OLMSTED’S FIRST DAY on the job was inauspicious. He showed up at Viele’s office and, after being kept waiting, was peremptorily sent off with an underling on a tour of the site. His guide purposely led him through the worst terrain. Olmsted’s street clothes were soon covered in mud, and he thought himself the butt of a crude joke. The workmen he encountered likewise treated him casually. The young gentleman was obviously an interloper. They knew that he had no real power—he could not hire or fire. They owed their jobs—and their political allegiance—to the Democratic party and its representative, the chief engineer.
Colonel Egbert Ludovicus Viele—he insisted on the military title—was not someone to be trifled with. A small man with a heavy mustache, he affected a rough, intimidating manner that hid his genteel, Knickerbocker background. His father, a judge and a regent of the University of the State of New York, was a state senator; his Dutch forebears had settled in upstate New York in the early seventeenth century. The thirty-two-year-old Viele had spent six years in the military, serving in the Mexican War, and fighting Indians on the Southwestern frontier. After resigning his commission he had come to New York, where he set himself up as a civil engineer. He had no training in this field—he had been in the infantry, not in the prestigious Corps of Engineers. Nevertheless, intelligent and enterprising, he knew how to organize men and get things done, and he persevered. He was employed by the State of New Jersey to conduct a topographical survey. Subsequently Fernando Wood, the mayor of New York, appointed him chief engineer of the projected Central Park.
Viele’s first task was to prepare a topographical survey. Although he had no background in landscape gardening, he proposed a design for the park. His straightforward, functional plan had the practical advantage of being adapted to the terrain and exploiting the existing natural features. A winding drive made a circuit of the park, to be traversed by four streets. There was a cricket ground and a botanical garden; he accorded pride of place to a fifty-acre parade ground. The Viele plan was officially accepted by Mayor Wood; however, when state legislators stripped the discredited mayor of many of his powers, this changed. The new park commissioners retained Viele to complete the survey, but set aside his plan. Ostensibly the reason was aesthetic—the design was held to be unimaginative. There was also reluctance to vest total control over the park in a Democratic appointee. On top of this disappointment, Viele was now saddled with Olmsted, this literary gent who, he suspected, didn’t know the first thing about the practical world.
Viele seriously misjudged Olmsted—and his abilities. The man who had ridden through Louisiana bayous and across the Texas plains was tougher than Viele imagined, and smarter. Within only a few weeks of his arrival, Olmsted made his presence felt. Some of the commissioners, including Elliott and Green, were disaffected with their arrogant chief engineer. In a deliberate snub, the board asked Olmsted to prepare a comprehensive report on draining the low and swampy land. Subterranean drainage was precisely one novel subject with which Olmsted was intimately familiar. It took him less than two weeks to submit a report. Unlike his literary writing, which was sometimes convoluted, Olmsted’s technical prose was a model of clarity. He described details, prices, and schedules. Drawing on his Staten Island experience, he included a long discussion of the benefits of manufacturing the drainage tiles on the spot. He quoted from current British technical journals. He reminded the commissioners that he had met Josiah Parkes, the world authority on underground drainage, and had inspected several installations in England and Ireland. He mentioned diplomatically that the chief engineer had to be consulted, while he left no doubt of his own expertise. A week later he submitted an equally authoritative report on tree planting, estimating the number, species, and cost of the trees required. Thus he defined the full range of his landscape-gardening knowledge. Round one to the literary gent.
The commissioners’ faith in their enterprising superintendent grew. In October they gave him full authority to hire up to one thousand laborers, and to dismiss those who were ineffective or malingerers. This was crucial, since many of the jobs were political sinecures. Soon Olmsted wrote proudly to his father: “I have got the park into a capital discipline, a perfect system, working like a machine.” In January the commissioners increased his salary to two thousand dollars, which was what Viele was being paid.
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In less than four months Olmsted had won the confidence of the board. He had taken firm control of his responsibilities, outmaneuvered Viele, and been given a raise—all as he had planned. But now he was overwhelmed by a singular personal tragedy. On November 13, 1857, his brother, John, wrote that his health had taken a considerable turn for the worse. He was in Nice, bedridden, and heavily sedated with opium. He was failing fast. “It appears we are not to see one another any more—I have not many days, the Dr says.” Eleven days later he was dead. He died attended by Mary and his three children, as well as by his father, stepmother, and half sisters, who had hurried from their European tour to his side. He was buried in the Protestant cemetery overlooking the Mediterranean. He was thirty-two.
Nothing prepares one for a death in the family. Olmsted felt the loss all the more, as he and his brother had recently spent so much time together: on the farm, roughing it in the Southwest, editing the final manuscript of A Journey Through Texas. “In his death I have lost not only a son but a very dear friend,” wrote his father. “You almost your only friend.” That was an exaggeration—Frederick had many intimate friends, not the least of whom was his father. But the two brothers were unusually close. John’s last letter included a sweet farewell: “I have never known a better friendship than ours has been & there can’t be a greater happiness than to think of that—how dear we have been & how long have held such tenderness.”