THE IMPROVED MAN

"He had come a long way to this blue lawn,
and his dream must have seemed so close that
he could hardly fail to grasp it."
—The Great Gatsby

"Il buono e el bello."
—Motto engraved above the door
of Andrew Jackson Downing's home

In 1850, Andrew Jackson Downing looked out from the highest tower of Warwick Castle and decided that to England it had been given to show the growth of man in highest development of class but to America has been reserved the greater blessing of solving for the world the true problem of humanity—that of the abolition of all castes, and the recognition of the divine rights of every human soul.

There was an enormous Warwick vase on Downing's estate, etched with fantastic arabesques around the bowl, and set out at the end of his splendid, velvet lawn it formed one of his exquisite vistas of the river and the rolling hills of the Hudson Valley.

His perfect little pictures in which every tree, every magnolia bush and wisteria arbor directed his guests' eyes toward exactly what Downing wanted them see the river the hills the natural beauty—and away from what he did not want them to see which were the raw industrial town of Newburgh, New York, with its factories, and its cotton mills, and the herds of pigs running loose in its unpaved streets and the working part of Downing's estate, the tree nurseries and the botanical gardens where he still made his living for at Highland Gardens work was banished.

Downing's guests came downstairs in the morning to find the white gravel paths already raked. The plush, tinted lawns already rolled as if by invisible hands.

And beside their plates were the fresh-cut blossoms deemed most fitting to their personalities tea roses and honeysuckle for the tenderhearted violets and pansies for the modest and shy marigolds and asters and carnations for the brilliant and gay

And after breakfast there would be boating and long walks, and archery, and books and conversation.

And after dinner, out on the moonlit summer lawn they would make music, and sample new wines they would sing Oh, Fly Me to the Prairie and Rocked in the Cradle of the Deep, and there would be charades around the giant Warwick vase but Downing who was good at everything was too reserved to make himself understood.

With Downing there were always mysteries within mysteries, secrets within secrets beginning with himself. In social intercourse he was like two persons: the one conversed with you pleasantly upon every topic, the other watched you from behind that pleasant talk, like a sentinel

At sixteen Andrew Jackson Downing was a slender, watchful boy, with luminous brown eyes. Son of a wheelwright, from an old Puritan family— (a man who had left his first wife and family in Lexington, Massachusetts, and went West to start over again to raise a new family and speculate in real estate and start a tree nursery)

His formal education was over. He knew the classics and how to make architectural drawings and landscape drawings and translate articles from the original French. He liked to swim across the broad, deceptive river with its treacherous crosscurrents and take walks in the woods and fields along its banks observing everything—

It might not have been enough.

Andrew inherited the tree nursery and he was soon renowned in Newburgh for cultivating one-hundred-and-fifty varieties of apples and two hundred separate varieties of pear. Turning out fruit more quickly than the industrialists turned out styles of hats or shoes in their factories down in the town.

That was where he might have stayed.

One more quietly frustrated, self-made man in a provincial town. Like thousands of other self-made men, stranded along every river and prairie bluff of the sprawling new nation. Churning out his pears and apples. Then something happened.

A miraculous story—a ridiculous story, really. A purely American story. He met a baron.

The Baron Alois Freiherr von Lederer, Austria's consul-general in New York who also liked to walk the hills and woods, collecting rare specimens of rocks and shells. One day he came across another rare specimen the quiet boy, with luminous brown eyes, and before the afternoon was over they had become fast friends.

Downing showed the Baron all of his favorite places, and the Baron taught him botany and mineralogy, and introduced him to the great families that lived along the river. He brought him to Edward Armstrong, who lived in a Greek Revival temple up over the Danskammer—the flat, jutting rock where Henry Hudson had once seen the Indians at their pagan dances Edward Armstrong, the beau ideal of river society, who played the violin and wrote poems, and danced a perfect double pigeonwing, and raised thoroughbred horses in his stables and Southdown sheep along his broad meadows and his wife, who painted watercolors, and spoke flawless French and Italian, and played the piano, and who was witty and gay and beautiful—

Downing set out to study them, as he would the rocks and the plants, and the dead birds and the mummified bones of lizards he found in the fields and the woods. And they took him in charmed by his innate good manners, by his quiet and graceful nature and Downing decided to resist his mother's urgings that he apprentice as a clerk in a dry goods store.

By nineteen he was landscape architect and gardener to the great, old river families more aloof in their way than even the codfish aristocracy of Boston or the planters of Charleston—these Van Rensselaers and Van Wycks, these Roosevelts and Delanos, these Schuylers and De Peysters and Van Cortlandts and Brinckerhoffs.

Yet who were willing to accommodate talented and persistent outsiders, ever since the English first showed up in New Amsterdam harbor with their men o' war.

It was a bad time for the river families. They were cashing in their land down in the unspeakable City. Building redoubts against the tenant farmers they treated like so many serfs. Throwing up one imitation Greek temple after another, in tribute to the austere ideals of the Republic they despised.

Even importing Mayan ruins stone warriors and jaguars and winged serpents, to plant up in the hills and pretend that they had always been there and always would be never mind the Indians who used to dance along the Danskammer rock or the unfortunate Tories whose lands and homes they nested in like so many wasps. Downing taught them: how to blend in

He taught them how to make their homes and their gardens look like something that had sprung up naturally from the Hudson landscape. He taught them that landscape and architecture must fit the country around it. Both must heed the land, the climate where they were set but neither was supposed to imitate nature.

Nature must always serve man Nature was always there to be improved upon whether that meant vegetables and fruits or landscapes or human civilization (Downing regretted the absence of the Indians along the Danskammer but felt it was inevitable that they should go.)

Above all Downing was determined to improve himself. He learned how to dress and to dance. He ate and drank little, never used tobacco. Wore his thick dark hair long over his collar. Visitors thought he might have been a Spanish aristocrat, fresh from the Escorial.

He was tall and erect, spoke and walked with an easy, learned elegance. He learned how to be gay and jocular with the gay, and silent with the silent He learned to be many things to many people, and they loved him for it.

And then one day he came to the great estate just across the river. He must have seen it many times, growing up. Swimming across the deceptive, deep-currented Hudson—

It was called Locust Grove, for the trees grown so high that their branches entwined like the vaulted ceiling of a cathedral. (he could match and surpass the old families in taste but there was no getting around age) The estate of John Peter DeWint, who had a hand in the Caribbean sugar trade and real estate, and who owned ferry boats and whaling ships and railroad stocks and whose wife was a granddaughter of John Adams, who liked to fill her sumptuous gardens with beautiful young painters and writers, and chocolate-box soldiers from up West Point in their smart, gray tunics and whose daughter was a bright young, birdlike woman named Caroline, with merry blue eyes and blond hair and a ready wit.

They were married with a grand dance and supper, and Caroline watched through a telescope across the river as he built their new home. Tying a white cloth to a tree when he would be back in the evening, daubing a board with a black mark when he would not be coming Home was everything to Downing it was the heart not only of the family but the Republic as well what bound man to place in the ever-expanding, shifting nation Highland Gardens would be proof of Downing's theories in action. A Tudor Gothic villa of sepia sandstone where inside

All the forms and colors, the style of the furniture, the frames of the mirrors and pictures, the patterns of the carpets, were harmonious There

Even the daylight is dusk—or, more properly speaking, pregnant with light...a sort of imprisoned sunshine, something warm and deep like a reflection of Downing's brown eyes.

While outside were his tinted lawns, and copses of elms and lindens, and ashes and yellow horse chestnuts, and spruces and fern-leaved beeches and white horse chestnuts, and urns and conservatories and sundials and hermitages, and other improvements upon Nature.

His Warwick vase and his Borghese vase, and covered seats and weeping fountains and prospect towers and alpine paths and lily ponds and above all porches. Porches were Downing's grand idea in microcosm the vital link that tied the home to the outdoors, the civilized to the wild. For Downing was doing more than simply showing how to build a villa he was inventing The suburb.

Just as the porch united home and nature, the suburbs could be suspended halfway between the barbarism of the wilderness, and the grime and din of the city. With the new railroads and steamboats, the old notions of time and space being half annihilated Downing anticipated the rapid multiplication of pretty cottages and villas in many parts of North America that would in and of themselves promote a virtuous and educated republic

And now everyone came to his perfect lawn—the poets and painters and witty young people, and the West Point cadets in their chocolate-box uniforms

It was a paradise where friends met congenial friend and where the feast of reason and flow of soul mingled with delicately seasoned meats, fruits, and wines His fabulous nurseries and greenhouses filled with flowers and plants and trees his father-in-law's whalers brought home from around the world. His books on the virtuous and elegant and above all affordable home favorite wedding presents ubiquitous on the nightstands of romantic young couples and securing Downing's reputation as The National Arbiter of Taste

Yet home was not all it seemed. The sepia sandstone actually stucco cunningly applied. And even so the debts kept mounting. The house had replaced too many of the profitable nursery trees and Downing was always extravagant.

Late one night a guest in the library saw to his amazement a bookshelf swing open on noiseless hinges revealing a secret chamber where Downing labored into the night, under the white plaster busts of his heroes Dante and Milton and Petrarch and Franklin and Linnaeus and Scott staring down at him as he edited the Horticulturist, and wrote his books on landscaping and architecture, and fruit and botany.

But then even Old John Peter DeWint sued him over money and put encumbrances on his home, and soon Downing was forced to sell the splendid tree nursery. The home and the dream slowly slipping away, like some lovely, disabled sailboat carried off on the Hudson.

His friends preserved him. They kept him afloat until he won his suit, got the liens removed from his home. In 1850 Downing was commissioned to transform the bleak and fetid gullies that surrounded the White House and the Capitol into a grand national gardens.

By the time he sailed to England in July he was a celebrity feted everywhere he went. And he in turn was enthralled by London. By the galleries of art, public libraries, parks and gardens, which have raised the people in social civilization to a far higher degree than what we have yet attained in republican America

Where the slums were teeming with immigrants, filling up with radical Germans and starving Irish. The City of New York bursting at the seams the sewers ran uphill when it rained spewing blood and butcher's offal into the streets

There was blood on the paving stones of fashionable Astor Place thirty-one dead in a riot over an actor named Die Again Macready there was the Doctors' Riot and the Flour Riots and the Dead Rabbits' Riot and the Police Riot. Visitors to the city were appalled by the restless, deeply sunk eye, the excited wearied features of its denizens.

But Downing had plans he always had plans he brought back from England a somber young architect named Calvert Vaux whom he had met in a picture gallery and convinced to return with him to America on the spot. Introduced him to a phlegmatic correspondent for the Horticulturist named Frederick Law Olmstead.For Downing had decided

If the people would not come to the country why not bring the country to the people?

What was needed was a park. A vast, new park that would have room for gardens and zoos, and concert halls and art galleries, and science museums and horticultural societies and a free dairy, so mothers would not have to buy the blue-tinted, tubercular milk from cows kept by Manhattan distilleries, and fed on old whiskey mash.

Above all there would be ladies and gentlemen of accomplishment such as Downing and his friends so the poorer classes could improve themselves just through their example. (There would be absolutely no room for doing the sorts of things the Irish and Germans liked to do on their holidays that is brawling drinking and playing baseball.)

By the summer of 1852 plans for the park were proceeding apace, and he had commissions in Newport, and plans to start a new magazine called Country Gentleman and Downing was only 36 and he and Caroline only seemed to grow more handsome, even younger with age.

That June they held a feast of roses, and afterwards the company rowed out to another party, across the river— (rowing out on the shimmering water under the gaze of the Mayan jaguars and warriors and feathered serpents, brooding over the Hudson after a thousand years in the jungles of the Yucatan—)

There one of Downing's friends noticed a young woman a handsome woman, with the traces of hard experience in her face lost in a reverie in the summer moonlight as a child snatching a brief dream of peace between spasms of mortal agony.

She was a widow, a woman named Matilda Wadsworth, a friend to both Downing and his wife. And as they drifted back across the calm river at midnight, Downing confided that she had a tragic, romantic past. Years ago it was she he used to swim across the river to see.

No doubt he could swim it still but if he had to die he would prefer that it be by drowning— More mysteries and romantic notions, influenced no doubt by old stories, and moonlight on the river.

A month later there was no more talk of tragedy or drowning Mrs. Wadsworth was as sunny as the day, which was one of the loveliest of summer. Waiting at the private dock of Highland Gardens, with Downing and Caroline and the family for the next steamboat to take them down to Manhattan.

In Albany the boys ran through the early morning streets calling "Hurrah for Harry of the West! Take the Henry Clay!" and "Be in New York first! Take the Armenia. No decent American would board the Henry Clay!" All that day the slender, white ships raced each other down through the ancient reaches of the river.

Both swift as arrows shot over Downing's perfect lawn until the mad Captain Collyer tied down the Henry Clay's boiler valves and fed fat cords of pine into the fire so that it shook and hummed, and raced ahead. This inferno bearing down full speed on the dock at Highland Gardens where Downing and his family waited.

They got on. Another mystery.

Perhaps Downing was simply in a hurry to get up to Newport or maybe it was that he loved the steamboats floating jewel boxes with their chandeliers and their orchestras and decktop cotillions. Their velvet couches and magnificent carpets used by drummers and egg dealers and peanut politicians and self-made self-righteous self-satisfied men of every variety.

Speechifying about politics and religion and the great issues of the day over their beefsteaks and buckwheat cakes, and baptized toast. Sleeping five hundred to a cabin, in long white rows of triple-tiered beds. They were another one of his Parks, another one of his Porches, his republican openings—

By three o'clock the race was nearly won. The Henry Clay speeding through the Tappan Zee, almost to Manhattan, when someone noticed the first wisp of smoke, floating up through the hatchway. A fireman staggered up on deck, clothes on fire, and within seconds the whole midships was in flames. The passengers screaming and running to aft while Collyer too late emerged from his fever dream, swung hard for the east bank. The engineer tying down the throttle before he fled the boiler room. She burrowed twenty-five feet up the shore, and eight feet into a railroad embankment. The fire blowing back toward the stern which lay still in deep water. The passengers trapped there, those who could not swim but Downing calmly strode the deck. Helping his wife and children into the water. Handing them down deck chairs to float on and Caroline made it to shore where she gathered up her family, and watched the rescues and the dredging for bodies 'til nightfall.

The Hudson calm now, bodies still floating in the clear, moonlit water. Until at last she returned to the house at Highland Gardens, where they came to tell her the next day that her mother and husband were dead. Downing last seen trying to help the struggling Mrs. Wadsworth but they found them drowned wrapped in each other's arms.

On the floor of the Senate Stephen Douglas and Charles Sumner compared him to Washington and Caroline had to sell off the house, and the furnishings and the ornaments, butEventually she remarried and the house was torn down like so many of the grand homes Downing had landscaped along the Hudson. His widow and friends put up a monument in Washington in the shape of the great Warwick vase that had sat upon his perfect lawn.

Round the bowl were the words that he had written: Plant spacious parks in your cities, and unloose their gates as wide as the gates of the morning, to the whole people. As there are no dark places at noonday, so education and culture—the true sunshine of the soul—will banish the plague-spots of democracy; and the dread of the ignorant exclusive who has no faith in the refinement of a republic...

Nothing else remained save for the great park in the middle of New York and the mysteries.

© Copyright Harper's Magazine 2000

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