Source: ALDaily

The achievement of Frederick Law Olmsted is so stupendous that one

cannot stand far enough back to take it all in. First there are the parks
Manhattans Central Park, Brooklyns Prospect Park, Bostons Emerald
Necklace, Chicagos Jackson Park, Montreals Mount Royal, to name only
the most prominent. These have indelibly shaped our notion of what a city
park isan ensemble of meadows, trees, and water arranged for the
purposes of recreation, aesthetic pleasure, and public health.
But Olmsted also gave us Riverside, Illinois, the prototype for that other
familiar object of the American landscape, the planned community. As the
writer of the study that created Yosemite National Park, he can be
regarded as the spiritual founder for the national park system. In the end,
Olmsted defies criticism. How can one evaluate a landscape architect
whose greatest achievement was to create the profession of landscape
architecture itself?
The material for a comprehensive evaluation is now at hand. Beginning in
1977, the Frederick Law Olmsted Papers Project has published eleven
volumes of his copious writings; the final two volumes are to present the
visual material. The first of these has now appeared, Frederick Law
Olmsted: Plans and Views of Public Parks, which reproduces the plans,
sketches, and photographs of thirty-one of his most important projects.
Here is as attractive a graphic record of his achievement as we are likely
to get.
Olmsted was thirty-six when his plan for Central Park was accepted, and
he had no formal training in landscape architecture. Nor had anyone else,
for at that time, parks were laid out by architects, gardeners, or surveyors.
Up to that point, he had led a highly erratic life, filled with false starts and
brave experiments that make for fascinating biography. Fortunately, there
are two very good ones, one by Laura Wood Roper (1973) and another by
Witold Rybczynski (1999), and they demonstrate that one cannot make
sense of the second half of Olmsteds life without understanding the first.
Olmsted was born in 1822 to a prosperous family of fabric merchants in
Hartford, Connecticut. He and his brother were both groomed for Yale, but
at the age of fourteen, he injured his eyes in a freakish case of sumac
poisoning, making me for some time partially blind . . . and the oculists
advised that I should be kept from study. There is something poetic in his
lifelong work with nature being determined by this first unhappy
encounter. This one fact, though, was not enough to close off the
possibility of formal studies. Other factors were evidently at play,
including a certain stubborn restlessness. For a time he was a clerk but
decided he did not like the indoor work. He then enrolled as a common
seaman and undertook a year-long voyage to China in 1843. A stint at Yale
as a special student lasted only a semester. Finally, in 1848, Olmsteds

father helped him buy 125 acres on the south shore of Staten Island,
where he was to establish himself as a scientific farmer.
Even here Olmsted could not sit still. In 1850 he set off with his brother
and a friend on a six-month walking tour of England, planning to live on 75
cents per day. He did not intend to write a book about it, but as it
happened, the publisher George P. Putnam (whose wife was a cousin of
the Olmsteds) was then introducing the paperback book and thought that
Olmsteds trip would be an ideal subject for one of these novel volumes.
The result was Walks and Talks of an American Farmer in England (1852),
a charming and thoroughly unsystematic distillation of extracts culled
from Olmsteds pocket diary and family letters. With his knowledge of
agriculture, he was a perceptive observer (who correctly foresaw that
cheap American wheat would soon devastate the English rural economy).
But his interests were omnivorous, and he had keen powers of
observation, including a stenographers gift for transcribing amusing
conversations verbatim