Designing the cityscape. - Review - book reviews

Public Interest, Wntr, 2000 by David Brooks

FREDERICK Law Olmsted, who spent much of his life designing places where people could find refuge, never seemed to find refuge for himself. He never settled down and built a private estate where he could retire and retreat from the pressures of the world. Instead, he traveled and worked ceaselessly. In 1894, at age 69, he wrote the following in a letter to his stepson John about his schedule for the coming months:

I am doubting some whether Eliot had better come here now or wait till February when, if living, I must come again. It should depend on the state of work elsewhere. I should think that by the end of next week I should be ready to start for Atlanta. Have you no doubt of the expediency of my going to Louisville, to Chicago, Detroit, Buffalo, Rochester? It is a long and risky journey for me. I am not quite sure of the plan we had in view when I left.

Even by the standards of the Victorian era, he possessed an awesome capacity for work. Olmsted was a believer in Thomas Carlyle's gospel of salvation through labor: "Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with all thy might. Work while it is called Today; for the Night cometh, wherein no man can work." Olmsted certainly lived up to the creed.

Still, it's sad to read of Olmsted's final years. He had achieved so much in life. He was already celebrated as the designer of Central Park, Prospect Park, Biltmore, and so many other great landscapes. He had managed the Sanitary Commission during the Civil War and one of the largest gold mines in the world just after. He had helped found the Nation magazine. Yet he never seemed to stop slaving away, never seemed to taste contentment. He just kept traveling from place to place, piling project upon project, an ever expanding list of parks, cemeteries, campuses, and properties. In part, he was driven by a desire to make his family financially secure. But there must also have been some other imperative within him, some little engine of ambition that, as with Lincoln, knew no rest. And maybe he had such a passion for the restorative and calming influences of nature because it allowed him to sample the tranquillity so obviously lacking in his own nature.

Of course, there is something self-defeating about making a profession out of your haven, Olmsted rarely seemed to enjoy his triumphs. He suffered bouts of depression. In his final years, he fell victim to dementia, and he finally died out of public sight.

THERE are two great contrasts that recur in Witold Rybczynski's superb biography, A Clearing in the Distance" Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the Nineteenth Century [ ]. The first is that between Olmsted's peripatetic and industrious life, on the one hand, and the natural tranquillity of the places he designed, on the other. And the second is that between rational planning, which is what Olmsted loved, and organic growth, which is what so many of his parks appear to be.

Olmsted, Rybczynski emphasizes, was an organizer and a planner. He was "one of the first people to recognize the necessity for planning in a large industrializing society--whether in peace or war." The diarist and civic leader George Templeton Strong saw him that way too. "He is an extraordinary fellow, decidedly the most remarkable specimen of human nature with whom I have been brought into close relations." Strong then added, "Prominent defects, a monomania for system and organization on paper (elaborate, laboriously thought out, and generally impracticable), and appetite for power.

What are we, a century later, to make of this point? On the one hand, Olmsted is a revered figure. The mere mention of his name tends to arouse rapturous descriptions of some beautiful spot in one of his parks. But, on the other hand, we are today extremely skeptical of planning, of efforts to impose rational schemes on complex reality. We've seen such schemes end in disaster too often, whether in the planned economies of Eastern Europe or the planned housing developments in American cities. So, does Olmsted reach out across the decades to tell us that we have overreacted to the recent failures of planning? Does his work demonstrate that large planned efforts to re-engineer reality can indeed work out, if they are done right?

One thing is certain, he did not plan his own life. Instead, he improvised and stumbled. When Olmsted was three, his mother died after taking an accidental overdose of laudanum while suffering a toothache. His stepmother showed little interest in him, and he was shuttled about from one New England boarding school to another. It was during this sad and unruly childhood that he developed his passion for long solitary hikes. Searching for a place in the world, he enlisted as a seaman on a trading vessel to the Orient. But conditions were horrible, and he was scarcely permitted to leave the ship once there, He tried his hand at surveying, bookkeeping, and scientific farming, after his father bought him some property on Staten Island. He did not succeed at any of these endeavors.