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
only
site, for a music hall worthy of the fair. Olmsted would not allow it. Next came Theodore Roosevelt, head of the U.S. Civil Service Commission and a human gunboat. The island, he insisted, was perfect for the hunting camp exhibit of his Boone and Crockett Club. Not surprisingly, given Roosevelt’s power in Washington, the politicians of the fair’s National Commission strongly endorsed his plan. Burnham, partly to keep the peace, also urged Olmsted to accept it. “Would you object to its being placed on the north end of the Island, snuggled in among the trees, purely as an exhibit, provided it shall be so concealed as to only be noticed casually by those on the Island and not at all from the shore?”
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 used up than I had supposed.”
A doctor, Henry Rayner, paid a social visit to Chislehurst to meet Olmsted. He happened to be a specialist in treating nervous disorders and was so appalled by Olmsted’s appearance that he offered to take him to his own house in Hampstead Heath, outside London, and care for him personally. Olmsted accepted.
Despite Rayner’s close attention, Olmsted’s condition did not improve; his stay at Hampstead Heath became wearisome. “You know that I am practically in prison here,” he wrote to Harry Codman on June 16, 1892. “Every day I look for decided improvement and thus far everyday, I am disappointed.” Dr. Rayner too was perplexed, according to Olmsted. “He says, with confidence, after repeated examinations, of all my anatomy, that I have no organic trouble and that I may reasonably expect under favorable circumstances to keep at work for several years to come. He regards my present trouble as a variation in form of the troubles which led me to come abroad.”
Most days Olmsted was driven by carriage through the countryside, “every day more or less on a different road,” to view gardens, churchyards, private parks, and the natural landscape. Nearly every ornamental flowerbed offended him. He dismissed them as “childish, vulgar, flaunting, or impertinent, out of place and discordant.” The countryside itself, however, charmed him: “there is nothing in America to be compared with the pastoral or with the picturesque beauty that is common property in England. I cannot go out without being delighted. The view before me as I write, veiled by the rain, is just enchanting.” The loveliest scenes, he found, were comprised of the simplest, most natural juxtapositions of native plants. “The finest combination is one of gorse, sweet briar, brambles, hawthorn, and ivy. Even when there is no bloom this is charming. And these things can be had by the hundred thousand at very low prices.”
At times the scenes he saw challenged his vision of Jackson Park, at other times they affirmed it. “Everywhere the best ornamental grounds that we see are those in which vines and creepers are outwitting the gardener. We can’t have little vines and weeds enough.” He knew there was too little time to let nature alone produce such effects. “Let us as much as possible, train out creepers, and branches of trees, upon bridges, pulling down and nailing the branches, aiming to obtain shade and reflection of foliage and broken obscuration of water.”
Above all, his sorties reinforced his belief that the Wooded Island, despite the Japanese temple, should be made as wild as possible. “I think more than ever of the value of the island,” he wrote to Harry Codman, “and of the importance of using all possible, original means of securing impervious screening, dense massive piles of foliage on its borders; with abundant variety of small detail in abject subordination to general effect. . . . There cannot be enough of bulrush, adlumia, Madeira vine, catbriar, virgin’s bower, brambles, sweet peas, Jimson weed, milkweed, the smaller western sunflowers and morning glories.”
But he also recognized that the wildness he sought would have to be tempered with excellent groundskeeping. He worried that Chicago would not be up to the task. “The standard of an English laborer, hack driver or cad in respect to neatness, smugness and elegance of gardens and grounds and paths and ways is infinitely higher than that of a Chicago merchant prince or virtuoso,” he wrote to Codman, “and we shall be disgraced if we fail to work up to a far higher level than our masters will be prepared to think suitable.”
Overall Olmsted remained confident that his exposition landscape would succeed. A new worry troubled him, however. “The only cloud I see over the Exposition now is the Cholera,” he wrote in a letter to his Brookline office. “The accounts from Russia and from Paris this morning are alarming.”
As Sol Bloom’s Algerians neared New York Harbor, workers assigned to the Midway erected temporary buildings to house them. Bloom went to New York to meet the ship and reserved two traincars to bring the villagers and their cargo back to Chicago.
As the Algerians left the ship, they began moving in all directions at once. “I could see them getting lost, being run over, and landing in jail,” Bloom said. No one seemed to be in charge. Bloom raced up to them, shouting commands in French and English. A giant black-complected man walked up to Bloom and in perfect House of Lords English said, “I suggest you be more civil. Otherwise I may lose my temper and throw you into the water.”
The man identified himself as Archie, and as the two settled into a more peaceful conversation, he revealed to Bloom that he had spent a decade in London serving as a rich man’s bodyguard. “At present,” he said, “I am responsible for conveying my associates to a place called Chicago. I understand it is somewhere in the hinterland.”
Bloom handed him a cigar and proposed that he become his bodyguard and assistant.
“Your offer,” Archie said, “is quite satisfactory.”
Both men lit up and puffed smoke into the fragrant murk above New York Harbor.
Burnham fought to boost the rate of construction, especially of the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building, which had to be completed by Dedication Day. In March, with just half a year remaining until the dedication, he invoked the “czar” clause of his construction contracts. He ordered the builder of the Electricity Building to double his workforce and to put the men to work at night under electric lights. He threatened the Manufactures contractor with the same fate if he did not increase the pace of his work.
Burnham had all but given up hope of surpassing the Eiffel Tower. Most recently he had turned down another outlandish idea, this from an earnest young Pittsburgh engineer who had attended his lecture to the Saturday Afternoon Club. The man was credible enough—his company held the contract for inspecting all the steel used in the fair’s structures—but the thing he proposed to build just did not seem feasible. “Too fragile,” Burnham told him. The public, he said, would be afraid.
A hostile spring further hampered the fair’s progress. On Tuesday, April 5, 1892, at 6:50
A.M.
, a sudden windstorm demolished the fair’s just-finished pumping station and tore down sixty-five feet of the Illinois State Building. Three weeks later another storm destroyed eight hundred feet of the south wall of the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building. “The wind,” the
Tribune
observed, “seems to have a grudge against the World’s Fair grounds.”
To find ways to accelerate the work, Burnham called the eastern architects to Chicago. One looming problem was how to color the exteriors of the main buildings, especially the staff-coated palisades of the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building. During the meeting an idea arose that in the short run promised a dramatic acceleration of the work, but that eventually served to fix the fair in the world’s imagination as a thing of otherworldly beauty.
By all rights, the arena of exterior decoration belonged to William Pretyman, the fair’s official director of color. Burnham admitted later that he had hired Pretyman for the job “largely on account of his great friendship for John Root.” Pretyman was ill suited to the job. Harriet Monroe, who knew him and his wife, wrote, “His genius was betrayed by lofty and indomitable traits of character which could not yield or compromise. And so his life was a tragedy of inconsequence.”