Frederick Law Olmsted

LELAND STANFORD JR. UNIVERSITY.

The shaded buildings correspond to the first six advised to be built at once by Gen. Walker, and would accomodate about 200 Students (32500 sq. ft.)

These buildings with their L additions and the others shown in dotted lines include the whole series of School buildings proposed by Gen. Walker, and would be sufficient for 600 Students. (71500 sq. ft.) He assumes that this would be all that would be needed for the first five or ten years.

All the other School buildings inside the first quadrangle of streets would be very nearly double the floor space and would therefor accomodate about 1500 Students. (138200 sq. ft.)

Inside this first quadrangle of streets there is also room for:--

1st. Church or Large Assembly Hall.

2rd. Library.

3rd. Art Museum.

4th. Museum of Natural History.

[large blue notation: 96]

The three quadrangles with the buildings as shown would afford very ample accomodation for 5000 Students, according to the rate of increase stated by Gen. Walker. (421400 sq. ft.)

The Shops would furnish 75000 sq. ft. more floor surface.

Brookline, Mass.

11th. February 1887.

Brookline, Mass. 14th July, 1889

[Large blue notation: 272]

The Hon. Leland Stanford,

Dear Sir: We are completing and expect to send in a day or two the last of the series of working drawings for the grading of the streets and approaches of the university prepared under your instructions of last Fall.

Among them there will be the drawings for the terrace walls north of Garden Avenue designed with a view to the use of a good deal of irregular stone struck off the blocks sit in the buildings.

We have today received a note from the Engineer reporting that grading operations are expected to begin tomorrow and to be prosecuted rapidly. But he adds that you have expressed a doubt about adhering to the plan in respect to the panels for shrubbery and an intention to write to us on the subject. We think we should advise you without delay that a

change of the plan in this particular would involve changes in [these?] particulars. We should have given different grades to all of the streets north of Garden Avenue if we had not had these features in view. If, therefore, you decide to abandon it, the plans should be returned to us at once and a new set prepared. In that case we shall need specific instructions from you what to do with the spaces which we have left with little variation from the natural surface intending that they shall be filled by shrubbery over the surface of which a comprehensive view of the principal buildings of the university would be had by all coming up the main avenue.

The question is as to where the balance of disadvantages lies. Knowing [that those]of this one place were very prominent to you, we had been slow to assume it fixed and it had been much on our minds for more than two years without our being able to devise any arrangement to which the objections did not seem to us much more serious and without the suggestion of any other arrangements

coming to us that would meet requirements that you had prescribed.

You will remember that the expedient for keeping view open was devised after discussion with you in 1884; that with your approval it was incorporated in our plan; was fully set forth, not only graphically, in the large drawings brought to Washington the following Spring, but in the explanatory verbal statement printed with them, and that it appeared distinctly in the large perspective drawing of the architects, afterwards photolithographed. Last fall it was brought again to your attention. We refer to the facts because we should feel not a little mortified to have expended all the labors we have upon these working drawings without having been fully assured that your assent had been well considered, reviewed and made complete and final.