BIOGRAPHICAL DIRECTORY

Andrew Haswell Green (1820–1903) was the dominant member of the park board during the early years of Olmsted’s involvement with Central Park. In 1861, comparing Green’s work on the board with that of the other members, Olmsted estimated that “he does, and always has done, a hundred times more work than all the rest together.”

Born in Worcester, Massachusetts, Green moved to New York City in 1835. After a series of business ventures he read law and began to establish a profitable legal practice, working for corporations and administering trusts. In those activities he established the reputation for rectitude and honesty that was such an important part of his later public career. He soon became a friend and intimate of Samuel J. Tilden. When Tilden was elected to the state legislature in 1844, thus beginning a long and influential political career, Green undertook to look after his office and law practice while he was in Albany. From that time until Tilden’s death in 1886, Green’s public activities were closely associated with those of his friend. Green’s appointment to the Central Park board when it was created in 1857 was presumably made in response to Tilden’s wishes; in fact, Green was appointed to the place on the board that was originally reserved for Tilden himself.

During his first two years on the board, Green served variously as treasurer and president. In the fall of 1859 the board elected him to the full-time position of treasurer and comptroller which it created for him at that time. Green then gave up his law practice in order to devote his full attention to park matters. He remained comptroller of the park until the Tweed Ring created its own park board in 1869.

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Green was a crucially important supporter of Olmsted during the early years of Central Park. He was the only Democratic member of the park board to vote to award first prize to the Greensward plan in the design competition of 1858. For at least two years following Olmsted’s appointment as superintendent in September 1857, Green used his influence to strengthen Olmsted’s position on the park. Until he became comptroller he was on cordial personal terms with Olmsted. A bachelor, he habitually joined the Olmsteds for Sunday supper during the summer of 1859.

Even then, however, Green’s self-satisfied manner annoyed Olmsted and Mary. Writing to Olmsted during his European trip of 1859, Mary described Green’s latest visit, remarking, “As usual he claims all ideas as original with himself. . . . I must confess he frets me with his manner of thinking himself so much more efficient than you or any body else.”

On those long Sunday visits, Green held forth on political topics as well as topics relating specifically to the park. To the distress of Olmsted, a Republican and former Whig, it was Democratic party doctrine that Green taught. The men he most admired were just those Democratic politicians on the New York scene whom Olmsted could least tolerate. Olmsted recorded his painful recollection of those lessons in politics many years later as part of an autobiographical sketch: [57]

Mr. Green, observing the sort of childish and pointless interest I took in the science of politics, my extreme ignorance of the art of politicians and my thorough but vague and futile hatred of their prevailing corruption and baseness, took a benevolent pleasure in giving me the benefit of his profound study and practice and in repeating to me the sayings of a few men at whose feet even he professed himself to be always seated. Mr. Tilden, Mr. John Kelly & Mr. [William F.] Havemeyer were men of whom he always spoke with a singular degree of reverence and by comparison with whom there were few others of whose knowledge and ability in politics it was possible for him to speak without contempt and animosity. It was evident that his ruling passion lay somewhere in the direction which their instruction had led him forward and that he felt that in mincing their meat for me he was moved by something of a benign and missionary spirit. I think truly the science of politics had drawn to it his whole religious nature, for if he ever made a reference to those of whom in their turn, his own masters had been disciples, such as Silas Wright and Azariah C. Flagg, it was with something more than mere reverence—they were his saints as Tilden, Kelly & Havemeyer, were his living priests and prophets.

It was not Green’s politics, however, that produced the growing estrangement between Olmsted and himself in the period 1859–60. Rather, it was the control that Green exercised over Olmsted as comptroller of the park—the relentless and sanctimonious way in which he enforced economy in all aspects of the operation. Green was determined to make sure that all expenditures of park funds were absolutely necessary. The fact that creation of the office of comptroller resulted from the board’s growing concern over the high cost of construction strengthened his hand. In consequence, Olmsted lost all independent power to authorize the outlay of funds. He later complained of this, saying of Green, “. . . not a cent is got from under his paw that is not wet with his blood & sweat.”

The conflict between the two men came to a head in the fall of 1860. Green took over Olmsted’s duties on the park during the two months following the carriage accident of August 6, and after Olmsted’s return he kept up a constant series of demands and denials. At the same time, Olmsted had to endure the physical pain of his shattered leg and the psychological suffering caused by the death of his child. Green penned one note after another to Olmsted: doubting that the rock-blasting that he wanted to do was necessary (“I am disposed to limit the rock work to the least possible amount & not to be diverted into merely desirable expenditures”); objecting to Olmsted’s cutting of willow trees that interfered with the installation of drainage pipes (“It is quite expensive to get trees on the Park, and I hope nothing in shape of a tree will be cut”); complaining of a bill for $28 for a ball used to signal good skating on the lake (“. . . its cost is extravagant to a degree that required examination. . . . Whoever had this business in charge should in my judgment be censured for the manner in which it was done”); and lecturing Olmsted for letting slip by a [58] voucher to pay a park laborer for a period when he was actually in jail (“Although an error is not a crime, yet in money matters it is a very serious affair”).

Green meant well, and even Olmsted admitted that “his intentions are good, and spite of his strong natural proclivities, he is honest and sensible in the main.” But Olmsted chafed under Green’s authority and resented the way it impeded the realization of the artistic aspects of the park’s design. Green could not comprehend Olmsted’s aesthetic conception and viewed as a waste of money much of the finishing work that he desired. Olmsted’s threat of resignation in January 1861, however, did set in motion a process of accommodation that solved what Olmsted viewed as his principal problem with Green. In June the board restored to him some power to authorize expenditures on the park, but that concession could not allay Olmsted’s bitter memory of what had gone before. His resentment was so strong that a reminder of his relations with Green could bring those feelings surging back. Writing to Vaux from California in 1864, he said:

I turned over my letter-book lately and it made me boil with indignation to see how cruelly and meanly Green had managed me—how entirely regardless he was of honor, generosity and truth, and what a systematic small tyranny, measured exactly by the limit of my endurance, he exercised over me. It was slow murder. It made my head swim to read my studied and pathetic remonstrances and entreaties.

Little more than a year later, however, Vaux launched his successful campaign to restore himself and Olmsted as landscape architects to the Central Park board—though, as he reported, Green “shyed of course at the idea of countenancing the return of that overwhelming personality FLO.” Olmsted did return, but without the authority he had enjoyed as architect-in-chief and superintendent of the park in the period of 1858–61. He briefly regained control of the keepers force and the gardeners in the 1870s, when Green was no longer directly involved in park administration. Green still opposed Olmsted vigorously whenever their paths crossed. He nearly succeeded in excluding Olmsted from the process of designing the state reservation at Niagara in the late 1880s, despite the fact that Olmsted had been a leader of the fifteen-year campaign to create the reservation.

By then, however, Olmsted had moved to Brookline, Massachusetts, and had little occasion to run afoul of Green. Meanwhile, Green had expanded his interests far beyond the parks of New York City. After serving as a powerless member of the Tweed Ring’s park board from 1869 to 1871, he became the comptroller of the city following the overthrow of Tweed. He presided over the reorganization of the city’s finances and ruled on the validity of debts incurred by the Tweed regime. As comptroller of the city from 1871 to 1876, he demonstrated the same reluctance to authorize expenditures he had shown earlier as comptroller of Central Park. Green played an important part in other aspects of the growth of the city as well. He took the lead in the Central Park commission’s [59] laying out of the basic street pattern on Manhattan above 155th Street in the years 1865–69. He did this without consulting Olmsted and Vaux, who had been advisers to an earlier commission charged with that responsibility in 1860. In addition, Green was the leading advocate of a metropolitan government for the New York City region. The consolidation that finally took place in 1898 owed much to his individual efforts. Green was also active in the formation of cultural institutions in the city. His influence with Samuel Tilden and his position as trustee of Tilden’s estate led to the incorporation of Tilden’s library as part of the modern New York Public Library.

Mary Perkins Olmsted (1830–1921), née Mary Cleveland Bryant Perkins, was first Olmsted’s sister-in-law and then his wife. Olmsted met her soon after moving to Staten Island in the spring of 1848. An orphan since the age of seven, she lived with her grandparents on a farm near his. Her grandfather Cyrus Perkins had moved there after retiring from medical practice in New York City. The family had important social connections: Daniel Webster, a distant relative, had dandled Mary on his knee when she was a child; the wife of William Cullen Bryant was her godmother; and the poet’s daughter Julia was her best friend. The grandparents’ household provided a domestic setting of culture and wealth. Olmsted was impressed by the family’s art collection, particularly an original Salvator Rosa and an Italian Madonna.

Olmsted was also impressed by the Perkins’s petite granddaughter, eight years his junior. He first described Mary as “comfortably pretty—conversable, [60] well bred of course and modestly rides horse about here alone.” A month later he elaborated on his views, observing that she was “just the thing for a rainy day. Not to fall in love with, but to talk with. A real earnest thinker and only 19.”

Mary was less impressed with Olmsted. She later recalled that in those days he was “perhaps somewhat too fond of argument to be attractive to a woman.” A poem Olmsted wrote for Mary at that time suggests that his relationship with her was primarily intellectual. In December of 1848 he informed his friend Frederick Kingsbury, who was studying law in Hartford, that she would be there at Christmas time. He asked Kingsbury to buy him a large knife and a toy knife. “You know she is little and quick,” he wrote; “I want the knives to take this to her.” Then followed his verses:

Olmsted confessed his lack of poetic inspiration, adding, “Now that’s about as high as I am acquainted with Parnassus.”

The qualities that Olmsted noted were very evident in Mary. She was tiny (under five feet tall), bright, outspoken, and critical both of herself and others. Her intensity could hardly have drawn a romantic response from Olmsted, who had those attributes himself and preferred women with softer qualities. Olmsted’s brother responded differently to Mary, and she in turn was quickly attracted to handsome, diffident John, with his gentleness and quiet humor. The two read John Ruskin’s Modern Painters together—the approved form of courtship among Olmsted’s friends at the time—and fell in love. They became engaged in the spring of 1850 and were married during the summer of the following year. John was already suffering from tuberculosis, so the couple spent the first year of their marriage in Europe hoping to improve his health. Their first child, Charles (later named John Charles), was born near Geneva in September 1852.

During the summer of 1853 the family returned to the United States, where for the next two years they lived with Olmsted on his Staten Island farm. John and Mary’s second child, Charlotte, was born in March 1855. Olmsted moved to Manhattan in April 1855 to become a partner in the publishing firm of Dix, Edwards & Company. Through that year and the next he frequently visited John and Mary on the farm. Then, in January 1857, John and his family again left for Europe to seek improvement in his health. They sought without success. He died at Nice on November 24, 1857, three months after the birth of the couple’s third child, Owen Frederick.

Mary then returned with her children to the Staten Island farm. In the [61]

last letter he wrote to Olmsted, John appealed to his brother not to let Mary suffer during his lifetime. The loneliness and difficulty of her position soon made Olmsted’s duty clear. Since 1851, when Emily Perkins broke off their short engagement, Olmsted had formed no romantic attachments. Moreover, he had been haunted since his early twenties by the prospect of remaining a bachelor. Even before his engagement to Emily Perkins he had predicted to his friend Charles Loring Brace that “as it is, I am likely to be all along a bachelor or to marry believing that the `highest element of love’ is not of earth, and so secure from disappointment if I shall not find it.” On June 13, 1859, Olmsted married his brother’s widow and confirmed the prediction. In marriage he found his duty, but not the “highest element of love.” In this respect his marriage resembled the second marriage of his father. After the death of Olmsted’s mother in 1826, the elder John Olmsted had married her close friend, the earnest and plain Mary Bull. In the next fifteen years Olmsted’s father and stepmother had six children, three of whom lived to maturity.

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With his marriage Olmsted gained both a wife and a family. His one description of his new state appears in a letter to his father of September 1859: “. . . there is not one of us in moderate health & never less than three that need careful nursing & bolstering. We found Charley’s eyes as bad as ever when we returned from Saratoga. Charlotte is covered with sores and Mary is half distracted with her multitude of anxieties, the servants always acting like she devils as soon as there is a five minute lull of other squalls. However, we have a good deal of happiness between the drops; that’s a fact.”

In Olmsted, Mary found a dutiful husband who worked long and hard to meet the economic demands of a growing family. However, his absorption in his work meant that there was little time for the domestic pleasures he sought to provide his clients. Moreover, he was frequently involved in design projects that kept him away from home for long periods of time. Mary, in turn, was not well suited for the daily management of a large brood of children and several servants. She was high-strung, often suffered from nervous exhaustion, and displayed various symptoms indicating illness induced by tension. How deep-seated her dissatisfaction must have been is suggested by Olmsted’s allusion to it in a letter of 1863, when their sojourn in California had improved the health and spirits of them all:

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One thing I have learned that will help my patience in the future perhaps—that a certain degree of health and of luxury does tend to limit your discontent, a fact which I don’t think before last summer—autumn—I ever made any progress of faith in. “What I mean to say, is” that I have an increased and increasing positive respect for you as well as a decreased disrespect for your occasional perversities. You will think that I am sick that I write this—but I am, however that may be, very happy in our experience of late.

Between 1859 and 1870, Olmsted and Mary had four children. Two died as infants, but Marion (1861–1948) and Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. (1870–1957), long outlived their parents. As Mary’s children by John Hull Olmsted grew to maturity, however, their fate caused her much pain (even though the grief she shared with her husband may have built the strongest bond between them). Young Owen was the most promising, good-natured, and enterprising of all her children. He seemed healthy compared to sickly John Charles, but in late 1881 he died suddenly of the same disease that had struck down his father. Charlotte had shown emotional instability in her youth, but seemed to improve after her marriage in 1878 to the Boston doctor John Bryant. The improvement was illusory, however; five years later she suffered a nervous breakdown from which she never recovered.

Through all these misfortunes, and in spite of her nervousness and frequent sickness, Mary seems to have gained in strength and fortitude. She lived to see her first-born, John Charles, become the leading figure in American landscape architecture, as her husband was before him, and to see that her other surviving son, Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., would replace his half-brother in that position of honor and influence.

Calvert Vaux (1824–1895) was co-author, with Olmsted, of the Greensward plan for Central Park, which won the design competition of 1858. While Olmsted directed construction of the park as architect-in-chief, Vaux served as chief designer of the architectural structures in the park. In the period 1858–61 these included the Terrace between the Promenade and the Lake, Bow [64]

Bridge, the Casino, more than two dozen “ornamental” bridges, and numerous rustic structures. Those years also saw the beginning of a design partnership between Olmsted and Vaux that extended to projects beyond the park.

Vaux was born in London, England, where his father, Calvert Bowyer Vaux, was a physician. In 1833, after attending the Merchant Taylors’ School, Vaux received training in architecture in the office of Lewis N. Cottingham, a leader in the Gothic Revival movement. Another of Cottingham’s apprentices was the architect George Truefitt. In 1850 Vaux traveled to the Continent with Truefitt to study and sketch royal gardens and public parks, as well as famous buildings. On his return he submitted his sketches to an exhibition in London, where the American landscape gardener Andrew Jackson Downing saw them. Downing was greatly impressed with the sketches and offered the young Englishman a position as his architectural assistant. Vaux quickly accepted. For the next two years he had the unique opportunity of working directly with the foremost landscape gardener in the United States. He shared Downing’s office in Newburgh, New York, in the vicinity of which the firm designed a number of houses. He also assisted Downing in designing the grounds of the White House and the [65] Smithsonian Institution in Washington. It was at Downing’s house in Newburgh in 1851 that Olmsted and Vaux first met.

After Downing’s death in 1852, Vaux continued the architectural work of the firm for four years in partnership with fellow English architect Frederick Clarke Withers. During this period he designed numerous residences, including the home of John A. C. Gray, a future commissioner of Central Park, and the Bank of New York, of which Gray was president. In addition to technical skills in landscape design, Vaux inherited from Downing a strong sense of the role that art could play in bringing American society to a higher level of civilization. In 1852 he published an article in Downing’s Horticulturist in which he pleaded for government encouragement of the arts. In his only book, Villas and Cottages; A Series of Designs Prepared for Execution in the United States, which was published in 1857, Vaux elaborated further on the role various classes could play in improving society through better architectural design.

When he moved to New York from Newburgh in 1857, Vaux took part in the agitation for construction of Central Park and for the holding of a design competition. Once the park board announced the competition, he convinced Olmsted to join with him in preparing an entry. To that work Vaux brought his experience from preparing plans with Downing—experience that showed clearly both in the plan and in the sketches of the “present condition” and the “effect proposed” of several views that he prepared to accompany the plan. He also brought a characteristic that Olmsted valued in him from first to last: a pertinacity that made him, in Olmsted’s view, “absolutely the most ingenious, industrious and indefatigable man in his profession of all I have known for the study of plans to meet complicated requirements of convenience.” In the case of the Greensward plan, the result was a coherent, unified design for a difficult site. Beyond that, constant discussion between the two men led to the idea of introducing sunken transverse roads. Olmsted and Vaux agreed to share equally the credit for both the overall design and the treatment of the transverse roads.

The aftermath of winning the Central Park design competition did not bring Vaux an equal share of authority or reputation, however. Olmsted was already superintendent of construction of the park, and as architect-in-chief he retained primary authority over the process of construction. Vaux was employed first as Olmsted’s assistant at $5 a day and then, from January 1859 to April 1862, as “Consulting Architect.” In April 1862 the firm of Olmsted, Vaux & Company became landscape architects for the park board.

Throughout the period 1858–62, Vaux believed that he lost substantial fees that he would have collected had he been paid a percentage of the cost of construction of the bridges and buildings he designed in Central Park. He also remained officially subordinate to Olmsted during those years. That fact led to strained relations between the two men in later years. Vaux claimed that he had accepted his position willingly so that Olmsted could secure the cooperation of the assorted professional men on the staff. “I set the example of subordination,” [66] he later wrote, “& it was followed because I set the example.” “You always seemed to be fearing that between Green on one side & me on the other you would get no reputation at all,” he observed. “I allowed this to pass as the misconception of youth that you would outgrow. Coming into business [as you did] at 40 with the spirit of a boy of 20 allowances had to be made by an old hand like me.”

Vaux also felt that Olmsted took the whole business of park superintendency too seriously. He later referred to Olmsted’s “porcupine arrangement of Foremens reports 10 to each pocket and one in your mouth so that you never had a word to say to a friend.” In the fall of 1859, after Olmsted had worked himself to nervous and physical exhaustion, Vaux expostulated,

Upon my word Olmsted I will not forgive you if you do not make a better show. Who will be tempted to a study of nature and the polite arts if the best paid and most popularly appearing professors cut such a lugubrious sallow bloodless figure as you insist upon doing. . . . “As you love me Hal” get flesh on your bones and forget that you ever had a puritanical marrow.

Vaux also objected to Olmsted’s attaching more importance to his function as administrator than to his role as artist. Looking back on those years, he accused Olmsted of having attempted to convert the Central Park project, “this many sided, fluent thoroughly American high art work,” into “a machine—over which as Frederick the Great, Prince of the Park Police you should preside, and with regal liberality dispense certificates of docility to the artists engaged in the work.” On the other hand, Vaux viewed himself solely as an artist, and as such the rightful master of administrators and politicians alike. As he undertook in 1865 to return the firm of Olmsted, Vaux & Company to its position on the park, he was firmly convinced that he and Olmsted could counter Andrew H. Green’s influence more effectively as artists than as managers or politicians.

Moreover, Vaux believed that Olmsted had far greater talent as an artist than as an administrator. It annoyed him that he always had to deal with Olmsted in two characters—with “Olmsted the artist & republican with whom I could heartily act and sympathize—and with Olmsted, the bureaucrat and imperialist with whom I never for a moment sympathised.” Concerning the work on Central Park before the Civil War, he informed Olmsted, “. . . the art in it was as pure as ever and was far reaching and sound in principle & the diplomacy or call it what you will—very defective and impatient.”

Vaux did admit, however, that it was not primarily Olmsted’s ability as an artist that he needed for the work on Prospect Park in 1865, nor even his knowledge of plants, for which he could turn to their faithful Central Park gardener Ignaz Pilat. Instead, what he most needed was Olmsted’s ability to direct the construction, on the ground, of an artistic conception—what Vaux called “the translation of the republican art idea in its highest form into the acres we want to control.” Olmsted accepted Vaux’s invitation and returned to help [67] complete the design and direct the construction of Prospect Park. He also accepted much of Vaux’s definition of him as an artist rather than an administrator. That step led him to a full thirty years of landscape design. “. . . I should have had nothing to do with the design of the Central Park or of Prospect Park, had not Vaux invited me to join him in those works,” Olmsted later testified. “But for his invitation I should not have been a landscape architect. I should have been a farmer.”

For seven years after Olmsted’s return from California in the fall of 1865, the firm of Olmsted, Vaux & Company produced a series of important landscape designs. They included Prospect Park, Fort Greene Park, Eastern Parkway, and Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn; a preliminary plan for Morningside Park in Manhattan; Delaware Park, the Front, the Parade, and connecting parkways in Buffalo; the Chicago South Parks; Walnut Hill Park in New Britain, Connecticut; Seaside Park in Bridgeport, Connecticut; South Park in Fall River, Massachusetts; the suburban village of Riverside near Chicago; and the campuses of Gallaudet College in Washington, D. C., and the state agricultural colleges of Maine and Massachusetts.

In the fall of 1872 the partners agreed to go their separate ways. Olmsted was again heavily involved in the administration of Central Park and had served as president of the park board in the summer of 1872. The re-emergence of “Frederick the Great, Prince of the Park Police,” must have been distressing to Vaux. Olmsted also wanted greater freedom to accept landscape commissions independent of Vaux, as his partner had always been able to do with architectural work. Moreover, Vaux’s prospects as an architect must have appeared more rewarding than his prospective work in landscape design. He was engaged in the major project of renovating a mansion on Gramercy Park for Samuel J. Tilden while at the same time advising the artist Frederick Church on the design of the house and grounds of his Hudson River estate, “Olana.” He was also beginning to design the American Museum of Natural History and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Events did not fulfill Vaux’s expectations of a rapidly growing architectural practice, however. Only one additional major commission, the Jefferson Market Court House, came to him during the 1870s, and his partner Frederick Withers did much of the work on that project. Most of Vaux’s architectural commissions thereafter came from Charles Loring Brace in the form of lodging houses for the Children’s Aid Society. After 1872, moreover, his only major work in landscape architecture was done in collaboration with Olmsted. The two men joined forces again for a revised plan of Morningside Park in 1887, the state reservation at Niagara Falls in 1887, and the Andrew Jackson Downing Memorial Park in Newburgh in 1889.

When Olmsted and Vaux dissolved their partnership in 1872, Olmsted remained as the landscape architect of the New York Department of Parks. He held that position until December 1877. Vaux then served in that capacity for the years 1881–83 and 1888–95. The position assured Vaux of a steady income, [68] but subjected him to bitter controversy and harassment. Particularly controversial was the proposed speedway that he fought successfully to keep out of Central Park and later, after more battles, designed for a site on the Harlem River.

Olmsted left little record of his thoughts concerning the difference between his principles of landscape design and those of his early mentor and long-time partner. He felt strongly the similarity of their approach and the extent to which it differed from that of most gardeners and landscape gardeners of the time. As he wrote to Vaux in 1887,

The great merit of all the works you and I have done is that in them the larger opportunities of the topography have not been wasted in aiming at ordinary suburban gardening, cottage gardening, effects. We “have let it alone” more than most gardeners can. But never too much, hardly enough.

The last phrase of his statement to Vaux implied the difference he felt had developed in their styles once their partnership was over, if not before. He described the difference briefly in a confidential remark to his son concerning the condition of Central Park in 1895. “In general Central Park suffers greatly from neglect of thinning, and from bad thinning,” he wrote, “(also, between ourselves, 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).”

Egbert Ludovicus Viele (1825–1902), a civil and topographical engineer, was chief engineer of Central Park during the period that Olmsted served as superintendent prior to May 17, 1858.

Viele graduated from West Point in 1847, fought in the Mexican War, and served on the southwestern frontier until 1853. He then resigned his commission and served for two years as topographical engineer of the state of New Jersey. He briefly resumed his military career during the Civil War, serving as a brigadier general of volunteers until 1863, when he once again resigned from the army.

Viele made the topographical survey of Central Park for the first park commission, which consisted of Mayor Fernando Wood and Street Commissioner Joseph S. Taylor. He also drew up a design for the park that the commission officially adopted in June 1856.

The new board of commissioners for Central Park created by the state legislature on April 30, 1857, retained Viele as chief engineer of park operations, but refused to be bound by their predecessors’ adoption of his plan. Instead, on October 13, 1857, a month after they appointed Olmsted superintendent of construction, the board announced a public design competition.

From the beginning, Olmsted’s relations with Viele were strained. During Olmsted’s attempts to gain appointment as superintendent, Viele treated him with contemptuous indifference. When, soon after his appointment, Olmsted indicated his reluctance to enter the design competition for fear of offending his superior, Viele replied that it made no difference to him. Viele’s own entry in the competition was essentially the same as his plan of 1856 and it received no votes from the commissioners. Selection of the Greensward plan in the competition led to Olmsted’s complete ascendancy over Viele. On the day Olmsted became architect-in-chief of the park, the park board abolished Viele’s position and fired him.

Offended by his double defeat, Viele remained an implacable enemy of Olmsted and Vaux for the rest of his life. In 1858 he called them imposters and swindlers who had stolen his plan. Two years later he sued the city of New York, claiming that he had been dismissed illegally and that the city owed him money for both the topographical survey and his designs. He asked for damages in the amount of $2,500 a year in salary for each year after May 1858 and $5,000 for the adoption his plan. In 1864 the jury in the case awarded him $8,625, plus costs and interest. During the trial, Viele asserted that the Greensward plan and half of the other competition designs submitted were simply copies of his plan. In later years he repeated the charge. As a U.S. congressman in 1886, he revived the old rivalry by criticizing Olmsted’s design for the grounds of the U. S. Capitol. Architect of the Capitol Edward Clark feared that Viele (“our military Congressman, the `designer’ of Central Park, etc.”) would attack the proposed appropriations for the work, for, as Clark said, “I have heard some of his grumblings.” Viele’s defeat in the election of 1886 eliminated his threat to Olmsted’s work on the Capitol grounds.

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Meanwhile, Viele challenged Olmsted and Vaux in the New York region. In 1861 he drew up a plan for Prospect Park in Brooklyn, only to have Olmsted and Vaux replace him four years later as the designers of the park. Moreover, he was a persistent source of worry with regard to Central Park. In November 1875, for instance, he made a public attack on the original construction of the park, charging that no underdrainage system had ever been installed and that the park was in a pestilential condition, spreading disease throughout the city. His charge set off two weeks of furor in the Herald that carried to the Times and other papers. Then, in 1883, Viele became a member of the park board, and the following year he served as president of the board. His appointment distressed Olmsted, who wrote to Vaux:

I had thought myself prepared for it but am really much shocked by Viele’s appointment. And it is bewildering to find no public comments recognizing the unquestionable fact that it has for twenty five years been his principal public business to mutilate and damn the park. Of course it can not be known to every [71] body as it is to us that he has systematically used falsehood for his purpose and proved himself capable of perjury. It is but poor comfort to know that even at his age he is sure to put his foot in it as in the mean time he may do infinite and irretrievable damage.

A decade later, Viele discussed his role on Central Park in an article for James Grant Wilson’s Memorial History of New York. He assured his readers that preparation of the topographical map of the park had been “a matter of no little difficulty, requiring both courage and skill, as well as a hardy constitution.” He also asserted that the first Central Park commission had chosen his design from among numerous proposals and had unanimously bestowed on him “the duty of converting this cheerless waste into a scene of rural beauty.” He made no mention of Olmsted or Vaux, indicating that he still viewed himself as the true “designer” of Central Park.