Genius of Place (50 page)

Having Olmsted's office on the first floor necessitated placing the dining room on the second. The kitchen was in the basement. Thanks to a dumbwaiter, it was possible to communicate between the kitchen and dining room. There was also a second-floor parlor; its walls were lined with Carleton Watkins's photos of Yosemite, scene of some of the family's happiest times together. Mary placed a piano in the parlor and enjoyed playing and singing. The top two floors were bedrooms for the family.

Everywhere, all over the house, there were books. The office had reference works such as Augustus Mongredien's
Trees and Shrubs for English Plantations
, G. M. Kern's
Practical Landscape Gardening
, and
Gardening for Ladies
by Jane Loudon. Elsewhere, books simply overflowed their cases; stacks grew on every available surface, and tottering piles were arrayed on the floor. According to a rough inventory, he owned about 2,000 books. The titles reflected his eclectic interests and concerns:
Principals of Political Economy
by John Stuart Mill and Darwin's
Origin of Species
, collections of poems by Browning and Burns, Macaulay's
History of England
, Hawthorne's
Marble Faun
, Defoe's
Robinson Crusoe
, and
Short Sermons to News Boys
by Brace. There was also a work on insomnia,
Sleep and Its Derangements
, by William Hammond.

The brownstone had a backyard, short and sixteen feet wide. It had been many years since Olmsted had lived in a home surrounded by so little land. But he made the best of it, using his well-honed perspective tricks to plant the tiny yard so as to give the illusion of space—as much as was possible.

 

In a new home now, Olmsted slipped back into his accustomed domestic relationships, ones that bore a marked similarity to those of his late father. As a widower with two small boys, John Olmsted had been in a hurry to wed Mary Ann Bull back in 1827. The couple had fallen into a relationship that was largely practical, hardly passionate. Over time, Olmsted and Mary had also achieved a kind of mutuality, an essential element of love, to be sure. But there seemed to be something muted about their feelings for one another, a lack of spark. Theirs was a love born of obligation—the death of Olmsted's brother—and deepened through successive sorrows.

Years earlier, Olmsted had confided to Brace that he feared he might have to settle in marriage and be left “believing that the ‘highest element of love' is not of earth.” That's precisely what had come to pass. In another confession, Olmsted once told Vaux that Central Park had been his grand passion and that while working on it, “a great deal of disappointed love and unsatisfied romance and down trodden pride fastened itself to that passion.”
Disappointed love
and
unsatisfied romance
are curious choices of phrase, more so when one considers that Olmsted wed Mary while work on Central Park was under way.

As for his relationship with his children, Olmsted was capable of great affection, as his own father had been. Both often showed a genuine sweetness toward their children that wasn't so common among fathers in nineteenth-century America. But both men also maintained some distance from their offspring. Work required Olmsted often to be absent from home; his father had sent him away to school for long stretches of his childhood. But here's where the two differed: Olmsted could at times be remarkably underindulgent—something for which his father could never be accused. His father was a comfortable Hartford burgher; Olmsted was a hard-driven and pioneering artist. Olmsted had high expectations when it came to parenting as well, and when these expectations weren't met, the results could be chilling.

Olmsted was fifty-one now; Mary was forty-three. Between his brother's three children, whom he had adopted, and two natural offspring, he had five children. His father also had five who lived to maturity.

John Charles, age twenty, was the oldest in the Olmsted brood. He'd grown into a deadly serious and painfully shy person. Because he was the firstborn, perhaps, he had an intense, overdeveloped sense of duty. As a boy, Olmsted had called him “Charley,” but the nickname proved entirely too lighthearted. By 1873, when the family moved into the brownstone, Charley had come to be known as John and was studying at Yale's Sheffield Scientific School. John had a talent for rendering. He was thinking about becoming a painter or an architect, perhaps even following his father into landscape architecture. John had also recently grown a beard, though not for the usual reasons. He'd slammed into a stone
wall while sledding with the Brace children. His chin was left so scarred that he wore a beard the rest of his life.

Among the various children, Charlotte, age eighteen, provoked the most concern for Olmsted and his wife. She was a bright young woman, who was studying at a boarding school in Massachusetts. Her dream was to run a kindergarten. She was tiny, like her mother, but given to violent mood swings. Charlotte's nickname was Chatty, though that seems like a euphemism for far darker personality traits. Olmsted once described how Charlotte “on the least provocation turns down almost to the bottom, pale, thin, blue, and hysterical.”

Owen, age fifteen, continued to look unsettlingly more like his father—Olmsted's dead brother, Mary's dead husband—with each passing year. He also shared John's casual, winning disposition as well as his fragile physical makeup. Owen was attending boarding school in Plymouth, Massachusetts, along with the Vaux boys. At one point, Olmsted wrote the headmaster, trying to ensure that Owen was receiving a rigorous outdoor training to go along with book learning. Perhaps exposure to the rougher side of life would fortify his delicate constitution. The letter is a litany—a form in which Olmsted excelled—detailing all the skills that Owen might properly be taught:

That's not even the half of it. On and on goes the letter, though it appears that Owen mostly learned the standard reading and math at
his boarding school. At home, he showed a talent for tinkering. Owen cobbled together some telegraph equipment and strung lines between the brownstone and the homes of four friends, one more than ten blocks away.

Marion, age eleven, was Olmsted's first child with Mary to survive infancy. She was energetic, a tomboy who enjoyed outdoor activities like hiking. There was also something incredibly stolid and dependable about Marion. “Just the nicest girl—little old maid—possible; patient; happy, indefatigable” is how Olmsted once described her.

And then there was Henry, the baby of the family, now two. At age seven, in a truly bizarre turn, he'd be rechristened as Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. By that point, Olmsted and Mary figured that he had a real chance of surviving, of carrying that name—and all that went with it—into adulthood. For now, Henry, née Boy, future FLO Jr., delighted in traveling from floor to floor in the dumbwaiter.

Throughout the mid-1870s, the Olmsteds would have a lively household on West 46th Street, and many people would come to visit. The Braces were regular guests, as was architect H. H. Richardson, critic Clarence Cook, the Putnams, and the Perkins cousins. Poet and
Post
editor William Cullen Bryant was a frequent visitor at a time when he was preparing a translation of the
Odyssey
. He read from the original Greek text in a stentorian voice, making quite an impression on the youngest Olmsteds.

But 1873, the first year spent in the new brownstone, proved most of all to be a difficult time. Within days of John Olmsted's funeral, Mary Ann Olmsted, Fred's stepmother, began questioning the terms of the will. She had always left financial matters entirely in her husband's hands, and when he died, she was stunned by how little money was left. She had assumed he had sizable real estate holdings, or maybe a large portfolio of investments. But chronic overindulgence of his children had left John Olmsted's estate quite diminished.

In the will, Fred was designated as a trustee along with his half-brother Albert, who was a banker in Hartford. The pair was left with the unenviable task of convincing Mary Ann that, given financial exigencies, she'd need to cut back. Fred suggested she sell one of the two horses and downsize from a double to a one-person carriage.

Instead, Mary Ann chose to contest the will and hired a lawyer. The lawyer went on the attack, trying to have Fred and Albert removed as trustees. Albert sent Fred regular updates from Hartford of the probate proceedings, in one describing Mary Ann as “the enemy/mother” and in another warning, “I write that you may be prepared for an attack from any quarter.” Meanwhile, Mary Ann sent a series of letters to Fred, containing everything from grave accusations—in one, she claimed he was cheating her out of her rightful share—to small jibes, such as a demand that he return to Hartford at once to pick up some old copies of the
Nation
stored in the house. Invariably, she signed these letters: “I remain your affectionate, Mother.”

Things grew progressively more ugly. Settlement of the estate, something that should have taken weeks, dragged on for months. Mary Ann even went so far as to claim that Olmsted and his half-brother had bribed the probate judge. At this point, Olmsted sent a letter to Central Park. Even in the best of times, Olmsted's longtime consulting role with the park was fraught with tension, and given his current family blowup, he felt that he needed to be “relieved of responsibilities which under present circumstances I can not satisfactorily meet.” Back came a telegram insisting that he stay on.

But then, just when the legal wrangle was beginning to look unending, the matter settled. John Olmsted's will was upheld. Per its terms, Mary Ann was to receive the Hartford house and a modest allowance. There was a portfolio of stocks and bonds sufficient to provide each of his children roughly $1,500 a year. This was nothing to scoff at, but it meant that Olmsted couldn't really pursue his occasionally voiced desire to slow down. The will proceedings also had another result: The acrimony left Fred's relationship with his stepmother in ruins. They would never manage to patch things up. And she would also not be coming to live at 209 West 46th Street.

Olmsted fell into genuine despair. His father's death had brought pain and consequences beyond anything he could have imagined. He wondered whether he really could go it alone without Vaux. Now, more than ever, it was necessary to strike out and find fresh clients.

Instead, Olmsted went blind. A doctor examined him and concluded that nothing was physically wrong. He was simply overcome with anxiety
and needed to rest his eyes. Olmsted appears to have been suffering from something like hysterical blindness. The whole episode has echoes of the sumac poisoning that spread to his eyes as a teenager, preventing him from going to college.

During the late autumn of 1873, Olmsted was confined to a darkened bedroom, doctor's orders, unable to work, unable even to read, just alone with his thoughts. Letters from potential clients piled up. P. T. Barnum wrote inquiring whether Olmsted might be interested in landscaping the grounds surrounding his mansion in Bridgeport, Connecticut. The Board of Education in Elmira, New York, sent a worrying note: “I hope you have not forgotten our school grounds.”

Even after Olmsted regained his eyesight, his mood remained black. In December 1873, he sent a rambling letter to Brace. Olmsted attempted to summon the spirit that had first bound the two in friendship—argument, endless argument—but his tone was so bleak that this came off as pessimism rather than provocation. Olmsted even took a few tired swipes at religion. “Do you suppose that it is a much smaller misfortune for a Chinese child to lose its Pagan mother than for an English child to lose its Christian mother?” he asked. “Do you suppose there is a whit more tenderness toward her child in an English mother than in a Digger Indian mother?”

But religion was a matter he'd settled long ago. Olmsted had made his peace with the rigid Congregationalist faith of his upbringing and the years spent with cruel country parsons. Over time, Olmsted had become what might best be called an agnostic. He frequently described himself in such terms, though he didn't use the word
agnostic
. No matter: In this letter to Brace, it seems clear, Olmsted's real anger was directed not so much at religion as at his puritanical stepmother. He also made an oblique reference to his recent medical condition: “Suppose a man who sees things so far differently than the mass of ordinary healthy men is thereby classified as of defective vision, as of diseased brain. Thus I have not a doubt that I was born with a defect of the eye, with a defect of the brain.”

 

As the year ended, Olmsted pulled himself together, as he somehow always seemed to do. In previous months, during the ugly inheritance
battle, he'd carried on a sporadic correspondence with Justin Morrill, senator from Vermont. Morrill was chairman of the Senate Committee on Public Buildings and Grounds. In the new year, matters took on increased urgency. Congress had just obtained some land that expanded the grounds surrounding the Capitol in Washington, D.C. Senator Morrill asked Olmsted to prepare a preliminary design.