Genius of Place (63 page)

Over time, Olmsted Brothers also built up an impressive list of original works such as Memorial Park in Maplewood, New Jersey, the grounds of the University of Idaho, and the Seattle park system.

Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. fulfilled his uneasy destiny and truly became “leader of the van.” He helped Harvard, his alma mater, to set up the first university course in landscape architecture ever offered in America. Following in his father's footsteps, he also became a pioneering environmentalist. When the bill to create the National Park Service was written in 1916, Rick contributed some of the key language and phrases. He helped establish national parks in the Everglades, the Great Smoky Mountains, and Acadia in Maine.

Rick also served alongside Daniel Burnham on the prestigious McMillan Commission, which reorganized various Washington, D.C., public spaces such as the Mall, the White House grounds, and Jefferson Memorial into a more coherent scheme. This experience pushed him into urban planning, far further than his father ever ventured. He drew up plans for the future growth of cities such as Detroit, Pittsburgh, and Boulder, Colorado. He also designed Forest Hills Gardens, a lovely and verdant 147-acre community smack in the middle of New York City (the community is not to be confused with nearby Forest Hills). This is Olmsted junior's masterpiece as surely as Central Park is his father's. Robert A. M. Stern, dean of the Yale school of architecture, recently described Forest Hills Gardens as “one of the finest planned communities ever.”

Olmsted Brothers carried on—in one form or another—for many decades. Along the way, the firm employed such notables as Frank Lloyd Wright Jr. and Arthur Shurcliff, known among other things as the landscape architect of Colonial Williamsburg. Marion Olmsted, who never married and continued to live at Fairsted, was also involved in the family business. A talented photographer, she took pictures of sites and reputedly even did some drafting work. But this was a different era, so the contributions of an Olmsted sister to Olmsted
Brothers
success—unsigned and uncredited—are impossible to reconstruct.

The firm continued well beyond John's death in 1920, one year before Mary's death. It was still going strong when Marion died in 1948. It even outlasted Rick, who retired in 1949 and died in 1957.

After there were no brothers involved in the business, the name was changed to Olmsted Associates (never mind that no Olmsteds were involved, period). The name held considerable equity, enough to propel the firm to 1980—when the offices moved from Brookline to Fremont, New Hampshire—enough even to carry it all the way to 2000. In the final year of the millennium, the business finally shut down. By then, the impact on the American landscape of Frederick Law Olmsted and his successors was—quite simply—indelible.

Olmsted's influence also extends far beyond his own firm. From 1857 onward, there isn't a single U.S. landscape architect that doesn't owe a debt to Olmsted. During his lifetime, he provided counsel not only to William Hammond Hall of Golden Gate Park but also Horace Cleveland, who designed the Minneapolis and Omaha park systems. Olmsted also carried on an active correspondence with George Kessler, the prolific designer of Houston's Hermann Park; Deming Park in Terre Haute, Indiana; Overton Park in Memphis; and a variety of other places. Not one of these is an Olmsted park, yet his fingerprints—the naturalistic designs, emphasis on ease of use, bold feats of engineering when necessary—are all over them.

Olmsted's reach extends to the current era, to such modern landscape architects as Peter Walker. Considered one of the field's preeminent practitioners, Walker has designed a vast array of spaces, including Burnett Park in Fort Worth, Texas; the grounds of a new airport in Bangkok; and the campus surrounding Pixar's Emeryville, California, headquarters. In 2004, Walker's San Francisco firm won a competition to design a memorial on the site of New York City's World Trade Center. “With my work, I always keep in mind that the goal is creating something socially useful,” Walker told me. “I think that comes mostly from Olmsted. That social vision is the thing that defines his greatness.”

 

Olmsted also left behind a formidable literary legacy. During the 1850s, his dispatches from the South were among the first works to “signal” (in the words of his friend Edwin Godkin) that the
New York Times
was a serious paper devoted to vital issues.
The Cotton Kingdom
, the abridged version of Olmsted's Southern trilogy, first published in 1861, remains in
print to this day. While in prison, Malcolm X read
The Cotton Kingdom
and later credited Olmsted with providing a startlingly unvarnished look at the institution of slavery. In an introduction to the 1953 edition, historian Arthur Schlesinger described
The Cotton Kingdom
as “the nearest thing posterity has to an exact transcription of a civilization which time has tinted with hues of romantic legend.”

Olmsted was also involved in the startup of the
Nation
and helped steer that publication on to its course as a prominent left-leaning journal devoted to broad inquiry. Since then, the
Nation
has featured an incredibly varied group of contributors: George Orwell, Ralph Nader, Hannah Arendt, Langston Hughes, Hunter S. Thompson, and Naomi Klein.

And then there are all the names and terms that have entered the language—Olmsted loved to come up with these. Drive down any divided road, even one of terribly modest and uninspired design, and chances are it will be called a “parkway,” a term coined by Olmsted and Vaux. Visit the wild section of a fair, filled with rides and carnival barkers, and chances are it will be called the “midway.” That's a nod to the Midway Plaisance, a stretch of Olmsted and Vaux's original 1871 Chicago parks plan that wound up housing the Ferris wheel and other attractions during the 1893 World's Fair. Or you could visit Millbrae, California. In 1865, Bank of California president Darius Mills rejected Olmsted's design for his estate. But the name Olmsted suggested stuck, and today Millbrae is a community of 20,000 people just south of San Francisco International Airport. And then there's Fenway Park. The home of the Boston Red Sox takes its name from the nearby place that Olmsted called the Back Bay Fens.

 

Yes, Olmsted is still very much with us. You can read his work; let one of his choice phrases “fall trippingly from your tongue,” as he once put it. Better yet, you can visit one of his green spaces. These transcendent creations provide a window into his spirit as surely as regarding the
Starry Night
will rouse Van Gogh.

Perhaps you have a favorite Olmsted spot. I know I do. I walk down the steps of Central Park's Bethesda Terrace, past the
Angel of the Waters
statue, and make my way to the edge of the Lake. Then I follow the shoreline to the Bow Bridge and walk across. I like to stand at the water's edge, soaking up this peerless composition: Vaux's beautiful bridge, both spanning the Lake and reflected in the Lake, and Olmsted's untamed Ramble all around.

But this is so far beyond a mere work of landscape architecture. Looking around, I'm always struck by the variety of people—every income group, every nationality, young and old, enjoying a dizzying number of different activities. Here it is, the twenty-first century, and one of Central Park's original purposes remains very much intact. In the truest sense, this place belongs to everyone. I think Olmsted would be proud.

NOTES

KEY

Unless otherwise indicated, correspondence is from the Frederick Law Olmsted Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Loeb Library
: Used to cite letters from the John Charles Olmsted Papers, Francis Loeb Library, Graduate School of Design, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

NYPL
: New York Public Library.

Papers
: Used to cite the multivolume collection of Olmsted's writings, reports, and other documents edited by Charles Beveridge. On first reference, a full citation of the volume will be provided; for example,
The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted
, vol. 1,
The Formative Years
(Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1977). Subsequent citations of the same volume will use an abbreviated form, with the volume and page numbers separated by a colon, as in
Papers
, 1:30.

The following initials will be used for frequently cited figures:

1
“Each of you knows”:
Daniel Burnham speech of March 25, 1893, Ryerson and Burnham Libraries, the Art Institute of Chicago.

2
“I was born for”:
FLO to JHO, March 27, 1856.

4
“When Olmsted is blue”:
George Templeton Strong,
Diary of the Civil War, 1860–1865
(New York: Macmillan, 1962), 243.

7
During this period, Hartford:
Lee Paquette,
Only More So: The History of East Hartford, 1783–1976
(East Hartford, CT: Raymond Library, 1976), 29.

8
In 1632, this original:
Henry King Olmsted and George Kemp Ward,
Genealogy of the Olmsted Family in America
(New York: A. T. De La Mare Printing and Publishing, 1912), x.

8
Voting records show:
Paquette,
Only More So
, 31.

8
Fred's very first memory:
FLO, “Passages in the Life of an Unpractical Man,” reprinted in FLO Jr. and Theodora Kimball, eds.,
Forty Years of Landscape Architecture
, vol. 1 (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1922).

9
suffering from postpartum depression:
For more on this topic, see Melvin Kalfus,
Frederick Law Olmsted: The Passion of a Public Artist
(New York: New York University Press, 1990), 96.

9
she had attended:
MAO to JHO, April 14, 1846.

9
“I chanced to stray”:
Autobiographical fragment, undated, FLO Papers, Library of Congress.

9
“No a/c kept”:
JO diary, March 12, 1826, FLO Papers, Library of Congress.

10
“celebrated beauty of the day”:
Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe: Compiled from Her Letters and Journals
, pt. 2 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1890), 30.

11
To learn grammar:
Books FLO used drawn from JO diary and Theodora Kimball's notes for
Forty Years of Landscape Architecture
, both in Library of Congress.

11
“The way of man”:
Noah Webster,
The American Spelling Book
(Hartford: Hudson, 1822), 43.

12
“infinite love”:
Autobiographical Fragment A, FLO Papers, Library of Congress.

12
“Miss Naomi Rockwell buried”:
JO diary, February 8, 1829.

13
“I was strangely uneducated”:
FLO to Elizabeth Baldwin Whitney, December 16, 1890.

13
Fred headed out:
Details regarding FLO childhood rambles drawn mostly from Autobiographical Fragment A.

14
“I was under no”:
Ibid.

15
explored his grandmother's book collection:
Ibid.

15
“strong discipline”:
Hartford Courant
, January 19, 1830.

15
“I was very active, imaginative”:
Autobiographical fragment, reprinted in
The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted
, vol. 1,
The Formative Years
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 110.

16
Fred lived with three:
Details of life with Joab Brace drawn mostly from Autobiographical Fragment A.

17
poison sumac:
Autobiographical Fragment B, FLO Papers, Library of Congress.

17
Reverend George Clinton Van Vechten Eastman:
Papers
, 1:110.

18
“we begin to feel”:
JO to FLO, Oct 7, 1838.

19
“I hear Fred'k coming”:
JO to JHO, 1840 [no month or day specified].

19
“Dear brother,” begins a letter:
FLO to JHO, June 9, 1840.

20
Mrs. Howard's boardinghouse:
Laura Wood Roper,
FLO: A Biography of Frederick Law Olmsted
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 18.

20
He hated the job:
Evidence that Olmsted hated working at Benkard and Hutton drawn from FLO to JHO, August 29, 1840, and FLO to Charles Brace, June 22, 1845.

21
As captain of the
Huntress
:
Henry King Olmsted and George Kemp Ward,
Genealogy of the Olmsted Family in America
(New York: A. T. De La Mare Printing and Publishing, 1912), 36.

21
In 1777, Olmsted was:
Joseph Olcott Goodwin,
East Hartford: Its History and Traditions
(Hartford: Case, Lockwood, and Brainard, 1879), 83–84.

22
teamed up with Jim Goodwin:
Papers
, 1:136.

23
Fox impressed Fred:
FLO to JHO, April 8, 1843.

23
“Now's the time”:
Ibid.

24
an almanac, a sea chest:
Laura Wood Roper,
FLO: A Biography of Frederick Law Olmsted
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 22.

24
“drowndered”:
FLO to JHO, April 10, 1843.

24
nearly thirty other ships:
FLO's
Ronaldson
voyage diary covering April 24–August 9, 1843, FLO Papers, Library of Congress.