BETWEEN AUGUST 1868, when Olmsted started to work in Buffalo, and March 1871, when the plans for South Park were completed, Olmsted and Vaux’s practice grew. They prepared a second study for the Fairmount Park Commission in Philadelphia, started to build city parks in New Britain, Connecticut, and Fall River, Massachusetts, and planned park systems for Albany and Hartford. The work in Brooklyn continued—and expanded: they were commissioned to build a large parade ground next to Prospect Park, to landscape Tompkins Square, and to lay out a brand-new park on the grounds of Fort Greene; Ocean Parkway was completed and work started on Eastern Parkway; the planting and architectural embellishment of Prospect Park required both partners’ full attention. There were more residential subdivisions—one in Needham, Massachusetts, and another on a beautiful nine-hundred-acre suburban site in Tarrytown Heights, New York—and campus work at Vassar and Amherst. Many of these projects produced only reports; others resulted in complete plans; some—New Britain, Riverside, and Buffalo—were under construction. Olmsted also had several personal clients such as the Staten Island Improvement Commission, Cornell University, and Quartermaster General Meigs, whom he advised on landscaping national cemeteries for the war dead.
It should have been a triumphant period for Olmsted. The landscape practice that he and Vaux had begun only five years before was a success. There had been setbacks such as Riverside, but Prospect Park—their masterpiece—was nearing completion, the Buffalo park system was progressing smoothly, and Chicago’s South Park promised to seal their reputations as the preeminent landscape architects in the country. Still Olmsted was dissatisfied. He relished taking on new and challenging commissions, but the pressure of having to produce plans and reports for so many impatient clients began to make themselves felt. He started to feel inadequate, which was usually a sign that he was overdoing it. “I am poorly qualified for a great deal of the work which I feel myself impelled to regard as coming to me as a duty,” he wrote his friend Kingsbury. He felt harried. “The very hardest of [my work] I cannot possibly perform, to satisfy my sense of duty under ordinary everyday conditions—in my office subject to interruptions & with all the distractions of constant complicated demands of a host of people.” He found himself taking work home. “I wish I could meet what I think to be my duties to the public & to my family with less work,” he complained.
He resented being drawn away from his family, all the more so as he was now the father of a new baby—a son—born the year before and christened Henry Perkins after Mary’s father. Olmsted cherished his domesticity. Here is his description of a typical Sunday at Clifton:
I am longer at breakfast & get a better one than usual. I read two Sunday newspapers, I smoke after breakfast as I usually do not. Being on the coast & near shipping, I reciprocate their courtesy & pay the day the compliment of hoisting my ensign or seeing the children do it. I play with the children more. Generally late in the day I go out with some of them—in summer we go rowing—sometimes drive back on the island—go to the Brewery & I treat them to sangaree [sangria] or a little beer; in winter I have been to the skating ponds with them. My wife generally goes with us. She has often been—at least more than once or twice—to the Brewery. Sometimes we go picnicing either by boat to the Long Island shore or to the high woods by wheels.
But he added, “I wish these excursions were more frequent, but I rarely get through or get too tired to go on further with my work till near sunset, & it is too late for anything but a row.”
Olmsted and Vaux shared the work. They developed the designs together, then Olmsted wrote the reports and Vaux and his draftsmen produced the plans. Vaux also supervised the design of any park structures such as bridges and pavilions. Yet the collaboration was unequal, for Olmsted devoted considerably more time to the partnership than Vaux, who also carried on an architectural practice. Between 1868 and 1871, Vaux and Withers designed and built three large hospital complexes and about a dozen private residences, including one for E. L. Godkin. Vaux’s most celebrated client was the noted landscape painter Frederic Edwin Church, who commissioned a remarkable Islamic-Moorish villa overlooking the Hudson River.
The responsibility for overseeing the landscaping and planning projects increasingly fell to Olmsted. His subordinates were engineers who supervised topographic surveys, drainage, and road construction, and landscape gardeners who attended to planting. But he oversaw the work and visited the sites—in Chicago, Buffalo, and scattered all over New England. Since he dealt with the clients, they wanted to see only him. Olmsted signed the preliminary Buffalo report with the name of the firm, but when it was published by the Commission, it was given the title “Mr. Olmsted’s Report.” He was the one to whom people talked, whose recommendations they wanted to hear. He was also the one who drummed up business.
Olmsted thought that he was carrying an unfair share of the firm’s work, but did not know what to do about it. He almost quit. “I feel myself so nearly desperate that I have to school myself against the danger of some foolish undertaking—such as putting all I can get together in a farm, cutting the world and devoting myself to asceticism. But against extreme lunacy in this way my wife makes a pretty strong bar.” Mary, who had had her fill of farming, would have nothing to do with the idea; he had to find some other solution. Olmsted discussed his predicament with his friend Samuel Bowles in Springfield, Massachusetts, where Olmsted was advising two of Bowles’s friends on landscaping (obviously part of Olmsted’s problem was that he couldn’t say no). Bowles, who shared Olmsted’s tendency to overwork, suggested that he move to the country, not to be a farmer but to work as an independent landscape consultant “not tied to any architectural firm.” The idea of striking out on his own intimidated Olmsted. “You write in view of one horn of my dilemma,” he wrote Bowles on his return to New York. “I want more assistance and, even if there were no ties of sentiment & obligation I have not courage enough left to dispense with V’s cooperation.”
Mary and the children usually spent the summers away from Staten Island. That September Olmsted joined them in Lake George. The month’s vacation did not lift his spirits. He was still undecided about his future. “I am looking in earnest for some less irritating & exasperating method of getting a living than that I have lately followed,” he wrote to Kingsbury on October 8, 1871, the very day the great Chicago fire broke out. Olmsted, who was in Chicago a month later, wrote a long article for The Nation. He mentioned that one of the less obvious but equally catastrophic effects of the fire was the destruction of “important papers, contracts, agreements, and accounts, notes of surveys, and records of deeds and mortgages.” Among these were all the plans and records for South Park, including the nearly completed assessment rolls. It would take months of painstaking work to recover this information. In any case, it seemed unlikely that construction of the park would begin soon; rebuilding downtown Chicago meant that the pleasure ground would be put on hold. Tropical lagoons and thousand-foot piers would have to wait.
• • • •
In addition to their professional practice, Olmsted and Vaux continued their on-again, off-again relationship with Central Park. They were appointed “Landscape Architects,” a title that proved largely honorific as their advice was rarely sought. In May 1870 William “Boss” Tweed pushed through a new city charter that supplanted the park board by a Department of Public Parks; Olmsted and Vaux were named “advisors” and “Chief Landscape Architects.” This turned out to be merely window dressing, too. Over their protests the Tweed administration spent large amounts of money “improving” Central Park—planting flowers, clearing undergrowth, building a zoo. After six months Olmsted and Vaux’s positions were abolished.
The Tweed regime did not last long. A year later, thanks in large part to the perseverance of Andrew Green, who was now city comptroller, Tweed was indicted and the so-called Tweed Ring collapsed. Henry Stebbins, who had headed the Board of Commissioners during Central Park’s early years, was brought back. Olmsted was delighted: “The appointment of Stebbins as Prest, of Green as Treasurer (which he declines) and of O. & V. as Landscape Archts. Advisory, is the public vindication of the Old Board.” Olmsted and Vaux also secured the appointment of Frederic Edwin Church as a park commissioner; his presence would ensure that in the board’s deliberations “the art element should be recognized.”
Olmsted and Vaux were paid a joint salary of six thousand dollars per year (later increased to ten thousand dollars). Their official title was now “Landscape Architects and General Superintendents,” but their roles soon diverged. Vaux busied himself with architectural matters such as designing the Boathouse. Olmsted, directing the Bureau of Design and Superintendence, turned his attention to repairing the damage and disrepair caused by the neglect and poor management of the previous administration. “The Park has suffered great injury,” he wrote, “which it is even now impossible wholly to retrieve through the neglect of timely thinning of the plantations and the maltreatment of the last year and a half.” He loved Central Park. He threw himself wholeheartedly into the job. He fired off letters to Stebbins, memoranda to park supervisors, and lengthy directives to the keepers and gardening staff.
In May 1872 Stebbins went to Europe on business and Olmsted was elected acting president and treasurer of the Department of Public Parks. He took full advantage of his authority. He initiated an inquiry into the advisability of lighting the park at night and opening it to the public. He issued a handbill publicizing park activities for children. (“At the Dairy and the Great Hill there is turf on which young children are allowed to play, and shaded seats; fresh, pure and wholesome milk is furnished at 5 cts. a glass, and bowls of bread and milk for children at 10 cts.”) He recommended a reorganization of the park police. (The first murder in Central Park occurred in October 1872.)
During that summer Olmsted received an unexpected offer. The Liberal Republicans had nominated Horace Greeley as their presidential candidate in the 1872 election. A dissenting faction, of which James Miller McKim was a member, proposed an alternative slate and nominated Olmsted as its vice-presidential candidate. This was all done without Olmsted’s knowledge and he refused the nomination, even publishing an announcement to that effect in the New York Evening Post. Privately, he wrote McKim, “It appeared to me in the highest degree absurd.” Nevertheless, he admitted, “I am surprised & gratified that it is so well received.”
On October 24 Stebbins returned from Europe. To be acting president, Olmsted had resigned his position as landscape architect and general superintendent, leaving Vaux alone in that role. Now Olmsted and Vaux requested Stebbins to change the earlier working arrangement. Henceforth Olmsted would be “Landscape Architect” and Vaux “Consulting Landscape Architect” to better reflect their respective responsibilities. They informed Stebbins that separate appointments would be necessary as they were no longer business partners. A week earlier, they had signed the following agreement:
It is hereby mutually agreed between Fredk. Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux that the partnership heretofore existing under the name of Olmsted and Vaux Landscape Architects (which has for some months been inoperative in reference to Central Park) shall now close so far as new work is concerned, and that all outstanding engagements on joint account shall be as soon as practicable be adjusted to this date.
Olmsted had overcome whatever qualms he had had about striking out on his own. I can’t help but see Mary’s hand in this. She could be fully as impulsive as Frederick, and she would have pressed for a decision. She had never warmed to Vaux. She would have encouraged her husband to make a break. Vaux, too, was at a turning point. He had severed his partnership with Withers a few months earlier and now had a new partner: Jacob Wrey Mould. Two important commissions for the New York Park Department had since come their way: the new Museum of Natural History, on Manhattan Square adjacent to Central Park, and across from it the new Art Museum on the east side of the park. When completed, the Museum of Natural History would be the largest building in the United States; the Art Museum (now the Metropolitan Museum of Art) was to be the foremost cultural institution of the city. Building these two civic monuments would make Vaux the leading architect in New York.
It was an amicable break. They agreed to work together again should the opportunity arise; for many years Olmsted kept a photograph of Vaux in his office. But both men wanted to go it alone. The partnership that had begun fourteen years earlier with Greensward was over.