CHAPTER VII
JANUARY 1879–OCTOBER 1879

This chapter is in part retrospective, beginning with Olmsted’s detailed but never-published account of chicanery and official malfeasance in the construction of Riverside Park. This article, written in early 1879, is a precursor and companion piece to The Spoils of the Park that Olmsted published three years later. The story ends with the dismissal, in the months following Olmsted’s own, of his associates and supporters engaged in the Riverside Park work. Concerning other issues, the letter to Edward Clark presents his proposal for planting an area south of the U.S. Capitol grounds for protection against malaria. The letter to Charles S. Sargent deals with the difficult problem of selecting viable plant materials for the Back Bay Fens. The extensive reports to Henry Attrill and his associate spell out Olmsted’s imaginative program for creating a hotel and resort at Rockaway Point near Brooklyn. Of equal interest with the imagination shown is his analysis of the sanitary and ecological conditions of the site. Letters to James Terry Gardner and Charles Eliot Norton represent early stages of planning for the Niagara reservation and the campaign to secure it.

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