Egbert Viele

For an introduction to Viele and his topological map of Manhattan, click here. In The Twilight Prisoner, more is revealed about Viele and his aspirations as one of the city’s top engineers. The story that Jack, Cora, and Euri learn about him—and his greatest professional disappointment—is absolutely true.

In 1856, Viele was appointed chief engineer of Central Park.  In this capacity, he surveyed the park, creating the map that Jack discovers in Tunnel Number Three. But in the competition to design the park, Viele’s design was rejected in favor of that of the team of English architect Calvert Vaux and American landscape designer Frederick Law Olmsted. As Eleanor Fletcher Bishop notes to Jack, Cora, and Euri, Viele had a fondness for filing lawsuits and, in 1864, Viele took the parks commission to court, claiming that the other competitors had taken his ideas and demanding compensation for the work he had done on the park’s behalf.

Although Viele’s plan shared elements of Vaux and Olmsted’s winning “Greensward Plan”—and pioneered the idea of following the park’s natural topography—it also differed in important ways. Viele’s design included four commercial roads through the park that would have brought far more traffic into it. Also, because he was trained as an engineer rather than as a landscape designer or architect, he conceived of the park less as a series of artistic tableaus than as practical spaces. He regarded the rectangular reservoir that once occupied the spot where the Great Lawn currently resides, for example, as an engineering feat and thus a popular attraction—a view others did not share. But Viele was also a victim of politics (the park commission was split between different political factions that did not favor Viele’s appointment as designer) and his own personality. He had a reputation of swearing at and insulting those he disagreed with, including ladies.

Viele’s lawsuit was only superficially successful--he won the back pay but not the credit he longed for. Throughout the rest of his life, just as Colonel Mann tells Jack, Cora, and Euri, Viele continued to think of himself as the park’s real designer. Adding insult to injury, a few years later Viele lost out again to Vaux and Olmsted in his design for Prospect Park in Brooklyn. Viele was a less visionary designer than the famous team but I believe that since his topographical maps served as the basis for their designs, he deserves some credit for the parks we enjoy today—and their iconic status.