perception of it. But again, Emeline was in love. It was not his place to wound her. She was young and enraptured, her joy infectious, especially to Dr. Cigrand, the dentist, who saw so little joy from day to day as he reduced grown men of proven courage to tears.
Soon after the Cigrands’ visit, Holmes asked Emeline to marry him, and she accepted. He promised her a honeymoon in Europe during which, of course, they would pay a visit to his father, the lord.
Dedication Day
OLMSTED’S TEETH HURT, HIS EARS roared, and he could not sleep, yet throughout the first months of 1892 he kept up a pace that would have been punishing for a man one-third his age. He traveled to Chicago, Asheville, Knoxville, Louisville, and Rochester, each overnight leg compounding his distress. In Chicago, despite the tireless efforts of his young lieutenant Harry Codman, the work was far behind schedule, the task ahead growing more enormous by the day. The first major deadline, the dedication set for October 21, 1892, seemed impossibly near— and would have seemed even more so had not fair officials changed the original date, October 12, to allow New York City to hold its own Columbus celebration. Given the calumny New York previously had shoveled on Chicago, the postponement was an act of surprising grace.
Construction delays elsewhere on the grounds were especially frustrating for Olmsted. When contractors fell behind, his own work fell behind. His completed work also suffered. Workmen trampled his plantings and destroyed his roads. The U.S. Government Building was a case in point. “All over its surroundings,” reported Rudolf Ulrich, his landscape superintendent, “material of any kind and all descriptions was piled up and scattered in such profusion that only repeated and persistent pressure brought to bear upon the officials in charge could gain any headway in beginning the work; and, even then, improvements being well under way, no regard was paid to them. What had been accomplished one day would be spoiled the next.”
The delays and damage angered Olmsted, but other matters distressed him even more. Unbelievably, despite Olmsted’s hectoring, Burnham still seemed to consider steam-powered launches an acceptable choice for the exposition’s boat service. And no one seemed to share his conviction that the Wooded Island must remain free of all structures.
The island had come under repeated assault, prompting a resurfacing of Olmsted’s old anger about the compulsion of clients to tinker with his landscapes. Everyone wanted space on the island. First it was Theodore Thomas, conductor of Chicago’s symphony, who saw the island as the ideal site, the
Olmsted did object. He agreed to let Roosevelt place his camp on a lesser island but would not allow any buildings, only “a few tents, some horses, camp-fire, etc.” Later he permitted the installation of a small hunter’s cabin.
Next came the U.S. government, seeking to place an Indian exhibit on the island, and then Professor Putnam, the fair’s chief of ethnology, who saw the island as the ideal site for several exotic villages. The government of Japan also wanted the island. “They propose an outdoor exhibit of their temples and, as has been usual, they desire space on the wooded island,” Burnham wrote in February 1892. To Burnham it now seemed inevitable that something would occupy the island. The setting was just too appealing. Burnham urged Olmsted to accept Japan’s proposal. “It seems beyond any question to be the thing fitting to the locality and I cannot see that it will in any manner detract essentially from the features which you care for. They propose to do the most exquisitely beautiful things and desire to leave the buildings as a gift to the City of Chicago after the close of the Fair.”
Fearing much worse, Olmsted agreed.
It did not help his mood any that as he battled to protect the island, he learned of another attack on his beloved Central Park. At the instigation of a small group of wealthy New Yorkers, the state legislature had quietly passed a law authorizing the construction of a “speedway” on the west side of the park so that the rich could race their carriages. The public responded with outrage. Olmsted weighed in with a letter describing the proposed road as “unreasonable, unjust and immoral.” The legislature backed off.
His insomnia and pain, the crushing workload, and his mounting frustration all tore at his spirit until by the end of March he felt himself on the verge of physical and emotional collapse. The intermittent depression that had shadowed him throughout his adult life was about to envelop him once again. “When Olmsted is blue,” a friend once wrote, “the logic of his despondency is crushing and terrible.”
Olmsted, however, believed that all he needed was a good rest. In keeping with the therapeutic mores of the age, he decided to do his convalescing in Europe, where the scenery also would provide an opportunity for him to enrich his visual vocabulary. He planned forays to public gardens and parks and the grounds of the old Paris exposition.
He put his eldest son, John, in charge of the Brookline office and left Harry Codman in Chicago to guide the work on the world’s fair. At the last minute he decided to bring along two of his children, Marion and Rick, and another young man, Phil Codman, who was Harry’s younger brother. For Marion and the boys, it promised to be a dream journey; for Olmsted it became something rather more dark.
They sailed on Saturday, April 2, 1892, and arrived in Liverpool under a barrage of hail and snow.
In Chicago Sol Bloom received a cable from France that startled him. He read it a couple of times to make sure it said what he thought it said. His Algerians, scores of them along with all their animals and material possessions, were already at sea, sailing for America and the fair—one year early.
“They had picked the right month,” Bloom said, “but the wrong year.”
Olmsted found the English countryside charming, the weather bleak and morbid. After a brief stay at the home of relatives in Chislehurt, he and the boys left for Paris. Daughter Marion stayed behind.
In Paris Olmsted went to the old exposition grounds. The gardens were sparse, suppressed by a long winter, and the buildings had not weathered well, but enough of the fair remained to give him “a tolerable idea” of what the exposition once had been. Clearly the site was still popular. During one Sunday visit Olmsted and the boys found four bands playing, refreshment stands open, and a few thousand people roaming the paths. A long line had formed at the base of the Eiffel Tower.
With the Chicago fair always in mind, Olmsted examined every detail. The lawns were “rather poor,” the gravel walks “not pleasant to the eye nor to the foot.” He found the Paris fair’s extensive use of formal flower beds objectionable. “It seemed to me,” he wrote, in a letter to John in Brookline, “that at the least it must have been extremely disquieting, gaudy & childish, if not savage and an injury to the Exposition, through its disturbance of dignity, and injury to breadth, unity & composure.” He reiterated his insistence that in Chicago “simplicity and reserve will be practiced and petty effects and frippery avoided.”
The visit rekindled his concern that in the quest to surpass the Paris exposition Burnham and his architects had lost sight of what a world’s fair ought to be. The Paris buildings, Olmsted wrote, “have much more color and much more ornament in color, but much less in moulding and sculpture than I had supposed. They show I think more fitness for their purposes, seem more designed for the occasion and to be less like grand permanent architectural monuments than ours are to be. I question if ours are not at fault in this respect and if they are not going to look too assuming of architectural stateliness and to be overbonded with sculptural and other efforts for grandeur and grandiloquent pomp.”
Olmsted liked traveling with his youthful entourage. In a letter to his wife in Brookline he wrote, “I am having a great deal of enjoyment, and I hope laying in a good stock of better health.” Soon after the party returned to Chislehurst, however, Olmsted’s health degraded and insomnia again shattered his nights. He wrote to Harry Codman, who was himself ill with a strange abdominal illness, “I can only conclude now that I am older and more
