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American Pastoral

Witold Rybczynski reveals the invisible hand of Frederick Law Olmsted.

By A. O. Scott

A Clearing in the Distance

A Clearing in the Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the Nineteenth Century
By Witold Rybczynski Scribner 416 pp. $28.
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There are certain artifacts of the American imagination that seem, uncannily, to anticipate the future--not by predicting its shape but by remaining open to its possibilities. Rooted in the time and place of their making, they are nonetheless perpetually contemporary. This is not just a matter of their status as classics; it is an intrinsic feature of their design. I have in mind some of Emerson's essays, Melville's Moby-Dick, Jackson Pollock's drip paintings, any number of Duke Ellington compositions, and a handful of poems by Walt Whitman--particularly "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," in which the poet projects his voice forward in time, addressing as intimates the New Yorkers of generations to come as they undertake their commute across the East River. To read Whitman's poem is to be included in it. On my own morning commute, as the D train mounts the Manhattan Bridge, bringing the Brooklyn Bridge, the Woolworth Building, and the Statue of Liberty into view, the first line invariably sounds in my head: "Flood-tide below me! I see you face to face!" In 1856, Whitman could not have foreseen the advent of the subway, the skyscraper, and the automobile, nor the consolidation of rural Brooklyn and bustling Manhattan into the great American metropolis of the twentieth century. And yet "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," a poem that ingeniously captures the rush and grandeur of urban life, suggests that, in the ways that really matter, he did.

"I too lived, Brooklyn of ample hills was mine." This line, from the same poem, sometimes comes to mind when I'm in the presence of another great American work of art--Prospect Park, which sprawls across 526 acres of rocky terrain and modified swampland a few blocks from where I live. It is testimony to how brilliantly the park succeeds that most of the millions of people who use it each year don't recognize it as a work of art at all. It appears to them--to me, as I loll in its shade or ramble on its rugged paths--to be a fact of nature. Or, rather, an example of what nature would be like if it were perfectly adapted to human desires. Nature, after all, rarely presents itself with so much variety, or so much beauty, in so little space. It rarely holds order and unruliness in such exquisite balance. Prospect Park is entirely the work of human hands, the realization of a human intention at once practical and transcendent. According to its architect, it was designed for the purpose of instilling in those who visited it "a sense of enlarged freedom" and also a feeling of common life: "In a park, the largest provision is required for the human presence. Men must come together, and must be seen coming together." Prospect Park is a concrete fulfillment in space of democratic political theory--in Olmsted's own words, "the translation of the republican art idea in its highest form" into meadows, forests, streams, and lakes.

Prospect Park is Frederick Law Olmsted's masterpiece. "Of all American artists," one of his eminent contemporaries, the Harvard art historian Charles Eliot Norton, asserted, "Frederick Law Olmsted... stands first in the production of great works which answer the needs and give expression to the life of our immense and miscellaneous democracy." Olmsted, one of the most protean and remarkable products of the American nineteenth century, was also, among other things, the author of several important books on the culture and economy of Southern slavery, the manager of the largest gold mine in North America, the head of a major government agency during the Civil War, and one of the founders of the Nation magazine. Olmsted's work was not limited to New York: He also designed the Stanford University campus, the Illinois town of Riverside, and George Washington Vanderbilt's Biltmore estate in the mountains of North Carolina. A contemporary of Melville and Whitman (they were born in 1819, he in 1822), Olmsted was, like them, too modern for his own time. His reputation languished in the decades after his death in 1903, until the urbanist and social critic Lewis Mumford (who also played an important role in the Melville revival) hailed him as a forward-looking native genius in his book The Brown Decades (1931). Since Mumford there has been a steady crescendo of attention to Olmsted and his work, first from social and intellectual historians interested in his parallel careers in journalism and politics, and lately from a new breed of interdisciplinary scholars whose focus is the cultural history of architecture and urban design. And now, thanks to Witold Rybczynski's learned, insightful, and accessible biography, many nonspecialists who have sampled Olm-sted's work, but who have only a dim sense of his life--just about anyone, that is, who has spent an afternoon in Prospect Park, or in the more famous (but less perfect) Central Park--will be able to appreciate more fully his remarkable vision and achievement.

In Rybczynski, a professor of urban studies at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of a number of books, including Home, City Life, and The Most Beautiful House in the World, Olmsted has found an able and appreciative biographer--someone who understands both the creative impulses and the technical difficulties involved in large-scale landscape architecture. One of the best things about Rybczynski is that he's not, by background or temperament, a biographer at all. Olmsted's childhood and family life are given plenty of space, and his melancholic tendency is noted (like William James, in many other ways a kindred spirit, Olmsted would probably nowadays be diagnosed with depression), but Rybczynski is not after the psychological underpinnings of Olmsted's genius. Rather, his account of Olmsted's life and times is meant to illuminate the art. And the book's dominant thread is a quiet but insistent argument in favor of Norton's contention that Olmsted was, above all, a great artist.

He was an artist whose medium barely had a name, and whose vocation was late in declaring itself. Olmsted was born into a respectable, well-connected mercantile family in Hartford, Connecticut. He was blessed with an indulgent father, who subsidized Frederick's long period of dilettantism and self-exploration. Instead of going to Yale, the younger Olmsted worked as a surveyor's apprentice, and then, like Melville, went to sea.

On his return, he tried his hand at modern "scientific" farming--without much success, though he did acquire a good deal of horticultural knowledge, as well as a sense of the importance of careful and integrated planning. He stumbled into journalism as a result of his involvement with abolitionist politics: In 1852, the newly founded New York Daily Times sent him on a tour of the South. His dispatches, collected as A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States, was welcomed by Harriet Beecher Stowe as "the most complete and thorough work of its kind." The book, along with its sequels, A Journey through Texas and A Journey Through the Back Country, eventually became The Cotton Kingdom, which remains a valuable firsthand account of plantation society before the Civil War.

Olmsted was 36 when his political connections and a bit of résumé pad-ding won him the post of Superintendent of the Central Park of New York. The new Republican administration had 800 acres on its hands and saw an opportunity to engage in some large-scale patronage while improving the health and morale of the city's motley and burgeoning population.

When Olmsted crossed paths with a young English architect named Calvert Vaux, Olmsted's life, and the life of America's cities, changed forever. The city adopted Vaux and Olmsted's Greensward plan, many of whose prominent features--the Ramble, the Bethesda Fountain, the boathouse and its ponds--remain cherished New York landmarks. But as Rybczynski astutely points out, "the years Olmsted spent on Central Park were his graduate school," and the park itself his dissertation.

The building of Central Park took nearly two decades, and the story of its completion is a study in political backbiting, bureaucratic intransigence, and the constant struggle between artistic ambition and fiscal reality. While Olmsted would insist upon, and occasionally be granted, greater autonomy in subsequent projects, such obstacles were a constant source of irritation to him. In Rybzcynski's account, Olmsted, as he goes from project to project, wrangling with uncomprehending city governments, meddlesome private clients, and dithering commissions, comes to resemble such great film directors as Orson Welles and Fritz Lang, who struggled to realize their visions within and against the constraints of the studio system.

Olmsted was not only a landscaper and a planner. He grasped, as few of his contemporaries did, the contour and direction of American history. At a time when the United States was still an overwhelmingly rural nation, he foresaw the scale and density of its cities, and he understood what it would take to make them livable. He envisioned not only parks but park systems like Boston's "emerald necklace" and Buffalo's green spaces. He built suburbs, cemeteries, neighborhoods, college campuses, and the 1893 Chicago World's Fair.

Rybczynski's achievement is to show how these projects contributed to the emergence of an original and enduring American response to modernity: Suburbs develop concurrently with cities; coordinated and centralized planning produces wilderness in the middle of urban grids; the English landscape gardens of the eighteenth century and the great forests of the California coast combine to inspire a nearly platonic vision of the native landscape, made actual in the middle of Brooklyn.

A Clearing in the Distance is prefaced with a quotation from Olmsted: "I have all my life been considering distant effects and always sacrificing immediate success and applause to that of the future." Rybczynski concludes with his own visit to Prospect Park in 1997. He does not comment on how dramatically the park and its surroundings have changed in the century and a third since Olmsted broke ground on his masterwork. Yet the park, he points out, for all its historic value, is not a monument: It is a living environment. It is ours, however much or little we may know about its creator. He has disappeared entirely into the landscapes he built, and they have made him immortal.

A.O. Scott is Sunday book critic for Newsday, and a regular contributor to Slate, the New York Review of Books, and other publications.


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