At Home - Bill Bryson [149]
At just this moment, the city of New York was about to begin converting 840 acres of hayfields and scrubland into the long-awaited Central Park. It was an enormous site, stretching nearly 2.5 miles from top to bottom and half a mile across. Olmsted, in some desperation, applied for the job of superintendent of the workforce and got it. He was 35 years old, and this was not a step up for him. Becoming the superintendent of a municipal park was, for someone who had enjoyed as much success as he had, a humbling comedown, particularly as Central Park was a far from assured success. For one thing, in those days it wasn’t actually central at all. “Uptown” Manhattan was still nearly two miles to the south. The area of the proposed park was an uninhabited wasteland—a forlorn expanse of abandoned quarries and “pestiferous swamps,” in the words of one observer. The idea of it becoming a popular beauty spot seemed almost ludicrously ambitious.
No design had been agreed for the park—which was, not incidentally, always called the Central Park, with a definite article, in its early days. A prize of $2,000 awaited the winning entry, and Olmsted needed the money. He teamed up with a young British architect, only recently arrived in America, named Calvert Vaux and submitted a plan. Vaux (pronounced “vawks”) was a slight figure, just four feet ten inches tall. He had grown up in London, the son of a doctor, but emigrated to America in 1850 soon after qualifying. Olmsted had passion and vision, but he lacked drafting skills, which Vaux could supply. It was the start of an immensely successful partnership. To satisfy the design brief, all the proposals were required to incorporate certain features—parade ground, playing fields, skating pond, at least one flower garden, and a lookout tower, among rather a lot else—and they also had to incorporate four crossing streets at intervals so that the park wouldn’t act as a barrier to east-west traffic along its entire length. What set Olmsted and Vaux’s design apart more than anything else was their decision to place the cross streets in trenches, below the line of sight, physically segregating them from park visitors, who passed safely above on bridges. “This also had the advantage of allowing the park to be closed at night without interrupting traffic,” writes Witold Rybczynski in his biography of Olmsted. Theirs was the only proposal with this feature.*
It is easy to suppose that park making consists essentially of just planting trees, laying paths, setting out benches, and digging the odd pond. In fact, Central Park was an enormous engineering project. Over twenty thousand barrels of dynamite were needed to reconfigure the terrain to Olmsted and Vaux’s specifications, and over half a million cubic yards of fresh topsoil had to be brought in to make the earth rich enough for planting. At the peak of construction in 1859, Central Park had a workforce of thirty-six hundred men. The park opened bit by bit, so it never had a grand opening. Many people found it disordered and confusing. And it is true, Central Park has little in the way of dominant focal points. As Adam Gopnik has put it: “The Mall is oriented toward nothing much and goes nowhere in particular. The lakes and ponds are all nestled in their own places, and are not part of a continuous waterway. The main areas are not neatly marked off but dribble away into one another. There is a deliberate absence of orientation, of clear planning, of a familiar, reassuring lucidity. Central Park is without a central place.”
But people grew to love it anyway,