Frederick Law Olmsted
Frederick Law Olmsted was an American landscape architect, journalist, social critic, and public administrator. He is considered to be the father of landscape architecture in the United States. Olmsted was famous for co-designing many well-known urban parks with his partner Calvert Vaux, beginning with Central Park in New York City, which led to numerous other urban park designs including Prospect Park in Brooklyn, Cadwalader Park in Trenton, New Jersey, and Forest Park in Portland, Oregon.
Olmsted's projects encompassed comprehensive park systems, planned communities, and institutional campuses across North America. His major works included the country's first coordinated system of public parks and parkways in Buffalo, New York, the Emerald Necklace in Boston, Massachusetts, the Grand Necklace of Parks in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and parks for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. He designed one of the first planned communities in the United States, Riverside, Illinois, and created master plans for universities including University of California, Berkeley, Stanford University, and the University of Chicago. Notable individual projects included the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, North Carolina, Mount Royal Park in Montreal, Quebec, and landscape work for the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C.
In 1883, Olmsted established his landscape architecture and planning consultancy at Fairsted in Brookline, Massachusetts. The firm was carried on and expanded by his sons, Frederick Jr. and John C., under the name Olmsted Brothers. Beyond design work, Olmsted was an early leader in the conservation movement, contributing to the preservation of Niagara Falls, the Adirondack region, and the National Park system. During the Civil War, he served as head of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, organizing medical services for the Union Army. The quality of his work was widely recognized by contemporaries; Daniel Burnham said of him, "He paints with lakes and wooded slopes; with lawns and banks and forest-covered hills; with mountainsides and ocean views...." His work set a standard of excellence that continues to influence landscape architecture in the United States.
Early life and education
Olmsted was born in Hartford, Connecticut, on April 26, 1822. His father, John Olmsted, was a prosperous merchant who took a lively interest in nature, people, and places; Frederick Law and his younger brother, John Hull Olmsted, also showed this interest. His mother, Charlotte Law Olmsted, died from an overdose before his fourth birthday in 1826. His father remarried in 1827 to Mary Ann Bull, who shared her husband's strong love of nature and had perhaps a more cultivated taste. Their children were Charlotte, Mary, Owen, Bertha, Ada, and Albert Olmsted. The Olmsted ancestors arrived in the early 1600s from Essex, England.Olmsted began attending Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, in 1837 to study surveying with Frederick Barton, leaving when Barton left in 1838. When he was almost ready to enter Yale College at a young age, sumac poisoning weakened his eyes, so he abandoned college plans. After working as an apprentice seaman, merchant, and journalist, he settled on a farm in January 1848 on the south shore of Staten Island. His father helped him acquire this farm, and he renamed it from Akerly Homestead to Tosomock Farm. It was later renamed "The Woods of Arden" by owner Erastus Wiman. The house in which Olmsted lived still stands at 4515 Hylan Boulevard, near Woods of Arden Road.
Career
Journalism
Olmsted had a significant career in journalism. In 1850 he traveled to England to visit public gardens, where he was greatly impressed by Joseph Paxton's Birkenhead Park. He subsequently wrote and published Walks and Talks of an American Farmer in England in 1852. This supported his getting additional work. His visit to Birkenhead Park inspired his later contribution to the design of Central Park in New York City.Interested in the slave economy, he was commissioned by the New York Daily Times to embark on an extensive research journey through the American South and Texas from 1852 to 1857. His dispatches to the Times were collected into three volumes: A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States, A Journey Through Texas, A Journey in the Back Country. The critic Charles Eliot Norton described the books as "the most important contribution to an exact acquaintance with the conditions and result of slavery in this country that have ever been published."
These are considered vivid first-person accounts of the antebellum South. A one-volume abridgment, Journeys and Explorations in the Cotton Kingdom, was published in England during the first six months of the American Civil War, at the suggestion of Olmsted's English publisher.
To this, he wrote a new introduction. He stated his views on the effect of slavery on the economy and social conditions of the southern states:
He argued that slavery had made the slave states inefficient and backward both economically and socially. He said that the profits of slavery were enjoyed by no more than 8,000 owners of large plantations; a somewhat larger group had about the standard of living of a New York City policeman, but the proportion of the free white men who were as well-off as a Northern working man was small. Slavery meant that 'the proportion of men improving their condition was much less than in any Northern community; and that the natural resources of the land were strangely unused, or were used with poor economy.'
He thought that the lack of a Southern white middle class and the general poverty of lower-class whites prevented the development of many civil amenities that were taken for granted in the North.
Between his travels in Europe and the South, Olmsted served as an editor for Putnam's Magazine for two years and as an agent with Dix, Edwards and Co., before the company's insolvency during the Panic of 1857. Olmsted provided financial support for, and occasionally wrote for, the magazine The Nation, which was founded in 1865. "Olmsted spent much of his free time working without pay as an editorial assistant to Godkin. It was a labor of love."
New York City's Central Park
, the landscape architect from Newburgh, New York, was one of the first to propose developing New York City's Central Park in his role as publisher of The Horticulturist magazine. A friend and mentor to Olmsted, Downing introduced him to the English-born architect Calvert Vaux, whom Downing had brought to the U.S. as his architectural collaborator. After Downing died in July 1852 in a widely publicized fire on the Hudson River steamboat Henry Clay, Olmsted and Vaux entered the Central Park design competition together, against Egbert Ludovicus Viele among others. Vaux had invited the less experienced Olmsted to participate in the design competition with him, having been impressed with Olmsted's theories and political contacts. Prior to this, in contrast with the more experienced Vaux, Olmsted had never designed or executed a landscape design.Their Greensward Plan was announced in 1858 as the winning design. On his return from the South, Olmsted began executing their plan almost immediately. Olmsted and Vaux continued their informal partnership to design Prospect Park in Brooklyn from 1865 to 1873. That was followed by other projects. Vaux remained in the shadow of Olmsted's grand public personality and social connections.
The design of Central Park embodies Olmsted's social consciousness and commitment to egalitarian ideals. Influenced by Downing and his observations regarding social class in England, China, and the American South, Olmsted believed that the common green space must always be equally accessible to all citizens, and was to be defended against private encroachment. This principle is now fundamental to the idea of a "public park", but was not assumed as necessary then. Olmsted's tenure as Central Park commissioner was a long struggle to preserve that idea.
U.S. Sanitary Commission
In 1861, Olmsted took leave as director of Central Park to work in Washington, D.C., as Executive Secretary of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, a precursor to the Red Cross. He tended to the wounded during the American Civil War. In 1862, during Union General George B. McClellan's Peninsula Campaign, he headed the medical effort for the sick and wounded at White House plantation in New Kent County, which had a boat landing on the Pamunkey River.He was one of the six founding members of the Union League Club of New York.
He helped to recruit and outfit three African-American regiments of the United States Colored Troops in New York City. He contributed to organizing a Sanitary Fair, which raised one million dollars for the United States Sanitary Commission.
He worked for the Sanitary Commission to the point of exhaustion: "Part of the problem was his need to maintain control over all aspects of the commission's work. He refused to delegate and he had an appetite for authority and power." By January 1863, a friend wrote: "Olmsted is in an unhappy, sick, sore mental state.... He works like a dog all day and sits up nearly all night... works with steady, feverish intensity till four in the morning, sleeps on a sofa in his clothes, and breakfasts on strong coffee and pickles!!!" His overwork and lack of sleep led to his being in a perpetual state of irritability, which wore on the people with whom he worked: "Exhausted, ill and having lost the support of the men who put him in charge, Olmsted resigned on Sept. 1, 1863." Yet within a month he was on his way to California.
Gold mining project in California
In 1863, Olmsted went west to become the manager of the newly established Rancho Las Mariposas–Mariposa gold mining estate in the Sierra Nevada mountains in California. The estate had been sold by John C. Fremont to New York banker, Morris Ketchum, in January of that same year. The mine was unsuccessful. "By 1865, the Mariposa Company was bankrupt, Olmsted returned to New York, and the land and mines were sold at a sheriff's sale."Before he returned to New York, however, he served on the first board of commissioners for managing the newly established Yosemite Valley and Mariposa Grove land grants.