INTRODUCTION

The years between 1865 and 1874 were among the most active and complex of Frederick Law Olmsted’s career. The period is bracketed by his arrival in New York City to collaborate with Calvert Vaux on the design of Prospect Park and the partners’ last report to the Brooklyn park commission of January 1, 1874. During this time the firm of Olmsted, Vaux & Company designed that city’s park and parkway system, several parks and public spaces in nearby Manhattan, other parks and parkways in Buffalo, New York, and Chicago, Illinois, at least five parks in smaller cities, several subdivisions and suburban communities, and two asylums for the insane. Olmsted and Vaux also advised or drew up plans for at least nine colleges and universities, perhaps as many as eleven. These public, private, and institutional projects brought Olmsted into close contact with other landscape architects, such as Horace William Shaler Cleveland and Jacob Weidenmann, who after working at Prospect Park went on to distinguished careers in their own right, and in frequent correspondence with William Hammond Hall, the engineer who designed San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, and Robert Morris Copeland, a talented landscape architect perhaps best remembered as author of The Most Beautiful City in America: Essay and Plan for the Improvement of the City of Boston (1872). Although the American Society of Landscape Architects would not be organized until 1899, Olmsted and Vaux’s activities during these years helped establish the foundations for the profession.

Olmsted also became involved in numerous other projects ranging from journalism to providing aid for drought-stricken Southern farmers facing starvation. Then, in 1871, following the collapse of the Tweed Ring, he assumed a significant role in New York City politics. Olmsted served for five [2] months as president of the Board of Commissioners of the Department of Public Parks and as a member of the powerful Board of Audit and Apportionment. By the time of this last appointment, in March 1872, Olmsted had come to believe that his partnership with Vaux was financially and professionally disadvantageous. In 1872 he and Vaux dissolved Olmsted, Vaux & Company but agreed, as Olmsted & Vaux, Landscape Architects, to complete the public design projects for which they had provided superintendence.

The documents, correspondence, and unpublished texts presented in this volume constitute the most important part of the historical record of these years that has survived. There are, however, significant omissions. Because Olmsted and Vaux usually worked in close proximity, much of their exchange of ideas was verbal, not written. Even if a draft of a particular report is in Olmsted’s hand, it is not possible to determine with certainty if it represents his ideas or Vaux’s, or, indeed, if it expresses a consensus or compromise reflecting both partners’ views. Equally important, after the dissolution of the partnership, Vaux retained at least some of the firm’s papers which are now lost. Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., and Theodora Kimball borrowed a number of documents from Vaux’s son, Bowyer, when preparing Forty Years of Landscape Architecture (1922–1928). Typed transcriptions prepared at that time indicate that at least one book of letterpress copies essential to a complete understanding of the firm’s activities has not survived.

Other important projects undertaken by Olmsted and Vaux during these years similarly suffer from lack of documentation. The minutes of the Brooklyn park commission were not published in the nineteenth century, and the editors have been unable to discover surviving manuscript records relevant to its activities during this period. The same is true for the reports the firm surely prepared to accompany plans for Seaside Park in Bridgeport, Connecticut (1867), South Park, in Fall River, Massachusetts (1870), the Hudson River State Hospital for the Insane, north of Poughkeepsie, New York (1867), and the plat of Tacoma, Washington (1873), as well as much of the outgoing correspondence relating to the Buffalo (1868) and Chicago park systems (1871). The diary of Olmsted’s associate Alfred Janson Bloor indicates that Olmsted and Vaux worked on other landscape projects during 1866 and 1867 for which little or no other verification exists. As a result, most of the materials relating to Olmsted and Vaux’s involvement in landscape design during these years are published reports.

Several important documents prepared during these years will be published in a separate volume of The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted, number 11, a collection of Olmsted’s more extended writings on park design. These include the firm’s 1866 and 1868 Prospect Park reports and Olmsted’s address to the Prospect Park Scientific Association (1868), as well as reports for the Buffalo and Chicago park commissions, Olmsted and Vaux’s assessment of the changes undertaken at Central Park during the ascendency of the Tweed Ring, Olmsted’s February 20, 1873, “Instructions to the Keepers of the [3] Central Park,” and Olmsted’s classic statement of the importance of park development as part of the process of urban growth, Public Parks and the Enlargement of Towns (1870).

In the summer of 1865, Frederick Law Olmsted’s career was at a decisive point. He had been released as superintendent of the Mariposa Estate, a gold-mining property that had collapsed financially earlier that year despite his strenuous efforts to make its operations profitable. He also worried about money the company owed him. Perhaps most important, Olmsted feared that the company’s imminent default, amid accusations of stock-jobbing, might adversely affect his reputation for honesty and competence. While living in California, Olmsted had received a series of letters from Calvert Vaux urging him to resume their partnership as landscape architects, a proposition that was attractive but that also evoked memories of the frustrations both men had experienced at the hands of the Central Park commission. After months of indecision Olmsted chose to return east.

When Olmsted, with his wife and four children, sailed into New York harbor on November 22, 1865, he resumed what proved to be a very productive partnership with Vaux. At that time, however, the only commission Vaux had secured was for the preparation of a plan for Prospect Park in Brooklyn, New York. The partners had also been appointed consulting landscape architects to the Central Park commission, though without any firm commitment that they would be expected to resume responsibility for superintending construction, maintenance, and use of the park.

Landscape architecture as a profession also had its drawbacks. Although Olmsted and Vaux cherished Central Park as an important contribution to the evolution of America’s republican experience, Olmsted had been frustrated in his dealings with the Central Park commission in general and its comptroller, Andrew H. Green, in particular. Moreover, the partners disagreed about various aspects of their professional relationship, as had become evident in the revealing series of letters exchanged by them between 1863 and 1865. Vaux, for example, alleged that Olmsted had received an undue amount of credit for the design they had prepared together. In addition, Vaux tended to emphasize the importance of their joint creation as a work of art, while Olmsted stressed his personal accomplishments as an administrator, a role Vaux derided when he referred to his partner as “Frederick the Great, Prince of the Park Police.”

During Olmsted’s residence in Washington and in California, Vaux had defended their common interest in Central Park. In 1863 the monumental designs Richard Morris Hunt had prepared for the southern entrances at 59th Street posed an immediate threat to their conception of the park. Vaux persuaded the commissioners that Hunt’s gateways would be inappropriate, and at the same meeting gained their approval of his and Olmsted’s plan for the extension of the park to 110th Street. He then submitted his and Olmsted’s [4] resignation—a measure of how serious the rift between the partners and their employers had become. In 1864 Vaux also defended their joint reputation during a lawsuit initiated by Egbert L. Viele, the engineer who had prepared the topographical survey and original plan for Central Park. Viele charged that Olmsted and Vaux, like the other entrants in the competition for designs, had stolen his plan—an accusation that Vaux vigorously rebutted at the trial.

Laying the foundation for the resumption of their joint work in landscape architecture in New York City, Vaux established conditions that he believed would be acceptable to Olmsted. Crucial was Vaux’s conciliation of Green, the dominant member of the Central Park commission. He also negotiated with James S. T. Stranahan, president of the Prospect Park commission, about preparing a design for that park. When Vaux appeared likely to receive the commission for the design (but not yet for superintending construction), he invited Olmsted to collaborate. Upon receipt of Vaux’s preliminary report on boundaries, Olmsted called it excellent and expressed great interest in the possibility of joining Vaux in that work.

Still, Olmsted was reluctant to accept Vaux’s invitation and return east. Involved in preparing designs for a cemetery, a college, and several private estates in California, he was also promoting the establishment of a public pleasure ground in San Francisco and was chairman of the commission overseeing the new state reservation at Yosemite. Moreover, Olmsted worried that his investments in California—the only financial capital he had accumulated during almost two decades of work—would require careful oversight that would be impossible from New York City. He also wondered whether landscape architecture would be remunerative enough to support his family and feared the possibility of “being turned out or harried out just as I had got settled.”

While continuing his discussions with Green and Stranahan, Vaux appealed to Olmsted by several means. First, knowing the pride his partner took in Central Park, Vaux pointed out that Olmsted’s reputation might suffer were the park to decline under a different, less sympathetic administration. Vaux also reminded Olmsted of the importance of the ideas represented in physical form by the park. Completion of Central Park and the new undertaking at Brooklyn would offer opportunities to advance the reformist goals both men shared. Finally, Vaux confessed to being a very incomplete landscape architect and urged Olmsted to realize that what they could accomplish in park design as partners was “of vital importance to the progress of the Republic.” During the spring and early summer of 1865, when Olmsted remained undecided, Vaux first sent him the preliminary terms of agreement with the Prospect Park commission and within a month informed him that they had just been reappointed landscape architects to Central Park “with the understanding that they are to be called on to advise & report on architectural designs that may be submitted to the Board &c.”

[5]

After Olmsted returned to New York, he and Vaux resumed their professional practice, beginning with completion of the plans and reports for the California projects. Another pressing task was the first report on Prospect Park, which they finished in January 1866. The commissioners accepted the report and accompanying plan on May 29, 1866, at which time they appointed Olmsted and Vaux “Landscape Architects.” On July 1 the firm assumed responsibility for superintendence of construction.

Journalism, a second longstanding interest, still appealed to Olmsted in 1865. He continued to consider this field a potentially powerful means of raising the level of civilization in the United States. During the 1850s and 1860s Olmsted had drawn up prospectuses for a weekly journal that would be committed, as he wrote in 1863, to “careful, candid and conscientious study” of contemporary events, social and political issues, literature, and the fine arts. In 1863 he shared his ideas with E. L. Godkin, a young Anglo-Irish journalist, and enlisted his support as the prospective assistant editor. When Olmsted moved to California that September, he left the project with Godkin, who in July 1865 began publication of a periodical similar to the one Olmsted had conceived, entitled the Nation. Upon Olmsted’s return to New York City, Godkin invited him to become associate editor of the financially pressed journal.

A host of problems plagued the fledgling paper and its editor, Godkin. Some of these difficulties stemmed from conflicting views of the journal’s purpose and the editorial positions of its financial backers. Godkin had raised his capital of $100,000 from subscribers in Boston, Philadelphia, and New York. Some of the Boston-area subscribers—in particular, abolitionist George Luther Stearns, who had contributed a substantial amount of money—expected the Nation to be a journal which would uncompromisingly champion the cause of the former slaves and support Radical Republicans in Congress. However, Godkin had charted an independent course in politics, and his criticism of Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner, a leading advocate of the interests of the freedmen, enraged Stearns. Another controversy arose over the issue of the tariff. Many of the Boston subscribers were free-traders, as was Godkin himself, while the Philadelphia investors were protectionists. In the attempt to conciliate these contradictory positions, Godkin had secretly promised Philadelphian J. Miller McKim that the Nation would not promote free-trade policies, which in turn angered a number of Bostonians. Lagging sales and these internal difficulties made the Nation’s survival uncertain.

Thus Godkin asked Olmsted to be an associate editor in the hope that Olmsted’s appointment would establish confidence in the Nation, among stockholders as well as the reading public. The terms of the agreement called for Olmsted to serve as associate editor for two and a half years, for which he would receive ten shares of the journal’s stock as payment. Apparently his duties included mollifying Stearns, and Olmsted did effect a short-term [6] reconciliation between the disgruntled investor and Godkin. But in March 1866, when Godkin proposed publishing the Nation on a semiweekly basis, Stearns set in motion events that led to the dissolution of the original Nation Association and the formation of a new company.

The extent of Olmsted’s editorial responsibilities at the journal has been difficult to assess. Although Godkin had determined the magazine’s editorial policy while Olmsted was in California, Olmsted generally agreed with it. Apparently he played a major editorial role during the first six months of 1866. In February of that year Godkin testified to his importance: “Olmsted sees, and discusses and is responsible for everything that appears in the Nation except now and then a book notice. There is nothing merely nominal about his connection with it.” Indeed, Olmsted was hard at work soliciting articles from friends and acquaintances such as Henry Lee and James Russell Lowell and overseeing the direction of the journal. He and Godkin seem to have hammered out the Nation’s political positions together: in February 1866 Godkin complained privately that he wished to include more stringent criticism of President Andrew Johnson but that Olmsted was very reluctant to do so. It seems likely, however, that Olmsted wrote few if any of the unsigned editorials and articles published in the Nation during these months.

By the summer of 1866, Olmsted’s editorial role at the Nation appears to have diminished as he gave precedence to his work as a landscape architect. Because he was committed to keeping the journal afloat, in May and June he took part in the complicated transactions that liquidated the old Nation Association of stockholders and replaced it with a new company. Under this arrangement, J. Miller McKim owned one-third of the stock, Godkin one-half, and Olmsted the remaining one-sixth. Then, to continue publication, they borrowed money on a note payable in five years. Olmsted, however, was unwilling to assume a larger, more public role in the journal. “The name of the firm is E. L. Godkin and Co.,” Godkin reported to Charles Eliot Norton in July 1866. “I wanted Olmsted’s name, but he was afraid it would injure his other business.” Olmsted continued to be a financial backer of the Nation until 1871, when he transferred his interest in the journal to Godkin and McKim.

After the summer of 1866, Olmsted appears to have contributed little to the Nation, but he retained his interest in politics, which he discussed most fully with four close friends: Godkin, George William Curtis, Charles Eliot Norton, and Samuel Bowles. The five shared many views and goals for America, and all would become involved to varying degrees in the reform movement of Liberal Republicanism in the 1870s. In 1866 the political questions they believed most important involved Reconstruction, the relation of the former Confederate states to the federal government, and the composition of the Republican party. While all five friends were uncomfortable with the Radical Republican plan of Reconstruction, none was willing to espouse President Andrew Johnson’s far more conservative alternative. Indeed, as [7] moderate Republicans, Olmsted and his friends demanded that the South ratify the Fourteenth Amendment as a minimal guarantee of civil rights for the freedmen. Although Olmsted advocated a speedy readmission of the rebellious states, he was unwilling to sacrifice what he considered the “fruits of victory.” He and Norton agreed that the punitive measures enacted by Southern legislatures, and the violence against blacks that occurred, for example, in race riots in New Orleans and Memphis, indicated that the old spirit of slavery was not dead among the whites. Thus the Fourteenth Amendment was vital for the protection of the former slaves. Still, for Olmsted, an enormously disturbing part of the debate over Reconstruction policy was the factionalism it created within the Republican party. He angrily denounced the attacks that Horace Greeley, editor of the New-York Tribune, made on moderate Republicans who were not yet ready to call for enfranchising all southern freedmen.

In the summer of 1866, Olmsted found General of the Army Ulysses S. Grant to be the one bright spot in national affairs. Olmsted had admired Grant since their first meeting near Vicksburg in the spring of 1863 and considered him a great general. When, during the spring of 1868, reports of Grant’s drinking problem threatened to derail his candidacy for the presidency, Olmsted wrote a letter to the Nation detailing what he believed to be the origin of such rumors and defending Grant against them.

Olmsted welcomed Grant’s election, but later revelations of corruption in that administration disgusted him and his friends. The extent of disaffection varied among them, but in 1872 all gave some support to the Liberal Republican movement and its convention, held in Cincinnati, to choose an alternative candidate to Grant. Olmsted angrily repudiated that convention when it nominated Horace Greeley rather than Charles Francis Adams, a man of unquestioned probity and diplomatic accomplishment. Olmsted chided Godkin for taking too neutral a stance in the election. When Samuel Bowles endorsed Greeley’s candidacy in the Springfield Republican, Olmsted could not contain his anger. A series of letters ensued in which Olmsted denounced Greeley’s ties to Tammany Hall and political corruption in New York City as well as his other political transgressions, all in a fruitless attempt to dissuade Bowles. To Olmsted, the direction the Republican party was taking must have seemed a repudiation of the high moral purpose of the war.

Despite his disdain for both Greeley and the Grant administration, Olmsted himself was not willing to enter the political arena. When a dissident faction of Liberal Republicans nominated him for the vice-presidency, he disavowed any political ambition. But as a concerned citizen, Olmsted was eager to take part in humanitarian endeavors. In 1867 social as well as political issues engaged him as he played a major role in the efforts of the Southern Famine Relief Commission in New York City. Early in 1867, reports began to reach the North that prolonged drought and the resultant failure of crops in the South portended famine. At a mass meeting called at the Cooper [8] Union late in January, Olmsted was among those proposed as members of the newly formed commission to aid the stricken region. This group, headed by Archibald Russell, a New York City merchant, was much like temporary relief societies being organized in other northern and midwestern cities.

As the Famine Relief Commission took form in February 1867, Olmsted was chosen recording secretary and two weeks later became chairman of the standing committee on “Business with the North.” The commission apparently meant to utilize Olmsted’s abilities as a publicist, which he had demonstrated as general secretary of the U. S. Sanitary Commission during the first two years of the Civil War. Olmsted had at that time used his ties to New York City newspaper editors to influence public opinion in favor of the reorganization of the army’s Medical Bureau. For the Famine Relief Commission he carefully edited the circulars explaining its purposes and asking for donations. Moreover, drawing upon his experience at the Sanitary Commission, he argued for the systematic allocation of corn and other supplies to areas in need. Much as the Sanitary Commission had employed army doctors to distribute supplies, the Famine Relief Commission called upon agents of the Freedmen’s Bureau, who usually were army officers, to allot its contributions. Olmsted may have suggested this arrangement; he certainly urged the relief commission to employ as its general agent John Bowne, a trusted employee of the Sanitary Commission. Olmsted may also have influenced the commission to look to California as a source of generous contributions, just as the Sanitary Commission had done. As the affairs of the commission were coming to an end late in 1867, Olmsted wrote the final report of its activities. In this he took an uncharacteristically conciliatory, if not forgiving, attitude toward the rebellious South. But while Olmsted regularly attended the Famine Relief Commission’s meetings and lent his considerable experience in support of its endeavors, he never brought to its work the same feverish intensity that marked his years at the Sanitary Commission. During the Civil War, he had believed that not only individual lives but the very survival of the nation was at stake. The cause of famine relief, while important, was not so compelling, especially given his numerous professional obligations.

The famine in the South was not the only “social” issue that concerned Olmsted in the late 1860s. He remained intrigued by the question of how immigration had shaped the American character. In 1863 his travels in the South and Midwest had led Olmsted to begin a manuscript about civilization in America, and his sojourn in California had given him further opportunity to study a society in its pioneering stage. In New York, Olmsted continued to draft portions of the study, and to supplement his observations he regained possession of questionnaires that detailed the nativity and habits of Union soldiers. While at the Sanitary Commission, Olmsted had devised these questionnaires to assemble data on what he called “social statistics” and had paid its agents to administer them to Union soldiers. Late in 1867 he [9] attempted to interest his friend Frederick Knapp in analyzing the completed forms, but Knapp apparently never finished the task.

A more obvious area of Olmsted’s interest in “social questions” was his membership and activity in the American Social Science Association (founded in Boston in 1865 as the American Association for the Promotion of Social Science). By the late 1860s Olmsted had joined this society in which so many of his friends and acquaintances (for example, E. L. Godkin, George William Curtis, J. Miller McKim) were active. Olmsted found the goals of the association—to “collect all facts, diffuse all knowledge, and stimulate all inquiry, which have a bearing on social welfare”—to be in harmony with many of his endeavors at the Sanitary and Famine Relief commissions, his inquiry into immigration and civilization, and his attempt to obtain information about recreational areas available to school children. Olmsted, like the founders of the American Social Science Association, believed that research and the gathering of information, especially statistical data, were closely linked to reform and the amelioration of social problems. Olmsted and these other promoters of social science shared a faith in “expert opinion” and assumed that the uncovering and dissemination of information would bring about reform. Early in 1870 Olmsted presented a major address on the subject of “Public Parks and the Enlargement of Towns” at the association’s annual meeting, and its Journal of Social Science published the paper the following year.

Olmsted’s interest in politics and involvement in social reform were expressions of his enduring concern for the future of American civilization—a concern which also manifested itself in his views on education. In a series of designs for college campuses and other writings, he articulated a concept of the role that publicly supported schools and institutions of higher education could play in a democracy. Given his profession as a landscape architect, Olmsted was particularly concerned with creating educational environments that would most benefit the students and the communities in which they lived.

In his various writings on education Olmsted rejected many of the accepted practices of his day. Although he did not refer to the maxim, “a sound mind in a sound body,” many of his ideas about education addressed that point. He considered his own, unstructured education to have been desultory and undirected, yet he believed that he had derived from it certain advantages not usually obtainable in schools. Thus he concluded that the best education should go beyond traditional academic subjects and introduce the student to outdoor recreation. In a letter to his friend Frederick Knapp, then principal of a military academy at Eagleswood, New Jersey, Olmsted outlined the elements of the education he desired for his stepson John Charles. Among these were physical fitness, the skills of a woodsman and sailor, and a working knowledge of farming and surveying. He considered these aspects of education [10] so important that he ranked them ahead of more traditional studies, including “Moral Philosophy, Theoretical Geometry, Rhetoric, Declamation & even French.”

In an essay on public schools and recreation that Olmsted apparently wrote about 1868 but never published, he further elaborated his belief that recreational activity in the outdoors was vital to a student’s physical and emotional well-being. Based on his observations, Olmsted inferred that wealthy parents were reluctant to educate their children in the common schools, where they might be subject to bad influences. If healthful forms of play were connected to the public schools, it would reassure such parents that they could safely entrust their children to the public systems. The participation of the well-to-do would ensure a proper level of financial support for the common schools and preserve them as bulwarks of the American republic.

Despite this realization of the importance of primary and secondary education, much of Olmsted’s thinking during these years centered on the role and duties of colleges. He took particular interest in the ways in which higher education was developing in the postwar period. Shortly after returning from the California frontier in November 1865, he accepted several commissions to design college campuses.

That Olmsted would devote so many creative hours to the design of institutions of higher learning might at first appear surprising. A serious eye infection had cut short his own schooling, and in the 1840s he had derided college as a “most grievous nuisance.” Yet as early as his 1850 walking tour of England and continental Europe, Olmsted had recognized that education could be an important means of furthering his goal of refining and civilizing American society. To do so, however, colleges would have to accomplish more than preparing men for a life of commerce or providing credentials as gentlemen.

The Morrill Act brought about significant changes in American higher education and provided Olmsted with the opportunity to design several college campuses. This law granted federal land, or scrip, to the states according to their congressional representation. States that accepted the terms of the law agreed to use the interest on money raised from the sale of the federal land to create educational opportunities for the “liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions of life.” Addressing the general lack of preparedness army recruits had shown at the outbreak of the Civil War, this law also mandated military training. Because the legislation’s only other requirement was that the endowed colleges begin instruction within five years, it did little to specify how each state should use the proceeds from the sale of federal land to promote agricultural and industrial education. Thus, in almost every state, allocation of resources from the Morrill Act became a source of contention, with sectarian schools battling nondenominational ones, and established liberal arts colleges competing [11] with newer public institutions. The Morrill Act marked the first major federal involvement in higher education in the United States; predictably, it spawned a vigorous though fragmented debate about the role of education in post–Civil War America.

Olmsted participated in that debate as he considered anew the importance of education to the future of the American republic. In letters, unpublished pieces, as well as designs and reports, he examined the relationship of higher education to the demands of adult life and the needs of community. As these plans and reports indicate, Olmsted was convinced that the physical environment in which instruction took place was an essential component of the education students would receive.

In April 1866, several months after completing his report to the College of California at Berkeley, then a private institution, and while preparing the plan for the Columbia Institution, Olmsted informed Charles Eliot Norton that the “Agricultural College question” was “very momentous.” The issue, as Olmsted perceived it, was whether a college could be “democratized”—whether it could combine the education of “head-workers & hand-workers.” Thus far, the prospects had been bleak. He had learned from recent graduates of Yale’s Sheffield Scientific School that students in the traditional curriculum treated Sheffield’s professors and students as social inferiors. Olmsted sought a way to prevent such “artificial distinctions” and found it in a common curriculum that all students would pursue for at least one year. During that time, he predicted, students would form friendships without regard for their fellows’ choice of career. “Alma Mater,” Olmsted asserted, “should be the mother common to all classes.”

Olmsted had numerous opportunities in the 1860s to work out a blueprint for the arrangement of the ideal college. In his report to the trustees of the College of California, he set out some of the major points he would elaborate in his other designs for colleges during this period. He conceived of the college as an organic entity whose buildings should be arranged to allow growth without destroying its overall beauty. This understanding led Olmsted to reject as “impractical” the “formal and perfectly symmetrical” arrangements of buildings that characterized so many Eastern colleges and to favor instead a “picturesque” treatment that would “better harmonize artistically with the general character desired for the neighborhood.”

In his design for Berkeley Neighborhood, Olmsted attempted to create a physical setting that would be the optimal environment for educating young men. In this respect, he considered the importance of both the community surrounding the school and the actual housing of the students. Unlike numerous educators of his day, Olmsted rejected a completely rural setting as ideal for a campus, calling it as inappropriate as an urban one. The first was too far removed from the “real life of civilization,” the second “not favorable to the formation of habits of methodical scholarship.” A suburban [12] setting such as that at Berkeley would, he predicted, be an advantageous location because it would supply the proper balance—a certain amount of seclusion for contemplative thought combined with interaction with the nonacademic world. Rejecting the “barrenness of monastic study,” he believed that fledgling scholars “should be surrounded by manifestations of refined domestic life.” Indeed, Olmsted argued that housing was an essential part of the college’s educational apparatus. He decried the two forms of domicile most often used by colleges: the lodging of students in hotels or with nearby families; or, alternatively, housing them in dormitories, which Olmsted vilified as “large barracks and commons.” Instead, he advised, the college could fulfill its civilizing mission by providing student dwellings that have “the general appearance of large domestic houses,” each with a common room, a dining room, and private rooms for twenty to forty residents.

Preparing the Berkeley Neighborhood plan and report had stimulated Olmsted’s thought on the importance of a properly designed campus to the college’s mission. The three principal concerns he expressed in that report—the need for an appropriate site plan that provided space for growth, the relationship of campus to community, and the scale and design of buildings—drew upon his own formative experiences and reflected his long-standing belief in the importance of environment in shaping character. He elaborated on these ideas when commissioned to prepare plans for the Massachusetts Agricultural College, a new land-grant school near Amherst, and the Maine College of Agriculture and the Mechanic Arts, now the University of Maine at Orono.

When Olmsted examined the grounds of the Massachusetts college, a majority of its trustees, headed by D. Waldo Lincoln, had already decided to erect a four-story stone structure with a Mansard roof. Olmsted objected both to the building, designed by Boston architect Joseph R. Richards, and to its proposed location near the center of the property. His report to the trustees held out an alternative arrangement that embodied his ideal for the land-grant college. Questioning “whether so large a building could be adapted to the requirements of an institution of a somewhat novel character,” Olmsted instead recommended a “less formal and rigid plan of building.” The customary use of large structures in campus design, he explained, had resulted from the colleges’ original locations in cities rather than from any special fitness of large buildings for instruction. On a site such as that of the Massachusetts college, he warned, “a straight-sided, evenly-balanced, many-storied structure of stone, will not be merely incongruous to the landscape, but will certainly impose quite unnecessary inconvenience and fatigue upon those who are to occupy it.” His solution was four smaller two-story buildings to house, respectively, classrooms, a laboratory and museum, a reading room and library, and a gymnasium and assembly hall.

Olmsted then proposed to rearrange the configuration of the college [13] in a way that affirmed the relationship of campus to community. He argued that the site chosen by Lincoln and other trustees would place the principal building on valuable farmland far from the main road. Such a location would interfere with what Olmsted believed to be the campus’s primary mission, to enhance the quality of rural life. For the college successfully to train “men of civilization,” Olmsted insisted, the campus should resemble a “model rural neighborhood” or “community.”

In formulating his ideal for the Massachusetts college, Olmsted contrasted the New England he had known in his youth with agricultural districts he later visited in the South and Midwest. He pointed out that a secluded campus would resemble a Southern plantation, withdrawn from the surrounding community, rather than the typical New England farmstead, located on the road that linked it to neighbors, the meeting house, and the nearby village. The contrast Olmsted drew between communal New England and other rural areas revealed much about what he believed Massachusetts’ land-grant college should be. He criticized farming communities in the South and Midwest for their “few public edifices or public works of any kind.” Massachusetts farmers, by contrast, were already leading the “drift” of civilization to a higher level. In his estimation they were citizens—a word that to Olmsted signified an acceptance of communal responsibility. Unlike yeomen elsewhere who tolerated “raw banks of earth, mud-puddles, heaps of rubbish and slatternly fences,” New England farmers devoted considerable time to maintaining “the common roads, bridges, schools, meeting-houses, public grounds, grave yards, monuments, libraries, and lyceums.”

Olmsted believed that the institutions of higher education established under the provisions of the Morrill Act should promote the commitment to community he attributed to New England farmers. He sought to convince the trustees of the Massachusetts Agricultural College that the way to achieve this was through a productive interaction between school and society. Although Olmsted envisioned the land-grant college as a model farm that would demonstrate the latest agricultural innovations to local farmers, he considered equally important its role as a model community that would reinvigorate the surrounding neighborhood and civilize the students so that they could further propagate such ideals. As a result, Olmsted hoped that the land-grant colleges would educate farmers’ and mechanics’ sons without drawing them away to urban areas. Instead, these graduates would return and work to improve their home communities. To stem what contemporaries perceived to be a widespread migration from rural areas, Olmsted argued that farmers and their families should partake of the “enjoyments of intellect and taste which are common to men engaged in any ordinary professional calling.” The college’s mission, broadly conceived, was to enhance the quality of rural life. Essential to that purpose was the kind of residence in which the students would live. As in his earlier report, Olmsted rejected both off-campus [14] housing and large dormitories. Students should reside in structures possessing a “domestic character,” he argued, which would advance their “education in the art of making a farmer’s home cheerful and attractive.”

Whatever its merits, Olmsted’s report worsened divisions among the college trustees in June and July 1866. Lincoln considered the report an insult and was further offended when Olmsted, in a subsequent letter, asserted that the “individuality of an agricultural college lies in its agriculture, not in its building, which is a mere piece of apparel to be fitted to the requirements of the agricultural trunk.” The trustees limited circulation of Olmsted’s report, and their failure to follow his advice helped bring about the resignation of the college’s president, Henry Flagg French, and trustee William B. Washburn. When erroneous accounts of Olmsted’s recommendations appeared in Amherst newspapers, French urged him to allow Samuel Bowles to publish the report in the Springfield Republican. The excerpts printed by Bowles elicited numerous letters asking Olmsted for copies of the report and encouraged him to publish it in December 1866 as A Few Things to be Thought of before Proceeding to Plan Buildings for the National Agricultural Colleges.

Olmsted’s January 1867 report to the trustees of the Maine college reiterated many of the themes presented in the earlier proposals to the California and Massachusetts colleges. The purpose of Maine’s land-grant college, he pointed out, was to provide “a liberal education to young men without unfitting them for or disinclining them to industrial callings.” He believed that in addition to training better farmers and workers, the college had a responsibility to elevate the “tastes, inclinations and habits” of its students.

Olmsted’s plan for the Maine institution, like that for the Massachusetts college, envisioned the campus as a model New England community. The trustees had acquired two farms near Orono that were separated by a public road. Olmsted proposed to treat the road as the “street of a village,” with the president’s house located at the southern end of the campus and that of the farm superintendent at the northern end. Farm buildings and model fields located in the northwestern part of the site and the arboretum and botanical garden near the president’s house would be visible from the road and would instruct the community as well as the students. At the center of the campus Olmsted placed the museum, library, and chapel, to define the campus in much the same way that civil and ecclesiastical structures adjacent to the village green often characterized the New England community.

South of the chapel on both sides of the public road, Olmsted designated sites for the small cottages that he proposed as student housing. In this report he argued even more explicitly against the more economical dormitory, which he characterized as a “common barn or barrack-like building.” Pointing out that most students in later life would reside in single-family dwellings, he asserted that as much as possible their collegiate domiciles should be “models of healthy, cheerful, convenient family homes.” After learning from the campus environment, graduates would know how to provide [15] proper dwellings for their families. The result, Olmsted predicted, would make rural life attractive for women and children and would thereby slow the depopulation of agricultural districts.

The most distinctive part of Olmsted’s recommendations for the Maine college was the emphasis he placed on military training, a concern that the Civil War had made important to him. His observations of the Union army during the summer of 1861 had revealed that volunteer officers possessed little knowledge of even the most rudimentary procedures to ensure that the troops were properly fed, clothed, and sheltered. Well-trained officers, he concluded, could protect the health of soldiers and maintain the necessary morale and discipline.

Thus, in his proposals for housing and his prescriptions for the students’ regimen, Olmsted sought to prepare them to become citizen-officers. While appropriate housing would teach domesticity, organization into platoons would impart military discipline. Olmsted intended that each student in turn would act as assistant commissary for his company in the same manner as an army officer, even using the same forms to requisition supplies. In phrases strikingly reminiscent of his instructions to Frederick Knapp about the education he desired for his stepson John, Olmsted asserted that “no student should be graduated with honor who could not construct and use a camp oven and camp kitchen, or who was not prepared to undertake himself and to instruct others in all the duties of a regimental commissary officer.” Such training would ensure that graduates would be prepared for leadership in their professions, in their communities, and should the need again arise, in defending their country.

The campus design by Olmsted and Vaux that was carried out most completely during these years was the Columbia Institution for the Deaf and Dumb (now Gallaudet University) in Washington, D.C. In 1865 its president, Edward Miner Gallaudet, had begun discussions with Vaux and architect Frederick C. Withers about architectural commissions for a major building program he envisioned. Upon Olmsted’s return, Gallaudet, who had been a neighbor of the Olmsted family in Hartford and who attended the same church, asked Olmsted to undertake a site plan for the campus that would unite two existing buildings.

The plan and report, both attributed to the firm, attempted to create an appropriate setting for the institution’s school and college. Although undertaken on a much smaller scale than the campuses Olmsted platted for the land-grant colleges, and located within a city, the plan for Gallaudet incorporated Olmsted’s idea of campus as community by including a common chapel flanked by independent dining facilities for college and school as well as sites for residences of the president and faculty. The carefully landscaped grounds would buffer the college from the surrounding environment, while its ornamental gardens would provide “agreeable sensation or delicate perception” to deaf students. Perhaps because of its urban location, the new buildings [16] that rose on the campus, designed by Withers, were much larger than any structures Olmsted otherwise recommended for collegiate use during this period.

Although Olmsted’s proposals to the College of California and to the land-grant schools in Massachusetts and Maine were never carried out, they, together with the plan for the Columbia Institution, constitute the earliest and most comprehensive statement of his philosophy of campus design. Many of the same ideas about students’ need for an aesthetic and communal education appear in other plans that he and Vaux prepared during these years. Olmsted advised Andrew Dickson White, first president of Cornell University, to arrange buildings according to a “more free, liberal, picturesque & convenient” plan than would be possible in the quadrangle Ezra Cornell favored, and thereby avoid the “same mistake which all the large colleges of the country are now repenting.” And he persuaded William A. Stearns, president of Amherst College, to adopt a plan that would create a coherently organized campus separate from the town that was growing around it. The college would then occupy a middle ground—neither in rural seclusion nor in the bustle of town or city–which, in his report to the College of California, Olmsted had indicated was essential both to scholarly pursuits and social and intellectual engagement with the daily life of the community.

What united Olmsted’s plans for college campuses during these years was a personal philosophy of education. Although few educators accepted his ideas, or were able to implement them, Olmsted believed strongly that the location and layout of the campus played an essential role in the students’ experience. The properly designed campus, as he envisioned it, would educate young men in communal responsibilities and domestic amenities. A well-designed campus, he informed the president of Trinity College in Hartford, would promote the “acquisition of the general quality of culture which is the chief end of a liberal education.” Together, faculty and campus would raise the level of civilization in America and reaffirm the republican values Olmsted cherished.

In planning the grounds of college campuses, Olmsted sought to provide opportunities for quiet scholarly contemplation as well as interaction with the nearby community. By contrast, in designing the grounds of asylums for the insane, he sought to create a complete therapeutic setting in which buildings and parklike surroundings would aid in the treatment of patients. Thus he landscaped the grounds to insulate patients from the disturbances of the outside world and yet also, through pastoral scenery, to counter the impression of confinement and restraint that the hospital would otherwise convey.

Olmsted, Vaux & Company prepared a site plan for the Hudson River State Hospital for the Insane, north of Poughkeepsie, New York, in 1867, for which Vaux, Withers & Company designed the hospital and ancillary [17] structures. The hospital’s superintendent, Dr. Joseph Cleaveland, was a follower of the Kirkbride principles of institutional design, which called for a central administration building with patients’ rooms in flanking wings. Withers’ design arranged the pavilions as steps linked by connecting passageways. This arrangement would allow better fenestration and ventilation as well as the separation of patients who required different amounts of care. The four-and-a-half-story structure, if completed as planned, would have measured almost a half-mile in extent. Although the editors have been unable to locate surviving documents that explain the designers’ intent, an undated but early map of the site suggests that Olmsted attempted to create a serene landscape that would have a soothing effect on the minds of inmates. The same is true of the site plan Olmsted prepared for an asylum in Buffalo, New York, where the building, designed by Henry Hobson Richardson, also placed patients’ rooms in pavilion wings.

As sympathetically designed as these landscapes were for potential patients, Olmsted believed that an institution for the insane must be domestic in scale. Prior to the Civil War, he and Vaux had advised John S. Butler, superintendent of the Hartford Retreat for the Insane, on a plan for improving that institution’s grounds. In 1872, at the time of his retirement, Butler wrote Olmsted and recalled that the plans he and Vaux had prepared for the grounds and buildings of the retreat had served to “kill out the Lunatic Hospital and develop the Home!”

Olmsted had the opportunity to help shape an asylum according to his ideas in 1872, when he advised Henry B. Rogers on the desirability of potential sites for what became the McLean Asylum of the Massachusetts General Hospital—where Olmsted himself would spend the last five years of his life. In urging the selection of the McLean site, he asserted that the “most desirable qualities in the home grounds of a retreat for the insane are probably those which favor an inclination to moderate exercise and tranquil occupation of the mind.” Least desirable would be a setting that had the opposite effect, one that would “induce exertion, heat, excitement or bewilderment.” Thus the pastoral grounds of the asylum, while different from a college campus or public park, were essential to its mission.

Indeed, implicit in Olmsted’s designs for college campuses and asylums was his interest in creating landscapes that met what he perceived as the needs of community. A parallel concern for educating the public is evident in several of his other activities, most obviously in his supervision of the public’s use of parks. Olmsted also continued to support schemes that promised to lift the general level of taste in America, as his interest in photosculpture during the 1860s indicates. A process developed in France in the 1850s to create three-dimensional representations, photosculpture utilized a machine called a pantograph to sculpt a bust or statuette of an image that had been photographed from twelve different angles. Olmsted found photosculpture particularly [18] exciting because it held out the promise of making original works of art available at a price that Americans of average income could afford.

Olmsted’s direct involvement in photosculpture was, however, quite limited. In January 1868 Alfred J. Bloor sought his aid and participation in a new company. A group of American investors apparently had purchased an option on the photosculpture process that François Willème had patented in 1864, and Bloor was seeking to become manager of the American company then taking shape. To enhance his own chances, Bloor suggested that Olmsted be made president, a largely symbolic post that he anticipated would lend prestige to the company and increase its business.

Although Olmsted thought that photosculpture’s benefits to the American people might well be substantial, he was understandably reluctant to become involved in another speculative business venture. Nevertheless, late in February 1868 he composed a prospectus which touted the possibilities of photosculpture and suggested the direction the new company should take. But as a necessary preliminary, he warned Bloor and Robert Dale Owen, a prominent investor, the Americans must secure complete financial information from the French company, the Société Général de Photosculpture de France—information the company was slow to divulge. By mid-March, Olmsted was tactfully advising Bloor that the stockholders in the photosculpture enterprise did not seem especially interested in the services either of them could provide. For his part, Olmsted was not willing to buy shares in the company; he would contribute only his expertise and reputation. His caution in this respect probably was wise, for the company apparently never became a viable business. Thus, after the spring of 1868 Olmsted gave little thought to photosculpture and instead concentrated on the landscape designs and superintendence that increasingly occupied his time.

Olmsted’s belief in the power of the physical environment to educate the sensibilities and advance the evolution of the American republic also shaped his approach to the design of public parks. Central Park’s greatest achievement, he had asserted, was as a social institution; it was, in his words, “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.” Although critics had predicted that it would become “a huge beer garden for the lowest denizens of the city,” Olmsted could point out in 1870 that the park was already exercising “a distinctly harmonizing and refining influence upon the most unfortunate and most lawless classes of the city—an influence favorable to courtesy, self-control, and temperance.”

Upon Olmsted’s return to New York in November 1865, he undoubtedly hoped that his and Vaux’s reappointment as landscape architects of Central Park portended a resumption of significant influence over the uses of the park as well as its maintenance, structures, and design. Realistically, [19] Olmsted could not have expected to resume the administrative responsibilities he had lost after 1859, when Andrew H. Green became comptroller, and in 1861, when the park commission removed the keepers from his oversight. Olmsted must also have expected a certain amount of disagreement with the commissioners, most of whom had been in office when he had served as architect-in-chief and superintendent. But it seems unlikely that he would have returned east, to the only certain long-term job in landscape architecture he could reasonably anticipate, had he realized how effectively Green would be able to limit the role of Olmsted, Vaux & Company on the park. Indeed, Olmsted found the situation worse than the apprehensions he had expressed to Vaux in 1865. The commissioners paid little attention to his and Vaux’s views on numerous important decisions regarding the park. Whether debating the merits of the gateways designed for the park by Richard Morris Hunt or plans for erecting the museum of the New-York Historical Society in the park, the commissioners did not request his and Vaux’s opinions. Even when the commission instructed them to prepare plans for a zoological garden, which they situated at Manhattan Square, across Eighth Avenue from the park, Green prevented the designers from presenting their plan to the full board. Moreover, doubtless to Olmsted’s chagrin, the Central Park commission never consulted the partners about its major new work—the laying out and opening of streets and avenues in Manhattan north of 59th Street. Indeed, the commissioners ignored Olmsted and Vaux, even though the partners had served in 1860 as landscape architects to the original commission charged with determining the arrangement of streets above 155th Street. Green even explained the appropriateness of the boulevards he suggested for that part of the island by ridiculing as “fanciful” the parkways Olmsted and Vaux had suggested to the Prospect Park commission in 1866.

Given the paucity of opportunities offered by Central Park, in 1866 Olmsted and Vaux turned most of the energy they would devote to park design and superintendence to the creation of Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. The planning for Prospect Park had already been under way for some years when Vaux began to study it in 1865 . In 1861 civil engineer Egbert L. Viele had prepared the original design and possibly even determined the land acquired for it—an irregularly shaped tract bounded by seven streets and bisected by a major thoroughfare, Flatbush Avenue. The site, like that of Central Park, contained a receiving reservoir for the city’s water system. But the Civil War delayed commencement of construction, and by January 1865 James S. T. Stranahan, president of the Prospect Park commission, had become dissatisfied with Viele’s plan and consulted Vaux. After examining the grounds, Vaux submitted a preliminary report that advocated a major rearrangement of the park’s boundaries.

Vaux envisioned a different park from the one Viele had designed. He urged the commissioners to abandon the land east of Flatbush Avenue so [20] that the street would not divide the park. In contrast to Viele, who had suggested that the avenue would become a “striking feature in the general design of improvement,” Vaux argued that as a “wide and conspicuous thoroughfare,” it would intrude upon the visitor’s enjoyment of the scenery. Not only would traffic disturb the tranquility of the landscape, but the avenue would divide the park into two sections, neither of which was large enough for “park purposes.” This was especially true of the eastern half, where the reservoir already occupied much of the proposed park. Although the larger area west of Flatbush Avenue possessed more desirable qualities of scenery, it was too limited in extent for use as a “pleasure ground devoted to recreation and enjoyment.” To remedy this deficiency, Vaux recommended acquiring additional land south and west of the original site.

Vaux’s report persuaded Stranahan and other commissioners to request that the state legislature authorize the purchase of this land. On June 13, 1865, the Brooklyn park commission engaged Vaux to prepare a plan for the park. Perhaps because of uncertainty over the boundaries, Vaux apparently devoted little effort to the preparation of a plan until Olmsted’s return in November. After Olmsted’s return, they must have worked rapidly to complete their plan and report, which they presented to the commissioners on January 24, 1866.

That report incorporated the ideas of both Olmsted and Vaux. Vaux’s contributions can be seen most clearly by comparing the jointly prepared January 1866 report with the one he had written alone the preceding February. Vaux had then recommended that the commissioners acquire Vanderbilt hill and the meadows north of Franklin Avenue, the future sites of the Lookout and Prospect Lake, as well as the land east of Ninth Avenue, which became the southern part of the Green, or Long Meadow, perhaps the park’s most distinctive landscape feature. He had also urged the commissioners to create a dramatic entrance at the intersection of Flatbush, Vanderbilt, and Ninth avenues, and designed an oval plaza, framed on the east and west by “crescents of plantation,” that would direct traffic into or around the park. In addition, the 1866 report incorporated significant passages verbatim and several other paragraphs closely paraphrasing the earlier report.

Nevertheless, important differences exist between the two reports, and some of them help distinguish Olmsted’s contribution to the design of Prospect Park. Olmsted apparently added to the later report a number of passages that reflected his longstanding concerns or earlier experiences. The section in the 1866 report on the purposes of a park, for example, paralleled Olmsted’s essay “Park,” written in 1861 for the New American Cyclopaedia. In addition to asserting the importance of rustic and picturesque elements to park scenery, Olmsted added references to the Sierra and to tropical vegetation, which he had encountered during his voyage to and residence in California. Olmsted also offered his classic definition of a park—a landscape that promoted a “process of recuperation” from the incessant pace of urban life.

[21]

Olmsted may also have contributed the idea of parkways as important adjuncts to the park. In his 1865 report, Vaux discussed approaches to the park solely in terms of the entrance plaza and the widening and realignment of Vanderbilt and Ninth avenues. In contrast, the 1866 report urged construction of a “shaded pleasure drive” connecting the park with Brooklyn’s suburbs and, by ferry, with roads leading to Central Park and the avenues then under construction in northern Manhattan. While there is little indication that Vaux had conceived of the park and its extensions, parkways, as a new stage in urbanization, Olmsted, in his preliminary study for the San Francisco pleasure ground, may have discerned the importance of park and avenue development as a means of directing and controlling a city’s growth.

Nevertheless, it remains impossible to determine the precise contribution of each partner to the design of Prospect Park. In September 1866, when Olmsted was particularly frustrated with his writing, he confessed to Charles Eliot Norton that Vaux had penned “considerable parts” of the firm’s reports of that year and concluded, “[Vaux] knows what it is he thinks better than I.”

When construction of Prospect Park began on July 1, 1866, Olmsted assumed responsibility for superintendence—which was the administrative skill Vaux had counted on his contributing to the project. Because a number of their principal assistants were employed elsewhere, the organization of work at first was “very imperfect.” To help direct construction, Olmsted and Vaux largely depended on men whose work and skill they, especially Olmsted, already knew well. This talented group included, at various times, Joseph P Davis, formerly chief engineer of the Nassau Water Company, and Charles Cyril Martin, best remembered for his subsequent role as first assistant engineer of the Brooklyn Bridge, as well as engineers John Bogart and John y. Culyer, who were former associates at Central Park. Edward C. Miller, who had been an assistant at Central Park and who had worked with Olmsted in California, became assistant architect. From Central Park Olmsted and Vaux also recruited Ignaz Pilat to direct plantings, and subsequently entrusted that task to a former associate from the U. S. Sanitary Commission, Oliver Crosby Bullard, who would later superintend construction of Olmsted’s design for Beardsley Park in Bridgeport, Connecticut. As park inspector, Bullard was responsible for the keepers, who beginning in 1867 maintained order and instructed the public in the proper use of the park. Jacob Weidenmann, who had superintended construction of Olmsted and Vaux’s plans for the Hartford Retreat for the Insane, and who would later become Olmsted’s partner, also worked briefly at Prospect Park. Among new associates who would figure importantly in Olmsted’s career were landscape architect Horace William Shaler Cleveland, who superintended the development of Olmsted and Vaux’s plans for Chicago’s South Park and who, in subsequent years, would design a park system for Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota; and architect Thomas Wisedell, an English immigrant who [22] shared responsibility with Vaux for designing many of the park’s structures and who later collaborated with Olmsted on the design of the grounds of the U. S. Capitol.

As soon as Olmsted assembled a staff, he pressed forward with construction. “We have put four hundred men at work and are getting on very nicely,” he reported to Norton in July 1866. Then, Olmsted added, “I did not much like the ground at first, but it grows upon me and my enthusiasm and liking for the work is increasing to an inconvenient degree, so that it elbows all other interests out of my mind.” Superintending the construction of a park where he and his partner collaborated with a supportive commission was a new and exhilarating experience for Olmsted. He pushed on with the work and by October 1867 as many as 1,800 men were engaged in the construction.

As had been the case at Central Park, Olmsted and Vaux devised an elaborate infrastructure for Prospect Park that included service buildings for the use of visitors, miles of underground drainage pipes, and a system of well-constructed roads, pedestrian paths, and bridle trails. They once again planned separate thoroughfares for these different modes of travel, but the high cost of constructing pedestrian underpasses near the lake prohibited a complete separation of ways. Another important component of the park’s infrastructure was the well house and its boiler, which pumped water to a reservoir that supplied the pools adjacent to the Long Meadow, out of which the water streamed through the rocky, heavily wooded Ravine to the Lullwater and Prospect Lake. To expedite construction, particularly the excavation of the lake and well, the designers used what they called a “Portable” railroad, which engineer C. C. Martin judged a “splendid success.”

During the first years of Prospect Park’s development, most construction took place in the northeast section, the area closest to the city and thus most convenient for visitors. Not until 1869, when condemnation proceedings for land southwest of the original site were completed, could the final lines of drives and paths in those areas be determined with certainty.

Between 1866 and 1873, Prospect Park took shape according to the outlines Vaux had initially sketched. Greensward, woods, and a lake formed the three principal components of its landscape. The Green, or Long Meadow, a sweeping lawn that appeared endless in extent, exemplified the type of scenery Olmsted termed “pastoral.” He defined this as “combinations of trees, standing singly or in groups, and casting their shadows over broad stretches of turf, or repeating their beauty by reflection upon the calm surface of pools.” Olmsted especially valued pastoral scenery in his parks because it was “tranquilizing and grateful,” and he offered as evidence the poetic words of the Twenty-third Psalm: “He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; He leadeth me beside the still waters.” Heavily wooded areas included land southeast of the Long Meadow, identified on the 1866–67 plan as “The [23] Woods,” and the Ravine, the rocky, hilly area similar in purpose to the Ramble in Central Park. The third element of the scenery, Prospect Lake, was also a facility for active recreation—skating in winter and boating in summer.

The final component of Prospect Park was the Parade Ground. The 1861 legislation creating the park had specified that the parade be built in the East New York section of Brooklyn, but Olmsted and Vaux urged the commissioners to acquire the land south of Franklin Avenue for that use. Location of a parade ground adjacent to the park would forestall the erection of tall buildings there and would also provide a place for the kinds of active recreation that Olmsted thought inappropriate within the park proper. After the Brooklyn park commissioners acquired the site in 1868, Olmsted and Vaux prepared a simple plan for the area; the following year Vaux designed a shelter and lodge for use by the militia as well as athletes.

As construction proceeded, Olmsted and Vaux modified the original design in a number of ways. The space identified on the 1866–67 map as “Concourse for Pedestrians” became the Concert Grove, the most formal and architectural element within the park, whose handsomely dressed stonework was designed by Vaux and Wisedell. As the 1871 report to the Brooklyn commission indicates, they also straightened and widened the drive and walks at the southern end of the lake to create a promenade, which, like the Concert Grove, would provide opportunities for “gregarious” or neighborly recreation. These changes necessitated a different treatment of the lakeshore and islands, both to open vistas across the water and to screen out with plantings the view toward the Concert Grove. Other modifications included the addition of pools of water to the Children’s Play Ground and Deer Paddock, both located outside the drive on the eastern perimeter. When in 1869 the land along Ninth Avenue finally became park property, Olmsted and Vaux also designed the walks and drives in that vicinity.

Even though the Brooklyn park commission was far more sympathetic and amenable to Olmsted and Vaux’s suggestions than its counterpart at Central Park, difficulties still arose. On several occasions the cost of land acquisition and construction provoked political controversy. Another irritant was Egbert Viele, who once again claimed that Olmsted and Vaux had stolen his plan, in this case for the Brooklyn park. In addition, in 1869, charges of fraud brought about an investigation of the park’s management. Construction of the park slowed to a halt in November 1869 and did not resume until July 1870, when an independent commission that investigated allegations of wrongdoing exonerated the Brooklyn park commission. This delay, later coupled with the effects of the Panic of 1873, prevented Olmsted and Vaux from fully carrying out their design in some areas of the park. Still, their accomplishment was considerable and soon received public recognition. Prospect Park quickly became the favorite resort of Brooklyn residents. Experts [24] on landscape design seconded the people’s judgment: landscape architect Robert Morris Copeland found it to be far superior to Central Park, while Charles Sprague Sargent, director of the Arnold Arboretum at Harvard University, later declared it to be “one of the great artistic creations of modern times.” Prospect Park, Sargent asserted, was “an urban park unsurpassed in any part of the world in the breadth and repose of its rural beauty.”

Perhaps even more important to Olmsted and Vaux was Prospect Park’s emergence as the centerpiece of an elaborate, carefully designed park system. In 1867 the Prospect Park commission received responsibility to administer other public spaces in Brooklyn, and it soon gave Olmsted and Vaux opportunities to work out some of their ideas on the proper form of the expanding city. With these smaller park sites, Olmsted and Vaux demonstrated both their versatility as designers and their commitment to creating parks that would serve the needs of various groups of people. Their desire to create discrete park spaces, each appropriate for specific kinds of activities, resulted in considerable differences among these designs as well as from that of Prospect Park.

Washington Park, already a public ground, was Olmsted and Vaux’s first smaller public design in Brooklyn . In 1847 the city had acquired the site of Fort Greene, a Revolutionary War redoubt, but in succeeding years the park had deteriorated to the point that some commissioners recommended subdividing and selling the land. Instead, the board asked Olmsted and Vaux to prepare a new plan. In their report, completed in September 1867, the partners envisioned uses for Washington Park which they considered essential for residents of the city but inappropriate in Prospect Park. Such features included an elaborate memorial over the remains of the approximately eleven thousand Continental soldiers who had died in British prison ships during the Revolutionary War. Vaux and Wisedell placed the monument between majestic steps leading up the steep hillside. Olmsted and Vaux also located in Washington Park a large space for public meetings and expressed the hope that the adjacent memorial would raise the level of discourse at political rallies. Other parts of their design included a saluting ground, athletic fields for boys and girls from the surrounding neighborhood, and walks and shaded seats.

Olmsted and Vaux prepared designs for different kinds of public use at Carroll Park and Tompkins Square. As was so often the case with city squares, Carroll Park was surrounded on its exterior by dense plantings. Olmsted and Vaux modified that original plan by lowering the ground in the park’s center to create an intimate communal area. At Tompkins Square, however, they admitted that the traditional design of such places simply had not worked, and they put forward a significant new conception of what a city square should be. Tompkins Square itself presented something of a blank space on which to design a new urban park. Although the two-block site [25] bounded by Greene, Lafayette, Marcy, and Tompkins avenues had been designated a park in the 1839 city plan that had attempted to bring order to Brooklyn’s streets, few, if any, improvements had been undertaken before Olmsted and Vaux began their plan in 1870.

In their report, Olmsted and Vaux attempted to reconcile the two purposes of a city square—presenting a “bright and beautiful front” to adjacent houses while also offering “an attractive recreation ground, with shady walks and seats, under conditions favorable to free observation, good order, and economy of maintenance.” To accomplish these goals, Olmsted and Vaux advocated turning the time-honored city square inside out. Such spaces had customarily been planted with trees and shrubs bordering the street and a lawn and seats in the interior. But as the trees matured, their shade and deeper roots deprived the grass and shrubs of essential light and nutrients, while the darkness of the interior at night made these places unsafe for all but “clandestine purposes.” At Tompkins Square, Olmsted and Vaux proposed to plant only the center of the square with large trees, which would be surrounded by seats and a temporary lawn (as the trees grew larger, the dying grass would be replaced with gravel) that would serve as a “promenade ground.” Between the open space and the sidewalk they placed an ornamental garden, “elegant with flowering shrubs and plants,” that would provide a foreground to pedestrians and nearby homeowners alike. If their design was adopted, Olmsted and Vaux believed, Tompkins Square would become an attractive center of the community, a place for promenades and gregarious recreation. Other advantages would include safety, increased property values in the neighborhood, and reductions in the cost of maintenance.

Together, Prospect Park, the Parade Ground, Washington and Carroll parks, and Tompkins Square constituted the beginnings of a comprehensive park system for Brooklyn. Collectively, the reports Olmsted and Vaux wrote for the Brooklyn park commission and the designs they brought to fruition were important landmarks in the public park movement in the United States. Indeed, the Brooklyn park system stands as the first of the many park systems Olmsted would create. From the perspective of city planning, however, the most creative and innovative aspect of their endeavors in Brooklyn was the system of parkways they designed to link the various public spaces they had designed or envisioned.

The city for which Olmsted and Vaux created these roads was an urban area in transition. In the early nineteenth century, Brooklyn had been a village, a small community whose merchants and tradesmen provided goods and services to the surrounding agricultural hinterland. The beginning of regularly scheduled ferry service had transformed Brooklyn into a prosperous suburb of Manhattan. After further increasing its population and area by annexing Williamsburg and Bushwick, Brooklyn had become a large city that lacked a coordinated urban plan. Each town had been laid out in a rectangular [26] gridiron oriented toward the East River, whose irregular shoreline caused the streets of one town to intersect with those of adjacent municipalities at awkward angles.

From the time of their initial report to the Brooklyn park commission in 1866, Olmsted and Vaux had recommended the creation of a series of suburban boulevards. In almost every subsequent report, they elaborated their plan for using park and parkway development as a means of bringing order to the city’s street system and, more generally, of controlling future development. In 1867 they urged the opening of new roads and the widening of existing streets as approaches to the park. They also sketched the outlines of a “broad boulevard,” extending eastward from Prospect Park to Ridgewood, that would be “shaded by agreeable plantations and adapted for use as a pleasure drive, ride and walk.” A system of “spacious and agreeable suburban thoroughfares,” Olmsted and Vaux predicted, would attract residents who would build handsome houses within the city limits and also “secure the advantages of proximity to the park to all who should live near them.”

In their 1868 report to the Brooklyn park commission, Olmsted and Vaux presented their first comprehensive explication of the importance of park and parkway development to urban growth. They argued that Brooklyn’s street system, despite its “apparent simplicity on paper,” contained serious defects. Its rectangular grid led “either to unnecessary taxation or to great permanent inconvenience.” Thus, Olmsted and Vaux asserted, Brooklyn’s growth required a radically different plan, and to illustrate their argument they traced the evolution of street plans since antiquity. Predictably, in each stage of urban development, they decried the congestion that resulted from the gridiron.

Fortunately, a number of developments promised to eliminate the “necessary evils of large towns.” Improvements in public health and the “abandonment of the old-fashioned compact way of building towns” were essential, as were new transportation technologies that had made possible the separation of workplace and domicile. Thus Olmsted and Vaux envisioned a new urban form taking shape around a broad avenue they termed a parkway. This road would not only extend the benefits of parks throughout the city, they explained, but would also “constitute the centre of a continuous neighborhood of residences of a more than usually open, elegant and healthy character.” Ample space about a house, Olmsted and Vaux asserted, would minimize the dangers of fire as well as provide the most appropriate setting for domesticity.

Olmsted and Vaux then proposed a new stage in the evolution of street plans, one inspired by European precedent but also a marked improvement on such noble streets as the Avenue de I’Imperatrice in Paris and the Unter den Linden in Berlin. The parkways they designed were not simply for commerce or for the rapid movement of troops. Instead, while providing a side road for service traffic, these tree-lined avenues would reserve a central [27] drive for carriage traffic and pedestrian paths in grass strips between the roadways. Such a parkway, Olmsted and Vaux predicted, would be the spine around which an openly built city would develop. They then sketched the rough outlines of two such roads, one extending eastward to Ravenswood, the other south and west to the Atlantic Ocean. Based on this and subsequent reports, the Brooklyn park commission secured legislative authority to take possession of the land that became Ocean and Eastern parkways.

In various reports and designs for Brooklyn, Olmsted and Vaux created their first comprehensive park system. Its constituent parts were a large, naturalistic park, smaller neighborhood parks for different recreational uses, and parkways to extend the benefits of parks throughout the city. This plan anticipated the more mature scheme Olmsted prepared for the Buffalo park commission in the summer of 1868—a time when Vaux was in Europe. The centerpiece of the Buffalo system was a large, 350-acre park located to the north of the built area of the city. But this was simply the “more important member of a general, largely provident, forehanded, comprehensive arrangement for securing refreshment, recreation and health to the people.” Olmsted also successfully urged the creation of two smaller parks near residential areas: the Front, a 32-acre space overlooking the Niagara River and Lake Erie; and a 56-acre parade ground to the east for more active recreation. Parkways linked each of these parks to the larger park, thereby creating an interconnected park system. Moreover, at Buffalo, Olmsted had his first opportunity to design a residential subdivision adjacent to a park he had planned. For “Parkside” he designed curving, tree-lined streets and platted lots large enough for handsome houses and their grounds.

Olmsted’s use of parks and their approaches as integral means of directing urban growth and creating residential neighborhoods appropriate for domesticity is evident as well in other reports he and Vaux wrote during these years. These parks were not designed simply to be escapes from urban sights and sounds, Olmsted informed the commissioners of Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park; they were part of the “general municipal economy of a great City.” Thus, as in the case of Brooklyn, Olmsted and Vaux paid particular attention to routes of travel that would make the parks accessible from the city. They urged the commissioners entrusted with developing a park in Newark, New Jersey, to ensure that land be set aside for “an unobstructed route, itself rural in character,” that would make the park “conveniently near the doors” of all inhabitants of the city. Similarly, at Albany, New York, Olmsted and Vaux proposed a system of “narrow, circuitous sylvan approaches” to Washington Park, as well as parkways extending from the park to areas not yet developed on the urban periphery. These strips of land would also serve as a “convenient local pleasure ground” for those residents who lived a distance from the park. Faced with particular situations in other cities, Olmsted and Vaux suggested alternative means of access to the parks they designed or envisioned. [28] In Philadelphia, for example, the railroads extending west brought Fairmount within easy reach of the city center, while in Chicago, Lake Michigan offered the opportunity of reaching South Park by steamboat excursion as well as by two parkways.

During these years Olmsted and Vaux designed three other public recreational grounds for smaller cities—Seaside Park in Bridgeport, Connecticut, Walnut Hill Park in New Britain, Connecticut, and South Park in Fall River, Massachusetts. In each instance they applied their understanding of the effects of park scenery to differing local circumstances. However, with the exception of Buffalo, where Olmsted’s valued associate William McMillan superintended construction and managed the plantings, Olmsted and Vaux had no opportunity comparable to that at Brooklyn of seeing their designs translated into physical form.

During the post–Civil War years Olmsted also first fully articulated his conception of the proper design of openly built residential subdivisions and took advantage of opportunities to plan suburban communities. In 1860, when he and Vaux were appointed “landscape architects & designers” to the commission empowered to layout streets north of 155th Street in Manhattan, Olmsted had analyzed the importance of roads in promoting the controlled development of a residential neighborhood. By 1866 he had already begun to link the emergence of the openly built city to new transportation technologies, which made possible the separation of workplace and residence, as well as to the traditional concept of community and the new culture of domesticity.

Much as Olmsted’s report to the trustees of the College of California at Berkeley articulated his vision of the proper physical location and design of the campus, it also set out many of the themes he would develop in regard to residential areas. Olmsted portrayed the suburb as a middle ground between city and countryside—a place that possessed many of the amenities of civilization he associated with urban areas, yet was also a retreat from the noise and bustle of the commercial and manufacturing city. A properly designed suburb, he informed the college trustees, must have good roads, both within the community and connecting it to the metropolis, as well as parklike spaces that would serve as the “social rendezvous of the neighborhood.” Above all, Olmsted argued, a suburb must provide for “domestic seclusion,” which he considered the “first and most essential condition of a home.” Moreover, each household should have “Attractive open-air apartments,” private areas that members of the family could use in work and play. Such gardens were not merely “ornamental appendages of a house”; they were as essential to “health and comfort” as beds and baths. Thus, unlike the residential community of Llewellyn Park, New Jersey, where Llewellyn S. Haskell proscribed the erection of fences marking property lines, Olmsted insisted that fences and perimeter plantings define the private outdoor space of a house. Olmsted would [29] reiterate many of these themes as he designed several different kinds of suburban communities during this period.

Although the subdivision that Olmsted proposed for Berkeley Neighborhood was never built, he brought similar ideas to the design of a community on the New Jersey shore in 1866. This commission came from Olmsted’s friend Howard Potter, a wealthy attorney and investment banker, and Louis B. Brown, a successful real estate speculator. Potter and Brown jointly owned a 150-acre tract of oceanfront property in fashionable Long Branch which they intended to subdivide into “suburban cottage sites” and name “Blythe Beach Park.” Brown and Potter apparently intended to sell all the lots fronting on the ocean, but Olmsted strongly advised against such a course. Once that land was developed, he warned, the remaining lots, cut off from the beach, would be “comparatively undesireable.” To maximize the attractiveness of the entire property, and consequently its value when sold, Olmsted urged Potter and Brown to reserve a part of the ocean front for the common use of all residents. This communal property, as well as the system of curvilinear drives Olmsted apparently proposed, would preserve the natural advantages of the site. Not only would all residents share access to the beach and water, but this communal space would also prevent construction of a row of houses along the shore blocking the sea breezes that made the area so attractive in hot weather. Olmsted also suggested some improvements, such as a promenade, ballgrounds, better hotels, and facilities for fishing, sailing, and sea bathing, to extend the resort season at Long Branch and assure its reputation as the foremost spa in the eastern United States. By the summer of 1867, however, Potter and Brown had decided to dissolve their partnership rather than proceed further with Blythe Beach Park. Instead, Potter asked Olmsted to lay out walks and drives and advise on plantings around his new cottage at Long Branch—the cottage that Potter and other wealthy businessmen would give to President Grant in 1869 for use as a summer home.

Early in 1867, when plans for Blythe Beach Park were still progressing, Charles Eliot Norton engaged Olmsted to prepare a plan for subdividing “Shady Hill,” his family estate in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Norton was planning an extended visit to Europe and hoped to finance it by selling part of the property as sites for suburban dwellings. The task, as Olmsted saw it, was to protect the trees that gave the neighborhood its reputation for sylvan beauty while designing new streets that would connect with existing roads to provide convenient access to building lots. He also argued that several of the streets then adjoining Norton’s property should be rearranged to establish a more convenient approach to neighboring Harvard College. Once again Olmsted emphasized the importance of the suburb as community by urging Norton to set aside part of the property as a “small public green or lawn.”

But the suburban design that most fully realized the ideas Olmsted had begun to set forth in these years was that for Riverside, Illinois. In the spring of 1868 the Riverside Improvement Company had purchased a 1,600-acre [30] tract of farmland located on the Des Plaines River nine miles west of Chicago and connected to the city by the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy Railroad. Olmsted visited the site the following August, and after inspecting the ground with engineer John Bogart, concluded that the land purchased by the promoters was indeed advantageous for suburban development because of its natural beauty and reputation for healthfulness. Olmsted then prepared the preliminary report as well as two large plats for subdividing the lots. In this endeavor, as in the preparation of initial plans for the Buffalo park system, Olmsted worked alone. Vaux was then in Europe.

Olmsted’s report to the Riverside Improvement Company constituted his first and most comprehensive statement about the modern suburb, a carefully designed space in which “urban and rural advantages are agreeably combined.” Like the parkways he had proposed to the Brooklyn and Buffalo park commissions, the suburb was part of the evolving metropolitan landscape and was another element in the “counter-tide of migration” to the urban periphery. Olmsted eagerly greeted the technological advances in transportation that made possible the separation of workplace and residence and thus promoted a more openly built city. A suburb such as Riverside, if properly designed and constructed, would, he predicted, exemplify the “most attractive, the most refined and the most soundly wholesome forms of domestic life, and the best application of the arts of civilization to which mankind has yet attained.”

Olmsted’s Riverside report, like that for Berkeley Neighborhood, emphasized the importance of developing a modern infrastructure, or what he termed the creation of “abundant artificial conveniences.” He deemed the construction of well-engineered roads most vital. Even with efficient rail transportation to Chicago, excellent (and expensive) roads would be essential to the success of both the Riverside Improvement Company and the community itself.

The streets and roads he designed at Riverside defined the shape of the community. First, he proposed an approach road, a parkway extending from Chicago to the suburb. He urged the promoters to acquire a strip of land ranging in width from 200 to 600 feet. This parkway would be an invaluable second link to the city, but Olmsted realized that such an approach road could confer other benefits as well. Like the parkways he planned for Brooklyn and Buffalo, the approach road to Riverside would provide for the separation of commercial and carriage traffic as well as paths for pedestrians and equestrians. The carriage road would be suitable for pleasure driving. Along its route Olmsted proposed to set aside spaces for “sheltered seats and watering places.” As a promenade, the parkway would serve communal needs: it would function as “an open-air gathering for the purpose of easy, friendly, unceremonious greetings, for the enjoyment of change of scene, of cheerful and exhilarating sights and sounds, and of various good cheer, to which the people of a town, of all classes, harmoniously resort on equal terms, as to a common property.” Together with the railroad, the proposed parkway would enable [31] residents of Riverside to enjoy the “essential, intellectual, artistic, and social privileges which specially pertain to a metropolitan condition of society.” By 1871, seven miles of a parkway with dimensions similar to those proposed by Olmsted had been constructed.

Within the suburb the streets would be characterized by spaciousness and gentle curves, thus differing from those of the city, where rectangular uniformity symbolized an “eagerness to press forward.” Olmsted believed that the roads of a suburb such as Riverside should “suggest and imply leisure, contemplativeness and happy tranquility.” Like the parkway, the street system within the suburb would also contribute to the residents’ sense of community. At intervals along the streets, Olmsted placed a series of open public spaces having the “character of informal village-greens, commons and playgrounds,” with fountains, sheltered seats, and facilities for active recreation. In urging yet another provision for neighborly recreation, Olmsted suggested that land adjacent to the Des Plaines River be set aside as a park, and that a series of rustic structures such as boat landings, pavilions, and terraces be built to enhance the attractiveness of the riverfront.

Important as these communal spaces were, Olmsted also believed that the “essential qualification of a suburb is domesticity.” As a residential community, Riverside would provide for domestic seclusion. Families, Olmsted asserted, should be able to enjoy privacy both indoors and out. Shortly after reading Edward Everett Hale’s Sybaris and Other Homes (1869), a novel that idealized the communal aspects of suburban life, Olmsted gently protested that the author’s ideas went so far as to place neighborliness above domesticity: “No house is [a] fit place for a family,” he informed Hale, “that has not both public & private outside apartments,” the latter defined by a fence, which Olmsted considered “a sort of outer wall of the house.” This balancing of communal and familial interests was also evident in Olmsted’s stricture that houses be set back from the street and that the intervening space contain several trees. These trees and lawns, together with the landscaped public places throughout Riverside, would create “an aspect of secluded peacefulness and tranquility.”

Although Riverside would eventually attain the serene beauty Olmsted envisioned, his relations with its developers were far from peaceful. At first glance, the commission promised to be quite profitable. In the agreement Olmsted signed with the Riverside Improvement Company in the autumn of 1868, Olmsted, Vaux & Company would receive lots in the community valued at $15,000 as compensation for completing the preliminary report and maps. Moreover, as payment for superintendence the firm would receive 7½ percent of the money the company spent on construction. If the Riverside Improvement Company raised the $1. 5 million it anticipated expending, Olmsted, Vaux & Company would earn more than one hundred thousand dollars from superintendence. Olmsted also foresaw that the suburb would generate numerous commissions for architects Vaux and Withers for [32] preparing designs for cottages and other structures. The suburb was admittedly a “big speculation,” Olmsted informed Vaux, but if it was successful, Riverside would be a highly profitable one for the partners.

Olmsted’s initial reservations about being paid in lots, which could not be sold immediately (even though the firm was incurring substantial debts while preparing the plans and report and maintaining an office in Chicago), soon grew into outright alarm. Within a month of signing a contract with the Riverside Improvement Company, Olmsted realized that its president, Emery E. Childs, had grossly misrepresented the value of the lots. Because the prices actually paid for the first lots sold were far below the value assigned to similar lots in the contract, early in November 1868 Olmsted feared that his already overextended firm had accepted payment for its services at less than market value. Within a year Olmsted, Vaux & Company twice initiated lawsuits to prevent Childs from terminating the firm’s superintendence of construction. In October 1869 Childs even planned to erect his own house in the middle of the Long Common, one of the most important public spaces in Riverside. By that time Olmsted had to admit to himself that Childs, and undoubtedly other directors as well, had never accepted—or even understood—the principles of suburban design he had outlined in the first report. As if adding insult to injury, the Riverside Improvement Company then asked Olmsted to explain in writing why trees in the suburb should not be planted in the same manner in which they would be placed along the streets of a major city.

By the fall of 1869 Olmsted concluded that Riverside was indeed a “regular flyaway speculation,” managed with the same unethical behavior he attributed to the notorious Wall Street financier Jay Could. The warning signs quickly became more ominous. Withers, who was the firm’s representative at Riverside, where he designed the community’s nondenominational chapel, its business block, and several residences, informed his partners that mismanagement and a lack of progress on the ground were injuring the firm’s reputation and causing it to lose potential business in the Midwest. As their disagreements with the speculators intensified, the designers were left with little recourse: on October 30, 1870, Olmsted, Vaux & Company negotiated a release from its agreement with the Riverside Improvement Company. In time, however, virtually all of the residential streets in Olmsted and Vaux’s plan for the company’s property east of the Des Plaines River, amounting to some one thousand acres, were laid out according to that plan. The considerable section west of the river was not carried out.

As distasteful as the experience with the Riverside Improvement Company must have been to Olmsted, his enthusiasm for the suburban ideal remained undimmed. Indeed, even as the firm was withdrawing from its commitment at Riverside, Olmsted was advising John S. Blatchford, former general secretary of the U. S. Sanitary Commission, and newspaper editor Samuel Bowles on the subject of creating suburban neighborhoods near Boston and Springfield, Massachusetts, respectively. Olmsted also counseled [33] Charles M. Pond on the feasibility of constructing a network of streets in Hartford that would extend from the city through its suburban districts. But two other projects called forth significant efforts from Olmsted and led to comprehensive plans for the Tarrytown Heights Land Company and the Staten Island Improvement Commission. In these community designs, Olmsted attempted to create the sorts of domestic and communal spaces he believed would improve the quality of metropolitan life.

In October 1870 Olmsted and Vaux accepted a commission to prepare plans for a large suburban subdivision at Tarrytown Heights, New York. A land development company had acquired approximately nine hundred acres twenty-five miles north of Manhattan and hoped to establish a handsome residential community. The area, whose lush scenery had served as backdrop for Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” seemed most advantageously located for suburban development. Because only a poor road connected it to New York City, Tarrytown Heights “had been overlooked in the general suburban movement of the people of the metropolis.” Construction of the railroad that became the New York, Boston and Montreal line promised to make central Westchester County accessible to commuters, but Olmsted, as in other projects, asserted that only a comprehensive plan could create a successful suburb—profitable for the developers and attractive to potential residents.

At Tarrytown Heights, Olmsted followed much the same planning strategy he had at Riverside: concentrating on healthfulness and infrastructure and demanding communal features. Using his own observations, the testimony of the noted sanitary reformer Elisha Harris and local physicians, as well as the results of soil absorbency tests, Olmsted pronounced the area “exempt from the bilious and intermittent fevers generally prevalent in the suburban districts of New York.” He then determined the placement of roads, which he insisted should be broad, well constructed, and gently winding so that their easy grade might follow the topography. These roads would also provide convenient access to each of the projected 159 lots (ranging in size from two to eight acres) on the property. As at Riverside, Olmsted also platted smaller “village lots,” located adjacent to the two railroad stations, which were intended for people of modest means who could not afford the expense of keeping a carriage. His design placed small parks nearby, while elsewhere in the development he set aside spaces for public groves, greens, and commons.

Perhaps because of Tarrytown’s proximity to New York, Olmsted became deeply involved in the affairs of the Tarrytown Heights Land Company. In the spring of 1872, shortly after the railroad had been built in that vicinity, he wrote most of a real estate prospectus explaining the advantages of a suburban residence there. He also exercised editorial control over the other documents published in the prospectus and selected the photographs that would illustrate the charms of the scenery. It is perhaps the best illustration of Olmsted’s [34] optimism about this project that despite his experience at Riverside, he accepted stock in the Tarrytown company—eighty shares—as compensation for the firm’s work. This form of payment made Olmsted, Vaux & Company heavily dependent on the success of the venture. As both the firms of Olmsted, Vaux & Company and Vaux, Withers & Company were being liquidated, Olmsted retained the shares of stock in the Tarrytown company and paid their cash value to his former partners. Once again, however, a suburban venture in which Olmsted had invested considerable time and money failed as the Tarrytown Heights Land Company went bankrupt during the Panic of 1873.

Olmsted’s designs for suburbs were not his only opportunities for planning communities. Even as he was breaking relations with the Riverside Improvement Company, he encountered a possibility for urban planning on yet a larger scale. This came from Staten Island, New York, the area where since the 1850s Olmsted had often resided and had owned property. During the summer of 1870, when a group of local businessmen apparently consulted Olmsted about the feasibility of making the island the site of an exposition and resort ground, he was quite enthusiastic about its potential. At about the same time, the New York state legislature created the Staten Island Improvement Commission, a body charged with ascertaining reasons for the lack of development on the island and recommending a course of action to promote economic growth. Olmsted welcomed the appointment of the commission but objected when the other members asked him to become chairman of its “Committee on Plans.” To serve on the commission fulfilled his obligation as a citizen; to draw up plans, Olmsted asserted, was a professional responsibility, “a matter of business.” Indeed, Olmsted pointed out that Staten Island’s growth had suffered because “its public works have been formed by citizens of the most unquestioned probity and common sense but utterly ignorant of and incompetent for the duties they have assumed.” Believing that the island needed planning by talented professionals rather than well-intentioned amateurs, he recommended that the Staten Island Improvement Commission hire a board of experts. Olmsted indicated his willingness to serve on such a board and urged the appointment of physician Elisha Harris, civil engineer Joseph M. Trowbridge, and architect Henry Hobson Richardson—all professionally trained men with ties to Staten Island. In particular, Harris, whose achievements in public health had been invaluable to the U. S. Sanitary Commission and the New York City Board of Health, had worked on the island in the 1840s. Once constituted, this board turned for advice to other professionals with expertise in soil analysis, ventilation, and drainage. This was consistent with Olmsted’s belief that detailed information was the foundation for effective planning, and coordinating the efforts of these experts was the role of the landscape architect. With findings in hand, Olmsted and his associates wrote a long report for the commission.

[35]

First, they examined Staten Island in relation to the New York metropolitan area. The board of experts asserted that the rosiest future for the island lay in becoming not a commercial or a manufacturing center but a “city of detached dwellings.” Here the report echoed Olmsted’s contention that the increasing tendency to separate residence from workplace was creating a faster rate of growth in areas surrounding Manhattan than in the city itself—a development that was almost certain to continue as people placed “more and more value upon the cleanliness and purity of the condition of their domestic life.” Yet Staten Island was a major exception to the trend. Property values there had risen only slightly in recent years, and the island’s increase in population was a fraction of that experienced in other suburbs equally distant from Manhattan.

Pondering why so little suburban development had taken place on Staten Island, Olmsted and his associates dismissed fashion and the length of time spent in commuting to the city as causes. Instead, they indicted malaria, the prevalence of which had given the island a reputation for unhealthfulness. Thus, a significant part of the report, undoubtedly written by Harris, described the conditions that were believed to cause malaria and the steps that were necessary to eliminate the disease. Harris blamed stagnant water and listed as its causes the rapid deforestation of large tracts, the abandonment of farms, and above all the construction of roads, which had destroyed the island’s natural drainage. The board of experts advised that thorough drainage, to which Olmsted had long been committed, would form the essential foundation of any systematic program of improvement. This measure to protect public health would be the key to unlocking the “hidden treasure” of the island’s potential.

Olmsted and his collaborators then outlined the program of improvement that would most benefit Staten Island. Their report asserted that making the island an attractive residential area required that its sites for dwellings be “furnished with urban public conveniences and associated with permanent and generally available advantages of landscape and sylvan beauty, all accessible with regularity and comfort from the business quarter of New York, and all preeminently healthful.” To this end, a “broad and comprehensive scheme of improvement” was essential. Olmsted and the other experts then called for the construction of the infrastructure that would accomplish this goal. Eliminating malaria would require the installation of main drains and reservoirs for collecting the water. Moreover, the board recommended the creation of two reservoirs to provide a supply of pure water to residents.

The second phase of infrastructure development was transportation. Improved, frequent ferry service to Manhattan was essential, as was the proposed railroad that would traverse the island’s north shore. Equally important was a better system of highways. This required the construction of a system of broad “high roads” extending from the southern to the northern end of the [36] island and terminating at the ferry landings. These highways would be supplemented with tributary cross roads which would connect the high roads with each other and with the railway stations. Such a system of roads, the report predicted, would not only attract prospective residents but would also “make Staten Island a resort of pleasure travel from all quarters.”

The board of experts emphasized the importance of carefully planned governmental action and spending and warned that merely local or volunteer efforts would not suffice. Indeed, the report attributed the island’s lack of development both to speculators and to private citizens unwilling to act in the public interest. Too much of the island already suffered from “land traders,” who in search of quick profit at minimal expense had created “paper streets and paper towns.” The report further argued that privatism had created obstacles that would have to be combatted. Indeed, the board of experts observed, “there is no obligation upon the owners of land to prepare it suitably for the residence of a community before putting it in the market, and very few, anywhere, are ever found disposed to do so.” Protection of the public’s health and promotion of the common good would necessitate increased governmental responsibility as well as some modification of traditional rights of property. For example, the county government would need the power to compel all private landowners whose property contained a “distinct malarial nuisance” to construct drains and connect them to the public drainage system.

With the Staten Island report, Olmsted moved from the planning of individual communities to that of an urban region. The Staten Island report repeated Olmsted’s earlier advice about the necessity of a comprehensively planned infrastructure with carefully designed networks of transportation. It also envisioned an essential role for governments in both financing and constructing these necessary systems. But the program of improvements outlined in the report must have been too ambitious and too expensive, for the recommendations were never implemented.

In each of his designs for residential subdivisions and suburbs Olmsted attempted to create the domestic and communal spaces he believed would improve life for his contemporaries. Obviously, most of the people who would benefit from suburban amenities would be the well-to-do, who could afford the expense of transportation to the city as well as the cost of a spacious house and lot. Even though Olmsted’s professional obligations led him to work principally for the wealthier classes, at Riverside and Tarrytown Heights he included lots for more modest residences. In addition, he tried to gain support for suburban subdivisions for families of the working class. Both his writings and his designs, Olmsted informed Edward Everett Hale, “urge principles, plans & measures tending to the ruralizing of all our urban population.” His goal—whether at Riverside or Tarrytown Heights or on Staten Island—was the “suburbanizing of the residence parts of large towns, elbow [37] room about a house without going into the country, without sacrifice of butchers, bakers & theatres.”

Olmsted’s vision of a restructured urban-suburban environment brought forth little actual change during the immediate postwar years. While he would return to planning suburbs, subdivisions, and communities in later years, the financial losses he incurred at Riverside and at Tarrytown Heights must have added to his sense of disappointment. To help meet the firm’s expenses in these ventures, Olmsted turned to his father, John Olmsted, who willingly, though perhaps exasperatedly, loaned the necessary funds. These were not the first projects that John Olmsted had underwritten: during the 1850s he had financed his son’s short-lived careers in publishing and scientific farming. Olmsted had continued to depend on his father not only for financial support but also for his general encouragement. Early in 1873, that support was coming to an end. As John Olmsted lay dying in Hartford, Connecticut, his son journeyed there from New York trying desperately to be the responsible son and successful professional man he thought his father wished him to be. Indeed, John Olmsted’s death forced his son to confront a difficult reality. He had lost not only a kind and generous father but also the man he most wanted to please in the world. The discovery that John Olmsted had, over the past twenty years, silently amassed a collection of newspaper clippings about his son’s achievements and activities gave Olmsted some solace, but it also brought the realization that without his father, he would in the future find less satisfaction in his own accomplishments.

Even before his father’s death, Olmsted had reached yet another decisive point in his life. He and Vaux had long disagreed about some aspects of their partnership and practice, and in the early 1870s those differences began to take their toll. “Mr Vaux’s ways are not my ways and I could not fit mine to his,” he later recounted. “There have been matters between us in which each thought the other wrong-headed. When suitable occasion came therefore it was a relief to me to part company with him.” By the fall of 1872 the “incompatibilities for close association” between the two men had become such that they dissolved their partnership.

The differences that ended their collaboration were professional as well as personal. While Olmsted apparently deferred to Vaux on many questions concerning architecture, the structures in the parks he designed later in his career were much more subordinate to the landscape than those in parks that he designed with Vaux. In addition, the two men differed in their approach to landscape design. Years later, Olmsted observed to his son that Central Park suffered “from a disposition which Vaux has much more than I ever had . . . to aim at garden, in distinction from landscape, effects—broad effects of scenery.”

These various stresses and strains were apparent by the spring of [38] 1871. That summer Olmsted confided to his friend Samuel Bowles that he was “nearly desperate,” so much so that he might embark on some “wildly foolish undertaking” in the country if it would support his family. Holding him to the partnership were “ties of sentiment & obligation” as well as concern about how his professional career would take shape independent of Vaux. In the same way that Vaux had needed him for reassurance in 1865, so Olmsted was hesitant to practice landscape architecture on his own in 1871. He found one answer to his dilemma as his involvement in Central Park deepened during the winter of 1871–72.

Olmsted’s new role at Central Park came after several years of virtual exile from it. In May 1870 the so-called “Tweed” charter had abolished the Board of Commissioners of the Central Park and replaced it with a Department of Public Parks. The new board was dominated by Tammany Democrats Peter B. Sweeny, Henry Hilton, and Thomas C. Fields. As the executive committee, they systematically excluded fellow board member Andrew H. Green from their deliberations. Olmsted and Vaux had been appointed “Chief Landscape Architects” and “advisors to the Board,” but not once did its members seek their professional counsel.

Instead the new board embarked on a program of profligate spending. During the fourteen-year period in which the Central Park commission had directed construction, maintenance, and use, it had disbursed approximately $6 million. In twenty months Sweeny and his associates spent $2.25 million to “complete” a park that was already essentially complete. For purposes of patronage they doubled the size of the keepers force and added hundreds of new workers—many of whom were physically unfit or completely untrained. The new board also raised wages above those of laborers in the private sector. And much of this new spending, designed to advance the interests of Tammany, went for improvements that Olmsted and Vaux believed were injurious to the park.

Indeed, the new board had a completely different vision of how Central Park should look and how it should serve residents of the city. Under the guise of correcting the “numerous alleged defects” of the Greensward plan, Sweeny and his associates fundamentally altered the Central Park that Olmsted and Vaux had created. Intending to provide residents of New York with “more than mere exemption from urban conditions,” the partners had designed sweeping pastoral meadows and picturesque, densely planted hillsides to form “passages of scenery” that were the “antithesis of objects of vision to those of the streets and houses.” In its opinion, during 1870–71 the new board proposed to remedy the “neglect” that Central Park had suffered by initiating a vigorous program of “improvement”—which included grubbing up understory plantings, smoothing and cleaning rocky areas, and trimming park trees the same way it would trim trees on the street. In addition to the more artificial appearance caused by these “improvements,” the Department of Public Parks introduced “a variety of beds in arabesque patterns, planted [39] with flower-garden annuals”—precisely the gardenesque style of landscape design Olmsted thought ruinous to public parks. The department also changed the Dairy, originally designed by Olmsted and Vaux to be the focal point of an area specifically intended for the use of women with small children, into a public restaurant, a function for which the building and its secluded location were ill-suited.

But perhaps the part of the Sweeny board’s agenda that most enraged Olmsted was the department’s ambitious building program. It adopted Jacob Wrey Mould’s design for a sheepfold, a Ruskinian Gothic structure that Olmsted and Vaux ridiculed as resembling “a large English parochial school.” They objected to the building as an intrusion upon the landscape because of its prominent place in the view across the largest meadow of the lower park. Equally annoying was the awkward siting of the building, which violated the separation of ways Olmsted and Vaux had carefully arranged. Although the pavilion wings of the sheepfold were intended for the use of visitors, pedestrians approaching the building from the meadow had to cross a bridle path at a particularly dangerous location. The Department of Public Parks also adopted plans for yet another restaurant, a conservatory, and a propagating house. The greatest intrusion on the park, however, was the proposed zoological garden. Olmsted and Vaux had recommended that it be located at Manhattan Square, across Eighth Avenue from the park. Instead, the board began construction of a large building for the zoo on the upper meadow, the most extensive expanse of lawn in the park. When the designers protested that decision, Sweeny first ignored their letter and then in November 1870 abolished their advisory position.

The collapse of the Tweed Ring a year later gave Olmsted an opportunity to return to Central Park. Commissioners Hilton and Sweeny resigned in disgrace and were replaced by Henry G. Stebbins, former president of the Central Park commission, and landscape painter Frederic E. Church. At its organizational meeting on November 23 the reconstituted board elected Stebbins president and treasurer and reappointed Olmsted and Vaux as advisory landscape architects. Precisely what the board expected its responsibilities to be is unclear, because Mayor A. Oakey Hall’s administration had left the city’s finances in disarray. Indeed, as Andrew H. Green struggled to restore order to the city’s budget, he discovered that millions of dollars had been misspent, if not stolen. New York’s treasury was empty.

The first task Olmsted and Vaux undertook was to survey the changes to the park introduced by the Tammany board. Because of the financial turmoil, at first they could do little other than order that the partly constructed zoological building on the north meadow be razed. Stebbins immediately trimmed the payroll by firing many laborers as well as fifty-four park and gate keepers. Although the board requested that Olmsted and Vaux investigate a number of projects ranging from the condition of Union Square to the improvement of Eighth Avenue, not until March 6, 1872—the day on which [40] Olmsted and Vaux presented their analysis of the changes the Sweeny board had carried out on the park—did it place them on the payroll as landscape architects.

But even earlier than March, the roles of Olmsted and Vaux at Central Park had begun to diverge. At its meeting on January 30, 1872, the board established the position of landscape architect and general superintendent and named both men to the post. But while Vaux shared the title, Olmsted was in fact superintendent while Vaux assumed a lesser role apparently limited to decisions about buildings on the park. Olmsted continued to direct the day-to-day operations of the department even after May 29, 1872, when he replaced Stebbins on the board and was elected president and treasurer. At that time Vaux received Olmsted’s former position as landscape architect and general superintendent, but Olmsted continued to superintend and oversee design, combining it with his new administrative responsibilities.

Olmsted had resumed the “business” of park-making with great optimism. Despite the city’s straitened financial situation, he was “riding on the very crest of the glorious reform wave” by which the Committee of Seventy had ousted Tammany Hall. Invigorated by the hope that the reconstituted board intended to end patronage and that the “best men”—people like Frederic Church—would henceforth “be expected to serve [the public interest] whether convenient or not,” he began during the spring of 1872 to remedy the “maltreatment” Central Park had suffered during the Sweeny administration. He saw the most important tasks as re-creating the “general open park effect” of the meadows, replacing the understory plantings that had contributed to the “natural wild character” of the park, particularly in the Ramble, making shrub areas “more natural and picturesque,” restoring the screening effect on the transverse roads and along the park’s borders, and thinning the plantations. Essential as well would be a general improvement of morale among park employees—keepers, maintenance workers, and construction crews—all of whom had been demoralized by the workings of political patronage.

Almost immediately, however, Olmsted ran into obstacles. The largest one was the impasse over city government. The park board was operating on an “ad-interim” basis until the state legislature adopted a new charter for the city, but Governor John T. Hoffman, a Tammany loyalist, vetoed even a watered-down version of the original reformist document. By May 1872 Olmsted feared that no significant reorganization of city government would be enacted. Moreover, the park commissioners did not entrust him with the authority he believed necessary to carry out his responsibilities to the public. He chafed at the independence of Columbus Ryan, who had originally been hired as a foreman to oversee the early construction of the park but thereafter, as Green’s protégé, had become its superintendent. In that position Ryan, rather than the landscape architects, directed the activities of the gardeners. Ryan ignored many of Olmsted’s instructions, particularly those regarding the [41] finishing operations Olmsted considered essential to the ultimate value of the park. Distressed because of the board’s lack of support, on May 25 Olmsted wrote an impassioned letter of protest to Henry G. Stebbins, who appeared torn between conflicting loyalties to Green and Olmsted. Within four days Stebbins resigned from the park board and sailed to Europe.

Mayor A. Oakey Hall named Olmsted as Stebbins’ successor, and at the meeting of May 29, 1872, Olmsted was elected president and treasurer of the Department of Public Parks. Hall’s choice of Olmsted was probably an attempt to mollify critics of Tammany, particularly after the failure of the proposed new charter. In any case, Olmsted at last had the power he wanted. With the presidency came additional responsibilities: serving as a member of the powerful Board of Audit and Apportionment, which attempted to stabilize and regulate the city’s finances, and assuming many tasks that earlier had been performed by Green or George Van Nort, the former clerk of the board who had since become commissioner of the Department of Public Works. Moreover, Olmsted continued to collaborate with Vaux on plans and drawings requested by the board. At this time Vaux, independent of Olmsted, began preparing designs for the new buildings for the Museum of Natural History and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Olmsted considered his two most important responsibilities to be directing the gardeners and superintending the park keepers. He had long taken special interest in these areas, but since 1861, when the board rescinded much of Olmsted’s authority, neither he nor Vaux had exercised authority over these employees. Beginning in the spring of 1872, however, Olmsted struggled to place the gardeners and keepers on a more professional footing and make them directly accountable to him. He wished to reeducate the gardeners. Rather than design beds of Rowers and create “pretty little local effects,” he urged them to strive to realize “the beauty of broad landscape scenes and of combinations of trees with trees and with rocks and turf and water.” Indeed, he informed the board, unless the gardeners followed the intent of the Greensward plan and his own instructions rather than Ryan’s, the city’s enormous investment in land and construction for the park would be wasted. The board did accede somewhat: although he did not gain absolute control over construction and maintenance, Olmsted acquired a small corps of gardeners who served at his direction rather than Ryan’s. Surviving records cast little light on the success of this arrangement, but the persistence with which Olmsted continued to press his demands for greater control over the gardeners suggests that he was dissatisfied with it.

Olmsted found the problems of the park keepers even more vexing and ultimately more intractable. In February 1858 Olmsted had assumed responsibility for training and administering a force of keepers to maintain order on the park. But the keepers were more than police officers enforcing rules. Olmsted believed their most important function was to educate the public in the proper use of the park. To accomplish these purposes, Olmsted [42] demanded of the keepers the highest standards of decorum and rigorous discipline.

Since May 1870 the keepers force had been a haven for Tammany faithful. Under Sweeny’s aegis the park board greatly enlarged the number of men employed and increased their salaries. It also appointed a new captain, Nathaniel R. Mills, a former officer of the metropolitan police who, to Olmsted’s dismay, adopted the regulations of the “street” police. Patronage appointments also harmed the system Olmsted had created, as even those keepers who had once performed their jobs effectively lost any incentive to continue to do so. The morale and efficiency of the force declined precipitously while crime and vandalism on the park soared.

Even after Stebbins fired fifty-four men in November 1871, the keepers force remained riddled with patronage appointees and costly to operate. In May 1872 Olmsted resumed management of the keepers and began studying their activities. Despite strenuous effort, he was unable to bring the force back to its former level of discipline because he lacked the authority to change their work habits. Over his objections, in the following five months the board added more than fifty men to the keepers rank “to oblige politicians.” Then, on October 2, the board charged Olmsted to “report on the expediency of securing a more economical and efficient administration of the police force.” Four days later Olmsted’s task assumed special urgency when the first murder was committed in the park. The keepers force had to be more efficient, he resolved, but it could not be more economical.

Olmsted’s report reminded the board that the proper policing of the park was “the most vulnerable point in the undertaking.” Even before the Civil War he had realized that “political corruption, unskillful administration or improvident parsimony” could destroy the efficiency of the keepers. Although the first two had occurred under Sweeny’s administration, the third loomed ominously in the new board’s call for greater economy. During fair weather, when the park was crowded, the keepers force was already insufficient; to reduce it further would be sheer folly. Thus Olmsted proposed a different organizational structure. He suggested reducing the number of patrolmen by 20 percent and adding a force of uniformed maintenance workers who, in addition to cleaning seats, shelters, and other facilities for visitors, would serve as keepers during periods when the park was most crowded. When unusually large numbers visited the park, a supplementary force of auxiliary gardeners and laborers would serve as extra keepers. This system would provide greater flexibility in policing the park, but its cost would not exceed the previous year’s average monthly expenditure for park keeping. Olmsted, however, wanted more than the reorganization of the keepers; he urged the board to resolve to eliminate all forms of political patronage and to ensure instead that all the men it employed were chosen because of their special qualifications to serve the park. Unless the department undertook these steps, unless the morale and effectiveness of the keepers improved immediately, [43] Olmsted warned, Central Park would lose the qualities that had made it attractive to New Yorkers and a “new park will have to be made upon the ruins of that hitherto designed, adapted to recreation of a less refined character.”

Even a “reform” park board would not eliminate patronage. The department did approve Olmsted’s proposed reorganization of the keepers, but rather than institute appointments based upon merit, the “reform” wing of the Democratic party ousted Tammany appointees and replaced them with their own faithful. Olmsted later described the reformers as actively engaged in political huckstering, and their ruling principle, like that of Tammany, as patronage. To illustrate his plight, Olmsted recounted a visit from four prominent gentlemen who requested the removal of a number of park employees he judged exemplary for their faithful service. These workers had had their time at the public trough, a “statesman” explained to Olmsted, and their positions should be awarded to reformers.

At the time the board adopted Olmsted’s reorganization of the keepers, Stebbins, who had resumed the presidency, fired more than sixty of the park police who were physically unable to perform their responsibilities at the park. After culling the worst of the keepers, Olmsted then directed physician R. D. Nesmith to give physical examinations to the remaining ninety-nine men. The doctor found not only that one-third of the men were in “unsound condition” but also that one-fifth were “positively unfit for duty.” Predictably, the board dismissed the physician, not the men appointed because of political considerations.

The persistence of patronage and its demoralizing effect on the keepers led Olmsted to abandon the beat system used by the keepers and replace it with what he called the “round system.” Keepers assigned to round duty would leave the station house at staggered intervals and make a circuit of the park along the drives. To complete their tour within the designated time, the men would have to walk reasonably quickly, which was precisely what Olmsted intended. Under the old system, keepers had given visitors the impression of lassitude, if not dereliction of duty. Olmsted reasoned that only the appearance of energetic activity on the part of the keepers would assure the public of its safety, and under the beat system that would have required “unusually exacting” discipline. In the absence of such a standard, Olmsted reasoned, only the round system would force keepers to conform to his expectations.

Introduced during the spring of 1873, the round system quickly earned the enmity of some keepers, who turned to the press and their political friends to influence the board to abandon it. One especially damaging account of the system appeared in the powerful New-York Daily Tribune on May 28. This article argued that the measures Olmsted had taken to overcome the effects of patronage had demoralized the keepers. Round duty, according to this writer, had “tied up the remainder of the original corps of [44] park-keepers to a ‘chain-gang’ system, so arduous, ineffective, and generally abominable” that it was both injurious to the keepers’ health and inadequate to the task of protecting the safety of visitors in the park. Were round duty to continue, the article asserted, the park would be “in imminent danger of soon becoming a break-neck race-course by day, and by night an open-air brothel, with occasional interludes of ravishment and highway robbery.” Without mentioning Olmsted by name, the author denounced the “genius” who had invented such a system and the board that had adopted it.

Although Olmsted responded to these accusations and publicly defended the round system, the Tribune article could not have appeared at a worse time. A revised city charter was to take effect on June 1, 1873, and newly elected Republican mayor William F. Havemeyer promptly appointed Philip Bissinger, Samuel Hall, and David B. Williamson to the three vacancies on the park board. Three weeks after publication of the Tribune piece, Bissinger suggested creating a special committee to review and revise the bylaws of the department. When that motion was adopted, Bissinger, Williamson, and Salem H . Wales—all recent appointees—began analyzing the effectiveness of all aspects of the department’s operations. The committee quickly moved to abolish the Office of Design and Superintendence and to replace it with independent offices of police, landscape architecture, and landscape gardening. Olmsted was appalled: not only did the proposed changes seem a throwback to the system of bureaus adopted by the Sweeny board, but the committee also expected that Olmsted would head the landscape architecture division and intended to remove him from authority over the two aspects of park administration he considered most essential and for which he considered himself most qualified. Instead of being responsible for the design and keeping of the park, Olmsted concluded, the new board wanted him to worry about “such matters as the setting of foundations on quicksands, the choice of tiles for a house flooring or the management of bears and wolves.” Olmsted protested vehemently in a report to the board as well as in a private letter to Stebbins, its president. When the board ignored Olmsted’s plea for a different administrative framework—one that would relieve him of all responsibilities save oversight of the keepers and gardeners—Stebbins resigned as president. On August 29, 1873, while Olmsted was away on vacation, the board elected Salem H. Wales president, Stebbins as vice-president, and Samuel Williamson treasurer. Williamson apparently had been appointed to the park commission at Green’s behest. Howard A. Martin, Olmsted’s longtime clerk, thus assessed the actions taken at the meeting: “On the whole it seems to be a success for Mr Green. He has his man in the Executive position after all for no matter how Mr Wales may exercise his authority, the Treasurer will always be in the position to block the wheels in the same way as Mr Whittemore did & probably he will be quite as subservient.” Martin also reported that the changes in by-laws adopted at the meeting [45] did nothing to resolve the conflict between Olmsted and Columbus Ryan. He informed Olmsted:

Mr Ryan sees that . . . there is no change in his relations to you & that if the old bylaws would bear the construction that he was independent of you that the new Bylaws will bear the same construction. He evidently means to follow the course he has always followed. The sentiment of the members of the Board is generally that Ryan had better be humored & managed—as heretofore.

The actions of Stebbins and Olmsted left the new board in a quandary. Except for the twenty months of Tweed rule and his self-imposed vacation, Stebbins had been a member of the board overseeing park operations since 1859 and had served as its president for most of that time. The public considered Olmsted, the co-designer of the park, its principal creator. Were either man to publicize his disagreements with the new board, a storm of criticism might follow. To avoid such a confrontation, the board asked Olmsted to explain the reasons for his resignation. When he presented a motion that would have placed all employees of the department under his supervision, the board tabled his resignation and asked Stebbins to mediate. The board ignored Olmsted’s proposed motion and eight days later voted to replace the round system with beat patrols and authorized the keepers to carry clubs.

This time, however, Olmsted did not press his resignation. His various investments in suburban development had brought financial losses rather than gains, and the parks he had designed for Buffalo, Chicago, and smaller cities promised no income from superintendence. Moreover, the Panic of 1873 had halted operations in Brooklyn. Yet, as had been the case seventeen years earlier at the commencement of construction of Central Park, the massive numbers of men put out of work by the recession led New York City to undertake an ambitious construction program. As the effects of the panic became evident, the board instructed Olmsted to prepare plans for employing as many men as possible to implement his and Vaux’s designs for Riverside and Morningside parks.

Olmsted had little alternative but to remain. The income from John Olmsted’s estate and from his own California investments provided some but not enough of the funds Olmsted needed to support his family. Few other professional commissions loomed on the horizon, none of which promised a long-term engagement, while the $6,500 a year that Olmsted received as landscape architect to the New York parks department provided him much-needed economic stability and security. Thus, in the fall of 1873, facing an uncertain future, Olmsted chose to continue working for what he considered an unsympathetic park board. He knew the risks, he knew the demands politicians [46] would place on him for patronage, and perhaps to defend himself he began keeping a manuscript journal about New York City politics which would later form the basis for his book The Spoils of the Park.

But Olmsted stayed for reasons other than a lack of alternative employment. Deeply committed to the park as an experiment in republican social institutions, he worried that Central Park’s fate might adversely affect park development in other cities. Because he had staked his career in landscape architecture on the belief that the public park was essential to the fulfillment of the nation’s republican destiny, he was tormented by the future it seemed to confront at the hands of an unenlightened democracy dominated by demagogues and politicians. Foreseeing the “ruin” of Central Park—and perhaps that of his reputation as well unless he remained—Olmsted decided to carry on. He would continue to fight both City Hall and Tammany Hall, members of the ring and reformist clubs, in order to protect Central Park and promote his vision of a restructured urban-suburban environment.

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