The Prescient Planner

"The main object and justification of [Central Park] is simply to produce a certain influence in the minds of people . . . The character of this influence is a poetic one and it is to be produced by means of scenes, through observation of which the mind may be more or less lifted out of moods and habits into which it is, under the ordinary conditions of city life, likely to fall." Frederick Law Olmsted's words on his noble design for Manhattan may ring with some irony in a New Yorker's ears today as he promenades his German shepherd past a sniffling junkie on a park bench and settles down to meditate on the future of rus in urbe among the tattered newspapers and paper cups surrounding some graffiti-sprayed rock. But the fact is that New York, to the extent that it is still habitable, remains so partly by virtue of Olmsted's prescient and humane planning.

Many of his urban designs have since been bastardized, and the parks he completed have been eroded by careless crowds, inadequate maintenance and spurious development. Consequently some of Olmsted's New York projects--Morningside Park in Manhattan, Tompkins Park and Prospect Park in Brooklyn--are now parodies of their 19th century selves. Moreover, a changed idea of leisure has bitten into the patterns that Olmsted left. Parking lots, baseball diamonds and 27 playgrounds, not to mention the Metropolitan Museum's expansion, have severely damaged Central Park itself. So grasping Olmsted's work is partly a matter of archaeology: the achievement must be reconstructed. This is the aim of a fascinating exhibition at Washington's National Gallery organized and directed by William Alex in commemoration of the 150th anniversary of Olmsted's birth.

The son of a prosperous Connecticut merchant--his ancestors had immigrated to America in the early 17th century--Olmsted was a capable writer, and his thoughtful, closely researched books on conditions in the South were acclaimed as the best record of the slave society that had been written before the Civil War. He farmed too, and dabbled (with disastrous results to his purse) in publishing. His career as a planner and designer spanned more than a generation, from his appointment in 1857, at age 35, as the superintendent of an as yet undesigned Central Park to his retirement in 1895. Throughout, Olmsted was known as a landscape architect. This "miserable nomenclature," as he called it, fretted him; but what else could Olmsted call himself? "For clearness, for convenience, for distinctness," he complained, "you do need half a dozen new technical words at least." The fact that his culture had no exact name for his work is an interesting proof of Olmsted's originality.

As Elizabeth Barlow writes in a graceful new study, Frederick Law Olmsted's New York (Praeger; $12.50): "At the time of his birth" his type of activity "was almost beyond imagining." America's image of itself was still Arcadian and rural; the city was generally considered to be past redemption, a sink of iniquity and profit. Even by the mid-19th century, there was no American equivalent of the royal parks in which Londoners could refresh themselves. From Boston to Buffalo to Chicago to Minneapolis, Olmsted set out to supply them. He also designed a park for San Francisco, which unfortunately was never built. As Mrs. Barlow puts it, he "did not turn his back on the process of American urbanization; rather, he took the Jeffersonian rural ideal and carried it into the heart of the city."

Complete Systems. His prototypes were, naturally, English. Olmsted had absorbed the lessons of the "picturesque" on his first visit to England and Europe in 1850--that mode of articulating a landscape or a park so that it seemed not designed, but modulated, into a suggestive wildness. The sight of hawthorn hedges and coppices, glistening under the mild English sun, threw him into transports of delight; two of the key texts on English romantic gardening, Sir Uvedale Price's On the Picturesque and William Gilpin's Forest Scenery, so influenced him that he later enjoined his pupils to read them "seriously, as a student of law would read Blackstone."

Olmsted's mind, so delicate in its attention to detail and so wide in its grasp of social issues, was of a sort not often found elsewhere in 19th century America; he was, in fact, the first American planner to think holistically, in terms of complete systems. Architect, sociologist, ecologist, engineer and conservationist, he felt an abiding concern for the refreshment of human life by an interaction with nature, but with a nature that was planned or, if not planned, lovingly preserved. He drew up a project that restored Niagara Falls after its defacement by commercial exploiters; and the conservation of Yosemite Park, whose rock outcroppings were already splashed with patent medicine ads as early as 1860, is largely the result of his dedication.

But it was in urban design that his genius revealed itself. No living architect could propose a more humane suburb than the cellular plan for Riverside, Ill., with its sociably curving layout and "character of informal village greens," which Olmsted and his partner Calvert Vaux drew up in 1868. Similar master plans for The Bronx and other areas of New York were not carried through; instead, the builders and real estate speculators imposed the mechanically uniform grid system that was a special target of Olmsted's anger--and remains today. The landscape of New York City--which, well into the 19th century, was still a landscape, mostly farm land--vanished under the relentless leveling, cutting and filling, and one of history's greatest urban bungles was consummated.

Waste Space. Except, fortunately, in Central Park: there, Olmsted and Vaux had a free hand. They won it with great difficulty against a phalanx of businessmen and politicos who could see no point in creating such "waste space" in Manhattan. Olmsted's tenacity was such that when his thigh was broken in three places by a carriage accident, he insisted on being carried round the park in a litter while he issued his orders to the foremen and struggled to complete, in grass and trees, his "gallery of mental pictures." Though he disapproved of such grand formal gardens as Versailles, the park entailed a stupendous effort of engineering. Ten million cartloads of earth and stone were dragged in and out of the area, millions of trees, vines and shrubs were planted, the brooks that traversed it were turned, by an impressive feat of hydraulic engineering, into lakes and reservoirs; even the four systems of traffic circulation, which Olmsted designed with unusual finesse, still work admirably after more than a century. No detail, from the marble inlay of a niche or the angle of a fountain jet to the disposition of a hickory grove, escaped him or Vaux. The result was a masterpiece.

Its uses have changed--the dubious honor of driving the first car in Central Park went to one Winston Buzby in 1898, and the present infestation of buildings and ugly monuments was no part of Olmsted's plan. Today, the character of Central Park is stretched to its elastic limit. But it still survives, and Olmsted's words to his partner Vaux (who got dispirited sometimes) still speak for many New Yorkers: "I have none of your feelings of nauseousness about the park. There is no other place in the world that is as much home to me. I love it all through, and all the more for the trials it has cost me."

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