INTRODUCTION

In early August 1857, Frederick Law Olmsted was staying at a Connecticut seaside inn writing a series of letters entitled “The Southerners at home” for the New York Daily Tribune. His economic prospects were bleak indeed. The publishing firm in which he had been a partner from 1855 to early 1857 had just failed, causing him to lose the $5,000 of his father’s money he had invested when he became a partner. He also felt responsible for several thousand dollars of the firm’s debts. He had hoped to finance the writing of his third volume on the South, A Tourney in the Back Country, through part-time employment with the now bankrupt firm. That was no longer possible, and other prospects were uncertain. He was attempting to interest the New England Emigrant Aid Company in a scheme to create a series of free-soil settlements in western Texas, in order to form a barrier to the expansion of slavery in that area. It was possible that he would go to England in the fall to solicit support from cotton textile manufacturers there, and then travel to Texas to select land for purchase. But in August there was no assurance that those plans would develop further.

At the inn, Olmsted happened told meet his friend Charles Wyllys Elliott, a member of the newly created Board of Commissioners of New York’s Central Park. Elliott informed him that the board was about to hire a superintendent and urged him to apply for the position. Olmsted quickly agreed to take the next steamboat to New York and make his decision on the way. On August 12 he made his formal application to the park board, having concluded, as he later told his brother, “what else can I do for a living.” At its next meeting, on September 11, the board appointed him superintendent of the park. With that event, Olmsted, the farmer and writer, took a major step toward the career of landscape architecture that would become his life’s work.

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Olmsted’s appointment resulted from a chance meeting with Charles Elliott, and his qualifications for the post of superintendent were questionable. He had no formal training in engineering or horticulture, and no experience administering large public works projects. The largest group of men he had ever directed was the eight field hands he employed at harvest time on his Staten Island farm. His appointment as superintendent of Central Park was due in part to the fact that he was a Republican who was not politically threatening to the Democratic members of the park board. Even less relevant to the task at hand, it was the signature of much-revered Washington Irving on a petition supporting Olmsted’s candidacy that convinced doubting members of the board to accept his appointment.

At the time of his appointment as superintendent, therefore, Olmsted appeared to lack the practical training and experience for the responsibilities of the post. Some of his superiors On the park clearly felt that to be the case. When he was seeking approval of his candidacy, both the vice president of the park board and the park’s chief engineer told him they would prefer a “practical” man for the job. In reality, Olmsted had gained a number of relevant skills from his previous activities. Even his haphazard education, with schooling at various academies and in the homes of Connecticut ministers, had begun his preparation for his work on Central Park. When severe sumac poisoning so injured his eyes in 1837 that he could not continue on to college, he spent several years living with a surveyor and civil engineer. Although he never went to college, he did spend part of one semester at Yale attending scientific lectures he thought would be useful to him as a farmer. The training in agriculture he received from farmers in Connecticut and New York in the mid-1840s also gave him practical skills that he later put to use on Central Park. So, too, did his experience of operating his own farm on Staten Island from 1848 to 1855.

On his farm, Olmsted required his half-dozen hired hands to make daily reports of the work they did; he also kept a careful inventory of tools. On Central Park he supervised a force of up to 3,800 men with the same rigor, devising an elaborate system for recording hours worked. Other interests from his farming years became immediately useful when he began work on Central Park. He had imported several thousand trees from abroad as part of a nursery and orchard business he developed on Staten Island. He had also read widely on the theory and practice of thorough drainage of ground by means of sunken pipes, a practice that was being introduced in many parts of the British Isles. He had met the leading theorist on the subject, Josiah Parkes, during his walking tour of England in 1850, and had examined several drainage projects recommended to him by Parkes. Soon after, he played a leading part in the importation by the agricultural society of Staten Island of one of the first machines for manufacturing drainage tiles set up in the United States.

Other elements of his experience had prepared Olmsted for his Central Park work in other ways. His apprenticeship with farmers, his year as a clerk in a [3] New York silk-importing firm, and his subsequent voyage to China in 1843 as a ship’s boy all taught him to deal with workingmen. His walking tour of the British Isles and the Continent in ] 850 brought him in contact with workers and farmers of many kinds. The same was true of the two journeys he made through the American South in the years 1852–54 as a correspondent for the New-York Daily Times.

Even Olmsted’s work in the “literary republic” of New York in 1855–57 proved valuable for his new career in park superintendence and design. As partner in the publishing firm of Dix, Edwards & Company and managing editor of Putnam’s Monthly Magazine, he met and corresponded with many leading literary figures. The secret editorial board of Putnam’s consisted of the influential writers George W. Curtis, Parke Godwin, and Charles A. Dana. Those men became Olmsted’s close friends as well as his professional colleagues. They helped to open doors for him in the literary world. During the twenty years of his direct involvement in Central Park, he frequently turned to his journalistic friends for support of his views on park matters.

In addition to acquiring the skills that enabled him to supervise construction of Central Park, Olmsted had arrived at a number of convictions that led him to attach great importance to the work. They sustained him in his efforts and helped to generate the tremendous energy he invested in the task. Those convictions related both to his own concept of what American civilization should become and to specific challenges to that concept from groups in America and Europe.

From the beginning, Olmsted believed that the creation of Central Park was an undertaking of special significance. As he told his friend Parke Godwin soon after completing the Greensward plan for the design competition of 1858, “It is of great importance as the first real park made in this country—a democratic development of the highest significance & on the success of which, in my opinion, much of the progress of art & esthetic culture in this country is dependent.” His concern for matters of landscape art and aesthetics was of long standing. In his childhood he had received a valuable, if informal, training in the subject from his father. The senior John Olmsted made the enjoyment of scenery the single form of recreation in a busy merchant’s life. Olmsted later said of his father that

his sensitiveness to the beauty of nature was indeed extraordinary, judging from the degree in which his habits were affected by it, for he gave more time and thought to the pursuit of this means of enjoyment than to all other luxuries, and more than any man I have known who could not and would not talk about it or in any way make a market of it.

Young Frederick learned about landscapes from the many prints his father collected of European scenery and parks. Every summer the family went on “tours in search of the picturesque” that took them to many scenic parts of [4] New England and New York. That early experience gave Olmsted a remarkably rich introduction to the appreciation of scenery and the principles of landscape composition. As he later recalled,

The root of all my good work is an early respect for, regard and enjoyment of scenery (the word tells much better of the fact than landscape) and extraordinary opportunities of cultivating susceptibility to the power of scenery. Not so much grand or sensational scenery as scenery of a more domestic order. Scenery to be looked upon contemplatively and which is provocative of musing moods. I think that I was largely educated for my profession by the enjoyment which my father and mother (step-mother) took in loitering journeys; in afternoon drives on the Connecticut meadows.

Given the impetus of his father’s love of scenery, Olmsted began to read the theory of landscape design at an early age. In the public library in Hartford he found the writings of the leading English theorists of the late eighteenth century—Uvedale Price, William Gilpin, Humphry Repton—and the pastoral poets William Shenstone and William Marshall. He also read Solitude, by the Swiss physician Johann Georg von Zimmermann, with its praise of rural life and personal testimony of the near-miraculous power of scenery to heal malaise and melancholy. In the mid-1840s Olmsted and his friends avidly read John Ruskin’s Modem Painters, absorbing its aesthetic doctrine. As a farmer, Olmsted read Andrew Jackson Downing’s journal, the Horticulturist and Journal of Rural Art and Rural Taste. From Downing he learned how taste in matters of architecture and landscape design could act as a powerful force for civilizing rural America. Although his design principles in later years differed considerably from those of Downing, Olmsted accepted the program of social reform through art that Downing espoused. The civilizing of America by providing all classes with the taste and manners of gentlemen served as an underlying social purpose of Olmsted’s later career as a landscape architect.

Olmsted’s visits to Europe and the British Isles in the 1850s furthered his education in park-making. The first public park he visited, Birkenhead Park near Liverpool, made a strong impression on him. Describing the experience in his book Walks and Talks of an American Farmer in England, which was published in 1852, Olmsted exclaimed, “Five minutes of admiration, and a few more spent in studying the manner in which art had been employed to obtain from nature so much beauty, and I was ready to admit that in democratic America there was nothing to be thought of as comparable with this People’s Garden.” During that first visit to the British Isles, Olmsted visited landscaped private estates, including Eaton Park near Chester and Chirk Castle on the Welsh border. During his second trip to Europe (a six-month tour of France, Italy, Germany, and England for his publishing firm), he saw numerous landscapes from which he drew lessons in later years. In London, where he spent the summer of 1856, he gravitated to the parks and spent most of his spare time in them.

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Olmsted’s second major area of travel, the slaveholding American South, provided him with experiences that forced him to examine his own social values. The process of reappraisal strengthened the beliefs that later found expression in his work on Central Park. Olmsted took with him to the South a set of values by which he judged the quality of the civilization he saw. He believed strongly in settled communities like the New England towns in which he grew up, where skilled artisans exchanged services and where public schools and libraries provided educational opportunities for all. His own upbringing also made him set great store by domestic surroundings that showed taste and culture. Those values of community and the provision of tasteful domestic amenities were crucial marks of civilization for him. The South, he concluded, was wanting on both counts. There were few towns worthy of the name, while the isolation of slaveholding plantations made exchange of services and creation of educational institutions difficult and expensive. In addition, most of the homes he visited were sadly lacking in domestic amenities. Capital went to buy slaves, and planters reserved little money for creating a tasteful domestic setting. Olmsted soon concluded that many of the problems of Southern society were due to the way slavery perpetuated a “frontier condition of society.” He had learned many lessons in his youth concerning the barbarism of the frontier. He had read Timothy Dwight’s critical description of the frontier of upstate New York in the 1820s, and his family’s minister in Hartford, Horace Bushnell, had delivered sermons about the frontier, using titles like “Barbarism the First Danger; A Discourse for Home Missions.” There was, therefore, a whole view of society implicit in Olmsted’s observation that

in Virginia itself, an essentially frontier condition of society prevails to this day. Beasts and birds of prey, forests and marshes are increasing; bridges, schools, churches and shops diminishing in number, where slavery has existed longest. The habits of the people correspond.

After his disappointment with the slaveholding South, Olmsted was reminded all the more forceably of the kind of society he valued most when he visited the German settlements around San Antonio. There he found delightful examples of taste, domesticity, and community. His new-found friends were overcoming the decivilizing influences of the frontier and were rapidly laying the foundations of permanent settlement and civilization.

Olmsted’s visit to West Texas in the spring of 1854 marked the beginning of his attempt to combat the barbarizing influence of the frontier as perpetuated by slavery in the South. At first he supplied financial aid to Adolf Douai and a group of antislavery Germans in West Texas. With the publication in early 1857 of his second book on the South, A Journey Through Texas, Olmsted tried to encourage Northerners to move to that region. At the same time he began to collaborate with officers of the New England Emigrant Aid Company, who were fresh from the battle to keep slavery out of Kansas. Olmsted planned to halt [6] further movement of slaveholders into the Southwest by establishing a line of free-soil settlements in their path. He hoped eventually to see creation of a free-soil state in West Texas and intended to fill the Indian Territory south of Kansas with free-soil farmers the moment it was opened for settlement.

With his appointment as superintendent of Central Park in 1857, Olmsted turned his attention to a very different project, but the values he brought to this task and the civilization he wished to establish were the same. In fact, he felt that he was exchanging one frontier for another. The eastern metropolis, swelling with migrants from rural America and immigrants from Europe, was the newest, most challenging frontier of all. It offered him the best opportunity to advance the cause of civilization in his lifetime. As he stated the issue,

Very slowly down to our own time the decivilizing conditions of emigration and of pioneering have been mitigated. But there is a liability to take too little account of those that remain . . . . We are too apt to regard the great towns in which so many newcomers are held as old towns—old settled towns, but we have nowhere on the western frontier a population newer to its locality and so little socially rooted or in which it is possible for a man to live so isolatedly from humanizing influences and with such constant practice of heart-hardening and taste smothering habits as that to be found in our great Eastern cities.

Olmsted developed this perception while living in New York City between 1855 and 1861. His work on Central Park before the Civil War was his first attempt to provide that city with the institutions it needed to meet the problems caused by rapid growth. His professional purpose was to employ landscape design to nurture the civilizing process in the raw frontier of urban America.

Other aspects of Olmsted’s experience in Europe and the American South intensified his perception of the historical significance of Central Park. When he said in his letter to Parke Godwin that the park represented “a democratic development of the highest significance,” he meant that it would disprove the claims of conservatives that it was useless to create parks and other facilities open to all citizens, or to try to raise the cultural level of all classes. The success of Central Park, he hoped, would go far toward disproving this “fallacy of cowardly conservatism.” It would answer aristocratic critics who asserted that citizens of a republic were unable to provide themselves with institutions of culture that in the Old World flowed from the noblesse oblige of kings and nobility, or from despots like Napoleon III of France.

In that respect, Olmsted viewed the movement for Central Park as part of the world-wide struggle between monarchy and republicanism. He saw the institutions of monarchy and aristocracy as “relics of barbarism” which it was the historical role of the nineteenth century to abolish. During his visit to England in 1850 he had predicted that Queen Victoria would be the last British monarch. With her death, he believed, Great Britain would become a republic.

Success of the republican cause on the Continent was far from assured, [7] however. Olmsted had avidly followed the early success of the revolutions of 1848, and was deeply discouraged when they were suppressed. He had learned of the sufferings of the insurgents from those who saw them firsthand. His friend Charles Loring Brace had been imprisoned in Hungary in 1851 as a spy for the revolution, and Olmsted’s German friends in Texas told him many tales of the fate of the revolts in the German principalities. In 1856, Olmsted himself visited Naples, which was in the grip of the cruel despot Ferdinand II. He also spent time in France, where the emperor Napoleon III had overthrown the French republic founded in 1848.

As early as his walking tour of Great Britain in 1850, Olmsted had encountered the pessimistic views of conservatives who supported the institutions of monarchy, aristocracy and established church, and who assumed that there could be no improvement of the lot of the large class of landless agricultural laborers. To those views he responded, “ . . . we hold that party in England, which regard their labouring class as a permanent providential institution, not to be improved in every way, educated, fitted to take an equal share with all Englishmen in the government of the commonwealth of England, to be blasphemers, tyrants, and insolent rebels to humanity.” Olmsted’s visits to Europe reinforced his optimism about the possibility of uplifting all members of society, but they reminded him how far most Englishmen and Europeans were from sharing that hope. He came to realize that in order to strengthen progressive forces in the Old World, the United States would have to provide an example of success.

When Olmsted visited Europe in 1856 on business for his publishing firm, he discovered that, on the contrary, the policies of the Pierce administration were causing untold harm to the cause of republicanism abroad. Violence arising from the struggle for Kansas, particularly the “sack” of the free-state capital of Lawrence and the caning of Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner on the floor of the Senate by representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina, had produced a strong response in Europe. Those and similar events were giving great comfort to the enemies of republican institutions. A leading English reformer told Olmsted that toleration of proslavery violence by government officials had forced him to admit that the “experiment of extreme liberalism in America” had failed. “Your government plots civil war, and encourages robbery and piracy in order to give strength and stability to an institution in itself barbarous, and which has in all nations heretofore lost ground just as fast as Christianity and civilization have advanced,” he said. “Your law system, admirable and superior in many respects to ours, as it is, is apparently powerless to punish crime of the most heinous character, when the guilty parties are men of station and wealth.” On the Continent the situation was even more depressing. “The German and French Republicans meet an American with melancholy or scornful and averted faces,” Olmsted mourned. To rectify the situation, he decided, Americans must disprove the attacks on republican institutions being made by European defenders of monarchy. Much of the success of the forces of liberalism [8] world-wide depended on a demonstration by the United States that a republic could keep civil order, guarantee justice, and provide the means for elevating all elements of the population.

The harm done to the republican cause abroad by proslavery interests in the United States was only one aspect of the danger they posed. Within the United States itself, the defenders of slavery challenged the viability of free labor and a democratic social order. The slaveholders of the South were the American counterparts of European defenders of aristocracy. Indeed, Olmsted viewed them as essentially aristocratic in their social views. They contradicted his own ideas by asserting that at least one part of American society, the blacks, could not survive in freedom and were unworthy of education. Wishing to see that claim disproved, Olmsted ended his letters on the South for the New-York Daily Times of 1853–54 with an appeal for “fair play for the Negro” in the North. The North would have to be the proving ground of the ability of blacks to live and prosper in freedom.

Adherents of the proslavery argument went further, asserting that slavery was a positive good and claiming that free-labor society, as demonstrated in the North, was a failure. Social order and adequate leadership could come only from a hierarchical society based on slavery. Olmsted, in contrast, viewed slavery as another “relic of barbarism” that his generation must work to abolish. He was dismayed not only by the way slavery dehumanized the blacks but also by the way the Southern slavocracy used its economic and political power for its own material advantage. The white, nonslaveholding majority in the South paid a heavy price for the yoke slavery placed on the whole society. But slavery could be abolished only when enough Southerners were convinced that free labor was superior to slavery both economically and socially. That demonstration, too, Olmsted concluded, must come primarily from the free-labor society of the North.

Olmsted was particularly disappointed with the “high-toned” Southern gentlemen he encountered in his travels. They were members of the favored upper class, whose wealth and leisure were purchased by the enslavement of blacks and by the economic and educational deprivation of nonslaveholding whites. They should, he felt, be setting an example of statesmanship, gentility, and culture for their society. Instead, he judged two-thirds of them to be selfish materialists and sensualists. Their vaunted good manners were superficial affectations, while their concept of honor and their quickness to take offense stifled the free exchange of ideas. They produced little in the way of scientific discovery, literature, or art. Moreover, they lacked any sense of responsibility for promoting the well-being of all groups—a concept that was central to the reforming mission Olmsted and his Northern friends had defined for themselves. In that respect, as in others, the master class of the South showed itself to be aristocratic at heart.

One experience in particular confirmed Olmsted’s opinion of the ruling class of the South. It also convinced him that it was crucially important for the [9] North to provide incontrovertible evidence of the superiority of a civilization founded on free labor. As he set out on his second journey through the South in late 1853, Olmsted stopped in Nashville, Tennessee. There he met Samuel Perkins Allison, a Yale classmate of his brother, John. Allison was a native Tennesseean, a slaveholder and member of a family that owned many slaves. For most of the next three days, Olmsted debated with Allison the relative virtues of free-labor and slave-labor societies. In response to Olmsted’s strictures on Southern gentlemen, Allison argued that the North had utterly failed to produce a class of cultivated gentlemen. “I tried to show him that there were compensations in the general elevation of all classes at the North,” Olmsted recounted to his friend Charles Loring Brace, “but he did not seem to care for it.” Allison’s criticism of the North was most discouraging to Olmsted; “ . . . altogether,” he admitted to Brace, “the conversation making me acknowledge the rowdyism, ruffianism, want of high honorable sentiment & chivalry of the common farming & laboring people of the North, as I was obliged to, made me very melancholy. With such low, material, and selfish aims in statesmanship as the best men of the South have and with such a low, prejudiced, party enslaved and material people at the North, what does the success of our Democratic nationality amount to—and what is to become of us.”

Olmsted’s encounter with Allison convinced him that he must strive to make the society of the North a living demonstration of the superiority of free labor and democratic social relations. He must work to achieve the “general elevation of all classes” that he had failed to convince Allison was already a reality in the North. That meant that he must become more of a democrat than he had been, he concluded-a “Socialist Democrat” or “Democrat of the European School” who would use the government to create institutions of popular education, culture, and recreation. “We need institutions that shall more directly assist the poor and degraded to elevate themselves,” he stated. “Our educational principle must be enlarged and made to include more than these miserable common schools. The poor & wicked need more than to be let alone.” Instead, government “should have in view the encouragement of a democratic condition of society as well as of government.” In a phrase that summed up the purpose of much of his professional activity for the next four decades, he declared: “The poor need an education to refinement and taste and the mental & moral capital of gentlemen.”

To his friend Brace, who as executive secretary of the newly formed Children’s Aid Society in New York was already engaged in uplifting and educating some of the poorest groups in the city, he wrote that the “moral” of the lesson he had learned from his encounter with Allison was to “go ahead with the Children’s Aid and get up parks, gardens, music, dancing schools, reunions which will be so attractive as to force into contact the good & bad, the gentlemanly and the rowdy. Those institutions would provide the means for [10] educating the poorest and least-cultured elements of society. In time all members of the democratic society of the North might enjoy cultural advantages that in the slaveholding South were restricted to a privileged few.

Much of the dedication that Olmsted concentrated on Central Park arose from his vision of the historic role of the society of the North in the mid-nineteenth century. But strong personal factors also were present. Central Park became the focus of hopes and ambitions that he had sought to fulfill in other ways. In his early manhood he had hoped to find a set of religious beliefs, a profession, and a wife. His religious quest led him increasingly toward rationalism. He rejected the inspiration of the Bible and, repelled by what he viewed as the pettiness and divisiveness of doctrinal debate, abandoned his concern with “points of doctrine” and articles of belief. He never joined a church and never achieved a sustaining sense of conversion. Instead, he turned from faith to good works and Thomas Carlyle’s injunction to “do the duty that lies nearest.” In that way, his quest for religious faith resulted in the sanctification of his work.

The outcome of Olmsted’s search for a wife also served to increase the importance of his professional life. During the summer of 1851 he had become engaged to Emily Perkins, the daughter of a leading Hartford lawyer and a granddaughter of the noted Connecticut clergyman Lyman Beecher. Almost as soon as they announced their engagement, however, she broke it off. Olmsted was shocked and humiliated. Between that time and the fall of 1857 he had no further romantic relationships.

Meantime, his closest long-term friendship, that with his brother, John, was moving toward its tragic end in a way that would determine the outcome of Olmsted’s quest for a wife. John had been suffering from tuberculosis since 1851. In October of that year, he nevertheless married Mary Cleveland Bryant Perkins, a neighbor of Olmsted’s on Staten Island, and left immediately for an eighteen-month honeymoon in Europe. When the couple returned they moved in with Olmsted at the farm on Staten Island. For three years the brothers lived together, spending six months of that time on their journey through Texas. In April 1855, Olmsted moved to Manhattan to enter the publishing business. Within two years John and his family again departed for Europe in search of a cure. When John left, Olmsted predicted sorrowfully, “I much fear I shall never see him again.” By the time Olmsted became superintendent of Central Park, his brother was at Nice in southern France. John’s health deteriorated rapidly, and on November 24, 1857, he died. So ended, tragically and too soon, the closest friendship Olmsted ever had with another person. As his father accurately observed, “In his death I have lost not only a son but a very dear friend. You almost your only friend.”

Olmsted responded to his brother’s death by plunging even deeper into work. For the next few months, after working long hours on the park, he spent the evenings with Calvert Vaux preparing the Greensward plan for the Central Park design competition and writing A Journey in the Back Country. “Unquestionably [11] I am undertaking too much,” he admitted to his father, “either one of the three enterprises being enough for all my talents and strength.”

The loss of his brother soon led Olmsted, in effect, to abandon hope of finding the love match he had sought for so long. The last letter his brother wrote to him contained the appeal, “Don’t let Mary suffer while you are alive.” Nineteen months later, Olmsted married his brother’s widow and assumed direct responsibility for her well-being and that of her three children, aged six, four, and one.

A marriage of duty instead of one of love increased the pressure on Olmsted to find satisfaction in his professional work. In a letter he wrote to Calvert Vaux six years later, he made an eloquent confession of the extent to which Central Park had compensated for the many difficulties and disappointments of his life. Speaking of his position as superintendent of the park, he declared to his ex-partner:

It is impossible for you to estimate the strength of my devotedness in the matter. There was no hope on earth that I would not have sacrificed to my desire to hold that position. . . . I am capable of stronger passions than many men and I never had a more desperate passion than that. . . . A great deal of disappointed love and unsatisfied romance and down trodden pride fastened itself to that passion.

In this passage, Olmsted was referring to his role as superintendent of construction of the park rather than to his role as its co-designer. During the period 1857–61 he viewed himself as primarily an administrator—a person capable of realizing on the land, efficiently and effectively, a park design of which he happened to have become co-author several months after having secured, for other reasons, the post of superintendent of construction. Not until 1865 did Calvert Vaux convince Olmsted to consider himself as much an artist as an administrator. Even then, Vaux admitted that it was primarily Olmsted the administrator and not Olmsted the artist whose assistance he needed in the creation of Prospect Park.

Olmsted’s work as architect-in-chief of Central Park after May 1858 placed him in the position he felt the landscape architect should occupy. As master builder and site designer, he directed the efforts of a large and varied group of professionals—architects, engineers, gardeners, policemen—in realizing his artistic conception. In addition, the park enabled him to form professional friendships that lasted through the rest of his career.

Among these friends was Ignaz Pilat, who served as head gardener of Central Park from 1857 until his death in 1870. Born in Austria in 1820, Pilat attended the University of Vienna, studying at the botanical gardens connected with the university and at the Imperial Botanical Gardens at Schonbrunn. For several years before the Central Park board brought him to New York, he had been director of the botanical gardens in Vienna. Pilat must have taught Olmsted much about plants as the Central Park design was realized on the park [12] grounds. Later correspondence indicates that the two men worked closely together as they strove to realize Olmsted’s conception of luxuriant “pseudo-tropical” scenic effects in the Lake and Ramble sections. Pilat also gave Olmsted and Vaux invaluable assistance in preparing planting plans for Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. Another gardener on the staff in the early days of Central Park who aided Olmsted in his later career was W. L. Fischer. Fischer had received his training on private estates in his native Germany, after which he had gone to England to work in the gardens of the Royal Horticultural Society. He also worked under Joseph Paxton at Chatsworth, the famous estate of the Duke of Devonshire. Olmsted made use of Fischer’s skills on Central Park after the Civil War and in 1884 convinced the park commissioners of Boston to bring him to that city to supervise the planting of Franklin Park.

During the construction of Central Park, Olmsted also relied on, and learned from, members of the engineering staff. Several of them assisted him in later projects. He employed J. H. Pieper and Edward C. Miller in California in the period 1863–65. He also worked with John Y. Culyer on Prospect Park, with John Bogart on Prospect and Riverside parks, and with William H. Grant on street plans for the twenty-third and twenty-fourth wards of New York City. And the engineer on Olmsted’s last great project, the Biltmore Estate near Asheville, North Carolina, was James Gall, who had been an assistant drainage engineer during the construction of Central Park.

The Central Park engineer who played the most important role in Olmsted’s later career was George E. Waring, Jr. When Olmsted became super-intendent in September 1857, Waring was already in charge of constructing the park’s drainage system. He was also renting Olmsted’s Staten Island farm, following two years as manager of Horace Greeley’s farm at Chappaqua. Although the park board abolished the position of drainage engineer when it made Olmsted architect-in-chief in May 1858, he immediately restored Waring to the drainage work. Waring went on to have a distinguished engineering career. He constructed a sewerage system for Memphis, Tennessee, which freed that city from the plague of yellow fever. As street-cleaning commissioner of New York City from 1895 to 1898, he brought order and efficiency to that department for the first time. Waring collaborated with Olmsted on several projects after the Civil War, including the suburban community of Riverside, Illinois, and the campus of Stanford University. He also advised Olmsted on engineering aspects of other designs, among them Mount Royal Park in Montreal and the grounds of the U.S. Capitol in Washington.

Olmsted learned much from his professional associates on Central Park that would benefit him in the years to come, but he must have learned an especially important series of lessons from Calvert Vaux. When the two men joined forces to make a competition design for the park, Olmsted brought to their endeavor a thorough knowledge of the topography of the site. But it was Vaux who possessed the technical skills and experience that were needed to draw up a [13] plan. He had learned those skills from his architectural mentors in England, as well as from Andrew Jackson Downing, the foremost American landscape gardener, whose partner he had been.

Nevertheless, Olmsted brought important experience, intelligence, and energy to the joint venture of preparing a plan for Central Park. Vaux made this clear when in 1863 he and Olmsted reached a formal agreement concerning their respective contributions to the creation of the park. Vaux readily agreed to the definition that Olmsted offered in a letter from California written on November 26, 1863:

There are several properties in the park held or properly belonging to us. 1st the general design, in which our property is mutual, equal and indivisible. 2d Detail of General design from which can not be separated something of “superintendence” and in which also there is equality of property between us. 3d Architectural design & superintendence in which I have no appreciable property-which is wholly yours. 4th Organization & management of construction force in which you have very little property, though more than I have in the last. 5th Administration & management of the public introduction to and use of the park, in which you have very little property and which I hold to be my most valuable property in it.

Moreover, Vaux soon made it clear that he placed greater value on Olmsted’s experience as a farmer than did Olmsted himself. Writing Henry W. Bellows in early 1864 to inform him of the definition of respective contributions to the park contained in Olmsted’s letter of November 26, 1863, Vaux elaborated on his own view of Olmsted’s role in the area of architectural design and superintendence. “I consider that although in a technical sense Olmsted has no property in this item,” he wrote, “. . . his advice was valuable and. . .his knowledge of agriculture in its finer sense (to which he does not refer) balanced my technical knowledge in this special respect.”"

Olmsted played a more important part in the construction of Central Park than any other person, and was equally responsible with Calvert Vaux for its design, but he took no part in the campaign for creation of the park or in the selection of the park site. By August 1857, when he first became professionally involved with the park, those preliminary stages were over. Olmsted was not pleased with the site finally selected, however. As he later declared, “It would have been difficult to find another body of land of six hundred acres upon the island (unless by taking a long narrow strip upon the precipitous side of a ridge), which possessed less of. . .the most desirable characteristics of a park, or upon which more time, labor, and expense would be required to establish them.” He blamed the selection of the site on political conniving, and may have been correct in so doing. The original site chosen in 1851 for a city park was the Jones Wood area on the city’s East Side. During the fall of that year, however, opponents of the site succeeded in replacing it with an 843-acre tract containing the Croton reservoirs in the middle of the island. The central site did not benefit any particular ward as [14] obviously as Jones Wood did. It was also closer to more sections of the city. But its rocky ridges and marshy valleys were less desirable for development than was Jones Wood, with its good drainage and deep-water shores.

By the end of 1853 the city had begun to acquire land at the central site, and in the spring of 1854 the state legislature repealed its authorization of the purchase of Jones Wood for a park. The election of the Democrat Fernando Wood as mayor in 1854 led to a resolution of the difficulties that had plagued the site-selection process. Wood vetoed an attempt by the Common Council to reduce the size of the central park by almost half. He also created a park board consisting of himself and Joseph S. Taylor, the city’s street commissioner. The board then hired Egbert Viele to make a topographical map of the land between Fifth and Eighth avenues from 59th to 106th streets. In June, Wood and Taylor went further and officially adopted a design for the park that Viele had drawn up. That summer the city authorized payment of over five million dollars for the land.

The Republican state legislature’s growing control of the city’s affairs brought Fernando Wood’s park board to an end within a year of its formation, however. In 1857 the legislature replaced Wood’s board with a commission of its own appointed by the governor. The new group had authority to call for up to a million dollars in construction bonds a year, which the city government was obliged to issue.

The new park commission took office in the spring of 1857. While Republicans were in the majority, they could not altogether ignore the wishes of their Democratic colleagues. In a spirit of accommodation they retained the Democrat Egbert Viele as chief engineer of the park and sought as superintendent a Republican who would be acceptable to the Democrats on the commission.

Soon afterward, Olmsted met Charles Wyllys Elliott at the Morris Cove Inn near New Haven and took the first steps leading to his appointment as superintendent of construction of the park. Once he assumed his responsibilities as superintendent, however, Olmsted would have to prove his practical qualifications to his superiors. What he could expect to undergo in the process was made clear to him when he called on chief engineer Egbert Viele soon after being appointed. Expecting the meeting to be merely ceremonial, Olmsted was dressed in his best clothes and overcoat, but Viele surprised him by sending him off on a tour of the park with one of the foremen. Dressed in shirtsleeves and with trousers tucked into high boots, the man led Olmsted on that hot afternoon through all the muck and mire of the park site. For some time thereafter, the park employees, secure in the political connections that had gained them their jobs, watched Olmsted with amusement as he attempted to establish his authority over them.

Olmsted found only one foreman in the whole force on whom he could rely, and he quickly decided that the park commissioners were “most unmanageable, unqualified & liable to permit any absurdity.” Still, the economic [15] conditions of the time and the policies of the Common Council soon gave him the opportunity to create a work force that was more responsive to his orders. When the Common Council was slow to authorize funds for which the park board applied in late September, a majority of the board voted to fire most of the park’s labor force. Only 100 laborers and a handful of foremen were exempt from the dismissal order. When in early November the aldermen authorized $250,000 for park construction, the board directed Olmsted to expand the force to 1,000 men. He also gained the power to fire employees whose work was unsatisfactory.

As soon as the order for hiring went out, coming as the hard times of the Panic of 1857 settled on the workingmen of New York City, Olmsted was inundated with applications. When he arose on the morning after the announcement, his frightened servant informed him that there were twenty men outside his door trying to deliver letters of recommendation. Four of them had forced their way into the house in an attempt to reach his office. On his way to his office in the park, Olmsted passed through a crush of job-seekers that one newspaper estimated at five thousand strong. “They were mostly laborers,” he later recalled, “but a number of members of the legislature and aldermen were among them.” Continuing, he wrote:

As I worked my way through the crowd, no one recognizing me, I saw & heard a man then a candidate for reelection as a local magistrate addressing it from a wagon. He urged that those before him had a right to live; he assumed that they could live only through wages to be paid by the city; and to obtain these he advised that they should demand employment of me. If I should be backward in yielding it—here he held up a rope and pointed to a tree, and the crowd cheered.

There was no way that Olmsted could satisfy the demand of all who were pressing him for employment. “It was a general impression that the pretence of work was merely a form of distributing the public money to the poor,” he later recalled, “and my office was for several days regularly surrounded by an organized mob carrying a banner inscribed Bread or Blood. This mob sent in to me a list of 10,000 names of men alleged to have starving families, demanding that they should be immediately put at work.”

Despite the severe pressures it put on him, the selection of a new labor force strengthened Olmsted’s authority on the park. He was well satisfied with the results, and by early January could boast to his father that he had got the park “into a capital discipline, a perfect system, working like a machine.” Part of the discipline was an elaborate system of timekeeping he devised to keep track of work being done and to guard against malingering. As a result, the park board became increasingly convinced of Olmsted’s “practicality.” His supporters continually requested his advice, seeking to advance him at the expense of Viele. In January 1858, as another indication of their satisfaction with his performance, the commissioners increased his salary from $1,500 to $2,000.

[16]

Within a few months of becoming superintendent of construction of Central Park, Olmsted demonstrated his ability in another field, that of park design. A month after Olmsted became superintendent, the park board announced a public competition for the plan of the park. Calvert Vaux proposed to Olmsted that they collaborate in preparing a design. Olmsted at first declined to join in the competition, fearing that he would offend his superior, Egbert Viele, whose design of 1856 had been adopted by the previous park board and who planned to enter the competition. But when Viele contemptuously expressed his indifference in the matter, Olmsted agreed to join with Vaux.

How early in the fall of 1857 the two men began work on their plan is not known. The park board had decided to hold a design competition even before Olmsted became superintendent, and on the day of his appointment the board had accepted a report from Commissioner Charles Wyllys Elliott concerning specifications and advertising of the competition. Olmsted and Vaux may therefore have anticipated the board’s public announcement of a competition on October 13 and begun their collaboration before that date. It is doubtful, however, that Olmsted could have found much time for the project during the first month of his employment on the park. He and Vaux worked together on their design through the winter of 1857/58 and barely met the submission deadline of March 31, 1858. In fact, when they arrived at the Arsenal late that day to deliver their plan, they found the park board’s offices already closed and had to rouse the janitor and leave their material with him.

Olmsted and Vaux included many elements in their Greensward plan that would be characteristic of their park designs in later years. One element was the exclusion of the sights and sounds of the city, the creation of a pastoral oasis in its midst. They pointed out in their report that New York was growing rapidly and that the reservation of more than seven hundred fifty acres in the center of Manhattan for a park“an oblong measuring two and one-half miles by half a mile“would accelerate the uptown movement of the population. The park must be planned for a time when the area surrounding it would be densely settled. Accordingly, Olmsted and Vaux proposed to “plant out” the city with a green barrier of trees and shrubs on the perimeter of the park. The long, straight sides of the park would then be obscured, making the park as a whole appear more extensive than it was. “No one, looking into a closely-grown wood,” they later explained, “can be certain that at a short distance back there are not glades or streams, or that a more open disposition of trees does not prevail.”

In their effort to separate the park from the city, Olmsted and Vaux went on to devise a unique solution to the problem of transverse roads. The competition rules called for four roads that would carry crosstown traffic more or less directly through the park. Olmsted and Vaux proposed to run the roads below the surface of the ground, in open cuts and tunnels. With that arrangement, the flow of wagons and carts across the park would not intrude on the [17] scenery. Any other approach“the use of walls or lines of heavy planting to screen surface transverse-road traffic from view—would have reduced the park to a series of compartments only a few blocks long. It would have been very difficult to achieve with such treatment the “range” and openness that Olmsted and Vaux considered to be the most important element of park landscape. Since the transverse roads of the Greensward plan were to be completely separate from the interior walks and drives of the park, they would spare park visitors the danger and inconvenience of encountering the cross-flow of transverse-road traffic eight or more times in each circuit of the park. The plan for sinking the transverse roads also made it possible to keep the roads open at all hours while closing the park at night to reduce crime.

Heavy boundary plantings and sunken transverse roads enabled Olmsted and Vaux to create in the park’s interior the passages of scenery that would refresh visitors and thereby fulfill the park’s principal function. Wherever possible, they designed “pastoral” scenery like that of private estates in England, interspersing broad expanses of gently rolling greensward with groves of trees and peaceful bodies of water. The terrain best suited for such treatment was in the upper park, above the new reservoir and the 97th Street transverse road. Accordingly, Olmsted and Vaux proposed to leave that section as free as possible from the distraction of “crossroads and other constructions.”

The park below the reservoirs, which would be used most heavily, presented numerous difficulties for securing large areas of pastoral scenery. The lower park consisted of a series of rocky outcroppings alternating with marshy valleys. Olmsted and Vaux created as much level terrain as they could by blasting and grading extensively, and used the two deepest valleys for the Lake and the Pond. One meadow that they leveled became one of the three playgrounds required by the competition rules, and was eventually known as the cricket ground. The other large open area became the Parade Ground, also required in the competition rules, but the designers must have hoped that the twenty-five-acre expanse would serve, as they later described it, as “a great country green or open common-a place where children may run about and play until they are tired, in nobody’s way, and without danger of being run over, or injured if they fall.”

Preparation of those level open areas in the lower park also required construction of a system of underground drainage pipes, the total length of which was over sixty miles. Olmsted later calculated that the amount of earth and stone handled in constructing the park was 4,825,000 cubic yards, “or nearly ten millions of ordinary city one-horse cart-loads, which, in single file, would make a procession thirty thousand. . . miles in length.” Over four million cubic yards of that material was transferred from one part of the park site to another. The moving of that material alone, Olmsted estimated, was equal to changing the level of the entire surface of the park by nearly four feet. The blasting of rock to [18] level outcroppings and construct the tunnels and cuts for the transverse roads required 20,800 twenty-five-pound barrels“or a total of 260 tons”of gunpowder. It was this massive reworking of the site before planting began that lent such irony to Horace Greeley’s famous exclamation when he first visited Central Park in the fall of 1859: “Well, they have let it alone a good deal more than I thought they would!”

Olmsted and Vaux could not hope to prevail completely over the rugged terrain of the park, nor did they wish to do so. They recognized the value of uneven surfaces and steep hillsides for creating certain kinds of scenery. While they preferred to secure as much pastoral effect as they could in the park, they also worked in another style, the “picturesque.” For this they employed rich and varied plantings that created “complexity of light and shadow near the eye,” in contrast to the open spaces and delicate, indefinite boundaries of the pastoral style.

The hillside south of the old Croton reservoir, which Olmsted and Vaux chose to make the scenic focus of the lower park, was particularly well suited to the creation of picturesque effects. There they proposed to plant, among the rocks and boulders, a variety of native evergreen shrubs that would make an “American garden.” By “planting abundantly” and “introducing fastigiate shrubs and evergreens occasionally” in the Ramble area, they sought to create a contrast to the “broadest effects of light and shade” and the “impression of great space and freedom” of the open park landscapes. Already Olmsted understood the impression that each style should make on the viewer: the pastoral had a quiet, soothing effect, while the picturesque gave a heightened sense of the bounteousness and mystery of nature.

Although the Greensward report refers to the subject only obliquely (in a phrase or two and a short list of plants), it offers intriguing evidence that Olmsted and Vaux intended to produce in one section of Central Park an example of picturesque scenery that contained the prime characteristic of Olmsted’s future work in that style. For him the epitome of the picturesque was the special lushness of vegetation in the tropics. His earlier travels had given him glimpses of that kind of scenery: his voyage to China in 1843 had taken him to Java and the islands of Malaysia, while his travels in the American South had brought him to the semitropical landscapes of the South Carolina and Georgia coasts. From those experiences, and perhaps from remembered images of thickly planted hedgerows in England and Ireland, Olmsted developed his concept of an “exhibition of semi-tropical trees” and other “pseudo-tropical planting” around the Lake and in the Ramble of Central Park (as illustrated in studies no. 5 and no. 6, reproduced on pages 144 and 145).

Not until he crossed the Isthmus of Panama in September 1863, however, did Olmsted see in its full glory the kind of foliage effects he had wished to create in those sections of the park. Only then, in response to that experience, did he write a description that has survived of what his design concept had been in 1858–59. The letters he wrote from Panama give a dramatic statement of the [19] extent to which he wished to learn from the lessons of tropical scenery. He did not wish to make exotic bits of decoration or displays of unusual plant specimens. Rather, he attempted to create whole “passages of scenery” that expressed the prodigal richness and mysteriousness of nature.

What impressed Olmsted most about the scenery in Panama was the powerful emotional response it produced in him stemming from “a sense of the superabundant creative power, infinite resource and liberality of Nature—the childish playfulness and profuse careless utterance of Nature.” To his wife he described the excitement he felt:

I am thoroughly enchanted with the trees & vines. But cane & palms are not trees or vines or shrubs or herbs. They are Gloria in Excelsis with lots of exclamation points, thrown in any where, in the grand choral liturgy. There isn’t any of your Cuba bare ground here. It’s all calla-like and lily and rush and fern & morning glories on an antic vine of Kalmia, where it is not foliage.

Olmsted’s experience in Panama also led him to write to his chief gardening assistant on Central Park, Ignaz Pilat, describing what the scenery of Panama had taught him about the way to plant the picturesque sections of Central Park. “I wished that we could have seen five years ago what I saw yesterday, and received then the same distinct lesson,” he wrote. “I think that I was rather blindly and instinctively feeling for it, in my desire to give ’tropical character’ to the planting of the island, and luxuriant jungled variety and density and intricate abundance to the planting generally of the lake border and the Ramble and the River Road.” He then instructed Pilat on the effects to aim for, suggesting ways to use plants native to northern climes to produce masses of foliage like those of the tropics. Despite the great difference between the climates of Panama and New York, Olmsted thought it would be possible to create scenery in Central Park that produced the same visual and psychological effect as what he had seen in the tropics. “I believe it will be a revelation of beauty to the people, and even to gardeners and artists,”he exclaimed, “for although. . .in many particulars, they have the advantage of us in England, in their materials, especially dark and glossy foliage, they can not approach us in materials for canopy and drapery effects of foliage.” The Lake border and the Ramble, he concluded, offered an unusually favorable situation for such planting in the picturesque style.

In order to create passages of scenery in the pastoral and picturesque styles that would act powerfully on the people who passed through them, it was necessary to free the landscape of incongruous and distracting elements. There were three chief categories of incongruity to avoid: uses, styles, and structures. First, activities that interfered with the quiet contemplation of scenery would have to be excluded, or the process by which scenery acted on the viewer most deeply could not operate. An incongruous mixture of landscape styles also would have to be avoided, since the psychological effects of particular styles, so effective [20] when experienced separately, worked at cross purposes when scenery of two or more styles was visible from a single vantage point. Finally, it was crucial that the design avoid introducing man-made structures that called attention to themselves instead of playing a subordinate part in a unified composition.

The Playground, Parade Ground, Pond, Lake, and Ramble were the principal scenic elements of the lower park. To protect the broad landscape effects of those areas, Olmsted and Vaux proposed to treat the east side of the park as “dress ground”; potentially incongruous activities, plantings, and structures would be placed there. The series of features on the east side would be completely separate from the broader landscapes of the interior and the west side of the park. Along the east side, Olmsted and Vaux placed the various structures called for in the competition rules. There was to be a concert hall (to which they planned to attach a palm house and large conservatory) and a geometrical flower garden with a large fountain. They proposed to fit up the old Arsenal at 64th Street and Fifth Avenue as a museum. The narrow space east of the new reservoir, they suggested, could be the site of an arcade 100 feet deep and topped by a carriage drive. They knew how European developers defrayed part of the cost of park construction by building residential terraces on adjoining lots, and they urged the New York park commissioners to follow that example by renting the series of shops that would be created by the arcade on Fifth Avenue between 86th and 93rd streets. On the east side of the park beyond the new reservoir and the 97th Street transverse road, Olmsted and Vaux placed an informally arranged arboretum of American trees and shrubs. By these means, nearly the whole eastern section of the park would be reserved for purposes that, while desirable in a park, should not be allowed to intrude on the major passages of scenery.

The few buildings that Olmsted and Vaux included in the central and western sections of the lower park were far less obtrusive than those they placed in the eastern “dress ground.” They planned a rustic shelter for spectators atop a large boulder south of the cricket ground and they situated a building for the players near the 65th Street transverse road. Both structures were to be of “moderate dimensions.” They proposed to have a summerhouse of “some architectural pretension” between the Parade Ground and the Lake, and a Casino, or refreshment house, near the carriage drive entrance at West 72nd Street.

Olmsted and Vaux pointed out, however, that these buildings were of secondary importance. “Buildings are scarcely a necessary part of a park,” they declared; “neither are flower-gardens, architectural terraces or fountains.” All structures should be “entirely subordinate to the main idea” of creating scenery. Except for a few simple timber bridges needed to carry the carriage drive over the transverse roads, structures should be erected only “after dry walks and drives, greensward and shade, and other essentials have been secured,” the designers advised, “and the expenditure for them should be made with entire reference to the surplus funds at the disposal of the commission after the park is constructed.”

[21]

The one structure of considerable architectural pretension that Olmsted and Vaux proposed was the imposing “monumental tower” on Bogardus Hill in the northwest corner of the park, which is illustrated in study no. 9. The competition rules called for a prospect tower, but it was clearly not of high priority for the designers. They suggested that it be constructed to commemorate a future event of historical significance, perhaps completion of the transatlantic cable, and included no funds for it in their budget. When they made a new plan for the upper park between 1858 and 1863, extending the northern boundary to I 10th Street, they made no provision for a tower on Bogardus Hill.

Border plantings, sunken transverse roads, and a section of “dress ground” along the eastern border permitted the designers to concentrate on creating landscape effects in the rest of the park. But something more was needed to give unity and coherence to the whole, to ensure the element of “design,” of subordination of all parts to the whole, that Olmsted demanded so consistently in his landscape works. In Central Park, as in his later parks, he secured this through the arrangement of the park’s walks and drives. The circulation system structured the visitor’s experience of the park.

The key element in the diversified lower park was the pedestrian Promenade—or Mall, as it later came to be called—near its center. Paths from the entrance gates led visitors quickly away from the boundary areas and toward the Promenade. As they entered it, the vista before them set off not an architectural feature but rather the hillside of the Ramble, the principal landscape feature of the lower park. At the northern end of the Promenade was the Terrace, from which one could view the Lake and Ramble beyond. At the level of the Promenade the designers created a concourse for carriages, while just to the north was a lower pedestrian “Water Terrace” adjoining the Lake. The Terrace would be a major architectural structure, but it would not be visible from the Promenade. While providing a fine view of the Ramble, it would not block the view toward the Ramble from the Promenade. Olmsted and Vaux intended visitors leaving the Terrace on foot to follow paths around the Lake and through the Ramble, moving circuitously through the picturesque scenery of that area to the culminating overview of the lower park from Vista Rock. To encourage this progression through the lower park, they proposed to place a simple Martello tower on Vista Rock. The tower would provide a focus for the view from the Terrace and would help to draw visitors toward the Ramble. They cautioned, however, that the tower should be “by no means a large one, or the whole scale of the view will be destroyed.” The same concern for scale led them to restrict the Promenade to pedestrians. A boulevardlike area for carriages would have taken up too much of the limited space of the lower park.

The discussion of the Promenade in the Greensward report shows that Olmsted was already conscious of the problem created by placing a formal feature in the midst of informal scenery; he was aware of the danger of introducing an “incongruous mixture of styles.” In Central Park the small scale of the [22] Promenade helped to obviate any clash between that feature and its surroundings. Moreover, Olmsted and Vaux sited the Promenade so skillfully that, except when viewed directly down its axis, it appears to be a part of the informal grove of trees surrounding it.

The presence of the Promenade in the Greensward plan, with the carriage concourse and formal pedestrian terrace at its northern end, suggests that Olmsted already believed a park should be arranged to provide two different kinds of social interaction. First, there should be informal areas like the Parade Ground (as “country green”) and the Ramble, which were well suited for “neighborly” activities. There, groups and families could picnic and play. In addition, for “gregarious” activities, there should be more formal spaces-promenades, carriage concourses, and concert areas. There, people of all sorts could mingle, to “see and be seen.” Long stretches where walking paths ran close to carriage drives would serve the same purpose. Olmsted and Vaux included the latter feature in Central Park because, as they observed, “it is hardly thought that any plan would be popular in New York, that did not allow of a continuous promenade along the line of the drives, so that pedestrians may have ample opportunity to look at the equipages and their inmates.”

The paths and carriage ways of Central Park, and of Olmsted’s later parks, were important in another way. They were carefully constructed to heighten the psychological effect of the landscape on the visitor. In fact, Olmsted designed them to facilitate the visitor’s complete immersion in the scenery-an immersion so deep that the scenery would act on those in its midst in a profound, subconscious manner. Olmsted had identified the powerful “unconscious influence” of scenery several years before he began to design Central Park. Attempting to explain the effect of the scenery of the Isle of Wight on him during his first visit there in 1850, he concluded:

Dame Nature is a gentlewoman. No guide’s fee will obtain you her favour, no abrupt demand; hardly will she bear questioning, or direct, curious gazing at her beauty; least of all, will she reveal it truly to the hurried glance of the passing traveller, while he waits for his dinner, or fresh horses, or fuel and water; always we must quietly and unimpatiently wait upon it. Gradually and silently the charm comes over us; the beauty has entered our souls; we know not exactly when or how, but going away we remember it with a tender, subdued, filial-like joy.

That immersion in scenery was what Olmsted wished to provide American city dwellers in his parks. The most important aspect of those parks was the opportunity they offered, by careful design, for what he later called “unconscious, or indirect recreation.”

To achieve that end, Olmsted designed paths and drives that were not narrow, unobtrusive tracks taking up little space; rather, they were so broad that it was unnecessary to pay close attention while moving along them. Both carriage and pedestrian ways were surfaced and drained so as to assure their convenient [23] me in all kinds of weather. As the section on construction in the Greensward report indicates, Olmsted carefully studied the various new kinds of paving materials then being invented. He wished to make his drives smoother and quieter than any that had been built before.

Even the course of the drives and paths was planned to make possible an easy-—even “unconscious”movement through the park. In the Greensward plan, as in their later designs, Olmsted and Vaux avoided sharp turns. Roads merged at easy angles, reducing to a minimum the care and thought necessary for their use. The width of the pedestrian paths and their angles of merging on level ground served the same purpose. There would be no need for constant decisions about which path to take, or for constant guarding against jostling and collision. As Olmsted and Vaux described this concept in their report on the second park they planned, Prospect Park in Brooklyn,

A drive must be so prepared that those using it shall be called upon for the least possible exercise of judgment as to the course to be pursued, the least possibly anxiety or exercise of skill in regard to collisions or interruptions with reference to objects animate or inanimate, and that they shall, as far as possible, be free from the disturbance of noise and jar.

To secure these negative qualities, the course of the road must be simple; abrupt turns must be avoided, steep grades that would task the horses or suggest that idea must not be encountered. The possibility of the road becoming miry must be securely guarded against; its surface must also be smooth and be composed of compact material.

The roads and walks on the Greensward plan show how thoroughly Olmsted and Vaux had worked out this design principle by early 1858. Of all the landscape designers of their time, they made the most consistent use of easy grades, sinuous roads and paths, and the gradual merging of ways.

With the exception of the sunken transverse roads, the original Green-sward plan made little provision for a feature that would receive much attention in the future, a feature that became an important means in later park designs for heightening the effect of scenery by reducing distractions. This feature was the separation of ways within the park itself. A close study of the Greensward report and plan submitted in the design competition of 1858 reveals that Olmsted and Vaux provided for a separation of ways at only one of the many crossings of a footpath and a carriage drive. That one instance was a footbridge between two large boulders in the Ramble, under which ran a carriage drive. The drive—and thus the bridge”were eliminated from later versions of the plan. One other separation of ways in the original plan, which also disappeared in later versions, was a tunnel. under the carriage drive between the portcullis-gate entrance for troops at West 69th Street and the Parade Ground.

The small number of bridges proposed in the original plan may have been due in part to the designers’ reluctance to proliferate works of engineering and architecture that might become the focus of attention. The Greensward [24] report makes it clear that Olmsted and Vaux intended for the bridges in the park to be simple and inexpensive. The two major crossings for drives and paths over the transverse roads were to be made by tunneling the transverse roads through rock. The seven additional bridges that were needed to carry the carriage drive over the transverse roads were to be plain truss bridges made of timber. The only other bridge for a carriage drive was to be a “small, but handsome stone arch” crossing the stream in McGowan’s Pass in the upper park. This conception stands in striking contrast to the elaborate system of bridges and underpasses later constructed in the park. Not until the end of 1858 could Olmsted state, concerning the plan, that “all parts of the lower Park may be traversed on foot, without encountering a single carriage or horseman.” By then, pressure from the park board had brought about major changes in the park’s design.

A moving force for those changes was park commissioner Robert Dillon. In May 1858, seconded by Commissioner August Belmont, he submitted a series of proposals that would have drastically altered the Greensward plan. There were three major parts to Dillon’s proposed changes. First, he wanted to run a straight “Cathedral avenue” from near 59th Street to the reservoirs, crossing the Lake by a wire suspension bridge and running directly to Vista Rock. The avenue would continue around the top of the reservoirs, making those triumphs of engineering, not the scenery, the focus of attention in the park. A second grand avenue would lead to Bogardus Hill in the northwest corner of the park, crossing the intervening valley of McGowan’s Pass with another suspension bridge.

Olmsted successfully demonstrated to the park board the undesirability of such a change in the design, but he had more difficulty countering Dillon’s demand that the transverse roads run across the park at ground level. While Richard Grant White, carefully coached by Olmsted, wrote editorials supporting the Greensward plan’s provision for sunken transverse roads, other journalists were less enthusiastic. The Daily Tribune declared, “. . . so far as we are aware that feature of the plan has failed to receive anything like the general approval of intelligent persons who have given the subject their attention,” while the Herald jeered that construction of the proposed tunnels was technically impossible. Moreover, the Herald concluded, the sunken roads would be “mere canals, filled with water in rainy weather, and blocked up with snow in winter.” Even Olmsted’s friend and supporter on the park board Charles Wyllys Elliott requested that he report to the board on the feasibility of sinking the trans-verse roads below the surface of the park only where they intersected carriage drives.

Olmsted resisted Commissioner Dillon’s proposals to transform the Greensward plan, but he did agree to a number of changes proposed by a special committee consisting of Commissioners Charles H. Russell and Andrew H. Green. In its report of May 10, 1858, the committee made the following proposals: to make carriage entrances on 59th Street at both Sixth and Seventh [25] avenues; to abolish the portcullis-gate entrance to the Parade Ground at Eighth Avenue and permit the carriage drive to sweep closer to the avenue at that point, providing a larger open area; and to make the width of the carriage drives less than the sixty feet indicated in the Greensward plan. Russell and Green also called for the introduction of a bridle path twenty feet wide and three miles long “running generally closely adjoining the principal drives, but with occasional variations as the surface may best indicate.” Olmsted agreed to these changes, but said he saw no need for any others. He conceded, however, that future examination of the ground and other considerations might reveal other desirable alterations of the plan.

The addition of a bridle path to the already cramped lower park created a series of new problems, but it also opened the way for a major innovation: the complete separation of interior ways in the lower park. As they redesigned the lower park during the summer of 1858, Olmsted and Vaux extended to the interior of the park the principle of separation of ways they had already introduced with the sunken transverse roads. The only alternative to such a separation, Olmsted pointed out as he submitted the new plan, was to layout the drives, rides, and walks with a north-south orientation, “nearly parallel with each other and with the avenues of the city.” Such an arrangement would defeat a major purpose of the Greensward plan, which was designed to draw visitors into the interior of the park and at the same time to secure as much open space as possible for pastoral scenery. Now, in the summer of 1858, Olmsted and Vaux created a whole series of way-crossings as they laid out the course of the bridle path.

The only suggestion from the commissioners for such a separation of ways was a request from Andrew H. Green on May 27 that Olmsted report on the feasibility of providing walks that would run from the 59th Street entrances to the Promenade, and from there to Vista Rock, without crossing any carriage roads. It is likely that Green made the request after discussing the subject with Olmsted. At the time Green made his request, Olmsted was already preparing the report that he presented to the board on May 31, 1858, in which he said that it would be possible to provide a “tolerably continuous” walk from the lower end of the park to Bogardus Hill in the northwest corner, and to design it “in such a way as to avoid bringing the pedestrian in contact with the drives or rides.” This was his first formal statement concerning the possibility of separating the interior ways of the park.

Olmsted and Vaux added at least nineteen bridges to their new design simply to provide the separation of ways. Fourteen of these, and the pedestrian arcade leading under the carriage concourse on the Terrace, were in the lower park. As a result, Olmsted reported, there was “no part of the drive, no part of the ride, and but little of the walk system which is not studiously adjusted to the arches, and planned, in respect to course, breadth, curves and grades, with a constant purpose to avoid leading people on foot to wish to occupy ground on [26] which others have a right to drive horses.” That is, the designers arranged the whole course of traffic, and the plantings between walks, drives, and bridle paths, so as to prevent those who were using one mode of movement from interfering with the enjoyment, or threatening the safety, of others. Not even the structures themselves were supposed to intrude on the landscape. Olmsted later explained that no archway was to be visible in the view across the two principal open spaces, the cricket ground and the Parade Ground. There was an arch on the edge of the smaller playground east of the old Croton reservoir, he observed, “but it is so retired and shaded as in summer to be undiscernible.”

Fearful that the commissioners would find such an arrangement too expensive, Olmsted assured them that the cost would be minimal. In all instances but two (the iron footbridges across the bridle path near 59th Street), the way-crossings occupied “positions in which artificial embankments with culverts beneath them will be otherwise required, so that the expense of constructing them will be chiefly that of the mason-work.”

Olmsted may indeed have believed that the extensive system of arches for the separation of ways that he and Vaux added to the Greensward plan during the summer of 1858 would be simple and inexpensive. But he did not anticipate the inclination of the architects on the staff, including Calvert Vaux himself, to create works of art and elegance when they had structures to design. As the plans for the bridges and arches developed during the next three years, they often proved both decorative and expensive. The new design of the lower park was a master conception for providing access to the park’s scenery by different modes of conveyance, but it opened the way for introducing into that scenery a series of architectural elements that were far more obtrusive and costly than Olmsted and Vaux had envisioned in the original Greensward plan.

Designing Central Park was an activity Olmsted and Vaux could carry on above the plane of politics. They worked out their ideas on the basis of aesthetic principles and the practical needs of users of the park. Following the official adoption of the Greensward plan by the park board on April 28, 1858, however, the two men operated in the area of politics as well as that of design. The political process began to work, in fact, as soon as the commissioners met to select the winning plan.

There are many possible explanations for the fact that the Greensward plan of Olmsted and Vaux won the Central Park design competition, but the pattern of votes cast indicates that the decision may have been largely a political one. While the result was to some extent a vote of confidence for Olmsted by his supporters on the park board, it is clear that party politics played an important part in the voting process. All six Republican commissioners voted for the Greensward plan, while three of the four Democrats voted for design no. 30, by the park’s Democratic superintendent of planting, Samuel I. Gustin. The only Democrat to break party ranks and vote for the Greensward plan was Andrew H. [27] Green. The sole American party commissioner, Waldo Hutchins, cast the one vote for design no. 26.

Not only did party divisions hold in all cases but one, but the commissioners clearly used the competition premiums to reward “their own.”The first prize of $2,000 went to Olmsted, the park’s superintendent of construction. Gustin, the superintendent of planting, received the $1,000 second prize. The $750 third prize went to Lachlan H. Mcintosh, the park’s disbursing clerk, and Michael Miller, the park’s property clerk. Not until the commissioners awarded the fourth prize of $500 to design no. 26 did they see fit to reward someone not already in their employ. This was Howard Daniels of New York City, who had designed a number of cemeteries and estates and had worked on the picturesque suburb of Llewellyn Park, New Jersey.

The result of the design competition quickly strengthened Olmsted’s position in the park’s administration. On May 17, 1858, the park board created the position of architect-in-chief with a salary of $2,500 and installed him in it. They ordered that the architect-in-chief “shall be the chief executive officer of this Board, by or through whom all work on the Park shall be executed, and shall have the government and supervision of all employees at the Park.” At the same time, they abolished the position of his arch rival, engineer Egbert Viele. They also abolished the position of Samuel Gustin and that of Olmsted’s friend the drainage engineer George Waring, Jr. The board authorized Olmsted to appoint ten principal assistants of his own choosing and to increase the park’s labor force to 2,000 men.

Olmsted quickly appointed the engineer William H. Grant as his principal assistant and reinstated Waring as drainage engineer. Among the other assistants he chose were three engineers with whom he would work closely in the future: J. H. Pieper, John Bogart, and Edward C. Miller. Olmsted also appointed Calvert Vaux to be one of his “assistants,” at $5 a day. It was in that less-than-glorious position that Vaux worked until January of the following year. During that time he helped Olmsted revise the park plan and played the major role in designing numerous architectural features, among them the lakeside Terrace and Bow Bridge.

After making these appointments, Olmsted quickly embarked on the construction of the park, and his position remained strong. In August he received authority to hire an additional 1,000 men, and in September an attempt by his leading antagonist on the board, Thomas C. Fields, to rehire Viele at a salary equal to Olmsted’s failed by a vote of 4 to 4. In January 1859 the board gave Olmsted increased discretionary power in financial matters, authorizing him to make purchases of up to $200 between meetings of the board.

Still, there remained the problem of Vaux’s anomalous position in relation to the park, as well as the question of the terminology and titles to be used for various administrative positions. In December, Charles Wyllys Elliott [28] proposed that Olmsted’s title be made simply “Superintendent of the Park” and that Vaux be given jurisdiction over architectural design and construction, with the title ”Architect of the Park.” Olmsted may well have been sympathetic to this proposal; at least he claimed that he disliked the title “Architect in Chief.” As he later wrote to Vaux, “The title of Architect-in-Chief was given to me upon the proposal of our enemy—Dillon. I objected to it strongly. I requested that it should be changed.”

After considering many proposals, the board decided in January 1859 to leave Olmsted’s title as it was and to make Vaux “Consulting Architect” at a salary of $2,000. In May the board went further and bestowed on Olmsted the grandiose title he retained until 1862, “Architect-in-Chief and Superintendent. The creation of that title had broader implications than simply designating the administrator of Central Park. It associated the term “architect” with the work of creating landscape designs, and by strengthening that image helped make it easier to apply the term “landscape architect” to the whole profession.

During the working season of 1858, considerable progress was made in the construction of Central Park. Thorough-drainage of the lower park was nearly completed, the Promenade was graded and planted with lines of twenty-year-old trees, the Lake was far enough along to be filled with water for skating during the winter, and construction of the Pond near 59th Street was well advanced. Moreover, most of the blasting and grading to create the two major open spaces—the cricket ground and the Parade Ground—was nearly completed. The carriage drive in the lower park was graded and several miles of walks were constructed. The bridle path in the lower park and some of the bridges separating it from carriage ways also were finished.

During early 1859 Olmsted also made progress in another aspect of park administration that he considered to be of great importance. He began to organize a force of park keepers who would protect visitors from harm and instruct them in the proper use of the park. He devoted much time and thought to making the force effective. Early in the year the park board gave him authority to enlarge the force to thirty-two men and approved the purchase of uniforms for the keepers. The next spring, Olmsted issued the demanding set of standards by which he expected these men to conduct themselves; following strict military discipline and displaying vigilance at all times, they were to treat citizens—even those who committed crimes-with gentlemanly respect.

The construction season of 1859 was a time of supreme effort. The engineering staff worked long hours to supply plans for the work force, which averaged nearly three thousand men and reached a high of 3,800 in July. During the summer the Ramble was opened to the public and the digging of the transverse-road tunnel under Vista Rock was finished. By fall over seventeen thousand trees and shrubs had been planted, work on the Lake had been completed, and the first transverse road had been opened to crosstown traffic. At the end of [29] the season, the board declared that construction of the park below 79th Street was finished. Olmsted could then say to his father, “I have fixed what I most cared for on the park beyond reconsideration.”

The strenuous regimen that Olmsted undertook in order to speed construction and to see that it was done well put heavy demands on him. There was little time for domestic leisure following his marriage in June to his brother’s widow, Mary Perkins Olmsted. Even as completion of the lower park approached, concern over the cost of the work mounted. In mid-June the commissioners formally requested that Olmsted report on the changes he had made in the Greensward plan and estimate how much those changes had increased the cost of construction. Olmsted assured them that he was exercising “judicious economy, looking to the future.” Even so, the cost of construction during 1859 had been an impressive $1,179,000. This brought the total cost to $1,765,000, which was $265,000 more than the legislature had authorized for the total cost of making the park. In August one of Olmsted’s opponents on the board, August Belmont, complained that the cost had been much higher than Olmsted had originally calculated (presumably referring to the estimates in the Greensward report of 1858, which proposed no costly separation of ways other than the sunken transverse roads).

Belmont urged that expenses be reduced, and on August 18 the park board acted. The commissioners resolved that all remaining bridges, viaducts, and other structures be completed with a close eye to economy. They suspended work on the transverse roads in the upper park and directed that attention be focused on the completion of planting and the construction of drives, walks, and bridle paths. The number of architectural structures, they added, would have to be decreased. Responding to an investigation launched by the Common Council to determine how much time and money would be required to complete the plan, the board also moved to cut back construction. After debating several proposals, including a drastic reduction of the work force, the board finally set a limit of $2,500 per month for wages, beginning in January 1860.

Meantime, the intense pace of the work, combined with the Common Council’s dissatisfaction and the park board’s complaints, took its toll on Olmsted’s health. For a week in early September he was so exhausted he could hardly hold his head up. He sought to recover at Saratoga Springs, but Andrew H. Green, who at that point was president of the park board, ordered him to return to the city after a few days. His condition worsened, however, until he “could not think connectedly without considerable effort.” He then took to his bed and for a week did nothing but take medicine and lie quiet while his wife read to him. The commissioners eventually took pity on him and provided the money for a six-week trip to Europe, ostensibly to study the design and administration of parks. A miserably uncomfortable outward voyage, coupled with a heavy schedule of park visitations during a period of almost constant rain, did [30] little to improve his health. But the journey did restore his equilibrium to some extent.

Olmsted’s period of sickness and travel in the fall of 1859 marked a major change in his career on Central Park. He returned to a very different situation from that which he had left in early September. His authority in financial matters had been sharply reduced, and he found himself far more subject to the opinions and concerns of Andrew H. Green. Part of the park board’s response to complaints by its own members and by the city’s aldermen concerning the cost of park construction was to decide, while Olmsted was on his sickbed, to create the full-time position of treasurer and comptroller of the park at a salary of $5,000 a year. On October 6, while Olmsted was on the high seas, the commissioners elected Andrew H. Green to that position. In keeping with their desire to reduce expenditures, they authorized Green to examine all bills, certify their correctness to the auditing committee, and assume responsibility for paying them. In the process, Olmsted lost the discretionary power to spend up to $200 per week that he had enjoyed since January. From this point on, Green kept close track of all of Olmsted’s proposals for spending money and frequently refused to authorize them.

In early October 1859, during Olmsted’s absence, Green also assumed Olmsted’s responsibilities. He set out at once to secure efficient work by stalking the park, attempting to surprise workers loafing on the job. He fired engineers without observing Olmsted’s rule for respecting seniority. He also pressed engineers and gardeners to work too fast for good results. George Waring informed Olmsted that

your successor at the helm does not know much of human nature. Of course he means well but he is so cross & crabbed that all with whom he comes in contact wish him to the devil a dozen times a week. . . . I am very confident that, from chief to water-boy, everyone does less work than he did under your system of placing some confidence in men’s sense of honor & duty.

During his visits to European parks in the fall of 1859, Olmsted was impressed by the amount of time those in charge were able to devote to details of construction, maintenance, and administration. Their situation contrasted sharply with his own, frequently beset as he was by job-seekers. He felt the burden all the more because, although he was theoretically free to hire the men he found best qualified, he was in fact constantly subject to pressure from commissioners to hire for political reasons. When he returned from Europe he made an eloquent plea to the park board, asking it to free him from the necessity of dealing personally with all job applicants and their supporters and friends. He gained no relief from the problem, however. Even though he took pains to ensure that laborers on the park were not pressured to vote for politicians in return for their employment, those abuses continued. In time, as queries concerning the cost of construction persisted, Olmsted came to blame much of the [31] excess cost on the fact that he had never been free to hire men on the basis of their ability alone. He had worked hard in the beginning to keep construction of the park from being done by subcontractors, and in 1858 had convinced the board to do the work with laborers that he hired and supervised. But by early 1861 he was claiming that the malign influence of politics had increased the cost of park construction by at least 20 percent.

As the construction season of 1860 approached, Olmsted learned more about the implications of the board’s growing cost consciousness. On April 7 the commissioners began to consider the coming season’s work. They ordered Olmsted to present, at the earliest possible moment, a detailed plan of work for the year, together with “careful estimates of the cost of said work, as also his reasons, at length, for his recommendations.” They had never been so exacting before, and their order came at a time when the engineering force was busy making plans for construction work.

It was three months before Olmsted could make his report, even though he pressed the engineering force to work extra hours. “The work has been continued till midnight for several days past,” he informed the board as he finally made the report, “and without interruption during the whole of the last night.” Olmsted reported that all bridges and archways in the lower park and the entire system of ways in the rest of the park would be completed before winter. He also proposed to build a refectory before the next skating season. The board approved his plan, but discontent was still evident among its members. A month after Olmsted’s report, Commissioner John A. C. Gray attempted to transfer to the executive committee of the board the responsibility for carrying out the Green-sward plan. Gray’s attempt failed, but the board adopted a substitute motion that made Andrew H. Green jointly responsible with Olmsted for the process of construction. During the construction season of 1860 major work was accomplished, but the expenditure of over eight hundred thousand dollars raised the total cost of the park to more than two and one-half million dollars.

During 1860, full of new pressures concerning park construction as it was, Olmsted expanded his design activities in other directions. In that year he and Calvert Vaux began the professional collaboration beyond Central Park that would produce a series of major designs during the next twelve years. In July the two men began to prepare a plan for the estate of the shipping magnate Edward K. Collins in New Rochelle, New York. At nearly the same time, Olmsted and Vaux were appointed “Landscape Architects & designers” to the commission created by the state legislature to layout the streets of Manhattan above 155th Street. The commission never presented an official report, but the remarkable letter Olmsted wrote on the problem to one of the commissioners, Henry H. Elliott, contains the basic ideas that underlay his approach to the design of residential communities during the rest of his long career. He showed Elliott how to design street systems in a way that would make possible the development of permanently attractive residential neighborhoods. The curved streets he [32] proposed would discourage the intrusion of commercial and manufacturing establishments and would be inconvenient for use by through traffic.

In 1861 Olmsted had the opportunity to design two residential institutions. Both were insane asylums—the Bloomingdale Asylum in New York City and the Retreat for the Insane in Hartford, Connecticut. Later correspondence concerning the Hartford institution reveals how much of Olmsted’s design theory for such settings was already evident at this time. In 1872 the retiring director of the institution wrote Olmsted a remarkable letter of reminiscence and thanks-in order, as he said, “to render honor to whom honor is due.” His recollections show that already in 1860 Olmsted wished to use his designs of institutional grounds to promote a feeling of domesticity and to counteract the depersonalizing effects of institutional life. In his letter, John S. Butler recalled how Olmsted had walked with him to the “common field” near the Retreat, “with its somewhat rude abundance of trees and shrubbery,” and how pleased he had been when Olmsted expressed admiration of the site and gave his opinion of its “rare capacity.” “Those words of yours were the ’punctum saliens,’ the starting point of the advancement of the Retreat,” Butler recalled.

They gave the impulse from which has resulted its entire reconstruction. . . . They made such a deep impression on my mind,—they gave such a distinct shape and direction to the indefinite plans and longings of years that I went that day to my desk and drew the outline of the scheme of future operations.

The key to the program, said Butler, was “Kill out the Lunatic Hospital and develop the Home!”

There were also ways in which Olmsted’s early work on Central Park sowed the seeds for concepts that would reach fruition later in his career. One example is the use of bold rockwork in the construction of bridges. Olmsted’s fullest exploration of that medium came in the early 1880s when he collaborated with the architect Henry Hobson Richardson in constructing fieldstone structures in Boston’s parks (most notably Agassiz Bridge in the Fenway) and creating the boulder gate-lodge at the Ames family estate in North Easton, Massachusetts. Olmsted made it clear that his work with Richardson was directly inspired by examples of stonework constructed in Central Park in the early 1860s. The structures in the Boston area, he wrote, were conceived only after Richardson had examined “two works of rough-hewn stones and boulders, built in Central Park twenty years before. ”

One of those structures was Riftstone Arch, which carries the drive over the bridle path near the west-side entrance to Central Park at 72nd Street. The thirty-foot span connects two bold rock outcroppings. As Olmsted described the arch while directing its construction in 1860,

The precipitous rock on each side furnishes rude natural abutments for the arch which is here required, and it is proposed to build the arch itself in rubble masonry of the stone of the locality, which mode of construction is appropriate and economical [33]

Riftstone Arch

Huddlestone Arch

[34] under the circumstances. In the estimate of work for the year it was proposed that the interior of the arch should be of brick. It can be built at considerably less cost of rubble work, and by carrying out the general rude character proposed in all the details it is estimated the arch may be made for $5000 which is $4000 less than was allowed in the estimate of the year.

One cannot be sure whether the demands of the park commission in late 1860 were the cause of Olmsted’s proposal to make the arch of such rough material, or whether that pressure simply gave him an excuse to make a less finished and elegant structure than the architects Calvert Vaux and Jacob Wrey Mould had designed in the park up to that time. In any case, Riftstone Arch clearly anticipated, and served as a model for, a style of building that characterized Olmsted’s later work with an architect who was more willing to subordinate his designs to overall landscape effect. The second structure to which Olmsted referred was probably Huddlestone Arch, which carried the carriage drive across the brook in McGowan’s Pass in the upper park.

The additional design activities with Calvert Vaux, coupled with mounting pressure for completion of construction of the park, greatly taxed Olmsted’s energy. As the summer of 1860 progressed, his health began to fail, as it had under similar pressures the year before. This time the results were disastrous. On August 6, while taking an evening drive in upper Manhattan with his wife and newborn son, he had a runaway accident. Olmsted was thrown from the carriage and suffered a fracture of the left leg; the injury was so severe that his physician despaired of his life. Olmsted’s wife, Mary, and their baby, John Theodore, were apparently unhurt, but the tragedy of the situation deepened when the child died a week later of cholera infantum. Olmsted’s recuperation was long and discouragingly slow. Nevertheless, within three weeks he was composing his dissertation to H. H. Elliott on the principles of community design. Soon thereafter he returned to the park, where he supervised the work from a litter in which he was carried from place to place. The fact that Andrew H. Green had assumed his responsibilities during his absence undoubtedly spurred Olmsted to return at the earliest possible moment. Still, it was many months before his leg healed completely, and it knitted shorter than his right leg, leaving him with a limp for the rest of his life.

As Olmsted recovered physically during the fall of 1860, he remained under emotional stress. In addition to his sorrow over the death of his baby boy, there was the continued abrasive presence of Andrew H. Green. Olmsted’s physical pain must have increased his impatience with Green’s exacting demands for full justification of every park expenditure, no matter how small. In one instance, Green required several meetings with Olmsted before he would authorize reimbursement for an outlay of twelve and a half cents. His watchdog approach to park finances was more than a time-consuming inconvenience for Olmsted. The comptroller’s concern for reducing costs interfered with the final stages of realization of the park design. As Olmsted described the result, “The practical [35] effect is that my hands are often tied just where it is of the highest importance that I should act with an artist’s freedom and spirit—namely, in the last touches, the finish of my work.” Green was satisfied once basic construction was completed; he had little patience with the additional expenses required to complete the planting that would transform the park into a work of landscape art.

By the end of 1860 the situation had reached the crisis stage. In the spring of the year the board had required Olmsted to prepare careful estimates of the cost of the coming season’s work. Although the commissioners approved the proposals that Olmsted submitted, they refused to provide him with the clerical force he felt he needed to keep accurate account of the cost of the various construction projects. At year’s end, Olmsted found that less work had been done, and at greater cost, than he had estimated; and he had no records that could show the cause of the discrepancy. Frustrated and humiliated by this situation, he decided that the commission was unfairly placing responsibilities of superintendence on him without providing an adequate force to assist him.

Convinced that he could not go through another year like the one just past, Olmsted presented his resignation on January 22, 1861. “I cannot without a sacrifice of self respect any longer allow myself to be held responsible for the duties implied by the designation, Architect-in-Chief and Superintendent of the Park,” he declared. In the long, impassioned letter of explanation that he then wrote at the request of the park board’s president, he poured out his frustration and discontent. The board must give him increased authority to direct the realization of the Greensward design, he insisted, or else accept his resignation. He argued that the superintendence of the park had cost less than that of many less complex engineering projects, and compared his small staff with the much larger and better-trained group of assistants he had found working under park administrators in England and France. After describing the effort required to convince Andrew H. Green to authorize even small but important expenditures, he concluded that there must be a change in the balance of authority between himself and Green. Even as a petty clerk in a dry-goods firm at age nineteen, he recalled, he had been given more power to authorize expenditures than he now had, at age thirty-eight, as the executive head of a great public works project. He further pleaded for recognition of his role as an artist—as the one man who could bring the artistic conception of the Greensward design to full realization.

The first response of the executive committee of the park board was to ask Olmsted to withdraw his resignation. He complied, but “with a clear understanding that my authority on the park should be placed on a different footing this spring-or that I should quit.” During the next two months he struggled to draw up an accurate statement of the expenses of the previous year’s construction, but on March 28 he confessed to the board that he could not present an adequate accounting. He also declared that unless changes were made in the park’s design and mode of superintendence, the total cost would be one-third more than the four million dollars the state legislature had recently authorized as [36] the final figure for construction. The additional expense was directly traceable, he asserted, to the failure of the board to permit him to hire park employees without taking politics into consideration. He requested that the commissioners give him an answer to his proposals for changes in the design and administration of the park, and stated that if they were not willing to give him a freer hand in hiring laborers, he wished to be relieved of responsibility for superintending construction.

By mid-April, Olmsted was anticipating an early decision by the board. On the seventeenth the commissioners informally requested that he meet with Green and devise a plan that would, as they phrased it, “obviate the difficulties of which you complain.” Not until June 6, however, did the board take formal action, presumably on the basis of an agreement worked out between Olmsted and Green. First, the commissioners took Olmsted at his word and relieved him of responsibility for superintending construction, “except in the finishing operations.” While there was to be no hiring of new employees to assist him, the board directed that he should receive whatever professional help he needed from the engineers and draftsmen already working on the park. Further, he was to have “such assistance and working force as may be required, on his requisition, for operations of finishing, planting, and maintenance.” This arrangement brought Olmsted at least a minor victory. It enabled him to continue to direct the final stages of work on the design while freeing him from responsibility for the quality and cost of engineering and architectural construction. At the same time, the park board moved to satisfy part of Olmsted’s plea for greater independence in financial matters. The commissioners ordered Green to honor Olmsted’s authorization of up to $500 per week in expenditures beyond the amount authorized beforehand by the board. In addition, Olmsted could incur expenses of up to $100 a week on his own authority, without having to secure Green’s approval. It was presumably this part of the new arrangement that Olmsted had in mind when a month later he said that “. . . the main purpose against Green was accomplished, and he doubtless felt himself beaten more than I did.”

The board’s concessions were too late, if not too little. By early June 1861 Olmsted was seeking a role in the approaching war between the North and the South. His game leg disqualified him from serving in the army, so as early as April he contemplated joining the navy. Soon he began to look instead for an administrative post. The question was already arising of what to do with slaves who escaped to Union lines or were left behind by fleeing masters. Olmsted had long been interested in the process by which slaves would make the transition to the responsibilities of freedom. Nearly a week before the park board finally made its offer to him, he wrote to his acquaintance Henry W. Bellows expressing a desire to become the superintendent of slaves held in government custody.“. . . I have, I suppose,” he observed, “given more thought to the special question of the proper management of negroes in a state of limbo between slavery & [37] freedom than anyone else in the country. I think, in fact, that I should find here my ’mission,’ which is really something I am pining to find, in this war.”

Instead, Bellows convinced Olmsted to shoulder a different administrative task. On June 13 Bellows became president of the United States Sanitary Commission, which President Lincoln authorized on that day. The commission was to gather information and offer advice concerning the health of the Union troops and the sanitary condition of their camps. (In this respect it was consciously modeled on the British sanitary commission made famous by Florence Nightingale’s work with the sick and wounded during the Crimean War.) On June 20, at the behest of Bellows, the commission invited Olmsted to be its resident secretary, or chief staff officer. He accepted immediately and wrote the park board the next day requesting a leave of absence. The executive committee of the board granted him a two-week leave, although he anticipated that the work of setting up the commission would require three or four months. Within a week he left for Washington, where he was to run the commission’s central office. Thus began Olmsted’s intense and exhausting two years as the chief staff officer of the largest voluntary association the country had ever seen, which during his tenure would spend more than half a million dollars inspecting army camps and distributing medical supplies, food, and clothing to sick and wounded Union soldiers. During that time his administrative abilities and capacity to work cordially with his official superiors were tested even more severely than they had been on Central Park.

Even in the midst of the Civil War, however, Olmsted did not lose his interest in, or his connection with, Central Park. He was determined to retain his hold on the superintendency. Despite the heavy demands of setting up the Sanitary Commission’s central office in Washington, he spent a good six weeks in New York during the summer and fall of 1861. He spent many of those days on the park, devoting the evenings to commission business. The following year the firm of Olmsted & Vaux assumed primary responsibility for supervision. Olmsted managed to find time in August of 1862 to work on the park, however, and when Vaux became seriously ill in September, he tried vainly to free himself from Sanitary Commission tasks long enough to supervise the autumn tree planting. Through it all, he retained the hope of returning to the park once his work with the commission was over. As he told Bellows in the fall of 1862, “After the war I want to be Superintendent of the Central Park in fact as well as name.”

During the fourteen months from April 1862 to May 1863, however, Vaux carried most of the superintending responsibilities on the park. In so doing, he became as aggravated with Andrew H. Green as Olmsted had been before him. By February 1863 Vaux was apparently reaching the limit of his patience, and Olmsted offered him this counsel: “It will probably be a question of degree, of accumulation; when it gets so bad you can’t stand it, you will resign gracefully.” At the same time, Olmsted was most reluctant to break his official connection with the park: [38]

For myself, I would sacrifice any thing but honor and a fair reputation to maintain a position of considerable influence upon the management of the park. I would drop the Sanitary Commission instantly, and every thing else, to secure it with moderate means of livelihood. . . . I shall quit, whenever I do, completely quit my hold with regret, and probably not without a dull hope that Green will yet be floored, Green and the Green influences, and that I shall come to my own again—my own by right of essential qualifications and by the superior value which I can give it. It will continue to be just beyond my highest hope of fortune, to be allowed to superintend the park with a reasonable degree of freedom from Greenism.

Vaux’s growing dissatisfaction with his position was probably related to the efforts made by some of the commissioners to erect architectural structures in the park without involving him. On January 26, 1863, Green submitted various plans for gateways along 59th Street. The board referred them to the Committee on Statuary, Fountains and Architectural Structures with a directive to “consult such architects in relation thereto, as they may deem proper.” In addition to attempting to retain his position as chief architect of the park, Vaux was trying to ensure the board’s adoption of the plan for the upper park, including the proposed extension from 106th Street to 110th Street, that he and Olmsted had drawn up at the board’s request in 1859. All of these issues came to a head on May 14, 1863. On that day the board adopted the Olmsted & Vaux plan for the upper park and Vaux resigned on behalf of the firm. The lame excuse he offered was that “we now find it will be impracticable for either of us to give a continuous personal attention to the Park operations during the ensuing summer.” In fact, it appears that while he had won his fight for acceptance of the upper park design, Vaux had failed to prevent other architects from designing the entrances to the lower park.

Within a month of Vaux’s resignation, the park board announced a public design competition for the four park gates along 59th Street. But after examining the competition designs in September, the commissioners concluded that none were of acceptable quality. They authorized the treasurer to distribute the premium among the competitors in any way he might “deem judicious” and then adopted designs that had been drawn up earlier by Richard Morris Hunt. Although Vaux was later able, by means of a public letter of protest, to force the park board to postpone indefinitely the construction of Hunt’s gates, he must have been convinced in May 1863 that the board would choose someone besides himself to design the gates.

So ended the period of nearly six years during which Olmsted played his most important role on Central Park. He and Vaux did return in the fall of 1865 as “Landscape Architects to the Board,” and Olmsted retained that position from the end of his partnership with Vaux in 1872 until December 1877. Through much of that period, however, the hostility of Andrew H. Green kept Olmsted from exercising significant authority on the park. Olmsted briefly secured control of the keepers’ force again in 1873, when Green was fully occupied as comptroller [39] of the city of New York. But Green’s return to power in park affairs following the adoption of the new city charter of 1873 again reduced Olmsted’s role. It was not until 1875, after a resurgent Tammany Hall regained control of the city government, that Olmsted recovered significant authority on Central Park. A new Tammany appointee to the park board was William Martin, whose brother Howard had been chief clerk of the park and a valuable assistant to Olmsted in the pre-Civil War days. Olmsted had so prized Howard Martin’s skills that in 1862 he had convinced him to go to Washington as an accountant for the U. S. Sanitary Commission. The next year he took Martin to California to assist him in managing the Mariposa Estate. Martin returned to Central Park after the war and in 1873 Olmsted was able to prevent Green from firing him. With the appointment of William Martin to the park board, and his selection as president of the board in May 1876, Olmsted received his reward. In 1875 the board restored him to control over the keepers force and re-established the system of gardening supervision that he had instituted before the Civil War and that had lapsed under the Tweed Ring. The board also dismissed park superintendent Ryan, a Green appointee, and gave Olmsted authority to superintend all planting work on the park. For two years he strove to repair the damage caused to Central Park by more than a decade of insufficient attention to his design principles, including the wholesale removal of shrubs and trimming up of trees carried out by the Tweed Ring’s park board.

This opportunity to restore the original conception of the park was all too brief, however. As “Honest John” Kelly increased his control of the city, he found William Martin, who was primarily a real estate developer rather than a politician, too slow a student of patronage politics. In December 1877 Olmsted’s second and final period of authority on the park came to an abrupt end. The park board abolished the department of design and superintendence, of which Olmsted was the head, and made him an unsalaried “Consulting Landscape Architect” who was to be paid for his services as they were rendered. The only member of the board who opposed the move was Martin, and five days later the mayor replaced him with a man more responsive to the wishes of Tammany Hall.

The difficulties Olmsted encountered in his attempts to direct the development of Central Park after the Civil War show how important for the whole enterprise the four prewar years of design and construction had been. Those years were Olmsted’s one opportunity to preordain and control what the park would become. Furthermore, there would be no second period equal either in intensity or in influence to the remarkable eighteen months between his appointment as architect-in-chief in May 1858 and the appointment of Andrew H. Green as comptroller and counterbalancing authority in October 1859. During that period Olmsted exercised full authority on the park for the first and only time. In those few months he brought construction of the lower park to virtual completion and laid the basis for the form of the upper park. He directed the labor of as many as 3,800 men on construction work that cost over two and one-half [40] million dollars. It was the most intense and the most productive period of park-building in his entire career. This volume presents the documentary history of that whole remarkable episode in his own career and in the history of the urban park movement in the United States.