Frederick Law Olmsted Sr. (1822 – 1903)
American landscape designer

The famous landscape designer of Central Park (on which he collaborated with the architect Calvert Vaux), Frederick Law Olmsted Sr. is widely known for that accomplishment alone. Considering the impact of the park on city life in New York, and on other designs around the world, that would be accomplishment enough. But Olmsted other achievements are so overshadowed by the Central Park project, that he is still not as well known in environmental circles as he should be.

Many people don't know, or are confused by, the fact that there were two Frederick Law Olmsteds: father and son, F. L. O Sr., and F. L. O Jr. Both of them were landscape architects, and F. L. O Jr. followed directly in his father's footsteps, assuming "leadership of the country's largest and most prestigious landscape architecture firm" after his father's death.

Olmsted Sr., was born in "the rural environs" of Hartford, Connecticut, the oldest son of a well-to-do merchant, from an old New England family. He was educated in a series of boarding schools in the rural Connecticut area where he grew up. More unorthodox educational benefits accrued from his apprenticeships as civil engineer and farmer along with his stint as a ship's cabin boy on a trip to China.

Reportedly, Olmsted's firm laid out some 1,000 parks in 200 cities. He also designed university campuses (U.C. Berkeley, Harvard, Amherst, Yale, etc.), cemeteries, hospital grounds (including the grounds for the hospital where he died, unhappy—even while suffering a terminal illness—that his plans for the hospital had not been followed carefully enough). A source of unhappiness in general was the fact that many of his plans were modified in ways he did not agree with (e.g., Stanford University), or even suppressed, as happened with his plan for Yosemite National Park .

The crown jewel of Olmsted's creativity is, of course, Central Park in New York City. As Bill Vogt describes it: "the entire area was man-made, literally from the ground up. It sprang from an 843-acre eyesore of stinking quagmire, rubbish heaps, rocky outcroppings, and squatters shacks." An army of workers created a lake, shoveled in enormous quantities of top soil to create natural-appearing meadows, and planted whole forests to screen the park from the city. Charles McLaughlin, the editor of Olmsted's papers, claimed that one of the reasons Olmsted was virtually forgotten for so long was that his designs have an "always been there" quality, resulting in landscapes that today "in their maturity...appear so 'natural' that one thinks of them as something not put there by artifice but merely preserved by happenstance." What Olmsted and Vaux created stands today as an oasis and respite from what Olmsted described as the city's "constantly repeated right angles, straight lines, and flat surfaces."

Among Olmsted's lesser known accomplishments were both his role in the Commission to establish Yosemite Park (a task undertaken in 1864, long before John Muir first saw Yosemite Valley) and preserve Niagara Falls, a movement which resulted in creation of the Niagara Falls State Reservation in 1888. He also was a prominent participant in the campaign to preserve the Adirondack region in upstate New York.

Even less well known are his writings not directly associated with landscape architecture or ecological design. Olmsted was quite an accomplished travel writer, producing still readable books like a Saddle-trip on the Southwestern Frontier of Texas, or his first book titled Walks and Talks of an American Farmer in England. Olmsted's travels in the South were as a roving journalist for the New York [Daily] Times ; he was an acute observer and his travel books on the south were also commentaries on the institution of slavery (that he believed "to be both economically ruinous and morally indefensible.") Books from this period included The Cotton Kingdom: A Traveler's Observations on Cotton and Slavery in the American Slave States, A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States, and Slavery and the South, 1852–1857. He was also a founder of the liberal journal of commentary, The Nation. He never dissociated his design work from its social context (believing, in his words, that his works should have "a manifest civilizing effect"), and his biggest disappointments occurred when he was not allowed to incorporate his ideas on social change into his various designs.

[Gerald L. Young Ph.D. ]

RESOURCES

BOOKS

Beveridge, C. E., and P. Rocheleau. Frederick Law Olmsted: Designing the American Landscape. New York: Rizzoli, 1995.

Fein, A. Frederick Law Olmsted and the American Environmental Tradition. New York: George Braziller, 1972.

Hall, L. Olmsted's America. Boston: Little, Brown, 1995.

Kalfus, M. Frederick Law Olmsted: The Passion of a Public Artist. New York: New York University Press, 1990.

Olmsted, F. L. The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted. Ed. C. C. McLaughlin. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977.

White, D. F. "Frederick Law Olmsted, Placemaker." Two Centuries of American Planning. Ed. Daniel Schaffer. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988.