THE OLMSTED FAMILY returned from Europe in mid-January 1858. In a welcoming letter Olmsted brought his father up-to-date. A Journey in the Back Country was now substantially complete, save for a chapter on Southern politics. Olmsted was trying—without success—to find a publisher who would reprint A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States and A Journey Through Texas, which had gone out of circulation with the demise of Miller & Curtis. At the end of his letter, Olmsted added that he was “living with my partner Mr. Vaux, & up at the park every other day.”
Calvert Vaux, two years younger than Olmsted, had been born in London. At nineteen he became an apprentice to a London architect who specialized in restoring Gothic churches. For unexplained reasons, Vaux left before completing his apprenticeship and spent the next four years knocking about the London architectural scene. A talented draftsman, he supported himself by doing illustrations for printers. In August 1850 he was introduced to a visiting American, Andrew Jackson Downing. Downing was in England looking for an architectural assistant. As a result of his house-pattern books and his flourishing landscaping practice, he was being approached by clients who wanted him to design houses. He needed an architect. He and Vaux—an intense, small man (only four feet ten inches) with a full beard and an artistic demeanor—hit it off. A week later, Vaux sailed with his new employer to New York.
Working under Downing’s direction, Vaux designed a dozen or so residences, ranging from country estates in the Hudson Valley to a large seaside villa in Newport, Rhode Island. After Downing’s tragic death, Vaux continued to practice in Newburgh with some success, eventually forming a partnership with Frederick Withers, another English architect who had worked for Downing. Vaux was ambitious and saw himself as Downing’s heir; to consolidate that position, he published a Downingesque house-pattern book, Villas and Cottages. When he got a large commission in New York for a bank building, he concluded that his future lay in the city, and after four years he and Withers split up. Vaux, now an American citizen and married with two children, moved to New York.
He was soon caught up in the debate over Viele’s Central Park proposal. “Being thoroughly disgusted with the manifest defects of Viele’s published plan I pointed out, whenever I had a chance, that it would be a disgrace to the City and to the memory of Mr. Downing (who had first proposed the location of a large park in New York) to have this plan carried out,” he recalled. Viele’s pragmatic plan was not really that bad. In fact, his naturalistic layout largely followed Downing’s precepts, but it was the work of an engineer and lacked that elusive quality, “good taste,” that Vaux prized. He was acquainted with two of the park commissioners: Charles Elliott, who had been a friend of Downing’s, and John Gray, the bank vice president, for whom Vaux & Withers had recently designed a residence as well as an office building. They arranged for Vaux to speak to the board. His impassioned testimony undoubtedly did much to convince the commissioners to set aside the chief engineer’s plan. In August 1857 the board announced a public competition for the design of Central Park.
Vaux intended to enter the competition. Six years earlier he had been introduced to Frederick Law Olmsted at Downing’s Newburgh nursery. Vaux now approached Olmsted and asked him if he would consider entering the Central Park competition with him. Vaux was no novice in landscape design. He had assisted Downing on many large projects, such as the plan of a farm near Poughkeepsie for Matthew Vassar, the wealthy brewer and future founder of Vassar College. He had also helped Downing with a major park commission: a 150-acre public garden between the Capitol and the Washington Monument, in Washington, D.C. Why did he approach Olmsted? He later maintained that he was attracted by Olmsted’s writings and by his familiarity with the site, and that Olmsted’s position as superintendent was not a consideration. This strikes me as disingenuous. Vaux was shrewd enough to appreciate that politics would play a role in the competition. He knew that Olmsted was currently the favorite of the board, hence someone with whom it would be advantageous to be associated.
Olmsted found Vaux’s proposal attractive. He was still brokenhearted at his brother’s death and ashamed of the commercial failure of his publishing venture. “I was just in mind to volunteer for a forlorn hope,” he later recalled to his biographer, the architectural critic Mariana Van Rensselaer. He then added mysteriously: “There was something else of which I have told you nothing, and I shall tell you nothing which made absorption in the work of the moment the more necessary for me.” Not surprisingly, he was reluctant to reveal that several thousand dollars of personal debt had drawn him into his life’s work. He owed money not only to his father but also to his friends, his landlord, even to his stableman. He might even be held responsible for the indebtedness of Curtis’s bankrupt publishing firm, whose legal affairs were in the courts. Debt made it “the more necessary” for him to enter the competition. “If successful, I should not only get my share of $2,000 offered for the best, but no doubt the whole control of the matter would be given me & my salary increased to $2,500,” he wrote his father.
Olmsted first cleared the matter with Viele. The chief engineer, who was himself preparing an entry, said that he had no objection to Olmsted’s participation, as several other park employees were competing. Olmsted and Vaux started working on the plans sometime in the fall of 1857. They met nightly and on Sundays in Vaux’s house on Eighteenth Street. The deadline, originally set as March 1, was extended to April 1. Even so, they were a day late. Their project, titled “Greensward,” was the last to be submitted.
• • • •
The thirty-three entries included eleven designs by people who were—or had been—associated with the park, not only the chief engineer and the superintendent, but also gardeners, engineers, surveyors, and clerks. The competition attracted only two entrants from outside the United States. Notably absent were some of the better-known American landscape gardeners: Eugene Baumann, who had been responsible for landscaping the New Jersey suburb of Llewellyn Park; Adolph Strauch, the expert Prussian-born landscape gardener who was in charge of Spring Grove cemetery in Cincinnati; and the celebrated Horace Cleveland, who was then laying out Sleepy Hollow cemetery in Concord, Massachusetts. Cleveland’s partner, Robert Morris Copeland, did enter. So did Howard Daniels, who was responsible for planning cemeteries in Columbus, Cleveland, and Poughkeepsie. No prominent landscape gardeners were on the jury. There had been a proposal to invite the superintendent of Liverpool’s Birkenhead Park, as well as Jean-Charles-Adolphe Alphand, the French engineer who had supervised the transformation of the Bois de Boulogne into a public park, but neither was present.
The jury consisted solely of the commissioners. They deliberated four weeks. Three projects were disqualified, including the French entry, which required razing the old reservoir to make room for a Champ de Mars. There were nine rounds of voting. The entry that treated the park as an allegorical map of the continents, with ponds serving as oceans, did not receive much support, nor did the entries that turned the park into a kind of amusement ground. The jury was looking for something more dignified. Susan Delafield Parish, the sole female entrant, did not get any votes. Copeland, who was probably the most experienced landscape gardener competing, was not a finalist; neither was Viele, to his everlasting chagrin. The jury appears to have been divided politically between two different contemporary fashions in park design: Democrats favored the formal European approach while Republicans opted for the picturesque English style. The entrants were supposed to have been anonymous, but it appears likely that their identities were known since three of the four prizes went to park employees, and voting was along party lines. Fourth prize was accorded to Howard Daniels for an accomplished design that, on the whole, followed the European tradition of a monumental civic space, complete with replicas of ancient temples; French, English, Dutch, and Italian gardens; and a formal avenue running up the center of the park.1 The third prize went to two park commission clerks whose chief qualification appears to have been a family tie with one of the commissioners. Second prize was awarded to the superintendent of gardeners, Samuel Gustin. The Times later dryly commented on the mediocrity of the second- and third-place finishers: “We do not find in them the decided merit discovered by the Board.” Gustin, a Democratic appointee, had the solid support of the three Democrats. The vote for first place was unequivocal. The six Republicans, together with the reform Democrat Andrew Green, all cast their votes for the same project: Greensward. Vaux and Olmsted had won.
1. The descriptions of the entries are from the written reports; only three of the submitted plans have survived.