Hugh Howard - Architects of an American Landscape: Henry Hobson Richardson, Frederick Law Olmsted, and the Reimagining of America’s Public and Private Spaces

Henry Hobson Richardson, Frederick Law Olmsted, and the Reimagining of Americas Public and Private Spaces

HUGH HOWARD

Atlantic Monthly Press

New York

Copyright 2022 by Hugh Howard

Jacket design by Kelly Winton

Front jacket artwork: Central Park, 1860 Andrew Fare/Alamy Stock Photo Back jacket artwork: Gate House, courtesy of Easton Historical Society and Museum; Allegheny Court House: Henry Hobson Richardson and His Works (1888). Public domain.

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FIRST EDITION

Published simultaneously in Canada

First Grove Atlantic edition: January 2022

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available for this title.

ISBN 978-0-8021-5923-6

eISBN 978-0-8021-5924-3

Atlantic Monthly Press

an imprint of Grove Atlantic

154 West 14th Street

New York, NY 10011

Distributed by Publishers Group West

groveatlantic.com

To the all-girl band,
Betsy, Slim, Biff, and, unexpectedly, Alice

I cannot express, or make those who did not know him even dimly understand, how much Richardson was in ones life, how much help and comfort he gave one in its work. He was the greatest comfort and the most potent stimulus that has ever come into my artistic life.

FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED

Prologue FAREWELL, FRIEND

Consult the genius of the place in all.

ALEXANDER POPE

High in the Rocky Mountains, a long, black steam locomotive chugged up the steady grade, coal smoke billowing from its stack. A tumble-down array of workers shanties came into view as the train neared the highest point, elevation 8,242 feet, on the nations first transcontinental rail line.

For much of the preceding twenty years, Sherman Station, Wyoming, named for Union general William Tecumseh Sherman, had been a busy place, with a roundhouse and train sheds, two hotels, a pair of saloons, a general store, a post office, and even a school-house. But what the railroad brought it could also take away. With the Union Pacific Railroad no longer making scheduled stops at Sherman Station, the population of the settlement between Cheyenne and Laramie had dwindled to fewer than a hundred people.

To the surprise of the passengers on this particular blustery January day in 1887, the brakeman brought the train to a halt in a cloud of hissing steam. A few moments later, a precisely dressed gentleman made his way down the steep steps of a Pullman car.

The man walked with an uneven gait, the result of a carriage accident more than twenty-five years before, his game left leg more painful than usual since he had been tossed about like a sack of potatoes in a train collision a week earlier. The other passengers watched from their seats as sixty-five-year-old Frederick Law Olmsted, a man widely known as Americas first and finest park maker, headed for the top of a nearby hill. His fame and reputation were such that, in 1872, Republicans dissatisfied with their partys nominee, Horace Greeley, had convened to discuss an alternative conscience ticket, and Olmsteds name had been bandied about as the choice for vice president.

At Olmsteds request, the train had paused so he could complete a small errand on behalf of Charles Francis Adams Jr., president of the Union Pacific Railroad and a friend of many years standing.

To the other riders, one thing was evident at a glance: Sherman Station was well on its way to oblivion. Its hotels closed and the railyard quiet, Sherman would soon enough become a ghost town. But as they watched, the stranger made his way across the windswept high prairie toward the towns one remaining attraction, which stood barely a hundred yards from the track bed. Built of immense blocks of rough-hewn local granite, the rugged and plain pyramid might have been an antediluvian survivor, fixed in place since the distant past. But it was almost new, constructed just four years before.

The Ames Monument atop of its eminence with some later visitors, ca. 1930. By then the rail line had been relocated several miles south and Sherman had simply vanished. The Saint-Gaudens bas-relief is of Congressman Oakes Ames.

Officially, this piece of pure geometry celebrated the completion of the transcontinental railroad, an achievement that, in the eyes of many, was the greatest triumph of modern civilization, of all civilization, indeed. But the monument was a reminder of a larger story too, one of an extraordinary national transformation. Since Olmsteds birth in 1822, a largely coastal nation with just one state west of the Mississippi River had banished the frontier, and the Union, reunited and recovering from the ravages of the Civil War, now consisted of thirty-eight contiguous states that extended to the Pacific. The United States was an increasingly urban country where agriculture was giving way to a booming manufacturing economy, and the railroad had played an outsize role in driving those changes.

On reaching the monuments base, Olmsted examined it, his gaze rising and falling as he took the measure of the sixty-foot-tall stack of stone. But none of those observing him were privy to the swirl of memories and emotions that surfaced in his mind. He could not help but think of the author of this monument, his great friend and longtime collaborator, the architect Henry Hobson Richardson.