Genius of Place (24 page)

The Lake, the site of future ice skating, was in reality a low-lying piece of swampy ground. Before park construction began, it existed only on Olmsted and Vaux's ten-foot blueprint, where the squiggly, naturalistic contours of its shoreline were rendered in india ink. To fill it, clay pipes carried rain runoff from the carriage paths and other spots in the park. To drain it, a series of sluices could be opened. Some of the sluices fed into natural springs running under the parkland, and certain springs, in turn, emptied into New York's East River.

This ingenious system, created in collaboration with a talented drainage specialist hired by Olmsted, made it possible to raise and lower the water level in the Lake. Rustic Central Park was also a triumph of
the latest technology. The plan was to keep the water seven feet deep during the summer for rowboats, but to lower it to four feet in winter for ice-skating. Shallower water would pose less danger if someone fell through the ice.

The Lake's design even included concrete steps built into the natural-looking shoreline. During summer, the steps were covered in water. But in winter, the steps could be used to walk down to the frozen surface.

 

During these early months of park making, Olmsted and Vaux's partnership was still very new. But they quickly fell into the roles that would define all their future collaborations. Vaux, being an architect, was responsible for designing structures such as bridges and archways. Olmsted took the lead on designing the landscape elements themselves, though often with considerable input from Vaux. In an extension of his earlier role as superintendent, he oversaw the construction, giving orders to crews of workmen. As their work progressed, Olmsted would become more involved in administration, developing rules for park use and figuring out policing strategies. As a pure artist, this held no interest for Vaux.

Vaux's training ensured a certain polish for anything the pair undertook. Olmsted compensated for his lack of training with an agile mind and an intuitive sense of design, drawing on his varied life experiences. He brought a fine sense of narrative to these park creations and a flair for the dramatic.

Together, Olmsted and Vaux were the American pioneers of a profession, landscape architecture, that to this point had barely existed in the world in either name or deed. This was a quantum step up from humble landscape
gardening
, which centered on planting flowers and terracing lawns. And while it incorporated the practice of architecture, it was so much more. Landscape architecture was the sum of Olmsted's and Vaux's parts, quite literally. It might best be described as the art of applying rigorous design to large pieces of land. To this point in history, there had been a tiny number of practitioners, mostly in Europe but also in Asia, who might rightly be described as landscape architects, though fewer still used the designation. In the United States, it was a novel field.

Oh, and there's one last useful way of breaking down the division of labor between Olmsted and Vaux. Vaux was supremely gifted; Olmsted quite simply was in another realm.

 

Olmsted's extraordinary gifts were nowhere more evident than in Central Park's meadows, as originally conceived. For these, Olmsted developed a signature hourglass shape, narrow in the middle and flaring out at each end. This shape was achieved by planting trees around the edge of the meadow. Someone standing in such a meadow, Olmsted surmised, would naturally be drawn toward the narrow middle. It presented an allure and a mystery. What was on the other side? After walking through the passage, there was a release, like walking through a tunnel into a stadium. Or like a city street that spills suddenly into an open field. “Passages of scenery” Olmsted called these set pieces of tree and turf.

At certain key spots, Olmsted planted so-called specimen trees. These might be solitary oaks or maples that would grow to awesome height, limbs stretching dramatically, exploding in color during autumn. Such a specimen was sure to grab the attention of someone who had just entered the open portion of a meadow. It was an ideal focal point for a vista.

Olmsted varied his plantings by color, planting trees with dark foliage such as evergreens in the foreground of a vista and lighter tones such as beeches more distantly. This trick of light and shadow made his meadows appear larger than they actually were. In cramped Central Park, creating a sense of boundless space was desirable, even if it was just an illusion.

Of course, time was needed for the trees to grow and for Olmsted's hourglass planting pattern to emerge. The Greensward plan had contained the argument that the passage of twenty years was required before Central Park's design could be properly judged. And so it would be with the meadows. Year upon year, visitors to the park would delight as Olmsted's grand tree plan unfurled. (Today, sadly, the park's meadows no longer hold to this imaginative scheme.)

 

Other brilliant touches were more rapid to reveal themselves. The Lake, for example, opened right on schedule. On December 11, 1858, Central Park welcomed its first official visitors, the ice skaters. Roughly 300 people
showed up on that first Sunday. A week later, 10,000 descended on the park. New York, suffering through the latest in a series of unseasonably cold winters, fell quickly into an ice-skating swoon.

Diocletian Lewis, one of America's first physical fitness gurus, had created a recent stir, lecturing about the healthful benefits of outdoor activity. Here at last was an opportunity for cooped-up city dwellers to get outside during this harsh winter, visit the new park, breathe in the crisp air.

Soon all kinds of makeshift concessions sprang up to serve this ice-skating craze. Skates could be rented for 10¢ an hour with a $1 deposit. Enterprising little boys wandered the ice, helping people affix skates to their boots for a 3¢ fee. This service was aimed especially at women, frequently decked out in so much finery that they had trouble bending over. For those too skittish to skate, armchairs for sliding over the ice could be rented for 15¢ an hour. The ideal configuration for this activity was an eligible gentleman pushing a seated young lovely over the ice. Yes, a yen for physical fitness may have been the original purpose for visiting the park, but something more basic turned this into a full-on frenzy.

In Victorian New York, ice skating was one of the few activities where unmarried men and women could mingle without chaperones. It was even possible for a woman to get ever so slightly coquettish, perhaps showing a hint of ankle as she glided past. “Many a young fellow has lost his heart, and skated himself into matrimony, on the Central Park pond,” a guidebook would note some years later. For the demure, or for those who wished to skate in peace without constant male attention, there was a separate ladies' section of the Lake.

As the winter drew on, sometimes as many as 100,000 people a day visited the park. Skating proved so popular that the park was kept open well into the night. The Lake's icy surface reflected the glow of newly installed calcium lamps. Vaux went skating. There is no record that Olmsted did.

Anytime the ice was thick enough for skating, a red ball was hoisted from the same tower used to signal that an explosion was imminent. The ball could be seen from quite a distance. This little touch was meant to
save someone who had come all the way uptown the further trouble of trekking into the park if there was no skating to be done.

By the standards of nineteenth-century New York, skating was an unusually egalitarian activity, available to many, though by no means all, of the city's residents. The frenzy was a huge sensation, covered by every paper, and writers couldn't resist commenting on the atypical mix of people they saw on the ice. The
New York Herald
reported that the Lake contained “members of the homo genus of every age, and probably every country that constitutes our nationality.” The
Times
encountered skaters from “all ages, sexes and conditions in life, from the ragged urchin with one broken skate, to the millionaire.” And again from the
Herald
: “Masters Richard and William from Fifth Avenue, in their furs, and plain Dick and Bill from the avenues nearer the rivers, with bunting flying from joints and middle seams, were all mingled in joyful unity.” Breathless as they are, these newspaper accounts were a heartening sign about Central Park. As Olmsted stated proudly, the park was turning out to be “a democratic development of the highest significance.”

 

In the summer of 1859, a second feature in Central Park was opened to the public. This was the Ramble, a wild garden, densely planted and laced with intricate pathways that crossed and then recrossed, switched and then switched back, until a person was hopelessly lost, and that was the fun of it.

The Ramble had been conceived as a way to disguise a bald hillside leading up to the embankment of the old Croton reservoir. Here—in stark contrast to his eons-to-unfold meadows—Olmsted planted fast-growing shrubs and flowers such as columbine, kalmia, and azalea. Vaux added a rustic arch, hidden away, spanning a path that had meandered deep into the Ramble. There was also a little stream that trickled down the hillside, spilled into a waterfall—and was totally engineered. It could be turned on and off with a spigot, and for its source it drew on the old reservoir, the one that had provided the city's drinking water. A natural-looking “grotto” was built to hide the pipes.

Olmsted considered the Ramble his greatest work in the park. It was—and would remain—very much a work in progress. He worried
ceaselessly over the plantings, constantly changing out one plant for another. With the Ramble, Olmsted was like a mad scientist, endlessly tinkering with the botanical formula, aiming for just the right mix of color and texture on that once-homely hillside.

New Yorkers by the thousands flocked to the Ramble, eager to enjoy a piece of countryside right in the city, just as Olmsted and Vaux had envisioned. In these times, the only hint of the rural for many city dwellers was a few stray flowers grown in window boxes. One of the great pleasures of the Ramble was vast beds of flowers, growing without limit. Visitors were particularly taken with the dandelions, not yet viewed as a nuisance plant. One account waxed rhapsodic about the “blessed dandelions, in such beautiful profusion as we have never seen elsewhere, making the lawns, in places, like green lakes reflecting a heaven sown with stars.”

But the most striking feature of the Ramble was a cave. It had been discovered, partially obscured by stone, when work on the hillside got under way. The stones were cleared, and the cave was wholly integrated into the park plan. The man-made Lake was extended so that it was possible to row a boat right into the entrance of the cave. The paths of the Ramble were construed so that just when visitors had tarried a bit overlong, they were suddenly confronted with this fearsome natural wonder.

The cave set people's hearts palpitating. And if a man played it just right, a woman might faint into his arms. As ever with the adoption of new things—those first dime-store movie reels, VCRs, and the Internet come to mind—Central Park's growing popularity was helped by having some racy content.

 

Walking through the Ramble, on a balmy Saturday, a person might also catch the strains of a Verdi aria, wafting through the air. During the summer of 1859, the first concerts were held in Central Park.

Harvey Dodworth was the versatile conductor of an orchestra that played everything from Strauss waltzes to Rossini marches to a song called “The Moorish Minstrel.” The free performances, dubbed “citizens' concerts,” were designed to appeal to a broad spectrum of New Yorkers. In fact, Dodworth had to get his programs preapproved by Olmsted and the Central Park board. For those first concerts, a bandstand had not yet
been built in the park. The orchestra set up along the edge of the Lake. While they played, visitors often went about other park activities, sunbathing or rowing in boats.

Olmsted loved music. He was aware of a distinct consonance between his creations and the flow of a symphony. “Landscape moves us in a manner more nearly analogous to the action of music than anything else,” he once wrote. Keen to heighten the interplay between music and the park, he obsessively paced over the grounds during Dodworth's concerts. Acoustics was still a casual science then, but Olmsted noted how sounds were amplified when they bounced off rock faces and other surfaces. He was struck by how sound traveled across water, making the orchestra seem closer to the listener than it actually was.

Olmsted drove poor patient Dodworth to distraction, asking him to arrange the orchestra at different points along the Lake, seeking that elusive sonic sweet spot. He even tried having the orchestra play from the middle of the Lake, aboard boats. That innovation didn't take.

At times when Dodworth's orchestra performed, the laborers who were building Central Park paused for a moment to listen. More often, they kept right on working, but as onlookers noted, their hammer thuds and clangs seemed to meld with the rhythm of the music.

 

The summer of 1859 was
the
intense stretch in park construction, the period when the most got done. Olmsted had nearly to double the workforce once again to 3,600 men. Men worked seven days a week, week in, week out. Olmsted drove his charges hard and jokingly referred to himself as a “Sabbath cracker.”

As Central Park progressed, being a vast public work, it also began to deviate from Olmsted and Vaux's original plan. Olmsted despised the idea of the statues in Central Park, for example, referring to them scornfully as “incidents.” In his view, objects so very temporal—a statue of a politician recently deceased, the bust of a poet currently in vogue—had no place in a landscape meant to be timeless. But New York is a big city, and plenty of people disagreed with him.