Hugh Howard’s new book, “Architects of an American Landscape,” sounds like it would be a work of serious scholarship. Published by Grove Atlantic, it is a work of serious scholarship. But it also felt like a paid vacation, traveling back to the horse and buggy days of the 19th century through the nation’s transformation into a fledgling world power. That was due, in no small part, to the development of the railroad.
And what could be a better vacation than one taken in the company of the two exceptional gentlemen referred to in the book’s title. Henry Hobson Richardson, whose name may provoke head scratching today, was the most important American architect of the 1800’s and the first to become internationally known. His works include Trinity Church on what would become Copley Square in Boston; the Buffalo, NY State Asylum for the Insane – these days a hotel and conference center – the so-called Million Dollar Staircase at the New York State Capitol and Albany’s shouting distance City Hall.
Transforming an insane asylum into a hotel isn’t as crazy as it seems – no disrespect to the former clientele – when you learn that the project’s landscape architect happened to be Frederick Law Olmsted, the creator of such masterpieces as New York City’s Central and Prospect parks. Olmsted’s the other architect referred to in the book’s title.
He was also Henry Richardson’s best friend. While Olmsted was 16 years older they became bucolic Staten Island neighbors and creative partners, Richardson often in charge of the building, Olmsted teaching him how to integrate it seamlessly into the landscape. By all accounts Richardson’s generous, ebullient personality was as much a work of art as anything he constructed. “He was the greatest comfort and the most potent stimulus that has ever come into my artistic life,” Olmsted testified.
One of the book’s many pleasures is Hugh Howard’s talent for describing buildings from the ground up. There’s a reason for that. Growing up around Worcester,MA. he worked as an electrician’s assistant for three summers during high school and college at Tufts University. “My writing about architecture,” he told me, “is a consequence not of academic study. It comes from hands on rather than brains on. That gives you a different approach.”
Hugh and his wife Betsy have been personal friends starting not long after they moved to Columbia County in 1981. He cuts an impressive figure. Not just because of his height – he’s over 6’6” – or that he built one of his homes from scratch. But also because he seems like a figure from a more civilized era, his manners courtly, his locution measured and precise.
I thought I finally identified that era after reading his book with the vivid, affectionate picture he paints of life in 19th century America. Among “Architects of an American Landscape’s” erudite side trips are Hugh’s history of the American library – public libraries effectively didn’t exist until the Boston Public Library was founded in 1852. Richardson designed several of them including the University of Vermont’s. The author also goes off on a lovely tangent about one of Richardson’s patrons, Frederick Ames, whose family made its fortune manufacturing a light shovel, so prized by California gold miners that it substituted for hard currency.
I’m not sure Hugh totally agreed with my armchair psychoanalysis, though he did concede a fascination with that period of American history. “It was an amazing transition,” he explained. “America became America in the industrial sense. The railroad really reinvented the country and gave us the great economic lift.”
Frederick Law Olmsted is far better remembered today that Henry Hobson Richardson. If anything his reputation keeps growing in tandem with our appreciation for the fragility and spiritual value of the natural world. But Hugh added to my understanding of Olmsted; a workaholic, with a difficult self-critical personality and a pronounced limp. It was the result of a catastrophic buggy accident after he was thrown while taking his wife Mary and seven-week-old son on a jaunt to the woods of Washington Heights in Upper Manhattan. They were unharmed.
If history is one of the passions Hugh Howard indulges in his book – though a work that took six years to write probably shouldn’t be described as an indulgence – nature is a second. Especially moving is his evocation of camping trips Olmsted and his family took in California’s Yosemite Valley, the first one seven weeks in the summer of in 1864 when he was working as a manager for the Mariposa Company, a large mining operation in northern California. The group raised tents by a stream in the valley, including one for bathing, arranged chairs and scattered carpets on the forest floor.
The job wasn’t the greatest fit, not least of all because of Olmsted’s perennially poor health, but experiencing the region’s giant sequoias and El Capitan, the 3,000-foot high granite monolith, reinforced the awe of nature that served as his signature, whether he was designing an urban park for the ages or the naturalistic foliage around one of his friend Richardson’s railroad stations. “His natural park in New York helped civilize a city through a simulated wilderness,” Hugh writes, “but here, in truly wild central California, the wildness of the unsettled Sierras seemed more civilized to him than the mining town.”
Henry Hobson Richardson was only 47 when he died of Bright’s disease, a kidney disorder. Olmsted passed away in 1903 at the age of 81. Many of Richardson’s works were demolished during the 20th century, Hugh reports, “but Olmsted’s parks in particular seemed to gain luster over time. Many is the American metropolis today where citizens know – and are quick to point out – that their city park is the work of Frederick Law Olmsted.”
Ralph Gardner, Jr. is a journalist who divides his time between New York City and Columbia County. More of his work can be found at ralphgardner.com
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