “when exposed by the falling tide to the summer's sun, which are perceptible at a great distance.”

As unappealing as these grounds had become, Olmsted immediately recognized what they had been. This was a salt marsh—a particularly vile specimen to be sure—but a salt marsh nonetheless. Salt marshes were a staple landscape when America was young, though they were fast disappearing as the country became more urban. Growing up, while ambling around Connecticut, Olmsted had seen plenty of salt marshes. He had always found them achingly beautiful. Now they reminded him of his departed father and of home in Hartford, where ties had been so cruelly cut by the estate battle.

Salt marshes were also untamed places, suggestive of nature's abundance, very much in keeping with his artistic vision. He was never one for manicured gardens. The presence of saltwater made ornamental flowers, per the discarded design, a ridiculous notion anyhow. Olmsted knew that he would need to select plants that could grow in this specialized environment. Olmsted also recognized that this design job was largely a sanitation job, something with which he had ample experience.

Olmsted worked closely with John. Olmsted's drafting skills were limited, so he drew rough sketches—this was how he typically worked. Once he'd settled on a design, his stepson gave it a more polished treatment. On October 24, 1878, Olmsted presented a preliminary plan to the commissioners. They instantly accepted it.

But Olmsted wasn't sure. He requested a meeting with Boston's city engineer. He wanted to make certain that the plan was feasible from a technical standpoint. The city engineer brought along the superintendent of sewers, and the men huddled for four hours. Once he was convinced, Olmsted was ready to move forward. The commissioners formalized the arrangement, hiring him for the job. In a better mood now, Olmsted saw his stepson in a better light. He gave John, now twenty-six, a financial stake in the business.

As a first step, Olmsted had the swampy stretch dredged and reshaped so that the water traveled in a sinuous line—more natural than nature. In cooperation with the city engineer, intercepting sewers were built to catch refuse before it flowed into the waterway and gates were installed to regulate the flow with the Charles River. Olmsted wanted to
maintain a constant water level that never varied more than a foot. After all, he didn't want the grounds to flood afresh at every high tide.

As for plantings, Olmsted called for a huge variety: sedges, salt grass, salt cedar, sea-buckthorn, and beach plum. He even suggested Oregon holly grape, a species brought back East by Lewis and Clark. Olmsted was a master at arranging plants in artful compositions but an undistinguished talent at actually growing them. For this project, he simply suggested a long list of salt-tolerant species. The idea was to see what would take. Just as Ignaz Pilat oversaw the plantings in Central Park, trained nurserymen did the actual planting here.

Not even lowly eels had been able to survive in the foul creek. But Olmsted was certain that abundant plantings coupled with cleaner water would provide a habitat. Birds like swans could be introduced, and he also hoped that wild fowl would be drawn here of their own accord. “The collection of water-birds should not be confined,” he wrote in a report to the commission, “... to a few sorts of swans, ducks, and geese, but include as many varieties of these as practicable, and also pelicans, cormorants, cranes, and other waders, and fishers.”

Olmsted's creation can fairly be called America's first wetlands restoration. What it was not was a park, at least by any ordinary definition. The commissioners were intent on calling the place Back Bay Park. But Olmsted was a stickler in such matters. Olmsted owned a dictionary published in 1706, which he often consulted when looking for suitably oldfangled names. He provided commissioner Dalton with a list of possibilities such as “Sedgeglade” and “The Sea Glades.” But then he hit upon it: the Back Bay Fens.
Fens
is an archaic word for a marsh or boggy piece of land.

Olmsted's plan called for pathways in the basin above his salt marsh so that people could amble past the landscape without trampling the plantings—or falling into the water. To cap his creation, Olmsted invited Richardson to design a bridge. That placed Richardson in the Vaux role, amplifying a landscape with architectural flourishes. In temperament, the effusive, bearlike Richardson was nothing like Olmsted's slight onetime partner. And the bridge he designed was nothing like one of Vaux's subtle, nature-first creations.

But it worked. Richardson's Boylston Street Bridge—mammoth, hewn out of blocks of Cape Ann granite—succeeded in pulling the design together. It provided a needed focal point, visible from all over the Back Bay Fens. It doubled as an observation deck; a person standing on top of the bridge could gaze out across this piece of landscape memory smack in the bustling heart of Boston.

 

In 1879, while work on the Back Bay Fens progressed, Olmsted began on another project in Boston. Once again, Olmsted moved his family away from New York for the summer, this time taking a rented house in Brookline. The project involved designing the grounds for an arboretum. Like so many Olmsted jobs, this latest grew out of an idea that had been bouncing around for years. Back in 1873, he had visited Boston to attend a rhododendron show held on the Common. At the time, he was still employed by Central Park, and he was on official business, scouting for flowers. While at the show, he met Charles Sprague Sargent, and the two became fast friends. Sargent was a man very much in the Olmsted mold. Like Olmsted, Sargent didn't exactly cotton to formal education. In fact, he'd finished eighty-eight out of a class of ninety at Harvard. Yet so intense was his passion for trees, that he had recently been named director of Harvard's fledgling arboretum.

Sargent had a dream of turning the arboretum into a public park. Although Olmsted admired Sargent's resolve, he didn't think this was a very good idea. An arboretum is essentially a collection of trees, where different species are grouped together, often following a scientific order. This would be so limiting, Olmsted felt, when it came to a park design.

But Sargent kept pursuing his idea for years. By 1879, the ever-strapped Boston park commission had finally come up with the money. Sargent asked Olmsted to collaborate, and Olmsted reluctantly agreed. The plan was to create a public park, with the city responsible for such things as policing and routine maintenance. At the same time, a proper arboretum required the expertise of trained botanists at a place like Harvard.

Sargent was a cantankerous man, more at ease with trees than people. Thus, it fell to the worldly Olmsted to work out a unique arrangement where Harvard sold the land to the City of Boston, which, in turn,
leased it back to Harvard for 999 years. Olmsted brokered this unique public-university partnership and found the negotiations exhausting.

That was the easy part. Olmsted also had to design the grounds of the arboretum. Here was the challenge: Hundreds of trees had to be planted in a precise order dictated by the Bentham and Hooker system, a Victorian Era scientific classification. Lindens need follow tulip trees need follow magnolias in rigid sequence. A suitable roadway had to be fashioned—winsome and winding—yet ensuring that visitors viewed the trees in the proper order. The idea was that this would be a drive-through park, where people traveled by carriage, looking at the trees.

All through the summer of '79, Olmsted produced study after tortured study. In his initial plans, the carriage road was so twisted as to make a pretzel look like a straight line. But he loved a good challenge. Although he'd initially been dismissive, he grew very passionate about Sargent's public arboretum. Eventually, he figured out an elegant road to carry people past the trees in the exact order spelled out by the Bentham and Hooker system.

Today, visitors walk over the grounds of Boston's Arnold Arboretum following the same path Olmsted originally designed for carriages. The trees are arranged in the exact same order. Some of the original trees are still alive, including a silver maple and a cherry.

 

Olmsted's focus was shifting from New York to Boston. He received yet another project from Dalton and the commission, for a park treatment along a section of the city's Muddy River. This was another unlovely stretch of fetid water, per its name, and once again Olmsted had to contend with both aesthetic and sanitary engineering challenges. He also teamed up with Richardson on a couple of private estate commissions in communities near Boston. In Easton, Massachusetts, Richardson designed the Ames Gate Lodge for railroad scion Frederick Ames, while Olmsted laid out the surrounding grounds. The pair also collaborated on the Ephraim Gurney House in Beverly, Massachusetts.

Meanwhile, Olmsted had ongoing jobs such as the Capitol grounds in D.C. And he was becoming increasingly involved in a project that was more like a personal mission. He was fighting to preserve Niagara Falls,
an outgrowth of that meeting at Cataract House back in 1869. The falls were fast becoming a wretched tourist trap, the stunning natural scenery slipping into ruin.

But in New York City, Olmsted's work had pretty much evaporated. In the winter of 1881, Olmsted spent a weekend with Richardson at his home in Brookline. On awaking Sunday morning, Olmsted looked out the window and saw a team of men clearing the streets of snow. “This is a civilized community,” he announced. “I'm going to live here.”

The idea of returning to New England where he'd grown up was appealing. Olmsted entered into yet another rental situation, this time moving to a house on Walnut Street in Brookline. He rented out the brownstone in New York City. But just as the family was getting settled, Olmsted received disturbing news about Owen. Apparently, his stepson had fallen gravely ill.

Owen, now twenty-four, had headed out West after graduation from the Columbia University School of Mining. As a sickly person, he'd pursued a nineteenth-century medical regimen that prescribed counteracting one's constitution through rugged outdoor activity. His natural father, John, had tried this, too. But Owen took it to the extreme. He'd spent two years learning cattle ranching from Clarence King, a man who had years back helped Olmsted survey Yosemite. Afterward, Owen had run a ranch of his own on the Powder River in Montana. Olmsted put up some of the money to help him buy cattle. He'd seen Owen, too, within the past year, and his stepson had appeared healthy, thriving even. But now a telegram arrived saying that Owen was “very low.”

Stepson John Charles was dispatched west to attend to Owen. He met up with him at Spearfish, South Dakota, where Owen had gone to convalesce in a fleabag hotel. The backwater town was one hundred miles east of his ranch, but it boasted a doctor—in name, at least. John sent telegram after telegram back to the family in Brookline. On one day, Owen would appear to be rallying. But on the next day, John would report that Owen seemed to have taken a dire turn. “We are again under the tension of a great domestic anxiety,” wrote Olmsted to Norton.