CHAPTER VII
JULY 1872–JANUARY 1874

Beginning in May 1872, Olmsted’s role in the administration of Central Park intensified. His report of July 17, 1872, arguing that the wages of park employees should not be raised above those being paid in the private sector, suggests some of the responsibilities he shouldered during the five months—from May to October 1872—when he served as president and treasurer of New York City’s Department of Public Parks. Other writings show the importance he continued to place on the construction, maintenance, and use of Central Park. They also document Olmsted’s increasingly troubled relationship with the commissioners, who oversaw his work. His reports of October 23, 1872, and July 8, 1873, about his attempts to revitalize the force of park keepers and his defense of these efforts in the New-York Daily Tribune reveal Olmsted’s conviction that proper performance of their duties and exemplary discipline were necessary to ensure safety on the park. The memo of February 1873 reveals that his differences of opinion with the new park board were so large that he felt the need to justify his continued association with the park. Letters of July 1873 charge that the “reformers” who made up the new board did not share his hostility to political patronage. The letter of July 30, 1873, is Olmsted’s aggrieved response to new bylaws that would have removed him from supervision of the gardeners and park keepers. It forcefully argues that the work of these two groups was absolutely essential to the success of the park as a work of art and as an institution serving the people.

Letters written in 1872 and 1873 indicate that other aspects of Olmsted’s life were as trying as his relations with Central Park’s new administration. His partnership with Calvert Vaux dissolved in October 1872, and in January 1873 he had to face the death of his father. Olmsted poignantly wrote [570] to his stepson John Charles and his lifelong friend Frederick Kingsbury about the loss he felt at the time of John Olmsted’s death. The letter to Charles Loring Brace later in 1873 defends John Stuart Mill and describes what Olmsted elsewhere characterized as the “vague blundering rationalism” of his own religious views. Even amid frustration and sadness, Olmsted constructed for Frederick Knapp a delightful account of a perilous sea voyage to Halifax, Nova Scotia.

During this period Olmsted also continued his landscape career outside Central Park. The reports that he and Vaux prepared for Riverside and Morningside parks proposed a different treatment of the landscape from that of Central Park and provided opportunities for different forms of recreation as well. Olmsted’s letter to Henry B. Rogers, in which he analyzed the potential sites for what became the McLean Asylum of Massachusetts General Hospital (where Olmsted would spend the last seven years of his life), is his fullest statement of what the physical plan of such an institution should be. The final document in this volume, Olmsted and Vaux’s January 1, 1874, report to the Brooklyn park commission, is the last report the two men drew up jointly during their post–Civil War partnership and the last on which they were to collaborate for more than a dozen years.