A Report on "Frederick Law Olmsted and the Public Park in America" Kenneth Bixgorin Broward College Theory of Architecture

(ARC 2201) Professor Galvis 20 July 2010 The film we viewed in class focused primarily on the life of Frederick Law Olmsted (Sr.) and the creation of Central Park. Though he felt unqualified as an artist, he admired artists. At that time in America, cemeteries were the only public places to picnic. While in Europe, he had studied the parks there. He felt that ornamental grounds had been reserved for aristocrats, such as those of Versailles, France, but in Britain, as in Hyde Park, parks began as Royal preserves but were open to all and were examples of the growing Park Movement. Olmsted's first landscape project was New York City's Central Park.. The land for the Park was acquired in 1956 for $5 million. The following year a Board of Commissioners was set up. They sought to hire a superintendant who could control the workers and be controlled by the Board. Olmsted applied, but his previous experience had been unsuccessful attempts at being a seaman, merchant, running a farm, and partnering in a publishing business, but he did have some success as a writer. The land acquired had a rugged terrain, and "the low ground was steeped in the overflow of pig sties." The site was "rubbishstrewn, deep in mud, filled with recently vacated squatter's huts, and overrun with goats left behind." The Board argued whether to hire a Tammany Democrat loyal to Mayor Fernando Wood. They decided to accept designs to be submitted by open competition. Olmsted was a Republican but uninvolved in Party politics. His application petition was signed mostly by literary men, such as Washington Irving, and was considered impractical. He explained that he saw the Park Movement as a struggle between democracy and monarchic tyrants and that a public park should offer "recreation to both the vicious and the virtuous," that is, open to all social classes. Olmsted was born in Connecticut, and he espoused an (pre-Civil War) abolitionist (Northern states) philosophy, Though the Board labeled Olmsted an idealist, they realized that they controlled the finances and hired him. Olmsted worked under Colonel Egbert Viele, chief engineer. Olmsted learned that workers were being hired based on the politics of those who wrote their recommendation letters. Though he was not taken seriously at first, Olmsted felt his way to an eventual command of the business, surprising the workers, who eventually numbered four thousand men, with disciplinary rules and ran the system like a machine. On the job, he learned that his brother John, was dying. John asked him not to let his wife Mary or the children suffer. John had eased his brother's suffering over failed romantic overtures to Elizabeth Baldwin (later Whitney), a woman whom Olmsted would consider a mentor throughout his life. Olmsted met architect Calvert Vaux, who had come to New York from England to compete in the six-month 770 acre design competition after Vaux's former partner Andrew Downing had died, and whom Olmsted had conversed with in Europe, Vaux obtained the typographical map prepared by an uncompensated Col. Viele, who intended to enter the competition and refused to otherwise assist Vaux, who asked Olmsted to join in making a proposal for submission. When Viele offered no resistance to Olmsted's leisure time work, Olmsted agreed to the partnership. Olmsted considered structures, such as "flower gardens, terraces, or fountains," subordinate to the main idea of creating rural scenery. He and Vaux used strings to ensure that paths and roadways would not intersect. The Park would contain four separate traffic systems: drives for coaches and carriages; bridal trail by means of an underpass beneath carriage and pedestrian crossings; footpaths ; and four sunken thoroughfares. They planned a sequence that visitors would enter and be guided to the center, giving a broad range of turf, offering a rural vista. They planned to use high trees and plantings around the outside to block out the city. If they need to they could blast solid rock into a meadow. Vaux wanted a formal promenade, a grand mall, but Olmsted argued that the treatment be simple and not artificial, that straight lines of trees belong in palatial gardens, not in a park. He wanted the greatest contrast with the conditions of the City. Olmsted and Vaux's Greensward Plan won the design competition, and Olmsted was appointed architect-in-chief. He and Mary, his brother's widow, married. Olmsted would later relate that all of the Park's features were man-made, with the exception of the rocks. It took vast work to "achieve the effect of rustic simplicity." People needed to escape the "rows

of monotonous, straight streets and piles of erect, angular buildings." A lake would offer a change of scenery as quickly as possible, transitioning from city to country. The effects they would create would take many years to grow. The plants would hide road bends. People would come across the bridge as a surprise. He planted foreground shrubs to appear as if they were found growing like that. He cleared and planted, rearranged the land by laying drains and converted swamps into ponds. Central Park required installation of 95 miles of drainage pipes. A receiving reservoir was converted into the Great Lawn. As Central Park's scenic focal point, Vista Rock, is the highest point in the Park. Thus, levels were changed by four feet. Hundreds of thousands of cubic yards of topsoil were brought in. Olmsted and Vaux ran into difficulties with Andrew Green, the Board comptroller. Olmsted felt his Greensward Plan was not a static document, that the Plan was only a sketch and that he needed to improvise and yet his hands were tied and was being managed cruelly, His newborn son died of cholera, and he had a carriage accident which left one leg shorter than the other. Olmsted resigned. He separated from Vaux who was angry with Olmsted's title as architect-in-chief and position as bureaucrat though he admired his artistic side. The United States Civil War led Olmsted to an appointment as General Secretary of the US Sanitary Commission (the forerunner of the American Red Cross). More men were dying from pestilential camp conditions - wounds swarming with maggots - than from gunshot. Olmsted organized volunteer doctors and nurses and directed shipments of donated medical supplies. Though physically disabled, he worked day and night. Just the same, he was criticized for his "monomania for system and organization on paper and an appetite for power." Whereas individual states wanted to dispense supplies only to soldiers who hailed from that state, Olmsted, called the Great Mogul, wanted a national system. Olmsted was forced to leave the Commission and considered his "life as about complete a failure as Jeff[erson] Davis's." Olmsted was hired to manage the gold mines of the Mariposa Mining Estates in California, but it quickly failed. He was asked to head the first commission in charge of Yosemite. Olmsted believed that it was the government's duty to establish public grounds and to withhold them from becoming the property of individuals, or else they would be monopolized. Vaux asked Olmsted to join him in consulting on Brooklyn's Prospect Park; this kept the partnership together for seven years, even as he returned to Central Park and was forced out again. He went with other partners, such as HH Richardson, working in Boston, site of the Fen and Franklin Parks, and on Staten Island, and with his sons to design hundreds of landscapes. Olmsted believed that parks provided broad landscape effects and the connecting parkways brought "rural green to many neighborhoods." He designed suburban communities with winding roads and open public grounds. He tried to created scenery with unconscious effect. He believed it was possible to create unconscious or indirect recreation. He saw natural scenery as being physically curative and metaphysically charming us into a "poetic" condition. He tried to establish the US's first large-scale experiment in scientific forestry, a national school of forestry and horticulture, more comprehensive than any arboretum on the Vanderbilt's Biltmore Estate in North Carolina. According to Kelly's Art of the Olmsted Landscape, "it is possible to identify fifteen elements which Olmsted's landscapes have in common: 1. They are man-made works of art. 2. They have their roots in the English Romantic style. 3. They reflect a Victorian influence. 4. They provide a strong contrast with the city. 5. They are characterized by the use of bold land forms. 6. They provide a balance between the spatial elements of turf, wood, and water. 7. They use vistas as an aesthetic organizing element. 8 They contain a series of planned sequential experiences. 9. They provide for the separation of traffic. 10. They provide visitor services. 11. They contain artistically composed plantings. 12. They integrate the architecture into the landscape. 13. Each has provision for a formal element. 14. They were characterized by variety. 15. They were built to provide for recreation." According to Barlow, Olmsted (born in 1822) was America's first landscape architect and city planner. Feeling provincial, "upper class dwellers desired concert halls, libraries, museums, and parks." Cemeteries had replaced churchyards. New York City, with population over a half-million, kept to its grid plan. Olmsted took the Jeffersonian rural ideal into the city. Like Beaux Arts architects, he tried "to stamp the City with an ennobling vision." In Central Park's transverse roads, he introduced the principles of grade separation. The work and concept of parkway are Olmsted's. He used a hierarchy of roads, segregating residential and commercial traffic. He wove chains of green in Central Park, hence the name of Greensward plan. Using natural drainage patterns, he strung parks together like emeralds on a

necklace as in Boston. Boston's Emerald Necklace was a continuous system of parks and parkways. In his site plan for the Columbian Exposition/World's Fair of 1893, in Chicago, he grouped the white halls of his collaborators around a series of formal courts. He even used animals as "grace notes" in his design of sheep meadow in Central Park and deer meadow of Prospect Park of Brooklyn, a civic rival. He worked on the village and grounds for the College of California at Berkeley, specifying that the curvilinear streets conform with the topography and worked on the Capitol grounds in Washington, DC, including stairways and terraces. Olmsted felt that not only did he lead an intellectual life, he raised his calling from a trade and handicraft to that of a liberal profession. (He had studied civil engineering.) Despite his honors, he worked for all the later generations to come and quoted Ruskin, who said, "See, this is what our fathers did for us."