Frederick Law Olmstead National Parks

The Olmsted Parks: Central Park and Prospect Park

Before Central Park and Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, no large public space designed solely for recreation existed in any American city. Olmsted and his partner, the architect Calvert Vaux, had to virtually invent the American park. A pastoral-minded visionary comfortable working with hard urban realities, Olmsted was ideally suited to the task. His mastery of the technological, economic, esthetic, social, and political implications of each park gave it an enduring place in the life of the city

Democracy in Dirt and Trees

Like many reformers, Olmsted believed he knew what was best for people. His principles were embodied in his parks, where he translated "democracy into trees and dirt." Every park Olmsted designed was part of a larger social vision; his opposition to the expansion of slavery and his advocacy of parks sprang from the same commitment to democratic ideals. While he loved cities, he also knew them as places where people "look closely upon one another without sympathy" and as quarters of crime and misery. Taking Birkinhead Park in England as his inspiration, Olmsted believed parks would replace "debasing pursuits and brutalizing pleasure" with "rational enjoyment." Beyond its physically restorative powers, beautiful scenery had for Olmsted a moral influence on human behavior, promoting "communitiveness" and a healthy participation in civic life. For him the common good was an article of faith, made visible in his parks.

Engineer

The size and beauty of Olmsted’s work make us sometimes forget that his parks are artifacts. They were massive public works constructed on a scale calling for the direction of a confident man: Swamps were drained, thousands of tons of rock blasted and earth excavated, hills and valleys created, water systems installed, road networks with bridges and overpasses built, and thousands of shrubs and trees planted. Olmsted was also a shrewd and respected administrator. He frequently encountered hostile politicians and at Central Park won the trust of thousands of sometimes unruly workers. One of Olmsted’s most remarkable talents was his ability to combine the practical and the beautiful. When he reshaped a piece of land to control flooding, he also transformed it into a pastoral landscape.

Artist

Olmsted saw a well-made park as a "work of art…framed upon a single, noble motive." Like a sculptor freeing the form within a rough piece of marble, Olmsted worked with earth, water, greenery, light, and stone to set in motion a transformation that would not be fully realized for decades. He insisted his parks were not works of self-expression; they were designed to elicit a specific response in others. Olmsted’s design was rooted in 18^th-century English landscape gardening, which had broken with the highly formal European style. The Pastoral (finished and "beautiful") and Picturesque (irregular and "wild") schools were subtly married in Olmsted’s own work. He respected the "genius of the place" rooted in the immense time taken to create its forms, and he strove to make his compositions as spontaneous and inevitable as the natural landscape. His most original contribution was the "kinetic" nature of his designs. The park experience is sequential and cumulative, the visitor encountering "passages of scenery" enhanced by memory and anticipation.

Landscape Architecture: Inventing a Profession

What Olmsted called his "vagabondish and somewhat poetical" early years prepared him for his life’s work. On trips through the New England countryside, he absorbed his father’s reverence for "great simple country." After less than a year of college, Olmsted embarked on his "voyages of discovery": apprenticeship to an engineer, time behind a counter as a clerk and before the mast as a seaman, four years as a "scientific farmer." As published account of his 1850 walking tour of Europe, where he studied parks and estate grounds, led to an assignment for the New York Times to report the effects of slavery on the South’s economy. Out of that trip came his influential book, Journey in the Seaboard Slave States (1856). In 1857, when a superintendent was needed to oversee construction of Central Park, Olmsted’s literary contacts and farm experience won him the job. He and architect Calvert Vaux transformed 840 acres of rock, swamp, scattered vegetable gardens, and hog farms into a multi-faceted pleasure ground. Central Park focused international attention on what Vaux called landscape architecture. Olmsted was preeminent in the profession for 40 years, gaining commissions for great projects like the Chicago World’s Fair, the U.S. Capitol grounds, and George Vanderbilt’s huge North Carolina estate, Biltmore.

Olmsted and Sons: Landscape Architects

In 1883, Olmsted moved his home and office from New York to a farmhouse in the Brookline. Here he established the world’s first full-scale professional practice of landscape architecture. Olmsted’s personal office became the nucleus of a rambling complex constructed between 1889 and 1925. All the processes of landscape design, from drafting to printing, were carried out here.

Often preoccupied and overworked, Olmsted was nevertheless responsive to the needs of his staff and eager to provide opportunities for training. Following the lead of his friend and collaborator, architect Henry Hobson Richardson, Olmsted instituted an apprentice system that combined instruction, assigned reading, and practical experience. Two of his most important pupils were his sons, John Charles (1852-1920) and Frederick Jr. (1870-1957). Both were trained from an early age to be landscape architects and given a more thorough grounding than their father’s own haphazard education. With his managerial abilities, John Charles gave continuity to the firm after Olmsted retired in 1895 and Frederick, Jr. became a partner.

The Olmsted firm prepared design plans for an estimated 44 states, the District of Columbia, and Canada. In 1980, the National Park Service acquired the site and began to inventory and conserve the historic design records, including thousands of plans and photographs dating from 1860 to 1980. Olmsted National Historic Site transcends the traditional role of a museum by serving as a center for the study and preservation of landscapes. The Olmsted Archives assists researchers from across the nation. The Olmsted Center for Landscape Preservation shares technical expertise in historic landscape preservation and maintenance.