The possession of arbitrary power has always, the world over, tended irresistibly to destroy humane sensibility, magnanimity, and truth.
Olmsted was born in Hartford, Connecticut in 1822 into a prosperous merchant family. While his parents intended for him to be a legacy student at Yale College, he felt that his eyes were too weak for all of that reading. Personally, I think this was just an excuse as he clearly was attracted to a more adventurous life than that of a Yale undergrad. Instead, he spent those formative years working as a merchant seaman, farmer, and eventually as a reporter for what would become The New York Times. It was in this latter vocation that he would first have significant social impact.
Sent by the newspaper to tour the South and observe how the economy was shaped by the practice of slavery [this was in the 1850's when the nation's social conscience could no longer avoid addressing it], Olmsted sent back enough dispatches to be bound in a three-volume collection. These books, published on the verge of the Civil War, framed slavery not just as legally and morally abhorrent, but also as economically illogical.
Olmsted observed that free people who are granted dignity in their work are happier, healthier, and more productive than those who are owned by others and gain nothing from their labors. While hardly a perspicacious observation, this wisdom sealed for many their opposition to slavery and their encouragement of eventual emancipation. Histories of this decade inevitably credit Olmsted's reporting, presented as it was through a practical merchant's perspective, as part of what changed conventional thinking.
That was only one portion of Olmsted's contribution; it was by no means his greatest.
As part of his reporting, Olmsted spent some time in England, where slavery had already ceased to be practiced a generation before, and was hosted by many of those interested in furthering the cause of emancipation. As that collection of Olmsted's contemporaries shared his education and background, he made the pleasant social rounds of concerts, lectures, and tours of England's historic places.
Of all of the sites and splendor to which he was privy, it was a walk through a park that Olmsted found the most inspiring. Birkenhead Park in Liverpool, opened to the public in 1847, was at the time the prime example of municipal planned landscaping. Graced with architectural structures, terraced gardens, winding paths, and a boating area along the Mersey River, as a public work funded by public money, the park also served as an example of hopeful egalitarianism.
Given what Olmsted had seen of slavery and its ill effects, enabled by the worst of government planning, it was refreshing for him to see what the best of government planning could provide.
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| The Roman boathouse at Birkenhead Park |
Upon his return to New York, and in the midst of producing his multi-volume collection, Olmsted would share his observations of Birkenhead Park with his family, friends, and anyone else who would listen. By coincidence, a city committee had recently been formed to ensure that a large portion of the rapidly growing Borough of Manhattan would serve a shared, public purpose and celebrate the natural beauty of the island. With a couple of friends, both of whom were landscape architects, Olmsted submitted plans for a park based on Birkenhead, except on a grander scale.
Despite much more experienced competition, and as a bit of a surprise, Olmsted and his partners would be charged with constructing what would become Central Park.
As we have seen with others whose lives we've appreciated, Olmsted was so focused on this project that it became for him a work of art not to be bound by obstacles such as an insufficient budget or the fact that 1600 people lived on the land that would be the park. In one of the first uses of eminent domain on an urban scale, the residents were re-located and the land purchased for $5,000,000, an amount already double the project's budget, even without construction having begun.
This lead to what would become a common experience in the remainder of Olmsted's career: He would be deposed from his position and replaced by someone more responsible with budgets. Olmsted's plan was retained, however, even with its expansive expenses. His name would forever be attached to the project and its reality.
Not that it mattered as the outbreak of the Civil War delayed construction and pulled the participants away to other types of service. Olmsted would spend the war as the executive in charge of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, the government organization charged with disease-control and treatment of the war's sick, wounded, and dying. So complete and useful was the structure that he established, the Sanitary Commission would become the foundation for the American Red Cross, while also helping to fund three regiments of freed slaves to serve in the Union army and create an organization that promoted the values of emancipation.
At the war's conclusion, his federal service satisfied, Olmsted moved to the west with the intention of managing a mining concern in the Sierra Nevada mountains. Instead, still convinced that the best exercise of government is to provide space and beauty for all of the citizenry, he formed a landscape design firm that would take his avocation to a much greater level.
Building upon the ideas he developed for Central Park, Olmsted's company would gain the contracts to design Brooklyn's Prospect Park, Chicago's Riverside Park, the area surrounding the New York portion of Niagara Falls, and many, many other municipal and public parks and green spaces. Olmsted, now joined by his sons, who would carry the business into the next century, would also design the landscaping for many academic institutions, including Trinity College in Hartford, Bryn Mawr in Pennsylvania, Groton School and Phillips Academy in Massachusetts, and Stanford University in California.
A full list of the Olmsted parks may be found at this link. The work is so prodigious that even in our century one may drive across the length of the United States and visit an Olmsted-designed park almost every day of the journey.
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| Louisville, Kentucky |
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| Boston to Brookline, Massachusetts |
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| Buffalo, New York |
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| Hartford, Connecticut |
As with any landscape designer, Olmsted was interested in the preservation and conservation of America's natural beauty. Using his considerable influence and inside connections, he encouraged Congress to officially designate portions of the Western United States as protectorates. Thus began what would be known as the U.S. Park System.
Frederick Law Olmsted would retire, mainly due to failing health, and surrender his business to his sons. Upon the occasion of his retirement, one of Olmsted's proteges, writing in particular of the work that Olmsted performed designing the landscape for the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago [the "alabaster city" that is celebrated in the verses of "America, the Beautiful"], he would observe, "An artist, he paints with lakes and wooded slopes; with lawns and banks and forest covered hills; with mountain sides and ocean views."
Olmsted would die in 1903, having enabled both the general support for emancipation and the ability for all of our nation's citizens to have access to natural beauty, even when in the midst of a cluttered urban landscape. It is a marvelous, and particularly American, legacy.
For those interested in further reading, there is a dedicated website, the National Association for Olmsted Parks, that includes maps and stories of the individual park's histories; and, among other works, the best-seller, The Devil in the White City, that details the inspiration, planning, and design of the Chicago World's Fair.