Genius of Place (55 page)

Olmsted had first glimpsed the falls at age six during a family trip. Ever since the 1869 meeting at Cataract House, Olmsted had been working to focus attention on the sorry state of this once-grand piece of scenery. He had been part of a New York State survey team that had explored the feasibility of tearing down the mills, removing the carny-style amusements. He had also spearheaded a petition drive demanding that Niagara be restored to a more natural state. In this effort, Charles Eliot Norton had joined him. Like Olmsted, Norton had a deep well of contacts. The pair managed to gather hundreds of signatures, including those of Emerson, Longfellow, and Whittier as well as Morrison Waite, chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, and seven of eight associate justices. Because the falls are also visible from the Canadian side of the Niagara River (and because Canada was then a dominion of Great Britain), Olmsted and Norton also obtained the signatures of such English notables as Ruskin, Lord Houghton, and Sir James Stephen. “Carlyle signs,” crowed Norton, when the literary hero of Olmsted's youth added his name to the petition.

The survey report, penned by Olmsted and accompanied by the petition, prompted New York State legislators to draw up a bill calling for the preservation of Niagara Falls. But it failed to pass due to the vehement opposition of Governor Alonzo Cornell. He was against spending taxpayer money, especially given that nothing was wrong with the natural wonder itself. What would be the point, he demanded, of removing the mills and amusement parks? “I don't see that it will make any difference—the water will run over the falls all the same,” said Cornell.

Olmsted kept up the pressure. He perceived that this was a cause best furthered via the press, a forum where he had always enjoyed an advantage. This would be another of his nineteenth-century public relations battles. But he would wage it by proxy. By this time, Olmsted had grown
extremely busy with the Boston system and other jobs. So Olmsted and Norton arranged to have Henry Norman, a recent Harvard graduate, write a series of articles that appeared in the New York and Boston papers as well as the
Nation
. Olmsted directed Norman, instructing him how to frame the Niagara Falls problem for public consumption. Olmsted and Norton also tapped Jonathan Harrison, a clergyman, to write more articles and even go on a speaking tour.

Meanwhile, hostile Cornell left office and was replaced by Buffalo native Grover Cleveland, an advocate of preserving the falls. “Governor Cleveland
strongly
in favor of Niagara,” wrote Richardson to Olmsted in 1883. He had gathered this scuttlebutt while having dinner with Cleveland and Dorsheimer, for whom he had designed a mansion along one of Olmsted and Vaux's Buffalo parkways. Within months, the state finally passed legislation to preserve Niagara Falls. Following that, an even more critical bill was passed, setting aside the money necessary to purchase the land from private interests. “I congratulate you, prime mover,” Norton wrote to Olmsted. “I hail you as the Saviour of Niagara!”

In 1885, a five-person commission was appointed, and Dorsheimer was named chairman. As a first act, he presided over that midnight “Niagara is free” festivity. Then it was on to the complicated business of purchasing forty parcels of land held by twenty-five different owners. It would be necessary to tear down roughly 150 different structures. Once the structures were down, someone would need to give the grounds surrounding Niagara Falls a proper landscape treatment.

Olmsted was the obvious choice. But Niagara was like an echo chamber of his past associations. One of the five commissioners was actually Andrew Green, his old Central Park tormentor. Green declared that the choice of Olmsted was “particularly offensive” to him. Whom did Green favor instead? Maybe Green was simply trying to stick it to Olmsted. His suggestion—Vaux!

Actually, Vaux was a logical choice. Vaux was one of the parties present for that seminal 1869 visit that set the “Preserve Niagara” movement in motion. Vaux was also close friends with Frederic Church, the civic-minded artist who had done the definitive Niagara Falls painting in 1857. Church and Olmsted were distant relatives. Echoes and more echoes.

Ultimately, the Niagara commission voted four to one to hire Olmsted for the project. Green was the lone dissenter. As a compromise, Olmsted simply agreed to team with Vaux. His old partner needed the work.

The bumbling, agitated manner; the constant fiddling with his spectacles—these had always conveyed that Vaux was a pure, uncompromising artist. It also communicated that he was difficult. As for the Metropolitan Museum and Museum of Natural History, the twin commissions that had promised to elevate him to the highest echelon of American architects—he'd been cut loose from both. In each case, structures designed by Vaux were actually built. But as the buildings expanded, he lost control of the commissions. Over time, his original work on both the Met and the Museum of Natural History would be almost entirely obscured by later work by other architects.

The years since Olmsted, Vaux & Company had ended had been cruel to Vaux. He was sublimely talented, yet his own business had dried up. Charley Brace had helped by hiring him to build a series of residences for the Children's Aid Society. It was modest work. Vaux was sixty-one now and filled with worry—about the future, about slipping into poverty, about his uncertain legacy. A diary entry by painter Jervis McEntee concluded sadly that for his old friend Vaux, “life seems a struggle.”

Olmsted and Vaux began working out their plan for Niagara Falls in 1886. (They would submit their formal report early the following year.) The site was such a contrast to Yosemite, Olmsted's first effort at preservation. Yosemite was isolated and forbidding and even by the 1880s received only a handful of visitors. But Niagara Falls was the ultimate tourist destination, a simple fact that could be neither ignored nor undone.

Olmsted and Vaux perceived that the challenge, from a landscape architecture standpoint, lay in framing the falls, but also making them accessible to the masses. The Niagara railroad depot was the stepping-off point for thousands of travelers who arrived weary, hungry, and confused. Olmsted and Vaux suggested adding a large building where tourists could check their possessions, purchase food, and use lavatories. Information signs—something that had been sorely lacking in the otherwise cluttered environs—should be strategically posted to guide people to the various sites. They also proposed simple “furniture” such as benches facing especially
fetching vistas. For safety's sake, Vaux designed railings to be placed in front of various precipices. The railings were utterly unobtrusive—just posts with three crossbars—and in a strange way, they were the apotheosis of his nature-first ethos. Awed by the falls, visitors wouldn't even notice the railings.

Olmsted was especially fond of the islands in the Niagara River above the falls. He felt the spectacle of the falls overshadowed the more subtle charms of these places. “I have followed the Appalachian chain almost from end to end,” noted Olmsted, “and traveled on horseback, ‘in search of the picturesque' over four thousand miles of the most promising parts of the continent without finding elsewhere the same quality of forest beauty which was once abundant about the falls.”

Olmsted and Vaux's plan sought to restore wildness to places such as Goat Island and the Three Sisters Islands. But per the mandate, these also had to be accessible. They suggested a system of carriage paths and footpaths that would guide visitors through the scenery. The carriage paths were one-third the width ordinarily used in a park. (At around this time, in a separate effort, Canada also began restoring its side of the falls.)

Vaux traveled to Fairsted at one point to work on the Niagara plan. “He helped me and I helped him and at some points each of us crowded the other out a little” is how Olmsted described their collaboration. In other words, they fell back into their old pattern. Vaux wrote Olmsted a long worried letter wondering when they were going to get paid. Olmsted offered to lend Vaux four or five hundred dollars. Olmsted had other work, and money was coming in, making him “well windward of expenses,” as he put it. Going forward, he would pretty well turn the job over to Vaux, who would supervise construction of the railings, benches, and other touches. It would give Olmsted's old partner a needed source of income.

 

On April 27, 1886, around the time work on Niagara Falls was getting started, H. H. Richardson died. He was forty-seven. The cause of death was Bright's disease, a kidney disorder now known as glomerulonephritis. Only a few weeks earlier, Olmsted had seen Richardson. His friend,
always of ample girth, had ballooned to a massive weight, a symptom of the illness. At the beginning of the visit, Richardson seemed downcast. But then he grew suddenly animated on the topic of an architectural commission. As Olmsted described it, “He went on discussing for the better part of an hour, growing to sit up erect, his voice becoming clear, his utterance empathetic, his eyes flashing, smiling, laughing like a boy, really hilarious.”

The funeral was held at Trinity Church with many of his fellow architects in attendance. Mourners passed around a story that Richardson had been blessed with a peaceful death. This was comforting: Richardson had created such great beauty during his brief lifetime that it seemed only fitting that he achieve some measure of grace as he exited this world. But it was far from the truth.

Richardson died as he'd lived, messily. He left behind a wife and six children. Though he was one of America's most successful and prolific architects, he also left behind a mountain of debt, a final display of what Olmsted called Richardson's “characteristic unconquerable recklessness.” He didn't just slip peacefully away, either. Richardson spent the last day of his life in excruciating pain.

Richardson's death was a hard blow for Olmsted. He lost a dear friend and a professional collaborator; he had anticipated that their best works together lay in the future. But he'd experienced so much loss of late. Sorrowful events had come one after another, packed tight. Shortly after having her third child, Charlotte—always unstable—had fallen into the grip of serious mental illness. She was sent to an asylum, where she would spend the rest of her life.

Olmsted had seen many old friends pass away. The Reverend Henry Bellows, from Civil War days on the USSC, had recently died, as had George Geddes, the man who gave Olmsted his start in scientific farming. On learning that Friedrich Kapp, one of the Texas Germans, had died, he had written to Brace that “changes in our time have been so great that while I feel myself in the full fruit of the life of today, I feel that the life of our early days was almost another life.” He added, “Instead of being shocked by the death of old friends, I wonder they could have lived till so lately—most of all that I am still living.”

So much change. So much loss. It made Olmsted feel the need to take stock. His self-assessment was unsparing: “I have done a good deal of good work in my way too but it is customarily & every where arrested, wrenched, mangled and misused. It is not easy to get above intense disappointment & mortification.” He was more generous toward Brace: “You decidedly have lived the best and most worthily successful life of all whom I have known. The C.A. [Children's Aid] is the most satisfying of all the benevolent works of our time.”

Brace passed Olmsted's letter along for Kingsbury to read. It was like the old days of the “uncommon set,” where everyone knew everyone else's business. Only now the set's ranks had thinned to three: brother John was long departed, and Charley Trask had drifted to the point that the others weren't even certain of what city he lived in.

Kingsbury wrote Brace back commenting on Olmsted's letter: “It's a pity he should attach so little influence to the much he has accomplished and so much to the little he has not succeeded in doing to his mind. No man even comes close to his ideals who has any.” Kingsbury had always seen Olmsted with particular clarity. He knew that his old friend wasn't about to rest easy.

 

Soon an intriguing opportunity came Olmsted's way, courtesy of Leland Stanford. Stanford had built the western portion of the transcontinental railroad; he'd driven the famous golden spike during the ceremony when the two sections were connected. During the 1860s, he'd served as California's governor. Stanford was iron-willed and ursine and wore a perpetual scowl. As one of the age's foremost rail barons, he'd amassed a fortune and also an ample list of enemies, such as journalist Ambrose Bierce, who insisted on writing his name: “£eland $tanford.”

Stanford had recently lost his only child, Leland Stanford Jr. While the family was traveling in Europe, the fifteen-year-old boy had died in Florence of typhoid fever. Stanford and his wife, Jane, were devastated. The couple consulted mediums and conducted séances, hoping to contact the boy's spirit. But even in grief, there was a limit to Stanford's tolerance for the ethereal realms. He soon hit on the idea of founding a university in his dead son's honor. And not just any university: This would be on the
grandest scale conceivable, akin to an opera aria that keeps rising and swelling because there's no other place for such great sorrow to go.

Stanford traveled east to discuss his big plans with educators at universities such as Harvard, Yale, and Cornell. Stanford was especially taken with General Francis Walker, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. MIT was still a young institution (just a couple decades old), and it had recently almost gone under. Walker had stepped in to turn the school around; he was Stanford's kind of can-do man. As it happened, Walker was acquainted with Henry Codman, a recent MIT graduate who also happened to be one of Olmsted's young apprentices.

It was Codman who forged the connection between Olmsted and Stanford. He also urged Olmsted to ask Stanford for $10,000 for a preliminary plan, an unheard-of amount. Olmsted was resistant; demanding a huge fee was a technique he sometimes used to drive away clients he didn't wish to engage. To his surprise, Stanford readily agreed to the $10,000. Clearly, this was quite a project. “There is not any word half big enough for his ideas of what it is to be,” marveled Olmsted, wryly adding that the only fitting term was “Universitatory.”