CHAPTER IX
DECEMBER 1893–MAY 1894

As 1893 drew to a close, Olmsted turned his attention to Biltmore, where he spent approximately three weeks in late November and early December. The Biltmore Village Memorandum of December 9 presents Olmsted’s vision for the village as a community independent of the estate, with its own civic space and businesses. The April 1894 letter to Charles McNamee refines this initial plan, with Olmsted criticizing the location for the estate office chosen by George W. Vanderbilt and Richard Morris Hunt and instead proposing an alternate location adjacent to the train station. Olmsted’s letters to Vanderbilt of December 30 and January 9 present his preliminary plans for the size, scope, and character of the Arboretum. The letter to Édouard André chronicles Olmsted’s continuing efforts to create a garden of choice espaliered fruit at the estate.

The first three months of 1894 saw Olmsted engaged in a mixture of projects, new and old. His letter to John Charles Olmsted of January 25, written after visiting Cincinnati in early January for a possible role in revising the city’s parks, contains his insistence that park commissions be free from the influence of patronage and political pressure. Olmsted’s letter to Boston City Architect Edmund Wheelwright proposes to limit the role of architects in designing structures for parks, while his letter to Paul Kendricken differentiates between parks and other public grounds in that city, identifying the distinct roles that large public grounds such as Franklin Park were meant to play in contrast to smaller and less scenic grounds such as Boston Common. The March 11 letter to John Charles Olmsted contains Olmsted’s admiration for Milwaukee park commissioner Christian Wahl, who was energetically leading the work at Lake Park. Letters to his partners of February 19 and to Calvert [723]Vaux on March 31 detail the firm’s engagement with the Brooklyn park commission, with Olmsted expressing his desire to return Prospect Park as much as possible to his and Vaux’s original design.

The most significant new project begun in this period was the redesign of Chicago’s Jackson Park and Midway after the close of the Columbian Exposition. In four letters to Chicago South Park commissioners in April and May, Olmsted presents his argument for the necessity of controlling the water levels in Jackson Park’s lagoon and in the proposed canal in the Midway. These projects, he concluded, would enable the South Park to become “the finest domestic boating park in the world.” In addition, Olmsted presents the firm’s preliminary plans for the redesign of the northern portion of Jackson Park, where the Palace of Fine Arts would remain as a permanent structure. The chapter concludes with a letter to architect Henry Ives Cobb regarding a private estate in nearby Lake Forest, Illinois, in which Olmsted emphasizes the importance of a large terrace as an outdoor room for the family.