Frederick law Olmsted

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Literary San Antonio Frederic Law Olmsted
John Singer Sargent portrait of Olmsted (Courtesy Biltmore Estate, Asheville, North Carolina)	As a nineteenth-century landscape architect, Frederick Law Olmsted’s major claim to fame was his accomplishment as a designer of Central Park in New York City. As a rather obscure travel writer of the 1850's, however, Olmsted lacked the prominence and appeal that later literary celebrities who visited and/or wrote about San Antonio would enjoy. Nevertheless, this native New Yorker’s account of his sojourn in Texas during 1854, A Journey Through Texas (1857), identifies the essential elements of San Antonio that have attracted the attention and sometimes captured the imagination of later writers. These elements include the exotic appeal of the town’s multicultural, or at least tri-cultural, inhabitants; its venerable architectural structures (venerable at least for Texas), dating back to eighteenth-century Spanish colonialism; and its refreshing natural landmarks, especially the spring fed San Antonio River and San Pedro Creek. Later writers--ranging from Sydney Lanier two decades later, to Stephen Crane at the end of the nineteenth century, to Graham Greene in the twentieth century--would focus their attention on many of the same points of interest that had appealed to Olmsted in 1854. What he considered the exotic nature of the city, for example, made quite an impression on the Yankee agriculturalist: We have no city, except, perhaps, New Orleans, that can vie, in point of the picturesque interest that attaches to odd and antiquated foreignness, with San Antonio. Its jumble of races, costumes, languages and buildings; its religious ruins, holding to an antiquity, for us, indistinct enough to breed an unaccustomed solemnity. (150)
Two early sketches of Commerce St. Bridge (San Antonio Express-News, Raba Collection)	He was also perceptive enough to notice that San Antonio during the mid-1800's was divided almost equally among three ethnic groups: Mexican, German, and Anglo: From the bridge we enter Commerce street, the narrow principal thoroughfare, and here are American houses, and the triple nationalities break out into the most amusing display, till we reach Main Plaza. The sauntering Mexicans prevail on the pavements, but the bearded Germans and the sallow Yankees furnish their proportion. The signs are German by all odds, and perhaps the houses, trim-built, with pink window-blinds. The American dwellings stand back, with galleries and jalousies and a garden picket- fence against the walk, or rise, next door, in three-story brick to respectable city fronts. The Mexican buildings are stronger than those we saw before, but still of all sorts, and now put to all sorts of new uses. They are all low, of adobe or stone, washed blue and yellow, with flat roofs close down upon their single story. (150)
Nineteenth-century style peasant jacal (San Antonio Express-News, Raba Collection)	While the Anglo-American Olmsted expressed a typically condescending attitude toward the Mexican population of San Antonio in 1854 as being unambitious and best suited for manual labor, he liked their joie de vivre and commended their “most gracious and beaming politeness and dignity” (161); as a Northerner he also admired their general abhorrence of slavery (163). He was especially intrigued by the exotic nature of their appearance, which he attributed “to three sources--the old Spanish, the Creole Mexican, and the Indian, with sometimes a suspicion of Anglo-Saxon or Teuton” (161)
Side view of Alamo façade in its present restoration	In contrast with Olmsted’s fascination with San Antonio’s inhabitants, the travel writer showed less interest in the architecture of the town, much of which was dilapidated or in a state of decay in 1854. Like many other newcomers, he made his way soon to “the square of the Alamo” (149), or Alamo Plaza. He devoted only a paragraph to describing the famous shrine of Texas liberty but was seeing it long before its restoration, although the U. S. Army had added the arched parapet which has turned the facade into a universally recognized icon: [The Alamo] is now within the town, and in extent, probably, a mere wreck of its former grandeur. It consists of a few irregular stuccoed buildings, huddled against the old church, in a large court surrounded by a rude wall; the whole used as an arsenal by the U. S. quartermaster. The church-door opens on the square, and is meagerly decorated by stucco mouldings, all hacked and battered in the battles it has seen. Since the heroic defense of Travis and his handful of men, in ‘36, it has been a monument, not so much to faith as to courage. (155)
Frontal view of San Fernando Cathedral	Olmsted showed even less enthusiasm for San Fernando Cathedral, which had been built in the eighteenth century for the Spanish contingent of colonists from the Canary Islands. He described it as a ”dirty, grim, old, stuccoed stone cathedral, whose cracked bell is now clunking the vespers, in a tone that bids us no welcome” (150). The author devoted a little more space to the other four missions (besides the Alamo), but he combined them together in a three-paragraph summation which began: The Mission of Concepcion is not far from the town, upon the left of the river. Further down are three others, San Juan, San Jose, and La Espada. On one of them is said to have been visible, not long ago, the date, “1725.” They are in different stages of decay, but all are real ruins, beyond any connection with the present--weird remains out of the silent past. (155)
Restored doorway of Mission San José, with original decorative stonework preserved	What seems to have made the greatest impact on Olmsted was not the appearance of the missions but rather the commitment and dedication of the “Spanish fathers” who built them in the first third of the eighteenth century: They pushed off alone into the heart of a savage and unknown country, converted the cruel brutes that occupied it, not only to nominal Christianity, but to actual hard labor, and persuaded and compelled them to construct these ponderous but rudely splendid edifices, serving, at the same time, for the glory of the faith, and for the defense of the faithful. (154) Because of his background as an agriculturalist, which led to his becoming a landscape architect, Olmsted was naturally interested in the climate and topography of the San Antonio vicinity, especially its sources of water in a semi-arid, semi-tropical latitude. As he entered the outskirts of the town from the German settlement of New Braunfels to the northeast, he noticed a sparcity of foliage to be seen “in this broad landscape. Along the course of the [San Antonio] river a thin edging appears, especially around the edge of the stream, a short ride above the city. Elsewhere, there is only limitless grass and thorny bushes” (148). By the time he made his way to the Commerce Street Bridge located near the middle of downtown, he became more expansive--and eloquent--in his description: We descend to the bridge, which is close down upon the water, as the river, owing to its particular source, never varies in height or temperature. We irresistibly stop to examine it, we are so struck with its beauty. It is of a rich blue and as clear as a crystal, flowing rapidly but noiselessly over pebbles and between reedy banks. One could lean for hours over the bridge-rail. (149)
Two views of San Antonio River: from Commerce Street Bridge looking north and from King William Neighborhood	Several paragraphs later, Olmsted came back to the subject of the spring-fed San Antonio River, when he discovered that it was ideally suited for swimming, or “bathing,” as he called it, although his visit was made during the winter months: The temperature of the river is of just that agreeable elevation that makes you loth to leave a bath, and the color is the ideal blue. Few cities have such a luxury. It remains throughout the year without perceptible change of temperature, and never varies in height or volume. The streets are laid out in such a way that a great number of houses have a garden extending to the bank, and so a bathing-house, which is in constant use. The Mexicans seem half the time about the water. Their plump women, especially, are fine swimmers, and fond of displaying their luxurious buoyancy. (157)
San Antonio River near its spring-fed source	Being especially attracted to fresh flowing water in a typically dry climate, Olmsted naturally included in his account the sources of the major local streams, the San Antonio and San Pedro Springs: The latter is a wooded spot of great beauty, but a mile or two from the town, and boasts a restaurant and beer-garden beyond its natural attractions. The San Antonio Spring may be classed as of the first water among the gems of the natural world. The whole river gushes up in one sparkling burst from the earth. It has all the beautiful accompaniments of a smaller spring, moss, pebbles, seclusion, sparkling sunbeams, and dense overhanging luxuriant foliage. The effect is overpowering. It is beyond your possible conceptions of a spring. You cannot believe your eyes, and almost shrink from sudden metamorphosis by invaded nymphdom. (156-57)
Source of San Pedro Spring in San Pedro Park	Of course, what Olmsted was describing in such animated terms here were the spring-fed sources of San Pedro Creek and its more celebrated counterpart, the San Antonio River. Almost every subsequent literary visitor to San Antonio would comment at one point or another on these two streams of water, in addition to the diverse local inhabitants that gained sustenance from them and the historic works of architecture that had been constructed along or near their fertile banks.