Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [634]
In the end the commissioners chose the Greensward Plan offered by Frederick Law Olmsted, whom they had just appointed superintendent of the park, and Calvert Vaux, a London-born architect who had suggested the competition idea to them in the first place.
Olmsted, son of a prosperous dry goods merchant from Hartford, had been set up by his father on a 125-acre Staten Island farm (on Raritan Bay) as a scientific agriculturalist. He had also written on rural design for Downing’s Horticulturalist (including a piece on Liverpool’s Birkenhead Park), published travel books on the social landscape of England and the American South, and in 1855 become a managing editor of Putnam’s Magazine, which by 1857 was foundering. When family friend and park commissioner Charles Elliott encouraged him to apply for the position directing the park’s labor force, he swiftly gathered endorsements from editors, writers, reformers, and friends, including Brace, Greeley, Cooper, and Irving.
One thing that helped him secure the position was his anti-laissez-faire conviction—very much in tune with the newest reform currents—that properly designed environments like English-style landscaped parks could elevate the character and condition of the poorer classes. Olmsted was also convinced of the value of class intermixing and in 1854 had urged his Yale chum and traveling companion Charles Loring Brace to “get up parks, gardens, music, dancing schools, reunions which will be so attractive as to force into contact the good and the bad, the gentlemanly and the rowdy.”
Vaux thought in similar terms. Trained as an architect in London, Vaux had attracted the attention of Andrew Jackson Downing, who in 1850 recruited him to run the architectural wing of his flourishing landscape-gardening practice. After Downing died in 1852, Vaux carried on his practice, then moved to New York in 1856, joined the National Academy of Design and the Century Association, and helped found the American Institute of Architects. He too adopted an environmentalist position and in 1857 urged municipal authorities to underwrite wholesome rational play—“public baths, gymnasiums, theatres, music halls, libraries, lecture rooms, parks, gardens, picture galleries, museums, schools”—as activities that would ensure “a refinement in popular education” and “good taste.”
When Vaux decided to enter the Central Park competition, he invited Superintendent Olmsted—whom he had met at Downing’s home in Newburgh—to join him, chiefly for his on-site familiarity with the topography. During the winter of 1857-58 they worked on a plan that would apply their social philosophy to the barren and rocky mid-Manhattan terrain. Evenhandedly rebuffing both working class desires for ball fields and aristocratic longings for a raceway, their Greensward Plan proposed a reformer’s vision—a space designed to school both patrician and plebeian cultures by transmitting, almost subliminally, civilized values and a “harmonizing and refining influence.”
To achieve this, they called for exiling the normal business of urban life to beyond the park’s perimeter. Coal carts, butchers’ carts, dung carts, and fire engines that had to cross the park were to be diverted to sunken transverse roads (rather as servants and tradesmen were kept out of sight in genteel mansions). Also banished was Manhattan’s grid, and with it the kind of streets that were “staked off,” as Olmsted put it, “with a rule and pencil in a broker’s office.” Here therapeutically romantic curves were to be the rule. Pedestrians and carriages would meander along paths affording ever-changing vistas, rather like a succession of Cole or Durand canvasses, intended to