A Clearing in the Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the Nineteenth

Description: A Clearing in the Distance by Witold Rybczynski This fascinating portrait of landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted transcends biography and makes American history an intellectual adventure story. of photos. FORMAT Hardcover LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Publisher Description In a brilliant collaboration between writer and subject, the bestselling author of Home and City Life illuminates Frederick Law Olmsteds role as a major cultural figure and a man at the epicenter of nineteenth-century American history. We know Olmsted through the physical legacy of his stunning landscapes -- among them, New Yorks Central Park, Californias Stanford University campus, Bostons Back Bay Fens, Illinoiss Riverside community, Ashevilles Biltmore Estate, and Louisvilles park system. He was a landscape architect before that profession was founded, designed the first large suburban community in the United States, foresaw the need for national parks, and devised one of the countrys first regional plans. Olmsteds contemporaries knew a man of even more extraordinarily diverse talents. Born in 1822, he traveled to China on a merchant ship at the age of twenty-one. He cofounded The Nation magazine and was an early voice against slavery. He wrote books about the South and about his exploration of the Texas frontier. He managed Californias largest gold mine and, during the Civil War, served as general secretary to the United States Sanitary Commission, the precursor of the Red Cross. Olmsted was both ruthlessly pragmatic and a visionary. To create Central Park, he managed thousands of employees who moved millions of cubic yards of stone and earth and planted over 300,000 trees and shrubs. In laying it out, "we determined to think of no results to be realized in less than forty years," he told his son, Rick. "I have all my life been considering distant effects and always sacrificing immediate success and applause to that of the future." To this day, Olmsteds ideas about people, nature, and society are expressed across the nation -- above all, in his parks, so essential to the civilized life of our cities. Rybczynskis passion for his subject and his understanding of Olmsteds immense complexity and accomplishments make this book a triumphant work. In A Clearing in the Distance, the story of a great nineteenth-century American becomes an intellectual adventure. Author Biography Witold Rybczynski has written about architecture and urbanism for The New York Times, Time, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker. He is the author of the critically acclaimed book Home and the award-winning A Clearing in the Distance, as well as The Biography of a Building, The Mysteries of the Mall, and Now I Sit Me Down. The recipient of the National Building Museums 2007 Vincent Scully Prize, he lives with his wife in Philadelphia, where he is emeritus professor of architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. Table of Contents CONTENTS Foreword Schemes 1. "Tough as nails" 2. Frederick goes to school 3. Hartford 4. "I have no objection" 5. New York 6. A year before the mast 7. Friends 8. Farming 9. More Farming 10. A walking tour in the old country Jostling and Being Jostled 11. Mr. Downings magazine 12. Olmsted falls in love and finishes his book 13. Charley Brace intervenes 14. Yeoman 15. A traveling companion 16. The Texas settlers 17. Yeoman makes a decision 18. "Much the best Mag. in the world" 19. Abroad Hitting Heads 20. A change in fortune 21. The Colonel meets his match 22. Mr. Vaux 23. A brilliant solution 24. A promotion 25. Frederick and Mary 26. Comptroller Green 27. King Cotton 28. A good big work 29. Yeomans war 30. "Six months more pretty certainly" 31. A letter from Dana 32. Never happier 33. Olmsted shortens sail 34. A heavy sort of book 35. Calvert Vaux doesnt take no for an answer 36. Loose ends A Magnificent Opening 37. Olmsted and Vaux plan a perfect park 38. Metropolitan 39. A stopover in Buffalo 40. Thirty-nine thousand trees 41. Best-laid plans 42. Henry Hobson Richardson 43. Olmsteds dilemma 44. Alone 45. "More interesting than nature" 46. Olmsted in demand 47. "I shall be free from it on the Ist of January" Standing First 48. An arduous convalescence 49. Fairstead 50. The character of his business 51. The sixth park 52. Olmsted meets the Governor 53. Olmsted and Vaux, together again 54. "Make a small pleasure ground and gardens" 55. Olmsted drives hard 56. The fourth muse 57. Dear Rick 58. Sunset Olmsteds Distant Effects Distant Effects A Selected List of Olmsted Projects Acknowledgments Notes Index Illustration and Photograph Credits Review Frances FitzGerald A sensitive, engrossing biography of Frederick Law Olmsted: one of the most evocative and multifaceted men of the American nineteenth century, whose works still live and breathe among us. Prizes Winner of Lukas Prize Project (Nonfiction) 2000 Winner of ALA Notable Books (Nonfiction) 2000 Review Quote Suzannah LessardThe New York Times Book ReviewExcellent...thorough and respectful, yet easeful in a way that is reminiscent of Olmsted himself. Excerpt from Book CHAPTER ONE "Tough as Nails" With his high forehead, wide-set blue eyes, and unruly hair, the young Frederick Olmsted made a strong impression. A boyhood friend described him as "a vigorous, manly fellow, of medium height, solidly built with rather broad shoulders and a large well formed head. If athletics had been in fashion he would have been high up in foot-ball and base-ball." In midlife he suffered a carriage accident that left him with a pronounced limp, but he remained a skilled small-boat sailor and an experienced horseman. He was a seasoned outdoorsman who hunted and fished, though not for sport. Later photographs usually show him pensive. He rarely looks directly at the camera, which gives him an air of self-containment, almost detachment. "His face is generally very placid," wrote his colleague Katharine Wormeley, "with all the expressive delicacy of a womans, and would be beautiful were it not for an expression which I cannot fathom, -- something which is, perhaps, a little too severe about it." But she added, "I think his mouth and smile and the expression of his eyes at times very beautiful...there is a deep, calm thoughtfulness about him which is always attractive and sometimes -- provoking." An odd choice of word -- "provoking." Olmsteds close friend Charles Eliot Norton likewise discerned this quality. "All the lines of his face imply refinement and sensibility to such a degree that it is not till one has looked through them to what is underneath, that the force of his will and the reserved power of his character become evident." When I asked the landscape architect Laurie Olin how he would characterize Olmsted, his immediate answer was "Tough as nails." Olin is right, of course. Although the modern image of Frederick Law Olmsted is of a benevolent environmentalist, a sort of Johnny Appleseed scattering beautiful city parks across the nation, he had indomitable energy and iron determination. As a mine manager in California, he once faced down a crowd of striking miners. (They were understandably upset because he had reduced their wages.) "They tried a mob but made nothing of it," he laconically wrote to his father, "and I have lost no property only time. I shall hold out till they come to my terms and dismiss all who have been prominent in the strike." He did just that. His obstinacy often got him in trouble. Many times he chose to resign positions rather than continue on a course of action he disapproved. His most famous resignations -- there were several -- occurred during the long and often frustrating construction of Central Park. But there were others. Leland Stanford, the railroad magnate, engaged him to lay out the grounds of what would become Stanford University. Olmsted prepared the plans on the understanding that, as was his practice, he would also hire his own staff to supervise the work. When Stanford, who had been governor of California and was used to getting his own way, reneged on the agreement, Olmsted walked away from the job. The university was completed without him. Another battle of wills occurred during his tenure with the United States Sanitary Commission. The Commission, a precursor to the Red Cross, was a private organization established after the outbreak of the Civil War to administer volunteer relief efforts to the Union troops. Olmsted spent two years as its first general secretary, in charge of day-to-day operations. As fund-raising efforts intensified, hundreds of thousands of dollars flowed to the Commission, whose board felt the need to exert more direct supervision over the activities of its chief executive officer. He characteristically bridled at any attempt to curtail his freedom, and a sometimes bitter struggle ensued. One of those with whom he had run-ins was the treasurer of the Commission, George Templeton Strong. Strong, best known as the author of an exceptional set of diaries, was a prominent Wall Street lawyer and civic leader. He knew Olmsted well: both men were involved in the Union League Club and in the establishment of The Nation magazine. Some six months before Olmsteds resignation, Strong noted in his journal: "He is an extraordinary fellow, decidedly the most remarkable specimen of human nature with whom I have been brought into close relations." Then, in obvious exasperation, he added: "Prominent defects, a monomania for system and organization on paper (elaborate, laboriously thought out, and generally impracticable), and appetite for power. He is a lay-Hildebrand." The last strikes me as a shrewd characterization. Hildebrand, or Gregory VII, was an eleventh-century pope who is remembered for his lifelong attempt to establish the supremacy of the papacy within the Church -- and the authority of the Church over the state. Olmsted, too, was trying to establish an ascendancy. He was doing it with what sometimes seemed to others religious zeal, but he did not seek personal aggrandizement. Strong commented on his colleagues "absolute purity and disinterestedness"; he recognized that Olmsted wasnt empire-building. The supremacy that Olmsted was trying to establish was that of the technician -- the organizer; the authority was that of The Plan. But he was ahead of his time. His obsession with organization and planning on paper may sometimes have been clumsy, and it was certainly laborious -- this was before telephones and typewriters, let alone computers and fax machines. But it was not, as Strong thought, ineffective. Olmsted successfully coordinated the operations of the Sanitary Commission, with its thousands of contributing private aid societies, and its scores of nurses and doctors. He deployed convalescent shelters, field hospitals, and hospital ships and distributed food and medical supplies over a battlefront that extended for hundreds of miles. Strong had also forgotten that it was precisely "monomania" that had enabled Olmsted to organize the labors of several thousand workers in what was then the largest public works project in the nation: Central Park. Olmsted was one of the first people to recognize the necessity for planning in a large, industrializing country -- whether in peace or war. This recognition was not yet widely shared, which is why he was often misunderstood. "He looks far ahead, & his plans & methods are sometimes mysterious," wrote Rev. Henry Whitney Bellows, founder and president of the Sanitary Commission, of his willful prot Details ISBN0684824639 Author Witold Rybczynski Short Title CLEARING IN THE DISTANCE Language English ISBN-10 0684824639 ISBN-13 9780684824635 Media Book Format Hardcover Year 1999 Subtitle Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the Nineteenth Century Imprint Simon & Schuster Place of Publication New York Country of Publication United States Residence PA, US Birth 1943 DOI 10.1604/9780684824635 AU Release Date 1999-06-08 NZ Release Date 1999-06-08 US Release Date 1999-06-08 UK Release Date 1999-06-08 Pages 498 Publisher Simon & Schuster Publication Date 1999-06-08 DEWEY 712.092 Illustrations 1, black & white illustrations Audience Undergraduate We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. With fast shipping, low prices, friendly service and well over a million items - you're bound to find what you want, at a price you'll love! TheNile_Item_ID:8331198;

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