Ask just about any adult or school age child in Riverside about how our village was created and they will tell you about Frederick Law Olmsted and his central role in planning the enterprise along with a few other details.
And we will remember Olmsted and assume that he built the village where generations have lived, loved and reared their families in the midst of beauty and tranquility.
This interpretation gives short shrift to the work of William LeBaron Jenney in the early years of Riverside’s development, work which is arguably second only to that of Olmsted himself.
The exact allocation of credit is, of course, open to debate and interpretation, but it should be noted that the defunct periodical Western Architect actually gave Jenney credit for laying out Riverside, completely ignoring Olmsted.
And Edouard Andre, a contemporary and an acquaintance of Olmsted’s, also attributed Riverside to Jenney in his 1879 work “L’Art des Jardins.”
Let’s look at the life of this onetime Riverside resident, who, while mainly revered as the father of the modern skyscraper, deserves a place of importance right behind Olmsted in our local history.
Jenney was born at Fairhaven, Mass. in 1832 to a prominent New England Puritan family of whalers and ship owners. He was educated at Unity Scientific and Military Academy, Marlboro Academy and Phillips Andover.
In 1850, when Jenney was 17, he talked his father into letting him on board one of the family’s clipper ships so that he could sail to California and join the gold rush. After arriving in California, Jenney chose to continue on to Manila in the Philippines.
Here he hit upon the idea of building a bridge across Luzon and resolved to study engineering. After a brief return to the United States, he embarked for Paris and enrolled in the prestigious Ecole Centrale des Artes et Manufactures, graduating in 1856.
Jenney continued studying art and architecture and roomed with such future stars as James McNeill Whistler, Gustav Eiffel and George DuMaurier. One Thanksgiving Day found Jenney particularly homesick, and the budding gastronome spent his time teaching and his roommates and their French cook the fine art of making a pumpkin pie. It was a smash hit!
After completing his studies, Jenney was appointed an engineer at the Bureau of American Securities, the president of which was William T. Sherman, shortly to become a household name as a Civil War general.
As civil war erupted at home, Jenney stepped up to his duty and applied his engineering skills to the Union cause. He was appointed a captain and aide-de-camp, assigned to duty at Cairo, Ill., building the forts guarding the junction of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers.
Later he was reassigned to Grant’s command, where he had to transport troops across the river at the battle of Shiloh. Jenney commandeered an old out-of- fuel steamboat. Seizing a store of ham and bacon to burn for fuel, he got the troops across. None other than the Secretary of the Treasury reprimanded the affair as a waste of money.
Grant reportedly replied “I’ll burn every ham and side of bacon in my commissary warehouse to win a battle any day.”
At the siege of Vicksburg in 1863, Jenney met Frederick Law Olmsted, who was inspecting conditions of the troops in the field in his capacity as U.S. Sanitary Commissioner.
The two men grew fond of each other, an event which would have consequences a few years later in Riverside. Jenney was transferred to Sherman, his old boss at the Bureau, where he helped build bridges on the infamous “March to the Sea”. He resigned from the Army in 1866 with the rank of major.
Lured by old army contacts to Chicago, Jenney began a career as an architect and landscape designer. His first important work was Grace Episcopal Church at 16th and Wabash and he also later worked on the important city parks of the west side-Garfield, Humboldt and Douglas.
At one point in his early career, Jenney applied for work with his old acquaintance Olmsted, but was turned down. Jenney partnered with John Bogart (who also worked with Olmsted) and L.Y. Schermerhorn (who was a friend of Emery Childs, president of the Riverside Improvement Company) from 1871-87 in the firm of Jenney, Schemerhorn and Bogart, engineers and architects.
The connections are obvious. Olmsted, Vaux and Co. produced the plan for Riverside. Jenney, Schermerhorn and Bogart carried it out.
Jenney built his own home, Fair Lawn, in Riverside at 200 Nuttall Road around 1870 (it burned down 1910) and was among those petitioning for the village’s incorporation in 1875.
Jenney left Riverside in the 1880s and moved to Chicago, eventually building a new home for himself in Buena Park on the North Side. Jenney also designed many of the early prominent homes in Riverside, many of which still stand.
And while supervising the village’s construction, he also built the early public buildings needed to sustain the village’s growth, such as the water tower, the original train depot, the Riverside Hotel and St. Paul’s Episcopal Church.
Although his role in the development of Riverside cannot be overstated, Jenney is primarily revered today as the father of the modern skyscraper, where weight has been transferred from load bearing walls to an iron skeletal frame.
His 1884 Home Insurance Building (now demolished) heralded a revolution in city skylines around the world. Jenney became well known in Paris, Rome, London and Berlin, and he was sought out by architects far and wide.
His practice, whether alone or with various partners, was always considered by Jenney to be just as much a teaching experience as a means of making money. He taught all aspects of the building trade, including heating and plumbing, and gave freely of his time and wisdom to such young architects as Daniel Burnham, Louis Sullivan, Howard Van Doren Shaw, and William Holabird.
Not all his pupils, however, engaged in Jenney-worship. Here’s how the great architect Louis Sullivan, who studied under Jenney, described his erstwhile mentor:
“The Major was a free and easy cultured gentleman, but not an architect except by courtesy of terms. … He spoke French with an accent so atrocious that it jarred Louis’ teeth, while his English jerked about as though it had St. Vitus dance. He was monstrously pop-eyed, with hanging mobile features, sensuous lips, and he disposed of matters easily in the manner of a war veteran who believed he knew what was what. Louis soon found out that the Major was not, really, in his heart, an engineer at all, but by nature, and in toto, a bon vivant, a gourmet …”
Jenney was a romantic and a functionalist, often railing against what he termed “mindless eclecticism.” He helped clear the way for Frank Lloyd Wright, Sullivan, and Mies van der Rohe’s “less is more” approach to architecture.
Throughout, Jenney maintained a keen interest in current events and literature and loved nothing better than the consumption of good food and wine with friends.
Jenney maintained a lifelong correspondence with Olmsted, and they once again found themselves in collaboration at the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. Olmsted designed the fairgrounds and Jenney received the commission for the Horticultural Building.
Jenney’s last work was the memorial at Vicksburg to fallen Illinois soldiers. Failing health forced Jenney to relocate to California in 1903, and he retired from practice in 1905.
Never jealous, always jolly and beloved by many, he died in Los Angeles in 1907, wishing only to be remembered as the man who introduced pumpkin pie to Paris.
