“Apparently spontaneous and incidental”

From Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America (2003). Frederick Law Olmsted decided that he wanted to make Jackson Park fun. He wrote to Daniel Burnham, Director of Works for the 1892–93 World’s Columbian Exposition:

Just as Olmsted sought to conjure an aura of mystery in his landscape, so here he urged the engineering of seemingly accidental moments of charm. The concerts and parades were helpful but were of too “stated or programmed” a nature. What Olmsted wanted were “minor incidents ... of a less evidently prepared character; less formal, more apparently spontaneous and incidental.” He envisioned French horn players on the Wooded Island, their music drifting across the waters. He wanted Chinese lanterns strung from boats and bridges alike. “Why not skipping and dancing masqueraders with tambourines, such as one sees in Italy? Even lemonade peddlers would help if moving about in picturesque dresses; or cake-sellers, appearing as cooks, with flat cap, and in spotless white from top to toe?” On nights when big events in Jackson Park drew visitors away from the Midway, “could not several of the many varieties of ‘heathen,’ black, white and yellow, be cheaply hired to mingle, unobtrusively, but in full native costume, with the crowd on the Main Court?”

Larson adds: “When Burnham read Olmsted’s letter, he must have thought Olmsted had lost his mind.”

Here, as with Olmsted’s dream of boats galore, I cannot help thinking of Steven Millhauser’s visionary environment-maker Martin Dressler.