INTRODUCTION

Olmsted and Vaux, 1872–1874

The formal partnership of Olmsted, Vaux & Co. was dissolved in September 1872, but the two men continued through 1873 to collaborate on Central Park and Prospect Park, as well as in the planning of Riverside and Morningside parks in Manhattan. Elsewhere, Olmsted soon began to advise on projects that he and Vaux had begun while partners. These included selection of a new site for Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, and informal advising on the Cornell campus, a role that had begun in 1867. Olmsted also continued to review work being done on the Buffalo park system that he and Vaux had planned in 1868–72, and he soon took on new commissions for that city — designing Niagara Square in 1874 and the grounds of Buffalo City Hall in 1875. New commissions in other places came quickly. In May 1873, U.S. Senator Justin Morrill requested Olmsted to plan the recently expanded grounds of the U.S. Capitol, and he began work on that project in early 1874. In the summer of 1874, Charles S. Sargent sought his assistance in a scheme to include the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard College in the projected Boston park system. By the fall of that year Olmsted was engaged to plan a park on Mount Royal in Montreal; in July 1875 he was appointed with Leopold Eidlitz and Henry Hobson Richardson to the advisory board for the New Capitol of New York State; in November, he was appointed with J. J. R. Croes to develop a plan of streets, parks, and rapid transit for the Bronx; and in the fall, the recently formed Boston park commission requested his help in planning the park system of that city. Documents in this volume chronicle Olmsted’s ongoing involvement in these varied projects.

The last eight years of Olmsted’s residence and practice in New York City, 1874–81 present a notable contrast with his role on Central Park during the previous decade. In 1865, he had returned from California to join Vaux as reinstated landscape architects of the park, despite the reluctance of Andrew H. Green, whose relations with Olmsted had become increasingly strained in the pre-war years. Olmsted’s efforts during the next few years focused on the design and construction of Prospect Park, and not on Central Park. He and Vaux developed the design concepts for Eastern and Ocean parkways in Brooklyn in these years, but they were given no role in planning the uptown boulevard and avenues that Green and his fellow commissioners were projecting for Manhattan at the same time. It was Green who wrote the reports of the New York parks commission on this subject. Nor did the park board involve Olmsted and Vaux in planning for the newly annexed area of the Bronx, a process that began in 1872.

During the brief hegemony of the Tweed Ring from May 1870 to September 1871, the new board dismissed Olmsted and Vaux and embarked on a program that would transform the park. They began to introduce such structures as the ostentatious “sheepfold” (later Tavern on the Green) on inappropriate sites, cleared out the dense plantings established by the designers, [4] and transplanted trees and shrubs to smaller Manhattan parks. In early 1872 the reformers who ousted Tweed restored the partners as landscape architects to the Department of Public Parks, and Olmsted became general superintendent of the department as well. In May of that year he regained control of the Central Park keepers force after a hiatus of ten years. He also secured control of a small corps of gardeners in order to complete planting some parts of the park, his first such opportunity in an equally long time. But this promising situation lasted little over a year. A new city charter brought a new park board in June 1873. The board moved quickly to limit Olmsted’s authority over the Central Park gardeners by creating an office of landscape gardening independent of him. By August the board had limited his authority further by forbidding the cutting of any trees on the park without specific approval. In September the board abandoned the new system for park keepers that Olmsted had instituted and relieved him of all duties of superintendence. Having sharply limited his authority on Central Park, the board set him instead to designing Riverside and Morningside parks, for each of which he prepared a report and preliminary plan before the end of 1873.

The New York City Parks, 1874–1877

Such was Olmsted’s situation in January 1874, at the beginning of the time period of this volume. Ironically, his final opportunity to direct work on Central Park came with the resurgence of Tammany Hall in the elections of 1874. The most important factor was the appointment to the park board of William R. Martin, a promoter of uptown development. The opportunities for park design and urban planning offered to Olmsted during the years of Martin’s presence on the park board, from January 1875 to January 1878, were significant. The key turning point was March 19, 1875, the day that Olmsted regained control over the labor force of the Department of Public Parks. He immediately hired his valued horticultural assistants William Fischer and Oliver Bullard to thin neglected and overgrown plantings in Central Park. At this time, Olmsted also regained control of the keepers force. During 1875 the park board directed him to draw up new plans for Riverside Park and Avenue and selected him, with the engineer J. J. R. Croes, to plan streets, parks, and a rapid-transit system for the recently annexed twenty-third and twenty-fourth wards of the city, the Bronx. In succeeding years, the park board under Martin’s presidency gave him the opportunity to redesign Tompkins Square on the East Side between 7th and 10th streets, and to begin planning East River Park (now Carl Schurz Park) between 84th and 86th streets.

Olmsted’s increased role in park affairs and his sponsorship by William R. Martin caused difficulties in his relations with an old colleague, Henry G. Stebbins, an early member of the park commission and its president from 1872 to May 1876. Stebbins was an ally of Andrew H. Green, whose animus toward Olmsted was of long standing. In the spring of 1876 the friction [5] between Stebbins and Martin became increasingly heated. Green was seeking to consolidate his control of patronage of the Department of Public Parks by maneuvering to become mayor of the city and through his efforts in the state legislature to replace the park board with a single commissioner allied with him, thus countering the Tammany faction represented by Martin. Park employees remained in a constant state of excitement as the opposing groups saw their prospects rise and fall. By May 1876, Green’s efforts had failed, and the addition of a new Tammany member to the park board brought William R. Martin the presidency. Green was quick to strike at Olmsted where he could. Olmsted was appointed a member of the State Survey Commission at the end of May and Green, as city comptroller, immediately withheld his salary, declaring that he had forfeited his position with the Department of Public Parks by accepting the state position. When the park board moved to reinstate Olmsted in July in anticipation of his impending resignation from the State Survey, Stebbins — as Green’s principal representative on the board — proposed instead to abolish his position. Olmsted was forced to sue for his pay for the summer of 1876, finally receiving a favorable court decision in May 1877.

Mayor Wick ham removed Andrew H. Green as comptroller in November 1876, replacing him with the rising power in Tammany Hall, John Kelly. During the following year, Olmsted’s principal task for the Department of Public Parks was developing plans for the twenty-third and twenty-fourth wards. This reflected a primary concern of park board president William R. Martin, but Martin’s days in the Tammany Hall hierarchy were numbered, as were Olmsted’s with the park board. An early sign of what was in store was the form letter Olmsted received in September from Kelly, as chairman of the Tammany Hall finance committee, directing him to contribute $112 to the Tammany war chest for the November elections. Olmsted presumably failed to respond, and the following month Kelly withheld his salary on the grounds that his full-time services were not needed by the park department during the winter months and that he had been absent on other employment every working day of November. This new crisis intensified for Olmsted the stress caused by physical debilitation brought on by the intense heat of the summer of 1877 and the return of an “old malarial complaint.” His doctors insisted that he take a vacation from his work, and late in December the park board granted him a three-month leave of absence for a trip to Europe. As he prepared to depart, they moved to make his leave of absence permanent by abolishing the Bureau of Design and Superintendence and making him Consulting Landscape Architect without salary. While he was absent on his voyage a group of influential friends and supporters launched a protest against his dismissal but to no avail. And so ended, in an abrupt and shocking way, Olmsted’s official connection with the New York City parks he had worked so long and hard to plan and protect.

Olmsted returned from Europe little improved in health or attitude, and it was several months before his wife’s regime of rest and horseback riding [6] brought noticeable improvement. He spent part of each of the next four years in the Boston region, beginning his design work on the park system there, but the fate of the New York parks still concerned him. Longtime supporters hoped to restore him to his old position there. Discussions in the fractious park board during the fall of 1881 brought proposals to secure the services of both himself and Calvert Vaux, but there was no agreement. Finally in November, to the surprise of most of those involved, the board appointed Calvert Vaux as Consulting Architect. Despite this change the board and its employees continued to carry out programs in Central Park that were the reverse of what Olmsted desired. Particularly troubling was the dedication of the new superintendent, appointed in August 1881, to “cleaning up” the park by clearing out the dense shrubbery and other undergrowth that Olmsted had carefully tended over the years, and by opening vistas into the park from surrounding residential areas. “How will it be,” he mused, “when ’a free circulation of air and light’ beneath every bush and brooding conifer has been secured; when the way of the lawn-mower has at all points been made plain, and the face of nature shall everywhere have become as natty as a new silk hat?”

In response, and as his parting shot, Olmsted wrote and published a critique of the policies pursued by the park board since his dismissal. He titled his pamphlet The Spoils of the Park, with a Few Leaves from the Deep-Laden Note-Books or A Wholly Unpractical Man” and published it himself in early 1882. Presented in this volume with explanatory annotation, it is a remarkable indictment of park policies and political patronage in New York City of the post-Tweed era. It was a companion piece to two other previously unpublished works that are included in this volume. One described the unfortunate effects of political forces on the final planning and construction of Riverside Park, a long article that Olmsted wrote in late 1879 after an independent commission of engineers revealed how irresponsible the officials in charge of construction of the park had been. He carried this project to the point of printing galley proofs and correcting them, but apparently abandoned the idea of publication. The other statement was the article titled “Influence” that he wrote following the fatal wounding of President James Garfield in June 1881. He presented the manuscript to his old friend George W. Curtis, a leading civil service reformer and president of the Civil-Service Reform Association.

The other remarkable record that Olmsted made of the prevalence of patronage in the public life of his time was the informal journal on the subject that he kept during the years of this volume. The editors have given it the title “Patronage Journal” and have identified as fully as possible the persons and situations mentioned in it. The memoranda in the journal constitute a rare record of the inner workings of the political system of New York City. The journal also records Olmsted’s attempts to reduce the wages of the park department employees who gained their employment through political influence, and to bring their pay more in line with that of private contractors during the hard times following the Panic of 1873. His description of the difficult [7] conditions and slight compensation that workers in this period were willing to accept (the instance of the road builders on Mount Royal in Montreal is particularly appalling) are another aspect of this valuable record.

The New York State Capitol, 1874–1882

The arena of the city and state of New York was the crucial one for Olmsted in the period 1874–1877. At the same time that his work for the New York City Department of Public Parks greatly increased, he became involved in the many controversies surrounding construction of the New Capitol in Albany. Victory at the state level in the elections of 1874 brought Samuel Tilden to the capital as governor. His lieutenant governor was William Dorsheimer, a Liberal Republican who had abandoned his party in reaction against the policies of the Grant administration. Dorsheimer was a longtime associate of Olmsted’s, having brought him to Buffalo to plan the park system there in 1868. He was also involved in development of the Buffalo Asylum for the Insane, designed by H. H. Richardson with grounds by Olmsted and Vaux, and he had been a member of the small group to whom Olmsted in 1869 had suggested creation of a public reservation at Niagara Falls. The change of state administration in 1874 gave rise to partisan controversy over the New Capitol. Dorsheimer expressed to Olmsted his misgivings about the architect Thomas Fuller’s design of the New Capitol, which had been approved in 1867 during a Republican state administration. He proposed formation of an advisory board to pass on Fuller’s design before further construction was authorized. Olmsted enlisted H. H. Richardson and they added the noted New York architect Leopold Eidlitz. When they submitted their report in April 1876, this advisory board proposed that so far as possible the Capitol, already half completed, be finished according to a different plan and in a different style than previously — substituting Romanesque for Fuller’s “Italian Renaissance.” This proposed mixture of styles and the overriding of one architect’s work in so politically charged an atmosphere drew immediate protest from the New York City chapter of the American Institute of Architects, chaired by Richard Morris Hunt. In the ensuing debate, Olmsted enlisted the support of his friend Charles Eliot Norton, professor of fine arts at Harvard College. Olmsted’s group prevailed, Fuller was removed, and in September 1876 the three-man advisory board became the official architects of the New Capitol. They then formed the firm of Eidlitz, Richardson, & Co., with Olmsted as treasurer, to facilitate their work.

In the planning of the New Capitol, Olmsted’s role was primarily to assist in defending the proposals of his colleagues and to write substantial parts of their reports. He also drew up a set of regulations for the Capitol’s police force. Olmsted played a part in their artistic discussions as well— those “all-night debates” he later recalled that enlivened the advisory board’s nocturnal steamboat trips between New York City and Albany. In those debates, Olmsted [8] seems to have argued for simplicity of form and clear expression of the function of the building in its exterior. The only elements of the building for which he seems to have made detailed designs were sidewalks on the north side of the Capitol and planting cases next to the windows in hallways. The latter were fabricated from plans that Thomas Wisedell drew up under Olmsted’s supervision, based on suggestions of appropriate plant materials provided by Charles S. Sargent.

The advisory board’s victory of 1876 was not easy to sustain. A new series of attacks on the proposed changes in design of the New Capitol was launched by Thomas Fuller and his architectural and political supporters early in 1877. This led to halting of construction and a new round of legislative investigations during the spring. A key document relating to this controversy is the testimony that Olmsted presented in March to the joint committees of finance and ways and means. His efforts and those of his colleagues were unsuccessful: on March 23, a bare majority of the Senate Finance Committee recommended that the New Capitol be completed in the architectural style of Fuller’s original design, and in May the legislature decreed that the exterior of the building should be completed “in the Italian renaissance style of architecture, adopted in the original design . . . . “ In consequence, Eidlitz and Richardson were required to devise a nominally “Renaissance” appearance for the rest of the New Capitol’s upper stories. Their principal design projects in the interior, the Assembly and Senate chambers and related hallways and staircases, were not affected by the dictates of the legislature concerning the exterior of the building. Problems and controversies concerning the soundness of design and construction of these spaces, however, continued to arise. As late as the fall of 1882, Olmsted had to rush to Albany and work frantically drawing up a response to a critical review of Eidlitz’s Assembly Chamber by a panel of architects that included George B. Post. Through these years, he remained convinced that the root of the controversy was the desire for patronage and the power to award employment to political supporters.

The Campaign for the Niagara Reservation, 1879–1882

While he carried on his work on the New York state capitol, Olmsted became involve~ in another project related to the state — the campaign to create a scenic reservation at Niagara Falls. As early as 1869, Olmsted had discussed with his. friends the possibility of removing the manufacturing and tourist buildings that marred the views of the American rapids at the Falls. It was nearly a decade later that a governor of the state, Lucius Robinson, embraced the issue. In January 1879, following a meeting with the Lord Dufferin, the governor-general of Canada, Robinson called on the New York state legislature to establish a public reservation there. The legislature then directed the New York State Survey Commission to establish appropriate boundaries. Olmsted and the director of the Survey, James T. Gardner, were already acquainted: [9] Olmsted had hired him in 1865 to survey and map Yosemite Valley. The two men now joined forces to preserve an equally iconic site. The report of the State Survey of 1879, presented to the legislature in March 1880, included brief “Notes” by Olmsted on the special quality of scenery at Niagara. Gardner’s accompanying report gave graphic descriptions, accompanied by numerous photographs, of the “disfigured banks” of the American rapids and other unattractive aspects of the area. The State Survey document also contained a petition in favor of a reservation signed by 270 luminaries from the United States and Europe, along with 400 unlisted signers, that Olmsted and Charles Eliot Norton had drawn up and circulated. A bill based on proposals contained in the report passed the state Assembly in May but failed to pass the Senate before the legislature adjourned. Norton then enlisted support in the British Parliament from the influential Earl of Derby, while Olmsted turned to organizing a new petition campaign. Any prospect of success during the following year was scotched by the hostility of the new governor, Alonzo Cornell. In the summer of 1881 Olmsted and Norton arranged to have a recent Harvard graduate, Henry Norman, write a series of articles for New York and Boston newspapers and by the end of the year were preparing to engage Jonathan B. Harrison, a New Hampshire clergyman, to write additional material. Their efforts bore fruit after Grover Cleveland became governor of New York in the fall of 1882. With his support, the legislature authorized creation of the Niagara Reservation the following year, and in 1885 followed that step by appropriating the funds needed to purchase the land. In 1887 Olmsted and his old partner Calvert Vaux drew up the plan and accompanying report for the needed construction. Their collaboration came as one more result of political antagonisms of previous years. Both William Dorsheimer and Andrew H. Green were members of the Niagara Reservation commission, and the former was determined that Olmsted should be engaged to draw up the plan of the reservation while the latter was equally determined that only his ally Calvert Vaux be chosen. The selection of both Olmsted and Vaux to prepare the plan was due to a grudging compromise on the part of both commissioners.

The Boston Parks, 1870–1882

By the end of the time period of this volume, Olmsted had changed his place of residence from New York City to the Boston suburb of Brookline. As he observed to his old friend Charles Loring Brace, still in New York running the Children’s Aid Society, “I enjoy this suburban country beyond expression.” Recent friendships also drew Olmsted to the Boston region. By 1879 his old acquaintance Charles Eliot Norton had become his most important ally in the campaign for a Niagara reservation, and, most valued of all, his friendship and professional collaboration with Henry Hobson Richardson was rapidly growing in importance. In fact, Richardson proposed to design a shingle-style house for Olmsted on the architect’s own property in Brookline. [10] It was while visiting Richardson in the winter of 1881–1882, so the story goes, that Olmsted observed the streets being cleared of snow on an early Sunday morning, directed by one of the selectmen, and concluded that a community with such attention to communal needs was the place best suited for him to live. In the summer of 1881 he moved to Brookline and two years later purchased the old farmhouse down the street from Richardson that he called “Fairsted.”

The professional attraction provided by Boston was the opportunity to plan a comprehensive park system for the city —something that only Buffalo had offered in previous years. Olmsted had been marginally involved in the debate about creating parks in Boston that took place in 1869. Some park advocates had urged him to testify on the subject and he delivered an address in Boston to the American Social Science Association entitled “Public Parks and the Enlargement of Towns.” Further involvement came in 1874, when Charles S. Sargent, director of the nascent Arnold Arboretum of Harvard approached him for assistance in making the arboretum part of the projected park system. Olmsted had also been involved since 1872 in the search for a new location for the McLean Asylum of Massachusetts General Hospital. In June 1875, Charles H. Dalton, for several years past a member of the committee charged with finding the new site, engaged Olmsted to review plans to be drawn up by the engineer Joseph Curtis for the property recently acquired at Waverly in Belmont. The following month, Dalton was appointed to the three-man park commission in Boston. By October he was soliciting Olmsted’s advice on the location of parks and the decade-long association of the two men began in earnest. Olmsted visited the park commissioners in October 1875, combining park and asylum work. He reviewed their plans again in the spring of 1876, just before publication of their proposal for a park system. The principal effect of his comments at that time was widening of the proposed park at the Back Bay to provide a more impressive vista from Parker Hill over the marshes and Charles River. Several elements of the plan differed from the system of parks and parkways that Olmsted and his firm came to design over the next two decades, but the fundamental concept of a linear system extending from the Charles River and Boston Common to Jamaica Pond and a large park in West Roxbury, with a parkway extending on toward Boston Harbor, was established by the commissioners’ plan of 1876.

Up to this point, Olmsted had been merely an occasional and unofficial consultant, a fact at which he broadly hinted in his communications with the commissioners. This anomalous relationship caused difficulties in the next stage of building the park system. On March 1, 1878, while Olmsted was recuperating in Europe and unbeknownst to him, the Boston park commissioners announced a design competition for the Back Bay Park. Entries were due on May first and would be judged by the commissioners and their “consulting engineer,” by which they meant Olmsted. One can imagine Olmsted’s [11] surprise when, a week after his return to this country, he received an urgent summons from Charles Dalton to come to Boston and help judge the competition. He quickly refused, citing the inappropriateness of such a role given his past and possible future relationship to the commissioners. He followed this with a systematic critique of the concept of design competitions. His response completely upset the plans of the commission. Henry Hobson Richardson convinced Dalton soon after that he must act quickly to secure Olmsted’s counsel. Accordingly, the commissioners awarded their prize to Hermann Grundel, a florist whose plan was clearly inferior to those submitted by such respected landscape designers as Robert Morris Copeland, Ernest Bowditch, and Joseph Curtis. The American Architect and Building News, in its review of the competition, remarked that “We presume it would be too much to expect the commissioners to give the inquiring public a reason for their extraordinary choice, but we should be glad to know what were the merits which they discovered in Mr. Grundel’s plan which in their judgment entitled it to the preference.” The answer seems to be that the commissioners believed that Grundel had no ambition to see his plan implemented, and no professional standing, leaving them free to enlist Olmsted as their designer. Their formal explanation was that none of the competition designs adequately addressed the engineering difficulties presented by drainage into the Back Bay of flood-waters from the Muddy River and Stony Brook. During the summer of 1878, Olmsted drew up his first concepts for tile Back Bay Fens and by year’s end the commissioners had formally engaged him to provide design and oversight of construction of the first section of their ambitious system.

Over the next four years, Olmsted developed his innovative plan for the Back Bay site. By installing a water gate at the Charles River he created a saltwater lagoon with only one foot of tidal rise and fall that would have an appearance similar to the salt marshes of the nearby Massachusetts coast. He dredged and mounded the soil of the bay to create a series of low-lying peninsulas with vegetation that would hinder tile development of destructive surf when the basin was used to hold floodwater overflow from Stony Brook. Sanitary engineering considerations, he insisted, made it impossible to create on that site the usual labor-intensive and decorative urban park. The great challenge, he was to discover, was to develop plantings that would thrive in the difficult situation of those barely tidal Fens. Although in appearance it was a wild, natural marsh, Olmsted made sure to provide adequate access to and through the landscape he created there. He designed carriage drives along both sides of the Fens, connecting Commonwealth Avenue and Boylston Street with Huntington Avenue and Brookline Avenue, and added a separate half-mile-long bridle path on the east side. For pedestrians he provided a sidewalk along the carriage drive on the steep and narrow west bank, while on the east side he designed a sinuous path through the marsh. Several small beaches provided access to the water and a series of boat landings were planned for the water-trolley [12] system he proposed to operate along the length of the lagoons. He worked through scores of sketches, considering many different treatments for the interior of the space. By the fall of 1878 he was ready to present several alternatives, all of which had more paths and other features in the interior than are found in the first published version of early 1879. Olmsted’s report of January 26, 1880, in this volume is the document that accompanied his official presentation of this plan to the board. It was 1882 before the watercourse took its final form, running close to the eastern shore of the northern basin, and minor changes appear in the later published plan of 1887 and thereafter.

As the documents in this volume indicate, Olmsted was determined that the bridges in the Fens not be designed by the city engineer, on whose professional skill he relied heavily in dealing with the issues of water control and sanitary engineering. He prevailed on the commissioners to let him engage H. H. Richardson for architectural design, and the two collaborated closely in providing concepts for the Boylston Street bridge in particular.

During these years, Olmsted was also engaged with Charles S. Sargent in securing a place in the Boston park system for the Arnold Arboretum. Sargent realized that he needed financial assistance from the city to achieve his ambitions for that institution. At first Olmsted was unsure that he could successfully combine an arboretum and a park, but he soon joined enthusiastically in the venture. Sargent gave him the task of deciding what land should be added to the existing holdings of Harvard College, and of planning the drives and walks. Olmsted also undertook to move the various parties — notably the city of Boston and the corporation of Harvard College — toward acceptance of the idea. “I always find the prospect bad when I arrive in Boston and good when I leave,” he observed to Charles Eliot Norton at a crucial stage of negotiations. In 1878, authorization was secured from all quarters and the city of Boston purchased the Arnold Arboretum, along with the forty-five additional acres identified by Olmsted, and leased them back to Harvard for 999 years. For that investment, payment of the cost of constructing and maintaining drives and paths, and provision of police service, the city added the property to its park system and the university secured a truly exemplary arboretum. Olmsted began producing designs for the arboretum in the summer of 1878, beginning a collaboration between his firm and Sargent that lasted beyond Olmsted’s retirement in 1895.

During these years Olmsted was involved in development of other elements of the park system. In 1879 he designed the extension of Commonwealth Avenue across the northern end of the Back Bay Fens and connecting with Beacon Street. In the following year, he and Sargent drew up a proposal for replanting the trees along Commonwealth Avenue between the Public Garden and the Fens. In the spring of 1881, he reported to the park commissioners concerning the land most desirable to acquire for the principal park of the system, in West Roxbury. In a report of 1880, he proposed to connect the [13] Back Bay Fens to Jamaica Pond along the Muddy River and marshes and ponds above it, rather than constructing a parkway from a park on Parker Hill to Jamaica Pond as proposed in the commissioners’ report of 1876. The river would be freshwater instead of brackish as heretofore, and would be separated from the saltwater Fens at Brookline Avenue by an underground conduit to the Charles River. The scenery along its banks, made accessible by carriage drives, walks, and a bridle path, would be that of a lowland stream, and the freshwater marsh above Tremont Street would become a pond for impoundment of flood waters. In this way the stream would keep its scenic character, saved from burial in a culvert and serving both recreational and sanitary needs of the area.

Thus, by a series of campaigns, reports, and designs, Olmsted was able by early 1882 to submit the last report in this volume on the Boston park system, in which he offered a classic description of how the “Emerald Necklace,” though decades from being named such, would offer a varied series of landscape experiences between the Charles River and what came to be Franklin Park.

Mount Royal, Montreal, 1874–1877

These extensive projects were only part of the public work that Olmsted carried out during the years covered by this volume. In 1874 he began to design a park on Mount Royal in Montreal, which offered him the challenge of creating a public recreation ground on a mountain site. The work engaged his attention during a period of three years. Over 100 letters that he wrote to the Montreal park com·missioners and their staff for the period 1874–1877 have survived. They describe the difficulties that he encountered in attempting, from a distance, to guide the construction of the first park design that he created without Calvert Vaux’s assistance. In the process, he became aware of the difficulties that developed when the group responsible for the park was not an independent commission, as had been the case in New York, Brooklyn, Buffalo, and Chicago, but rather a committee of a city’s common council. The first major construction project on Mount Royal, the carriage drive up the mountain, was carried out with little reference to Olmsted’s detailed plan. Later, the city chose to place a reservoir in the only area suited for truly parklike pastoral scenery. Further construction of a circuit drive atop the mountain closely followed his plans, but the charming “Crown of the Mountain” refectory and vista point designed for him by the architect Thomas Wisedell was not built, nor was the system of footpaths that he planned by which even visitors in wheelchairs could ascend to the summit. The difficulties Olmsted encountered in realizing his concept led him in 1881 to write and publish an explanation of his plan. That document, “Mount Royal. Montreal,” stands as one of his richest and most impassioned statements on landscape design.

The U.S. Capitol Grounds, 1873–1882

A professional commission of great importance that commanded Olmsted’s attention through the whole period of the present volume was the design and construction of the newly expanded grounds of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., and the designing of terraces for that structure. The project began with a request in May 1873 from Senator Justin Morrill of Vermont, chairman of the Senate Committee on Public Buildings and Grounds, that Olmsted undertake the project. “I hope you may feel sufficient interest in this rather national project,” Morrill urged, “not to see it botched.” It was indeed an undertaking of national significance. Olmsted saw the importance of creating grounds for the legislative halls of the Republic that assisted its efficient operation, and he wished to create a setting that heightened the grandeur and dignity of the building. Through subordination, visually and functionally, of the grounds to the Capitol he hoped as well to create a nationally influential example of good taste in landscape design—a demonstration that would counteract the current emphasis on decorative, horticultural display.

Olmsted’s first concern, as he expressed it to Justin Morrill in his first substantive letter of January 22, 1874, was to urge a coordinated treatment of the whole area between the Capitol and the Washington Monument and White House. In that entire area he found a confusion of spaces, each treated in a different way by different agencies and overseen by different congressional committees. Still aware of the issues of nationalism and states’ rights that had so concerned him during the Civil War, he observed that “the capital of the Union manifests nothing so much as disunity.” “What is wanting,” he instructed Morrill, “is a federal bond.” On March 27 he engaged to prepare a plan for the grounds of the Capitol, but attempted first to have a board of landscape architects consider his proposal “to bring all these grounds into subordination to a comprehensive scheme.” His efforts, however, came to naughty

As for the setting of the Capitol itself, he observed that the earthen berms that provided terracing on the north, west, and south were insufficient for the enlarged building. On the east side, the eastern edge of the grounds must be lowered six feet to reach the level of newly constructed First Street East, and many trees in that area must be removed or transplanted. By June 1874 Olmsted had prepared a “skeleton plan” for the grounds. On the east side it simplified the approach to the Capitol by merging the fourteen streets reaching the grounds to half that number. By this time he had also worked out the shape of the two broad ovals of turf and trees in order to achieve an effect of spaciousness in the interior of the east grounds. He also arranged the plantings in a way that permitted views of the full façade of the Capitol from only the best vantage points. This plan did not provide for extending East Capitol Street directly into the grounds. It also contained the germ of the concept of an architectural terrace for the west front: but Olmsted at this time proposed simply to widen the earthen berm, introducing an architectural structure only [15] in the form of two broad staircases with connecting walled terraces at their three landings. He and his architectural associate, Thomas Wisedell, made numerous alterations during the summer of 1874, and in September Wisedell drew up a large, colored version of their plan. It showed two-tiered architectural terraces on the north, south, and west sides of the building, and allowed for the full forty-foot extension of the West Front, as planned by the previous Architect of the Capitol, Thomas U. Walter. When U.S. Army Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs, an opponent of the extension, queried Olmsted about that aspect of his plan, he replied that he had wished to intrude as little as possible on the purview of the architects. He added, however, that he had told Edward Clark, Justin Morrill, and others that among the various proposals being discussed for extending the east and west fronts, he “regarded that as the best by which they would be advanced the least.”

Most of the other features shown on Olmsted’s plan of late 1874 were adopted and constructed. The most obvious difference is the plan’s treatment of plantings on the west grounds along the walks of Maryland and Pennsylvania Avenue extended. The 1874 plan shows thick plantings of trees and shrubs that would have created an enclosure of dense shade in summer. Eventually, Olmsted lined these walks with formal rows of London Plane trees. The final treatment of the area between the staircases on the West Front also differed considerably from that shown on the plan of 1874, and the terraces never had the polychrome paving of red and blue that Olmsted proposed at that time. (Such pavement was, however, used on the sidewalks on the eastern edge of the Plaza on the east grounds.)

In explaining his plan in an article for the New-York Daily Tribune in November 1874, Olmsted wrote that his purpose was twofold: to “provide convenient approaches to and standing room about the Capitol” and to aid and heighten the effect of its “imposing dimensions and the beauty of its architecture.” He emphasized the importance of subordinating the grounds to the structure, the landscape architecture to the architecture. Warning particularly against the introduction of distracting decorative features, he wrote:

The same principle of subordination to the building will prevent the introduction in any part of the ground of local ornaments, whether in flowers, leaf-plants, or other objects imply curious or beautiful in themselves. Those matters only will be decorated which by their position and form carry out, repeat, and support the architectural design, nor will any decoration be such as to hold the eye of an observer when in a position to take a general view of the Capitol.

This was the plan that Justin Morrill, Edward Clark, and others reviewed and approved on September 28, and that Olmsted presented to the Senate Committee on Public Buildings and Grounds in January 1875. The committee approved his plan on March 3, 1875. Construction moved forward steadily during the next four years, and much of the work on the grounds was completed in that period. But serious difficulties then developed. Thomas Wised ell had [16] produced many architectural drawings, since it fell to him to provide all the detailed planning and rendering for the walls around and within the grounds, as well as the seats on the east grounds from which to view the façade, the two large fountains, and the numerous light posts. In the summer of 1879 he became ill, probably with the heart trouble that would cause his death five years later, and fell badly behind. For weeks he failed to respond to urgent requests for drawings, and even though he finally agreed to be more prompt, crucial construction was left unfinished when Congress convened in the fall of 1879. The principal problem was the “summer house” that Olmsted planned in the northwest section of the grounds as a place of rest and refreshment. He used all of his ingenuity to create a unique and especially pleasing refuge-half-sunken into the hillside and surrounded by mounded earth heavily planted with shrubs. There was a fountain in the center, open to the sky, over which arched trees with delicate leaves. Several stone screens permitted foliage-scented and cooling breezes to pass through the structure, while at one end was a grotto-like enclosure with dripping water and moss. Olmsted even had the Tiffany firm contrive a carillon, run by the water of the fountain, that emitted a sound partly like music, partly like a purling stream. He adjusted every element to create the utmost effect of delicacy, and a cool, refreshing atmosphere. But by the time that Congress met in 1879, only the foundations were in place, standing raw and barren all through the winter. Several senators complained, and the general dissatisfaction was such that in the spring of 1880 Congress refused to authorize the first substantial appropriation for Olmsted’s terraces. In an attempt to secure funding, Olmsted included a description of the terraces and their purpose in his annual report to Edward Clark in the fall of 1881. Then, in early 1882, he drew up an illustrated pamphlet explaining the terraces and distributed two hundred copies to members of Congress. However, the funds were finally authorized only beginning in 1884, the year that Olmsted lost responsibility for them. Wisedell had completed many of the plans needed by the end of 1882, but final plans were drawn up by August Schoenborn in the Office of the Architect of the Capitol.

Hartford, Connecticut—Capitol and College, 1872–1877

In this period of patriotic construction of capitol buildings, Olmsted planned the grounds of a second state capitol, in his home town of Hartford, Connecticut. This was part of a twofold process, since the new capitol was sited on the edge of Bushnell Park on what was previously the campus of Washington — or Trinity — College. Unfortunately, no extensive description by Olmsted of his plans for the capitol has survived, although he did secure alterations to the section of the park near the building and worked diligently to provide convenient access between capitol and park. A fuller record has survived of his concept for the Trinity College campus. Part of this correspondence [17] deals with the character that it was desirable to achieve for an American college campus, while other letters describe his plans for partial implementation of a quadrangle design by the English architect William Burges. Olmsted also wished to arrange several blocks for private residences surrounding the Trinity campus, a project that he was not able to carry out.

Community Planning: The Bronx, 1875–1878

Olmsted’s outstanding project in community design during this period was his planning of the street system of the Bronx with the engineer J. J. R. Croes. For years he had complained of the lack of an area in the New York region where a permanent residential quarter could survive — where a neighborhood could resist the constant transition from places of residence to places of commerce. He and Vaux had begun planning such an area for Washington Heights in 1860, but the commission they advised never submitted a formal proposal. The opportunity to plan the twenty-third and twenty-fourth wards in the mid-1870s was therefore doubly welcome to Olmsted. Much of the Bronx already had a gridiron street pattern. He proposed no major changes for these areas and concentrated on the hillside section between Riverdale Road and the Hudson River. There he planned a curvilinear street pattern that he hoped would lead to a stable “villa” neighborhood. At the same time, he was seeking to demonstrate the superiority to row houses of freestanding residences for city residents of means. In conjunction with this street plan, which was adopted in sections by the city between 1876 and 1878, Olmsted and Croes also devised a rapid-transit rail system that would serve the area on tracks at separate grades from the streets. It was a radical and comprehensive extension to a full city plan of the principle of separation of ways that he and Vaux had introduced in Central Park in the late 18505. As for public parks in the newly annexed regions, one can see a number of small parks on the plans that Olmsted and Croes created, particularly along the line of the boulevard that eventually became the Henry Hudson Parkway. The reports describe a few other parks, but Olmsted’s full conception on this subject is not known. The fullest explication of such a concept was written by William R. Martin — with what help from Olmsted it is impossible to estimate — in a report of 1875. In any case, the principal authors of the new plan for the Bronx — Olmsted, Croes, and Martin — all lost the power to realize their vision when they were dismissed from their positions with the Department of Public Parks in early 1878.

Other Community Design, 1874–1879

New York State was also the venue during these years for other kinds of community designing, little of which came to fruition. In the mid-1870s Olmsted drew up a plan for a residential neighborhood, “Parkside,” next to [18] Delaware Park in Buffalo. This was virtually his only commission for a residential community next to a park of his design. The plan went through several versions through the 1880s, as did other designs for subdivisions north of Delaware Park, but the final street pattern bore little relation to the elegant curves of Olmsted’s first plans of the 1870s.

More ambitious was the detailed and imaginative proposal that Olmsted drew up in 1879 for a resort at Rockaway Point near New York City. There he combined an impressive analysis of the site itself with considerations of a resort that would combine a large hotel with many attractions for day visitors. His report for the project, which was not carried out, demonstrates the imagination that he could bring to bear on design issues when he was not constrained by the need to give primacy to issues of landscape experience. An-other revealing design, which was carried out in large part, was that for Point Chautauqua on Lake Chautauqua in upstate New York in 1876. A summer colony for a religious group, the project gave Olmsted an opportunity to inveigh against the character of most sectarian summer communities and to analyze how best to secure a desirable result.

Grounds of Private Residences, 1879–1882

The landscape design category that received least attention from Olmsted during the period of this volume — as in all other periods prior to at least 1890—was the planning of the grounds of private residences. Olmsted felt that designing for residential communities — private or institutional— and the planning of public parks and recreation grounds was the most important work that he could do. And yet private residences involved a number of issues for which he felt considerable concern. Creation of freestanding residences was important because of the opportunity they offered to strengthen the family, the most important civilizing institution in American society, to develop taste, and to improve health through access to sunshine and fresh air. Realization of an urban alternative to that “relic of barbarism” the row house, a holdover from the ages when cities were constructed primarily for purposes of protection and defense, was a particularly important responsibility of nineteenth-century society. The more a place of residence could strengthen the family, Olmsted believed, the stronger society would become. Creating the setting for the family residence, moreover, would enable householders to foster their own individuality by expressing their particular character. Such an approach would not consist of egotistical display or ornamental flower-gardening: rather it would, ideally, draw its character from the natural setting and serve as a training-ground for an aesthetic sensibility to subtle variation in tone, texture, and form of the plant materials used. Olmsted’s apprentice Charles Eliot recorded such a response when Olmsted examined the site for the residence of G . Nixon Black on Manchester Harbor on the North Shore of Boston in 1883. Echoing his mentor’s design standards, Eliot remarked that [19] he saw “many ridiculously incongruous attempts at gardening” in the area. “Several proprietors have seen fit to ’smooth up’ all their land that they possibly could, and here lawn mowers and hose are to be seen,” he recorded, “ —also ribbon beds of coleus and other foliage bedding plants — with circles of geraniums scarlet and other abominations.” When the architect Robert S. Peabody asked Olmsted how he would demonstrate a more appropriate design approach, he replied, “I would not try to change the very pleasing natural character,—I would take this present character and work it Up.”

Olmsted applied this concept to his designing of the grounds of two Massachusetts estates described in this volume. In both cases he was working without a partner, and his approach is of special interest. One estate was only half a mile from the farmhouse he would soon choose for his own residence. There, Barthold Schlesinger had recently purchased several properties as a setting for his mansion. Olmsted’s correspondence with him published in this volume discusses issues of overall character, the siting of the house and approaches to it. In particular, Olmsted’s letters provide his doctrine of terraces, of the importance of providing a zone of transition between the house and the grounds. More extensive and important is the example of the estate of John C . Phillips on Wenham Lake in North Beverly that Olmsted began to plan in 1880. There he demonstrated how he wished to fit even a large country house designed by Peabody and Stearns into its setting. At the same time he showed his willingness to meet certain needs of the residents by bold re-shaping of the land. He built a massive terrace in order to set the house closer to Wenham Lake. At the same time, he created on the terrace a large “open-air apartment” where the activities of the family could be moved out of doors. At the end of the lawn he placed a tea-house or “pavilion” with views of the lawn and house in one direction and overlooking a sunken flower garden in the other. In this fashion he carried out his concept of the varied spaces needed to meet the needs of the residents: “There should be a dry walk for damp weather, a sheltered walk for windy weather, and a sheltered sitting place for conversation, needle work, reading, teaching, and meditation.” These features, the paved terrace next to the house, the enclosed lawn area, and the separate space for decorative gardening, represented Olmsted’s key concepts for the grounds of private residences. For large country estates he had another purpose that he first implemented at John C. Phillips’s estate, “Moraine Farm.” This was the demonstration of advanced farming techniques and reforestation, which would reach its fullest and more resplendent realization at Biltmore Estate over a decade later.

The Further Range of Commissions, 1874–1882

During these years Olmsted undertook numerous commissions not represented by documents published in this volume and for some of which the extent of correspondence, number of plans prepared, time period of work, [20] and extent of execution of designs is not well understood. Working with Thomas Wised ell, for instance, he drew up plans for the Schuylkill Arsenal in Philadelphia at the invitation of Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs, for whom he also planned the Jeffersonville Depot near Louisville. In Washington, D.C., while working on the U.S. Capitol grounds, he made suggestions to Senator William Windom for the grounds of his residence and to Senator Justin Morrill for the arrangement of Thomas Circle. He also drew up a plan for the campus of the Industrial Home School in the District. While planning the setting of the Washington Monument in Baltimore, he advised Reverdy Johnson, Jr., concerning use of the “Clifton” estate for the campus of Johns Hopkins University. In the Boston area he not only collaborated with H. H. Richardson on the bridges in the Back Bay Fens, but also prepared landscape plans for Richardson’s Crane Library in Quincy and for the grounds of the house that Richardson designed in Cohasset for Olmsted’s stepdaughter Charlotte and her husband, John Bryant. In Buffalo while engaged in the public projects documented in this volume Olmsted prepared a plan for Lafayette Square and, with George Radford, planned the Parkside subdivision adjoining Delaware Park. Elsewhere he planned a 385-lot subdivision, “Bellegrove,” for John Watts Kearny in what became the city of Kearny in Hudson County, New Jersey, and designed a subdivision for the Aspinwall Hill Land Company in Brookline, Massachusetts. In addition to several private estates in Massachusetts and Connecticut, he planned two extensive estates on Long Island — those of Charles Anderson Dana on Dosoris Island at Oyster Bay and of Henry B. Heyde in Suffolk County. By early 1882, he was also engaged in planning a park on Belle Isle in Detroit.

Conclusion

The years 1874 to 1882, therefore, offered Olmsted a wide range of landscape design opportunities. He would find many new opportunities during the remaining dozen years of his professional practice, which he now began at the age of sixty, but a new domestic setting, a more benign political regime in the city of his principal park planning, and a growing number of employees and partners, meant that he would not be called upon to experience as intensely the principal difficulties he encountered in the years described in this volume. He would never again be the employee of a municipal bureaucracy, as he was during his years with the New York Department of Public Parks. Nor would he again be embroiled in political controversy to the extent that he was while a member of the advisory board for the New Capitol of New York State. As he reported to his friend Charles Loring Brace in the last document in this volume, “You can have no idea what a drag life had been to me for three years or more . . . . I am still delapidated — have a great noise in my head and a little exertion sets my heart bouncing but I sleep well and seem to myself to carry on my legs not quarter of the weight I did a year ago.” His move [21] from New York City to Boston, the satisfaction offered by the planning of the Boston park system, and the relief and renewed energy they brought him, meant that Olmsted was indeed entering on a new stage of his life.