SAMPLE WORK LETTER V9 [draft] [Late August 1894] Dear Vaux. I slept three nights in New York last week but was out of town all of evry day & evng, meeting engagements or I shd have called on you. A Tribune reporter caught me one night and you probably saw the result. Dodge had written me indicating that a movement was to be made to save the Pallisades, intimating that I shd be employed and asking for the address of Harrison. (Dodge had been a contributor to the fund which I raised years ago for employing Harrison in the Niagara agitation) I replied advising him to call on you; stating that you long since had seen the danger to the Pallisades to which he was just waking up, that you had resided on the Pallisades, were well posted as to the facts, and better able than I should be even after considerable study to give him the advice he needed-- I said what I did to the Tribune man to encourage the agitation. Stiles aftds called on me but I was not in. I have not seen him for a year past. I was chiefly occupied with Brooklyn Park matters. The situation is a very embarrasing one. Really, our principle duty there is to hinder, delay and resist operations further upsetting the original design, while we wait and seek opportunity to urge & advance restorations and recoveries. This last week under instructions I defined a site for a house for tennis players which I suppose White is to plan. (Though White has been often referred to as if he were the Architect of the Park, we have not seen him nor been brought into communication with him.) There are two things to which in Brooklyn I make every thing else secondary. One is to secure certain additions to the plantations which were intended and prepared for at the time we left and the lack of which frustrates leading motives of our design; the other to get the soul into the Concert Ground. The present arrangements is simply absurd. It is the play of Hamlet with Hamlet omitted. Yet nobody in Brooklyn seems to have recognized it or to be able to recognize it and I am almost driven to ask: "Am I crazy or is it these others who are so." I have been cautious as yet, not wishing to be thought a crank, but I have not found a Brooklyn man who can entertain the only idea on the subject that I think sane. I detect an inclination to smile when I approach the question. I was told last week that a trial of music on the island had been made years ago and that it was a failure. I do not believe it. I never neglect to urge the completion of the arrngmnt, but the Commissioner always looks uncomfortable and shies it. The present conditions are hideously absurd. There are two other matters which my heart is set to further. First, to recover the use originally intended of what is now a mere shabby desert of sand, the ground designated by us as a Play Grnd for little children. The other, the Plaza, as to which there is a disposition to raze the mounds & abolish the fountain. That being done, what next I dont yet know. I am simply resisting with the aim to get back to our original plan. What is chiefly wrong now, and exciting to projects for radical changes of plan is plainly, it seems to me, the result of incomplete work, and neglect in mangmt of the plantations which as a consequence are wholly ruined. The Commission from time to time advances suggestions for new works which we try to discourage with a view to the use of the money they wd require for restorations, corrections and the carrying out of intentions which have been frustrated & thwarted. We have been asked to advise about a piece of ground which has probably been made public property because it would cost too much to adapt it for buildg lots. Instead of having it cut down at great cost I have proposed that it shd be dealt with as you dealt with Trinity Cemetery and that this proposition might not be misunderstood & misinterpreted, I got the Superintendent to go with me to the Cemetery where the results that you obtained converted him. John is in Europe this summer, Rick graduated with honors last Fall & has been spndg the summer in the Rocky Mtns on the Coast Survey. SAMPLE WORK LETTER V9 ANNOTATION To Calvert Vaux [late August 1894] [23: 149] The original is a draft in Olmsted’s hand in the Olmsted papers. 1. Olmsted was staying in Manhattan for site visits to the Vanderbilt Mausoleum in New Dorp, Staten Island on August 15, to Brooklyn for park work on August 16, and to Brooklyn for the Bay Ridge parkway on August 17. Staten Island and Brooklyn were not yet part of New York City, and so were “out of town.” 2. The New-York Tribune had reported that Olmsted was in New York “in connection with the landscape work on the Harlem River Driveway,” but Olmsted declined to speak about it. “I am only willing to say that as regards the artistic part of the work I agree with Messrs. Dana and Vaux. Further than that I have nothing to offer.” The reporter then asked if there were important places in New York that should be preserved from development. “There is one place,” said Mr. Olmsted, of extremely great value which ought to be held by the public, because in time it will become of extreme value. I refer to the Palisades. Of course, they are a part of New-Jersey, but in the broad sense they are a part of New- York. At present they are being ruined by persons quarrying paving stones from them. Mr. Vaux, landscape architect of the Park Department, has called attention to this. It is one of the critical points in the vicinity of New- York which the public should have free access to, and which should not be possessed by private property owners. It will in time become a place of great magnificence. The view down the Narrows from there is really something wonderful, and the view of the city is also fine. As the city grows further northward the need of the Palisades being set apart will become more apparent. The building of the North River Bridge furnishes another reason for acquiring the Palisades before it is too late. It is a shame to the city of New-York that so beautiful a work of nature should be given over to quarrymen, when paving stones can be obtained just as cheaply elsewhere. It is much more valuable as a strange work of nature for the everlasting entertainment of the people than for quarrying purposes. The blasting should be stopped at once (“The Palisades Should be Saved. A Word of Warning from Frederick Law Olmstead—The Harlem River Driveway,” New-York Tribune, Aug. 16, 1894). 3. William Earl Dodge, Jr. (1832--1903), a wealthy New York businessman, senior partner of Phelps Dodge, a vast copper mining company, and philanthropist. Olmsted may have met Dodge through his efforts in behalf of the U.S. Sanitary Commission in New York City during the Civil War. The two men were also member of the Century Association. Dodge’s letter to Olmsted of July 24, 1894 apparently does not survive in the Olmsted Papers. However, on August 3 Olmsted replied to it by recounting an earlier effort to protect the Palisades: “The treatment of the Palisades has been considered from the Real Estate Point of view by my former partner Mr. Vaux, who lived for one or two summers on the brow of the Palisades and made some plans that have not been carried out for the improvement of the region. I think, also, that Mr. Owens, the engineer who laid out the “Boulevard back of the Palisades, may have given it some attention.” Olmsted then inquired whether it would be possible, through joint legislative action by New York and New Jersey, to create a public reservation on the Palisades comparable to the Middlesex Fells and Blue Hills in eastern Massachusetts. The Palisades, a sheer wall of rock that reaches a height of more than five hundred feet, extend approximately fifteen miles along the west bank of the Hudson River north of Fort Lee, New Jersey. Quarrying had long been practiced in the Palisades, but the introduction of dynamite, and the vastly increased destruction of its scenic qualities that resulted, led many New Yorkers to join a crusade to preserve them. As Governor of New York, Theodore Rosevelt became a staunch advocate of preservation, but that crusade was completed only in 1909, through the efforts of George W. Perkins and the Palisades Interstate Park Commission (“William E. Dodge Dead,” New York Times, Aug. 10, 1903; FLO to William E. Dodge, Aug. 3, 1894; David Schuyler, Sanctified Landscape: Writers, Artists, and the Hudson River Valley, 1820-1909 [Ithaca, 2012], pp. 156--62). 4. Jonathan Baxter Harrison (1835--1907), a Unitarian minister and protégé of Charles Eliot Norton, had in 1882, with the financial backing of Olmsted and Norton, written a series of eight letters to New York and Boston newspapers on the condition of Niagara Falls. These were published as The Condition of Niagara Falls, and the Measures Needed to Preserve Them . (New York, 1882). Dodge clearly hoped Harrison could provide a similar service in the campaign to save the Palisades, but Harrison did not write about the cause (Papers of FLO, 7: 564, n.