A Clearing In The Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the 19th Century

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Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903) is best remembered today as a landscape designer, well known for his plans for New York's Central Park and Prospect Park, the grounds of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., and the campus of Stanford University, among other noteworthy sites.

But, writes urban studies professor and accomplished author Witold Rybczynski, Olmsted was an American original, a 19th-century success story who packed many careers and wide learning and travel into a long life. He spent time in China and Europe, managed a California gold mine, edited The Nation, commanded a medical unit in the Civil War, and crisscrossed the United States many times over, writing long reports and articles all the while. (One series of reports urged, for instance, that the then-remote Yosemite region of California be made a national park.) Olmsted, Rybczynski suggests, changed the face of America: he had a vision of the American landscape as a reflection of the national character, with its broad vistas and open skies, and he was concerned to make America's urban spaces livable, bringing "trees and greenery into the congested grid of streets." At Olmsted's urging, many American and Canadian cities adopted his system of parks, broad avenues, and greenways, which encouraged the appreciation and preservation of nature; his influence is felt today in the so-called urban ecology movement, and in dozens of public spaces across the continent.

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review
The name Frederick Law Olmsted, if it is recognizable to us at all, is usually connected with the design and construction of Central Park. A few readers may also be aware that Olmsted was also responsible for giving us Brooklyn's Prospect Park, Boston's Emerald Necklace, the Biltmore Estate in North Carolina, the Pinehurst Country Club in Atlanta, and the campus of Stanford University in California.

But most will probably be surprised to learn that Olmsted drifted from one job to the next for most of his 20s. (Take heart, all you slackers!) Eventually, though, as Witold Rybczynski reminds us in his new book, A Clearing in the Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the Nineteenth Century, Olmsted would make up for lost time: In addition to his role as a pioneer in the field of landscape architecture, Olmsted was also a well-respected journalist and editor who published several books about his travels through the West and the pre-Civil War South and who would go on to cofound The Nation magazine.

Olmsted saw himself as a man of letters, hobnobbing with the literary elite of New York (Washington Irving helped him secure the Central Park assignment), but in fact it was his journalistic curiosity and attention to details that made him so effective as an administrator and planner. Once, on a trip to England, he came across Birkenhead Park, outside of Liverpool. So impressed was he by that common that he sought out the park's superintendent and grilled him on its particulars: What kind of drainage system was used? How many trees were planted?

Born in Hartford, Connecticut, to a successful merchant and his wife, little Fred was only three when his mother died. Shifted from one school to the next, from one tutor to another, young Olmsted received an intermittent, nontraditional education. When it was time for college, he felt so ill prepared that he decided to become an apprentice instead. Two apprenticeships and one grueling stint as a working sailor later, Olmsted again changed careers and decided to go into farming. This would be the career that shaped his future.

His first farm, dubbed Sachem's Head and located on the southern shore of Connecticut, was more attractive to Olmsted for its physical beauty than its ability to produce crops. He spent much of his time there importing trees and bushes and arranging them for maximum effect against the backdrop of Long Island Sound. Later, when he bought his second farm (on the south shore of Staten Island), he also spent much of his time investigating tree species and drainage systems rather than actually planting crops. (Neither farm made any money; both were largely financed by his father.)

It was during his tenure at Tosomock Farm on Staten Island that Olmsted began meeting members of New York's literary circle. What began as a career writing about parks and trees for The Horticulturalist soon turned into a four-month journey through the South, writing correspondence pieces for The New-York Daily Times (the paper we now know as The New York Times). This in turn led to a job as managing editor at the prestigious but short-lived Putnam's Monthly Magazine.

Olmsted was 34 when Putnam's folded. Neither his farming nor his writing had made enough money for him to support himself. When he was offered the position of superintendent of Central Park, which carried with it a $2,000-a-year salary (a considerable income at the time), he immediately accepted it. This would prove to be a pattern in Olmsted's life, especially after he married his brother's widow and took responsibility for her and her children. Although he continued to write articles and to see himself as a man of letters, Olmsted took administrative (if high-level) posts in order to secure a living.

So it is a bit ironic that he is remembered today primarily for his work as a landscape architect, a field that had been virtually nonexistent until the mid-19th century. Until that time, no one had foreseen the tremendous development of cities, that people would be forced to live in crowded, dirty conditions with no access to flora or fauna. In the early 1800s, natural splendors were reserved primarily for the rich, who could afford to own a home in the mountains or at the shore. And as working farmers saw their children departing for better jobs in the cities, the number of working-class people with strong ties to the land would further dwindle.

Olmsted was able to see all this before it happened. Not only that, he believed deeply that people of every class should have access to nature's restorative powers. A conservative fellow, and patient, Olmsted was able to visualize the saplings he planted as the full-grown trees they would be 30 years later, to envision how his parks — and the cities that surrounded them — would appear in the future. Such urban planning (Olmsted was responsible for some of the first suburban planned communities) was a new concept to most people at the time; they thought Olmsted stodgy and impractical. But actually he was one of the most practical men in the world.

In A Clearing in the Distance, Witold Rybczynski has written a wonderful book. Perhaps because he is not primarily a biographer (he is a professor of urbanism at the University of Pennsylvania and writes regularly about cityscapes and urban issues), Rybczynski has eschewed the day-to-day format that so often drags biographies into tedium. He is not afraid to insert himself into the story — "I feel myself becoming impatient with Olmsted," he writes at one point — and he occasionally inserts passages of pure, descriptive narrative — his own imaginative conjecture based on real events — which really liven up the story.

Because Olmsted wore so many hats, his life story allows the reader to experience a wide-ranging mid-19th-century milieu. The subcultures of the city-planning establishment, the New York publishing world, the nascent ecology movement, and the abolitionist movement all come into play. (The Civil War, during which Olmsted served as general secretary of the Sanitary Commission, the precursor to the Red Cross, cuts a bloody gash down the center of the narrative.) We often take for granted the spaces in which we move every day; A Clearing in the Distance reminds us that the streets, buildings, parks, and shopping malls that we scarcely notice in our daily lives have not always been there. Frederick Law Olmsted is one of a small number of people who were instrumental in shaping our cities, through his own designs and those of the hundreds of landscape architects whom he influenced. This extraordinary man here receives the extraordinary treatment that he deserves.

—Gail Jaitin

FROM THE PUBLISHER

In a brilliant collaboration between writer and subject, Witold Rybczynski, the bestselling author of Home and City Life, illuminates Frederick Law Olmsted's role as a major cultural figure at the epicenter of nineteenth-century American history.

We know Olmsted through the physical legacy of his stunning landscapes -- among them, New York's Central Park, California's Stanford University campus, and Boston's Back Bay Fens. But Olmsted's contemporaries knew a man of even more extraordinarily diverse talents. Born in 1822, he traveled to China on a merchant ship at the age of twenty-one. He cofounded The Nation magazine and was an early voice against slavery. He managed California's largest gold mine and, during the Civil War, served as the executive secretary to the United States Sanitary Commission, the precursor of the Red Cross.

Rybczynski's passion for his subject and his understanding of Olmsted's immense complexity and accomplishments make his book a triumphant work. In A Clearing in the Distance, the story of a great nineteenth-century American becomes an intellectual adventure.

FROM THE CRITICS

Economist

When some New Yorkers wanted a running track in Central Park, the commissioners asked Olmsted to explain his objections. At his mention of landscape, one of the plan￯﾿ﾽs promoters exclaimed: "Oh, damn the landscape. We don￯﾿ﾽt know what landscape has to do with the matter before us." Olmsted￯﾿ﾽs only weapons against such bluster were his persuasiveness and the transparent excellence of his schemes.

Andrew Ferguson

[Landscaping] really was an art form onceand the life of the man who made it so deserves to be remembered....A Clearing in the Distance is...humanelivelylearned but not pedanticbrief but comprehensive....What better time to rediscover Olmstead and reclaim the patrimony he hoped to leave us? —Fortune

Publishers Weekly

In 1893, at a banquet at Madison Square Garden in New York, a Chicago architect delivered an impromptu encomium to Frederick Law Olmstead, the landscape designer responsible for the grounds of the recently opened Columbia Exposition at the Chicago World's Fair: "An artist, he paints with lakes and wooded slopes; with lawns and banks and forest-covered hills; with mountain sides and ocean views." The designer of many of America's first public parks--Manhattan's Central Park and Brooklyn's Prospect Park, the Fens in Boston and others in Buffalo, Louisville and Chicago--Olmstead (1822-1903) blazed through several careers. He studied scientific farming; traveled the English countryside and the antebellum South, speaking out against slavery while writing for the New York Times; ran the U.S. Sanitary Commission during the Civil War; and oversaw a gold mine in the Sierra Nevadas. Olmstead's 1858 plan of Central Park established a new American pastoral aesthetic, uniting English picturesque elements, such as large, winding areas of grass, water and woods, within a harmonious but sharply circumscribed urban space. Rybczynski (City Life) depicts Olmstead as a zealous humanist who saw municipal parks as a civilizing force for a rapidly growing urban population that had little access to natural scenery. This richly anecdotal chronicle of the forces and the characters who transformed the American landscape in the 19th century rarely comes alive as a biography, however. Its laborious, reconstructed dialogue and set pieces, set off in italics, are in sharp contrast to Rybczynski's elegant musings on architectural and natural space. But in the final chapter, when Olmstead succumbs to dementia at McClean's asylum in Waverly, Mass., surrounded by grounds that he himself has designed, it's hard not to be stirred by the loss of a true American visionary. Photos. Author tour. (June) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Having written incisive and original books on architecture and art and even a social history of the weekend, Rybczynski has found his ideal biographical match in this marvelous life of the noted landscape architect and reformer whose accomplishments include New York's Central and Prospect parks. Clearly, Olmsted thought at least as much about the interaction of art and society as Rybczynski himself. (LJ 5/15/99) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Booknews

Olmsted (1822-1903) is best known for designing American city parks, but Rybczynski (urbanism, U. of Pennsylvania) looks at his other contributions to 19th-century culture. He sailed to China at age 21, co-founded magazine, agitated for abolition, explored as far west as Texas, farmed on Staten Island, and managed the largest mine in California. Then he got serious and entered politics. The account includes several high quality photographs. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com) Read all 11 "From The Critics" >

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