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CHAPTER X
FEBRUARY 1881-DECEMBER 1881
During the time period of this chapter, Olmsted rented his house in Manhattan and moved his family permanently to Brookline, Massachusetts. Two reports of these months deal with new aspects of the developing Boston park system. The report of May 17 examines the proposed site in West Roxbury for the principal park of the system, and the report of December 29 contains Olmsted’s first description of the linear system of parks and parkways running from Charlesbank and Boston Common to the West Roxbury park. In addition, the letter to Charles Francis Adams, Jr., encourages the movement in suburban Quincy to reserve the area of Merry Mount for park purposes. The letter to John Sterling marks the beginning of Olmsted’s planning in Detroit of the park on Belle Isle.
In the letter to Edward Clark, Olmsted provides his fullest explanation of the process by which he planned the West Front terrace and other terraces of the U.S. Capitol. On a similar theme, his letter to Barthold Schlesinger sets forth his doctrine of terraces as applied to private residences. The letter to Charles Eliot Norton of October 19 is an impassioned statement of his continuing efforts to discover and publicize a comprehensive and coherent definition of landscape design. Other letters to Norton chart the development of the Niagara reservation campaign. The letter to Cornelius Agnew explores issues of private and public space in a community, as applied to a summer colony being designed at Montauk by the firm of McKim, Meade and White.
The assassination of President James Garfield in the summer of 1881 moved Olmsted to write the article “Influence,” containing a concise and forceful review of his experience with the politics of patronage during his [524] years on Central Park. This he submitted to his friend George W. Curtis, president of the Civil Service Reform Association, for use in a new campaign.
To Horace William Shaler Cleveland
| My Dear Mr Cleveland; | 209 W. 46th St. N. York. 9th Feby 1881. |
Thank you very much for your kind note of 4th just received. My life is a slow but steady and wearing fight with the common ignorance and presumption which denies that our profession is an art and will not allow it the position of a trade. There is not a public work with which I have {been} connected & have left which is not being despoiled by men who have neither knowledge or interest in its purposes much less of the processes by which they are to be served. It all makes me sick and keeps me sick—though I have been rather better in health of late through a systematic cultivation of patience. I have often asked myself whether I could not do something to influence people in Providence to trust to you and sustain you. Is there anyone there you would like me to send a copy of the pamphlet to? I am nearly out but could spare one or two.
I heard of your great loss last summer through your sister—not however until long after it occurred. Otherwise I should have written to express the strong sympathy I felt. I was then, however, expecting soon to see you.
Fredk Law Olmsted
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