Frederick Law Olmstead
andTacoma
 Laying
out cities in the 1870s was child's play. The ideal was a broad
rectangle subdivided into squares. All that was required was a map
and a ruler. James Tilton, who had been surveyor general of the
territory back in the Isaac Stevens era, was still around. They
handed him the ruler and told him to start drawing.
It
has been said that Tilton used as his model a plan for Sacramento
that McCarver brought north after his misadventures there, or that
Tacoma was patterned after Melbourne, Australia; but chances are
that the old engineer needed no pony.
Tilton's sketches do not survive. An account in the Weekly Pacific
Tribune for October 3, 1873, indicates he made a few modifications
to the basic grid plan then in vogue. Three main avenues 100 feet
in width paralleled the waterfront. Two others slanted diagonally
up the face of the hill, a concession to the difficulties of
horse-drawn street-cars, not to mention pedestrians, would
encounter on a direct climb. The five avenues were flanked by
blocks 120 feet deep which ended in 40-foot-wide streets, too
broad to degenerate into alleys but not grand enough to detract
from the designated thoroughfares.
In
the middle of town a twenty-seven-acre knuckle of land about 1,000
feet south of the bay was left open for development as a central
park or as the campus of a building complex should Tacoma become
county seat or territorial capitol. Two smaller parks stood on the
north and south flanks of the town.
This first dream of Tacoma failed to get off the drawing board.
While Tilton was still making sketches, events and decisions back
east aborted his conception. Board members expressed some
dissatisfaction with Tilton's proposals for solving drainage
problems on the clay-bank hill, but far more important was Jay
Cooke's slide toward bankruptcy. As the sale of railroad bonds
slowed, sale of land at the terminus offered the best hope of
raising working capital.
The
Northern Pacific in August formed a subsidiary, first called the
Lake Superior & Puget Sound Land Company but quickly renamed
the Tacoma Land Company, which was capitalized at one million
dollars and assigned to develop the terminus and sell the town
lots. C. B. Wright was selected by the Northern Pacific directors
to head the land company. Almost immediately President Wright
began to discuss replacing Tilton with the country's best-known
landscape architect, the brilliant, unorthodox, opinionated,
highly controversial Frederick Law Olmsted.
A
journalist turned planner/administrator, Olmsted had conceived and
brought into being New York's Central Park; in 1873 he was
embroiled in a widely publicized struggle with Tammany Hall to
prevent its commercial exploitation.
He
had also designed Morningside Park in Manhattan, the Brooklyn
Parkway (he coined the term parkway), and on commission from the
Quincy Railroad he had planned for Chicago commuters the suburban
community of Riverside which, as Olmsted put it, emphasized "gracefully-curved
lines, generous spaces and the absence of sharp corners, the idea
being to suggest and imply leisure, contemplativeness and happy
tranquillity."
Whether Wright and the board were concerned with prompting happy
tranquillity at their terminus is doubtful. Probably what
attracted them was Olmsted's capacity for getting attention and
his reputation for finding novel solutions to difficult problems
of terrain. Whatever their reasons, the board summoned Olmsted to
the New York headquarters of the Northern Pacific on September 19
(just one day after the closing of Cooke's bank) and commissioned
him to make in all possible haste six weeks a preliminary study
for the townsite.
Olmsted teamed with G. K. Radford, whom he described to Wright as
"an experienced sanitary and hydraulic engineer," in
creating the plan. He did not visit Tacoma but worked from contour
maps and sketches. It is not clear how the two men divided the
labor but it is likely that Radford concentrated on drainage
problems, Olmsted on creating a town that would blend with sea,
forest, and mountain. Sketches in the Olmsted Papers at the
Library of Congress show his concept of a latticework of diagonals
to climb the hill back from the bay.
The
plan was delivered to the Northern Pacific on schedule in early
December and reached Tacoma the week before Christmas, where it
was put on display in the Tacoma Land Office. Residents who had
been eagerly awaiting the metamorphosis of the clay cliff into the
metropolis of their dreams studied Olmsted's vision with a bemused
blend of boosterism and dismay.
Thomas Prosch, who had bought the Pacific Tribune of Olympia from
his father, Charles, and moved it to Tacoma on the strength of its
prospects as terminus, reflected the ambivalence of the locals in
a long but muted story that appeared on December 23.
The
new plan he found "unlike that of any other city in the
world," and "so novel in character that those who have
seen ' hardly know whether or not to admire it, while they are far
from prepared to condemn it." He outlined the main features:
The ground laid off is on
the southern shore of Commencement Bay 1000 acres in extent, and
reaching from the Gallilier mill pond two and a half miles down
the bay to the Tacoma mill pond. A portion of the mud flat is
also laid off, for future use. The most peculiar features are
the varying sizes and shapes of the blocks, and the absence of
straight lines and right angles.
Every block and every street
and avenue is curved. The lots have a uniform frontage of 25
feet, but differ in length, averaging, however, 180 feet. The
curvature of the blocks does away with corner lots, and their
great length with much of the misery of street crossings, where
collisions and accidents always happen, and where mud and dust
are invariably the deepest. . . .
The three grand avenues are
Pacific, Tacoma and Cliff. Pacific leads up the banks, from the
rail road dock, and out into the country; Tacoma is about a mile
only in length, intersecting up in town with Pacific Avenue and
running down to the beach between the old and new towns; Cliff
Avenue extends along the brow of the bluff, two miles or more in
length. . . .
The first is intended for
the business of the town, and for country trade and driving; the
second takes one past the principal parks; and the third will be
magnificent for residences, promenading and driving, as it will
be high and sightly, with nothing between it and the water. . .
. There are seven parks laid out, consuming about 100 acres of
ground, and varying from two to thirty acres each in extent.
Young Prosch felt that time alone would prove the plan's
practicality but added, hesitantly, "Certainly, if a large
city is ever built here, after that plan, it will be through and
through ' like a park, and have very many important advantages
over other cities."
In
rival Portland, the Bulletin discussed the Olmsted plan with
irony. Conceding the originality of the great planner's concept,
the paper commented that since "Tacoma is already set upon a
hill, or two hills for that matter, it would be ridiculous for
such a city to copy after unpretending places like Chicago or San
Francisco. Tacoma resolves to have an individuality and to assert
it. . . .
"The curve is the
favorite geometrical line at Tacoma. it is supposed to be
borrowed from the magnificent movements of the celestial
spheres, or other great operations of nature; and with these
movements Tacoma is determined to be in harmony. Tacoma, with
her new plat, must be almost as perfect as anything can be in
this ill-favored world."
Tacomans were not amused. Neither were they enthusiastic. Prosch,
in a follow-up story on the plan, concentrated on the assumed
wisdom of the managers of the Pacific Division of the Northern
Pacific ("Save for unscrupulous, mendacious, hireling editors
and their abettors, none have any fault to find with their course")
rather than on the plan itself.
He
allowed that the Olmsted concept was approved by "many men of
ripe judgment and unquestioned taste; in their view it will make a
beautiful city and is in every respect adapted to the character of
the ground." His own opinion he kept to himself.
Even among the scrupulous, the nonmendacious, the unhired, and the
nonjournalistic there were to be found skeptics who questioned the
incarnate wisdom of the Pacific Division managers, the genius of
Olmsted, and the merits of a nonangular street plan.
Speculators who wanted to buy corner lots saw no merit in a
downtown deliberately left deficient in fourway intersections;
Olmsted's dream of a business district without bottlenecks was to
them a nightmare. Nor were the engineering crews assigned to run
lines amid the downtown stumpage to locate Pacific, Cliff, and
Tacoma avenues persuaded by Olmsted's dictum that "speed of
traffic is of less importance than comfort and convenience of
movement."
Early settlers who had seen others profit from the rise of
foursquare business districts grumbled that the plan for their
town resembled "a basket of melons, peas and sweet potatoes."
They said that in the street patterns one could find
representations of everything that has ever been exhibited in an
agricultural show, from calabashes to iceboxes."
In
prosperous times the Olmsted plan might have survived, even
benefited from, the controversy and ridicule. Had the Northern
Pacific board had the confidence to wait out discontent, the
materialized dream might well have answered the doubters. One has
only to look at the plan and imagine the park-like city that could
have been on the lovely curve of Tacoma's harbor to grieve that
the vision was not made manifest.
But
Jay Cooke's bank had failed, the panic was deepening into
depression, the railroad was desperate for capital. With
confidence shattered and money short, there was no rush to invest
in the western terminus of an ailing and incomplete railroad. The
NP balled out.
Late in January, only forty-three days after he had submitted the
plan, Olmsted was notified that his ideas would not be used and
his services were no longer required. The letter of dismissal, and
Olmsted's reply, have never been located. Olmsted never mentioned
the rejection publicly. |
