CHAPTER III
LOOKING HOMEWARD

The letters that Olmsted wrote between Thanksgiving and Christmas of 1863 tended to review the past and express his homesickness. He wrote three of them on holidays, when he must have sensed acutely his distance from family and friends. While working on a general report to the Mariposa Company, he experienced an alarming “pen-sickness,” whose symptoms he describes on Christmas Day in letters to Edwin L. Godkin and Henry W. Bellows. He had given up his hopes to “drive through California” and come home with his debts paid quickly. To Bellows he admits his disappointment with Mariposa and his preference for civilization. He looks back with longing to his “nice bit of civilized workmanship” at the Sanitary Commission, and to his association with its leaders, who represent to him the best products of that civilization. His sense of failure and bleak prospects for the future is expressed in his letter to Charles Loring Brace concerning the fatal illness of their mutual friend Eliza Hamilton Schuyler.

The letter to Calvert Vaux written on Thanksgiving Day is one of the most significant in this volume. At the heart of the misunderstanding between the two creators of Central Park was the title “architect-in-chief,” which the Central Park commission had given to Olmsted in 1858, less than a month after he and Vaux had jointly produced the winning design for the park. In his letter of October 19, 1863, Vaux had hinted at the injustice of Olmsted’s having accepted and retained this title. Olmsted heatedly denies any injustice by tracing his longstanding desire to promote the success of public parks in the United States. He explains that this desire was satisfied by his original position as superintendent of [144]Central Park, which preceded his partnership with Vaux in designing the plan. Olmsted claims that he regarded the title “architect-in-chief” as an extension and enlargement of the superintendency and therefore appropriate for himself alone. In an attempt to separate the strands of their respective “properties” in the park, Olmsted sets up the designation “X” for their joint property, the design of the park, and “X’” for his prior or reserved property, the administration or superintendence of the park. Throughout their correspondence over the next two years, the two men continued to wrestle with the proper balance between art (or design) and administration in their work together.