INTRODUCTION

“The People’s Park at Birkenhead, near Liverpool,” 1851

This article, from A. J. Downing’s journal the Horticulturist, was Olmsted’s first published writing on parks. It describes his response to the first designed park that he had the opportunity to examine. He visited Birkenhead Park in the summer of 1850 as he began a six-month walking tour of the British Isles and the Continent with his brother John Hull Olmsted and close friend Charles Loring Brace. At that time Olmsted was operating his own farm on Staten Island and was actively involved with the agricultural society there. Much of the book he wrote describing the first part of his journey with his friends, from Liverpool to the Isle of Wight and then on to London, contains descriptions of British farming practices, as befitted a book entitled Walks and Talks of an American Fanner in England. He recorded his enthusiastic appreciation of English scenery as well. Moreover, he admired the various communal institutions that he found in the suburban town of Birkenhead, on the Mersey River across from Liverpool. Laid out in the early 1840s, the suburb had developed in conjunction with the rise of the great Laird shipyards on the Wirral peninsula. The 125-acre park was impressive to Olmsted both because it was the first “freely accessible public park” to be authorized by Parliament and because of the skill of its designer, the architect [7] and landscape gardener Sir Joseph Paxton, who later designed the Crystal Palace for the Exposition of 1851 in London. “We passed through winding paths, over acres and acres, with a constant varying surface,” Olmsted related, “where on all sides were growing every variety of shrubs and flowers, with more than natural grace, all set in borders of greenest, closest turf, and all kept with most consummate neatness.” He testified that “five minutes of admiration, and a few more spent in studying the manner in which art had been employed to obtain from nature so much beauty, and I was ready to admit that in democratic America, there was nothing to be thought of as comparable with this People’s Garden.”

Both elements made a deep impression on him — the fact that such a work of art was a communal institution open without charge to all classes, and the particular means taken by the designer to make the park such a success. Although Paxton planted in a less naturalistic way than Olmsted would come to do when he created profuse masses of shrubs along winding paths on steep ground — as in the Ramble in Central Park — and although Paxton’s walks and drives followed simpler curves than would the sinuous and subtly varied ways in Olmsted’s parks, there was much that Olmsted could, and apparently did, learn from the designer of Birkenhead Park. In his encyclopedia article “Park,” included in this volume, Olmsted stated that Birkenhead Park was “one of the most instructive to study in Europe.” The park contained the same dense planting on steep slopes and open lawn-like treatment of level areas that Olmsted consistently created in his own work in later decades, producing the same separation of the picturesque and pastoral landscape styles. Paxton’s park, like Olmsted’s, had paths with easy grades and gentle curves. And, as Olmsted noted at some length in his article, the walks and drives were carefully designed to provide a smooth and well-drained surface for park users. Olmsted incorporated all of these elements into his first park design, that of Central Park in 1858. Birkenhead Park provided his first demonstration of the contribution a public park could make to a community. No other park that he saw in England or on the Continent provided him with so many lessons concerning landscape composition and engineering.

As indicated by the comment that A. J. Downing added at the end of the piece, the editor of the Horticulturist welcomed Olmsted’s article as a contribution to the campaign for creating a large park for New York City that was occurring at the time. Ever since founding the Horticulturist in 1846, Downing had occasionally urged the importance of creating parks in American towns and cities. Then, in the summer of 1850, he visited England for the first time. After his return to the United States in the fall, he published several letters on his travels in England. Meantime, the pressure to create a New York City park increased, and in the fall elections of 1850 the victorious mayoral candidate, Ambrose Kingsland, embraced the cause. He had not acted on his campaign promise when Downing published Olmsted’s article on Birkenhead Park, but during that same month of May 1851, Kingsland [8] called on the New York Common Council to create a 160-acre park on the East River site known as Jones Wood. Olmsted’s article of May 1851 became the first of three articles that Downing published in the Horticulturist in a four-month period addressing the issue of a park in New York City. In June he published an article enthusiastically describing the parks of London that he had visited the previous summer. Two months after that, in the August 1851 issue of the Horticulturist, Downing published his most cogent statement, entitled “The New-York Park,” calling for a larger park than the Jones Wood site would provide, and describing the variety of features that the park should contain.

Olmsted’s Early Park Designs, 1858–1866

The principal documents relating to Olmsted’s early park designs, covering his work in Manhattan and the San Francisco Bay area between 1857 and 1866, have been published in volumes 3 and 5 of the Olmsted Papers series. They chronicle the evolution of the Central Park design as it changed during the years of construction. The most striking change from the original “Greensward” plan was Olmsted and Vaux’s proposal of 1858–59 to expand the innovative separation of traffic ways that their competition design of 1858 had provided for crosstown traffic by means of four sunken transverse roads. They proposed as well to separate the three interior circulation systems — walks, bridle paths, and drives — from each other. The commissioners approved the new plan and much of the system of ways in the lower park was constructed by the summer of 1861.

During his stay in California from 1863 to 1865, Olmsted began to evolve a style of landscape design appropriate for the semiarid American West. Since he felt that creation of broad landscape effects in the California climate was undesirable and that the irrigation to sustain them would be too costly, he designed no parks for that region. The main feature of the system of “public pleasure grounds” that he proposed for San Francisco was a wide, sunken “General Promenade” with separate ways for carriages, equestrians, and pedestrians that would run a four-mile course from the harbor along the line of Van Ness Street and on to the vicinity of present-day Buena Vista Park. Along the promenade Olmsted proposed a series of decorative plantings and scientific displays that were a far cry from the rigid subordination of all elements to overall landscape effect that he insisted on in his parks. The linear alameda of Spain, and not the pastoral park of England, was the model for his system of recreation grounds for a metropolis in the semiarid West.

Other significant aspects of Olmsted’s later design work also appeared during his projects of 1864–66 for California sites. His first effort to preserve a streamway in an urban area was for Strawberry Creek in Berkeley, which he proposed to retain as part of the campus of the College of California, with its upper reaches above the campus serving as a public recreation [9] area. His first plan for a scenic carriageway, moreover, was for Piedmont Way, which was to run along the hills from Berkeley to eastern Oakland.

During his years in California in the 1860s, Olmsted also continued to develop his views of the psychological effect of scenery. In his San Francisco report he stressed the importance of the relaxing and reviving effect of the public spaces he designed. The stress of business was particularly debilitating in San Francisco, he observed: “Cases of death, or of unwilling withdrawal from active business, compelled by premature failure of the vigor of the brain, are more common in San Francisco than anywhere else . . . ” Daily access to public recreation grounds would be the best antidote.

In his report of 1865 as chairman of the commission in charge of the Yosemite grant, Olmsted also analyzed the nature of the effect of scenery. The experience of natural scenery contrasted with the “severe and excessive exercise of the mind” demanded by close pursuit of details leading to future goals:

In the interest which natural scenery inspires there is the strongest contrast to this. It is for itself and at the moment it is enjoyed. The attention is aroused and the mind occupied without purpose, without a continuation of the common process of relating the present action, thought or perception to some future end. There is little else that has this quality so purely. There are few enjoyments with which regard for something outside and beyond the enjoyment of the moment can ordinarily be so little mixed . . . . It therefore results that the enjoyment of scenery employs the mind without fatigue and yet exercises it, tranquilizes it and yet enlivens it; and thus, through the influence of the mind over the body, gives the effect of refreshing rest and reinvigoration to the whole system.

“Preliminary Report to the Commissioners for Laying Out a Park in Brooklyn, New York,” 1866

With his return to New York City in the fall of 1865 and his professional reunion with Calvert Vaux, Olmsted focused his attention on the first public park whose site was at all suitable for creating truly park-like scenery. The site as originally selected had serious shortcomings, since it was bisected by Flatbush Avenue and had no section that would permit the breadth of landscape treatment that was the most important element in a park. Vaux had resolved this problem while Olmsted was still in California, prevailing on the commissioners to abandon the section north of Flatbush Avenue and to acquire additional land to the south and west that permitted creation of the Long Meadow and Prospect Lake. To secure land for what became the Long Meadow, Vaux proposed in his report of February 4, 1865, to extend the park along Ninth Avenue from 3rd Street to 14th Street. This created an extension [10] three blocks deep between 9th and 12th streets, but left intact the Quaker cemetery that lay southeast of Eleventh Avenue between 11 th and 14th streets. (See Vaux’s plan on page 82 below.) By the time that Olmsted and Vaux drew up their plan a year later, they had further extended the park to 15th Street, absorbing and removing the cemetery. An important purpose of their report was to show the significance of securing adequate “range” of pastoral scenery in the Green, later called the Long Meadow.

In Prospect Park, Olmsted and Vaux carried out their most notable passage of scenery in the “pastoral” style. As they explained in a report published below,

Civilized men, while they are gaining ground against certain acute forms of disease, are growing more and more subject to other and more insidious enemies to their health and happiness, and against these the remedy and preventive cannot be found in medicine or in athletic recreation but only in sunlight and such forms of gentle exercise as are calculated to equalize the circulation and relieve the brain.

Olmsted and Vaux taught that “a sense of enlarged freedom is to all, at all times, the most certain and the most valuable gratification afforded by a park.” Scenery that made this experience possible was the most desirable to secure. In their reports on Prospect Park Olmsted and his partner offered a clear statement of the psychological effect of park scenery and its relation to the rationale for creating parks. Based on this analysis, Olmsted drew conclusions that he would often repeat in the years to come:

A park is a work of art, designed to produce certain effects upon the mind of men. There should be nothing in it, absolutely nothing, which does not represent study, design, a sagacious consideration & application of known laws of cause & effect with reference to that end.

At the same time, the designers clearly defined the social purpose that underlay that psychological purpose. In California, while chronicling the development of the Mariposa Estate, Olmsted had concluded that the most important quality in members of society was what he termed “communitiveness.” This was a combination of qualities that enabled people “to serve others and to be served by others in the most intimate, complete and extended degree imaginable.” Olmsted’s goal for society was to make that exchange of service as effective as possible. An important purpose of his park-planning was to restore the energy that people expended in the exercise of their duties. Much of his landscape design work was dedicated to promoting the values of community in one fashion or another, and none was more important than fostering “communitiveness.” Accordingly, as he explained in the Prospect Park report of 1866, the “recuperation and recreation of force” that had been expended in exchange of service was the prime purpose of a park.

To illustrate this concept, he referred to an old story about Aesop. [11] According to this fable, one day when Aesop was playing games with some children an Athenian chastised him for such frivolous activity. In response he took a bow and bent it, observing that if not soon unbent it would lose all spring and flexibility. People must also “unbend” occasionally or suffer a similar fate. In daily life, this was best achieved by “occupation of the imagination with objects and reflections of a quite different character from those which are associated with their bent condition.” The scenery that best served this purpose would provide the most complete contrast to the conditions of the daily workplace. Resorting to another image, Olmsted described this scenery by invoking the Twenty-third Psalm with its rhapsodic phrases: “He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; he leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul.”

The report also explains how Olmsted and Vaux designed their parks so as to give the visitor a sense of space that extended well beyond the field of view at any given time, appearing to reach far beyond the actual borders of the park. The 1866 Prospect Park report includes a detailed description of the way they arranged such an experience for visitors entering Central Park from present-day Columbus Circle.

Despite the importance of scenery in a park, however, Olmsted’s purpose was not simply to imitate nature. Rather, he proposed to bring together in a coherent and harmonious way the several highest ideals of the scenic character of a site. The report clearly shows this to be another of his basic precepts of landscape design. Accomplishment of this goal, while providing necessary architectural elements, was what constituted the art of landscape architecture.

While the report emphasizes the value of extended passages of pastoral scenery in a park, it also recognizes the need to provide for large numbers of visitors. Both considerations were important, and they could not be fully harmonized. It was necessary to construct walks and drives sufficiently wide that visitors need not worry about the danger of collision. Yet these artificial elements must also order and enhance the experience of the landscape, and so must fit into it — though not at the expense of the engineering needed to make them usable in all weather conditions. Moreover, the park must be equipped to serve large numbers of visitors at the same time. “Men must come together, and must be seen coming together, in carriages, on horseback and on foot, and the concourse of animated life which will thus be formed, must in itself be made, if possible, an attractive and diverting spectacle.” Olmsted and Vaux achieved this goal in Prospect Park through the liberal dimensions of the music grove area and outlook concourse, and, a few years later, in the “promenade” area along the southern edge of Prospect Lake. The large refectory and series of terraces and boat landings that they proposed for the northern shore of the lake (but never constructed) were planned to meet further social needs of visitors. All of these features were intended to enrich the experience of the park. The only other facility proposed was a [12] menagerie along Ninth Avenue in the vicinity of Litchfield Mansion, in a space the designers viewed as ancillary to the park landscape. Similar considerations led to placing the children’s play area and boat pond (later named the Vale of Cashmere) on the edge of the park near Flatbush Avenue. On the opposite side of Flatbush Avenue, Olmsted and Vaux proposed to locate various institutions of popular education that the city needed but that would be intrusive and destructive to the park if placed within it. The area eventually became part of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, and both the Brooklyn Public Library and the Brooklyn Museum were sited nearby.

Report on Parkways to the Brooklyn Park Commission, 1868

With a treatise of 1868 to the commissioners of Prospect Park, the third report in this volume, Olmsted turned to creation of a coherent system of parks and public spaces in a city. In the process, he wrote an extended commentary on the history of city planning and street design. He believed strongly that the closely built commercial and industrial city of the early nineteenth century, as epitomized by New York, represented the persistence of anachronistic habits that were harmful both to amenity and to health. His solution was to create a “more openly built” city whose sections devoted to manufacture and trade were separate from residential areas of low density that provided healthful conditions and access to sunlight and fresh air. To plan otherwise was to perpetuate a tradition by which the dead hand of the medieval city, constructed for defense, would blight the lives of modern-day city dwellers. Olmsted would further develop this theme of anachronism in his 1879 article “The Future of New-York,” in which he asserted that the city’s row houses represented “a confession that it is impossible to build a convenient and tasteful residence in New-York, adapted to the ordinary civilized requirements of a single family, except at a cost which even rich men find generally prohibitory.” The plan of the row house, he declared, was “more nearly that of a light house built upon a wave-lashed rock, than of a civilized family home.”

To illustrate the persistence of anachronistic ways of planning streets and cities, he constructed a description of the history of “street arrangements” prior to his time. Such a detailed historical analysis was unusual for Olmsted, and may in this case have been a response to a recently published report by Andrew Haswell Green, the controller and most powerful member of the Central Park commission. Green’s report, describing the commission’s street plans for Manhattan, included an historical section that referred to the streets of ancient Athens and Rome and seventeenth-century London. Olmsted was probably annoyed that he and Vaux were not being consulted in the preparation of the new uptown avenues and boulevards in Manhattan and surely [13] resented Green’s characterization of green medians in wide streets as “fanciful arrangements.”

Olmsted’s solution for the modern city was construction of wide “parkways” that would extend the recreation grounds of cities while at the same time structuring their growth. In Brooklyn he envisioned parkways radiating from Prospect Park and providing easy access to the park while creating a series of “parkway neighborhoods” that would realize the great potential of the city as a place of residences. The parkways would extend from Fort Hamilton on New York Bay to Ravenswood on the East River opposite the Central Park section of Manhattan, and from Prospect Park to the ocean at Coney Island.

The key innovation of the parkway that Olmsted and Vaux first described in this report, and first saw constructed in Brooklyn, was the separation of ways of transit that it introduced. The highest development of urban streets thus far, in Olmsted’s view, had been the Avenue Unter den Linden in Berlin and the Avenue de l’Imperatrice in Paris. Both were exceptionally wide streets with some separation of ways and wide strips of grass and trees. Olmsted and Vaux’s proposed Brooklyn parkway was 270 feet wide from house to house and 210 feet between the rows of trees along the sidewalks on either side. Inside of these were four medians, each 7.5 feet wide with a single row of trees, separating the other traffic routes. These were two side roads for wagons and service to the houses, two pedestrian paths, and, in the center, the “Park Way,” 65 feet wide with smooth pavement and intended for the exclusive use of private carriages. By this arrangement, private conveyances could quickly and easily move through the city without the impediment of the carts of commerce or the jolting of cobblestone streets. The creation of such separate ways was in keeping with Olmsted’s longstanding desire for division of labor within cities, whereby individuals served others with specific kinds of expertise and wherein each physical arrangement realized as fully as possible the same kind of fine-tuned meeting of particular needs. Olmsted and Vaux utilized both the concept of the parkway and the term in their later urban planning. In the twentieth century this concept has seen extensive application in the form of the automobile parkway, providing a pleasant greenway for private cars separate from trucks and other commercial vehicles.

While the separate, central “park way” for carriages was the key element of Olmsted and Vaux’s innovation, the parkway was also an important part of the city’s park system. It extended to many sections of the city the amenity of green open space found in the park itself, and so served the needs of citizens when they lacked the means or the time to visit the park. This extension of the amenity of park-like space was crucially important, for, as Olmsted asserted once again in this report, “there is no doubt that the more intense intellectual activity, which prevails equally in the library, the work shop, and the counting-room, makes tranquilizing recreation more essential [14] to continued health and strength than until lately it generally has been.” This was true in all the great cities where he worked — San Francisco, New York, Brooklyn, Chicago, or Boston.

“Address to the Prospect Park
Scientific Association,” 1868

Olmsted elaborated further on the nature and effect of the pastoral scenery he wanted in parks in the fourth document in this volume. It stands as his most complete discussion of the issue. The document expresses Olmsted’s belief that pastoral scenery had a universal appeal that went far deeper than did the sources of fashion. Park scenery was particularly well suited for satisfying certain propensities “which are part of human nature and which the progress of civilization does not affect, as it does mere manners & customs.” That scenery was “a combination of elements which shall invite and stimulate the simplest, purest and most primeval action of the poetic element of human nature.” For Olmsted, the qualities of grace and ease were the essential elements of pastoral park scenery. His purpose was to create a space that “invites, encourages & facilitates movement.” His aim in designing a park, therefore, was “to make gracefully beautiful in combination with a purpose to make interesting and inviting, or hospitable, by the offer of a succession of simple, natural pleasures as a result of easy movements.”

Olmsted described his own experience of the universal quality of such landscape during the journey that he and his brother made across the plains of Texas in 1853. He showed how the campsites they chose offered easy access to wood and water while providing sheltering trees in places with distant views. He felt that such landscape had been specially valued by humankind ever since our emergence onto open savannahs at the dawn of the herding culture. This lecture also anticipates by a century the concept set forth by Jay Appleton in The Experience of Landscape that the aesthetic appeal of landscape stems from its ability to satisfy biological needs and that the key element in such a landscape is its provision of shelter and prospect.

Proposal for the Buffalo Park System, 1868

Soon after the 1868 Brooklyn parkways report and before construction of Eastern Parkway and Ocean Parkway in that city began, Olmsted visited the city of Buffalo and took steps toward planning the first unified system of parks and parkways that he and Vaux were to design. The group of leading citizens who were promoting creation of a park system guided Olmsted on a hurried examination of three sites under consideration: one on the shore of Lake Erie near the entrance to the Erie Canal, one on the height of land in the eastern part of the city, and one along Scajaquada Creek to the north. In his first report, addressed to William Dorsheimer, Olmsted urged them to [15] make use of all three sites, damming the creek to form a lake and including level farm land adjoining it that became the 120-acre “meadow park” section of Delaware Park.

The city followed Olmsted’s advice, although the final configuration of the system was somewhat different from the one that he proposed in this report and that the park commission and city council authorized during the last five months of 1869. Sometime after the bill authorizing creation of the park system was introduced into the state legislature, a clause was added to the bill requiring that one-fifth of the 500 acres of parks and parkways be located east of Jefferson Street. Since none of the system that Olmsted proposed, as described in the report published below, had extended east of that street, considerable changes had to be made. The original site for the Parade had been in the vicinity of present-day Masten Place and the parkway route between the Parade and Delaware Park was to have been along Jefferson Street.

To meet the new requirements of the authorizing legislation, the Parade was moved several blocks to the east and north; it was connected to Delaware Park by Humboldt Parkway, instead of following the course of existing streets as originally planned. A major reconfiguration of Delaware Park was also required. The wide meadow section of the park had to be moved eastward, while the borders of the western section of the park were drastically narrowed. As Olmsted later stated, “after pinching the ground on the north side of the water as much as possible without abandoning the design, it was still necessary . . . to throw out some ten acres of land on the south side of the water previously intended to be included in the Park and which for many years to come would be more valuable than any other.” Eventually, in part as a result of Olmsted’s repeated urging, the picnic grove south of the lake was added to the park in the mid-1880s.

Moreover, it was not possible to make the park crescent-shaped with parkways extending from each end toward the city as Olmsted proposed in his report of 1868. On the west side of the park this resulted from selection in November 1869 of land near the park for the site of the Buffalo State Asylum: that 200-acre tract included the route Olmsted had proposed for the last half-mile of the western parkway. Instead, he and Vaux designed three short parkway sections radiating out from Soldiers Place.

The multiple elements of the Buffalo park system served three distinct purposes. First, the Parade and the “Front” on the lakeside site provided for activities other than the quiet enjoyment of scenery to which Olmsted and Vaux dedicated Delaware Park. The Parade had space for military maneuvers and gathering of crowds for civic events. It also contained a large refectory and a children’s playground similar to the facility that Olmsted and Vaux had designed for Prospect Park in 1868. In addition, the design of the Front included space for team sports and concerts. This was the first time that Olmsted had the opportunity to design several recreation grounds in a [16] city at one time, knowing that space was available outside the landscape park for potentially intrusive uses. In consequence, Delaware Park had fewer structures and facilities than any other major park that he designed prior to his last two park systems in Rochester and Louisville, beginning in 1888. By contrast, his park planning in New York City, which included Central, Riverside, and Morningside parks and Union and Tompkins squares, took place over a fifteen-year period. Planning of the four parks and two parkways he and Vaux designed for Brooklyn extended over the period 1865 to 1870. His next opportunity to plan a coherent park system would not come until the 1880s with the Boston park system.

Olmsted was also anxious to have public recreation grounds quickly accessible from the densely settled parts of a city. Existing Delaware Avenue connected the center of Buffalo with the principal park, but areas to the northwest and northeast were not similarly served. The Front and Parade were to act as neighborhood parks while at the same time providing some all-city recreational facilities.

The final element of the Buffalo system was the parkways and streets that connected the Front and Parade with Delaware Park. Most impressive was two-mile-long Humboldt Parkway. With eight parallel rows of trees and a width of 200 feet, it exceeded most of the famous boulevards of Paris in both respects. The three-spoked parkway system south of the western end of Delaware Park, with Soldiers Place as the hub, created a parkway neighborhood similar in concept — though different in configuration — to that proposed in 1868 for Brooklyn. Connection of these parkways to the Front was achieved by widening and planting trees along existing city streets. In this way, Olmsted achieved the extension of park-like grounds for which he gave the classic description found in this report:

Thus, at no great distance from any point of the town, a pleasure ground will have been provided for, suitable for a short stroll, for a playground for children and an airing ground for invalids, and a route of access to the large common park of the whole city, of such a character that most of the steps on the way to it would be taken in the midst of a scene of sylvan beauty, and with the sounds and sites of the ordinary town business, if not wholly shut out, removed to some distance and placed in obscurity. The way itself would thus be more park-like than town-like.

During the early 1870s, Olmsted witnessed construction of the system that he and Vaux had developed in 1868–69. Coupled with the original city plan of 1804 by Joseph Ellicott, he believed the system made Buffalo “the best planned city, as to its streets, public places and grounds, in the United States if not in the world.” He drew up an illustrated plan of the city portraying these qualities and displayed it at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876. It was then displayed at the Universal Exhibition of 1878 in Paris, where it received honorable mention. In addition to the public facilities, the exhibit showed the residential subdivision, Parkside, that [17] Olmsted and engineer George Kent Radford planned in the mid-1870s on the northern side of Delaware Park. (This area was eventually laid out for residences, but not to any significant degree according to any of the surviving plans that Olmsted created for it, either in the 1870s or during a second phase of planning in 1886.) The exhibit that Olmsted prepared also showed how Forest Lawn Cemetery south of the park and the Buffalo Asylum grounds west of it increased the area of greenspace in the city.

“Public Parks and the Enlargement of Towns,” 1870

Olmsted’s lecture at the Lowell Institute in Boston in February 1870, part of a series sponsored by the American Social Science Association, took place amidst spirited debate in that city about creation of a park. It would be six years before Olmsted became involved in creating Boston’s park system, but at this time numerous participants in the debate sought to enlist his support. In mid-October 1869 a group of Boston citizens petitioned the city council to create a series of parks, and during the next month public hearings were held on the subject. One of the leading park proponents, James Haughton, urged Olmsted to testify before the state legislative committee considering the park bill; Robert Morris Copeland, author of one of the proposals, asked him to secure notices in the New York press; Edward Everett Hale delivered sermons and published articles drawing from Olmsted’s writings on parks; and at the suggestion of James Haughton, James T. Fields, editor of the Atlantic Monthly, urged Olmsted to write a short article on parks. Within three weeks of receiving Fields’s request, Olmsted sent him a long article that was probably close in subject and length to the address published here. Fields returned the manuscript, finding it too long, too much an “essay on social science,” and “not of general interest.” Olmsted seems never to have submitted the short article on the advantages of public parks that Fields desired.

The same day that Fields returned the manuscript, Henry Villard, secretary of the American Social Science Association in Boston, wrote Olmsted proposing that he deliver a lecture on parks in the association’s February–April lecture series at the Lowell Institute. The timing of this letter and the short period it gave Olmsted to prepare his presentation suggests that Fields had informed Villard of the existence of Olmsted’s manuscript.

Olmsted’s Lowell Institute lecture stands as his clearest assertion of the advantages of urban life. In the first section he developed his theme that cities were improving in quality while the countryside languished. The largest cities were growing ever larger and would continue to do so. For Olmsted, this “townward movement of population” and the concurrent “suburban tendency” were developments of great promise. Nineteenth-century engineering had solved the health problems that had plagued the previous period of urbanization. If city dwellers would abandon anachronistic crowding [18] of population into tenements and row houses and live instead in spacious suburbs open to sunshine and fresh air, cities could grow to great size while improving the living conditions of their residents. At this time, Olmsted and Vaux were developing at Riverside, Illinois, an example of what he believed the residential community of the future should be.

While the separation of place of work from place of residence solved the major sanitary problems of earlier cities, the psychological toll of urban life had also to be reckoned with. Most troubling was the impersonal and heart-hardening daily contact of persons engaged in competitive business activities. The result, Olmsted observed, was that people raised in cities displayed “a peculiarly hard sort of selfishness. Every day of their lives they have seen thousands of their fellow-men, have met them face to face, have brushed against them, and yet have had no experience of anything in common with them.” The most promising institutions for countering this influence were public recreation grounds such as Olmsted and Vaux were developing in New York, Brooklyn, Buffalo, and Chicago. There needed to be formally arranged promenades for “gregarious” recreation, where large numbers of a city’s residents could gather and see and be seen — “congregated human life under glorious and necessarily artificial conditions,” as Olmsted called it. There should also be spacious parks where smaller “neighborly” gatherings of family and friends could take place.

In his discussion of needed urban improvements, Olmsted also stressed the importance of tree-lined avenues and parkways as a complementary element to the promenades and parks he sought for “receptive” recreation and the playing fields needed for “exertive” activities. These were significant themes for a New England audience, and within the next year and a half he would be involved in park and parkway planning for Hartford and New Britain, Connecticut, and Springfield and Fall River, Massachusetts.

Olmsted made no reference to the Boston park movement in his Lowell Institute address, however, and took no sides in the debate over park sites. Instead, he limited himself to an examination of the beneficial effect that his oldest and best-known park, Central Park in Manhattan, had had on the residents of New York City. In so doing, he recalled what has become the most famous of the predictions of the park’s opponents in the mid-1850s, the editorial from the New York Herald declaring that the city’s ruffians would drive away respectable citizens and that “the great Central Park will be nothing but a great bear-garden for the lowest denizens of the city, of which we shall yet pray litanies to be delivered.” Quite the reverse had taken place, Olmsted assured his listeners: gentlemen and their families visited the park in large numbers, frequenting it “more than they do the opera or the church.”

Such a development would not have been possible, he pointed out, had not control of the park been in the hands of an independent board of commissioners. The Central Park commission had provided continuity of administration, with virtually no change in membership from its creation in [19] 1857 to its dissolution by the Tweed Ring in 1870. He also emphasized the importance of an efficient corps of park police who would both protect visitors and instruct them in the proper use of the park. These two themes, the proper roles of commissioners and of park keepers, would recur many times in Olmsted’s writings on parks during the next twenty-five years.

The Boston press enthusiastically reviewed Olmsted’s talk, but given the general tenor of his remarks it is unclear what influence he had on the course of the city’s park movement. The state legislature was considering the park bill when he spoke and passed it three months later; but the voters of Boston failed to provide the necessary two-thirds vote of approval in elections the next fall. Not until 1875 did Boston’s park supporters secure creation of a park commission and begin the process of park-planning that would involve Olmsted and his firm for more than three decades.

“Report Accompanying Plan for Laying Out the South Park,” 1871

During the period of his partnership with Calvert Vaux, Olmsted found in the city of Chicago a challenging opportunity to plan the development of a great metropolis. The 1,600-acre village of Riverside, which he began to plan in 1868, was the most extensive and fully realized of any of his community designs. And the 1,000-acre South Park that he and Vaux designed in 1871 was to be the great metropolitan park of Chicago. Olmsted intended it to have a preeminence in its area even greater than that of Central Park in the New York City region.

Olmsted had been intrigued for several years with the opportunity for park-building that Chicago offered. Visiting the city in 1863 on U.S. Sanitary Commission business, he had investigated the possibility of constructing a privately owned and operated park. The scheme came to naught, but his host during that visit, the lawyer Ezra B. McCagg, was to be one of the leaders in the Chicago park movement. Olmsted’s contacts increased during his time in California. William Bross, senior editor of the Chicago Tribune, was a member of the party led by Speaker of the House of Representatives Schuyler Colfax that was in Yosemite Valley in the summer of 1865 when Olmsted presented his report on the management of the Yosemite grant to the Yosemite commission. Olmsted returned to San Francisco with the Colfax party. According to Bross, a prime subject of conversation during that trip was Central Park in New York. He recalled that “both Colfax and Olmsted agreed with me that nothing was needed to make Chicago the principal city of the Union but a great public improvement of similarly gigantic character.”

When park advocates in Chicago finally secured enabling legislation from the state in 1867–69, Olmsted could well have anticipated that he would plan the whole park system, despite its division into three administrative areas, north, south, and west, with independent commissions and separate [20] funding. The leading parks advocate, physician and sanitary reformer John Rauch, wrote Olmsted indicating his intention to see this occur, and Olmsted’s friend McCagg was head of the North Park Commission. Soon after his appointment he wrote Olmsted on behalf of the commission, asking him to prepare a design for Lincoln Park. As early as October 1869 Olmsted and Vaux were also discussing terms of engagement with the South Park commissioners. In the end, only the South Park system came within Olmsted’s sphere. There is no evidence that he made a plan for Lincoln Park, and Swain Nelson, a Swedish gardener who had done the first designs for Lincoln Park around 1865, continued as its designer through the 1870s. Moreover, the planning of the three West Parks — Central (later Garfield), Humboldt, and Douglas — went to the engineer William Le Baron Jenney, whom Olmsted had brought to Chicago to work on Riverside. One aspect of Jenney’s West Parks was the reiteration of the same general plan and set of features in each park, rather than the creation of a distinctive plan for each project that was the hallmark of work of Olmsted and Vaux. Their plan for the South Park Commission emphasized this difference in design approach, as shown in the differing character of the lakeside park and the inland park (later named Jackson and Washington parks).

The site for the parkland under the control of the South Park Commission consisted of two large areas, one of 593 acres on the lake and one inland of 372 acres, and a narrow, mile-long connecting strip. Part of Olmsted and Vaux’s reason for treating this area as a single park was very likely because it would be distinctly the largest park in the Chicago system and thus better able to claim preeminence and truly metropolitan character. This remained Olmsted’s intention through the rest of his career. When his firm undertook to provide a revised plan for Jackson Park following the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, he reiterated his belief that it could be “the finest domestic boating park in the world.”

The features that Olmsted and Vaux included in their original plan demonstrate how complex and comprehensive they intended the park’s recreational facilities to be. The inland section (later named Washington Park) was to have the “Southopen Green” for sports and gatherings, with an adjoining “pavilion ground” with a pavilion and refectory, courts, gardens, galleries, and carriage concourse. There was also to be a quarter-mile-long mall and four areas for picnics, a mounded and densely planted Ramble, a deer paddock with its Farmstead Close structures, and a pond with boat landings. The narrow Midway Plaisance connected the two larger sections of the park: it contained formal bodies of water flanked by walks, drives, and rows of trees. The lakeside section, later called Jackson Park, had a concourse where the Midway met the Lagoon, a long pier on the lakeshore with adjoining concourse (one of five carriage concourses of two acres each planned for the park), and the Belvedere refectory with its large enclosed lawn. At the inner [21] end of that lawn was an extensive promenade and concert grove, with an island for the band or orchestra, as in Prospect Park.

The 165-acre Lagoon that was the principal landscape feature of this section of the park had at least a dozen boat landings with structures of various sizes. In addition, some of the islands in the lagoon were to be refuges for wild birds, serving as part of what the designers envisioned as the finest living ornithological collection in the world. This might, they suggested, be connected with a natural history museum in the park that could include such appropriate species of animals as bison, elk, bears, seals, and sea lions. In addition, they proposed a large area for boating south of the lagoon that would be sheltered from the wind and directly accessible from the lake, its entrance protected by the 1,000-foot pier. Since the South Park was to function as a park system in itself, the designers took special pains to secure certain sections that were to be kept open and lighted at night for social gatherings and athletic activities. These were the Southopen Ground (including the Southopen Green), the Lakeopen Ground (including the Lakeopen Green) and Parkhaven Green. They were to consist of greensward and scattered trees and would have little understory or shrub planting. These areas encompassed a total of 460 acres. The three “plaisance” areas, which were to be more densely planted and so more difficult to maintain and secure, would be surrounded by fences and closed at night: they consisted of the southern section of Washington Park, the Midway Plaisance, and the lagoon area of Jackson Park, totaling 547 acres (see map on p. 220).

The circulation system of the South Park was ambitious as well. There were to be fourteen miles of interior drives and thirty miles of paths, exceeding the systems of nine and twenty miles, respectively, in New York’s Central Park.

This proliferation of spaces and structures stands in marked contrast to the plan that Olmsted and Vaux had drawn up two years earlier for Delaware Park in Buffalo. In that city they had the option of placing most recreational facilities in the Parade and Front, leaving the park itself with only one large public building, the boathouse-refectory on the lake. Of all the parks that Olmsted designed, only Central Park had a multiplicity of areas, structures, and activities comparable to Chicago’s South Park, and several of those features had been stipulated in the original Central Park competition rules of 1857.

While the South Park plan contained many “artificial” elements that met a variety of recreational needs, its central purpose was to provide passages of scenery for the enjoyment of Chicagoans. According to Olmsted’s theories, the kind of landscape to be provided there should have been drawn from the “genius of the place,” involving a perceptive realization of ideal forms of the kinds of scenery found on the site. But Olmsted found the soggy, windblown prairie section unappealing and later referred to the marshy area back of the [22] lakeshore dunes as “a swamp without beauty.” There was only one element of the local scenery that he truly appreciated. This was Lake Michigan itself. The grandeur of the lake, he asserted, would compensate for the lack of varied terrain on the site. He was delighted to have the lake as a scenic adjunct and way of access to the park, but admitted that no artistic means could make it more grand. Still, if the artist’s hand could not improve the sublime, such a feature as the lake could add immeasurably to the park. Indeed, this was the only instance in his career of urban park design where he was able to associate passages of scenery of his favorite styles of park landscape, the pastoral and the picturesque, with an expanse of the sublime. Only the Chicago South Park would bring together the three distinct styles of natural scenery that he recognized in his professional thought and work.

As Olmsted had made clear in his earlier park reports, pastoral scenery was the most valuable kind for counteracting the debilitating influences of the city. The flat prairie of the South Park offered no barrier to creating such passages of scenery, although Olmsted felt little assurance that the wet, cold soil could ever produce splendid specimens of shade trees. The inland section was particularly well suited to pastoral landscapes, which became the key for that 370-acre area. The 100-acre Southopen Green was, moreover, one of the largest open spaces of meadow he ever designed. It was not, however, a prairie, or a landscape inspired by prairie conditions, that he planned for Washington Park. Rather, it was a version of the universal park-like scenery that he had traced far back in human history and considered an essential part of any urban park.

Still, it was not meadow scenery but water — the water of Lake Michigan extended — that provided the unifying element of the South Park design. The Mere of Washington Park connected to the formal waterway of the Midway Plaisance, which flowed into the Lagoon of Jackson Park, which connected to the Parkhaven harbor and thence to Lake Michigan. It was in the water section of the park — the Jackson Park Lagoon — that Olmsted found the most exciting opportunity for creating scenery.

Turning to an analysis he often used, that of basing a landscape design on the actions of nature in producing scenic effects, Olmsted observed that if geologic and climatic conditions had been somewhat different, a landscape would have developed behind the lakeshore dunes that was “of a most interesting and fascinating character, that, namely, of the wooded lagoons of the tropics.” Olmsted proposed to make the whole 165-acre lagoon of islands and sinuous waterways of this character. His inspiration was not the swamps of the Lake Michigan shore but rather the lush bayous of the Gulf Coast and the rainforest waterways of Panama that had so impressed him in his travels. He had experienced the awe, the sense of profusion and of mystery, provoked by tropical landscapes, the “profuse careless utterance of Nature,” in those southern places. Olmsted welcomed the opportunity to evoke [23] the same elemental response in this northern site, through the use of different plant materials, as he had previously welcomed a similar opportunity in Central Park. As he summed up the case in the South Park report:

You certainly cannot set the madrepore or the mangrove at work on the banks of Lake Michigan, you cannot naturalize bamboo or papyrus, aspiring palm or waving parasites, but you can set firm barriers to the violence of winds and waves, and make shores as intricate, as arborescent and as densely overhung with foliage as any. You can have placid and limpid water within these shores that will mirror and double all above it as truly as any, and thus, if you cannot reproduce the tropical forest in all its mysterious depths of shade and visionary reflections of light, you can secure a combination of the fresh and healthy nature of the North with the restful, dreamy nature of the South that would in our judgment be admirably fitted to the general purposes of any park, and which certainly could nowhere be more grateful than in the borders of your city, not only on account of the present intensely wide-awake character of its people, but because of the special quality of the scenery about Chicago in which flat and treeless prairie and limitless expanse of lake are such prominent characteristics.

Olmsted’s concept was not realized during the first two decades of construction of the park, but selection of Jackson Park and the Midway Plaisance as the site of the 1893 Exposition breathed new life into the scheme. As he set out to plan the Exposition, he revived the concept of a lagoon with wild, profuse plantings on its verge. By that time he had successfully carried out a similar project in Boston’s Back Bay Fens, but had been disappointed in his attempts to realize such a plan on the Great Lakes in the Buffalo South Park project of 1888. Even so, the Wooded Island and Lagoon of the Exposition constituted the first fully realized demonstration of a kind of landscape, called the “prairie river,” that became so important an icon for landscape architects in the Chicago region, most notably Jens Jensen and O. C. Simonds, in the following years. Olmsted’s demonstration was impressive for its size, as well as for its extensive use of native plants gathered from nearby swamps.

Even the simpler concept of greensward, groves, and ponds in Washington Park, ably carried out under the supervision of H. W. S. Cleveland in the early 1870s, had been botched in the 1880s by the banal plant-sculptures of a later superintendent. The popularity of this artificial garden art led Cleveland to conclude grudgingly, “we need two systems of parks — one for the comparatively few who really want seclusion and the beauty of nature — another for the multitude who can only enjoy solitude in crowds — to whom any work is artistic in proportion as it is artificial.” Neither Olmsted nor his successors had much occasion to recover the original concept for Washington Park, but the firm’s thorough redesign of Jackson Park following the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 led to the realization of much that Olmsted had wished for many years to achieve on the site.

“A Review of Recent Changes, and Changes which
have been Projected, in the Plans of the Central Park,” 1872

At the time they were drawing up their plan for the Chicago South Park, Olmsted and Vaux were receiving another lesson in the politics of park design from the park commission of Boss Tweed in New York. Although the designers of Central Park were nominally landscape architects advisory to the new board of the Department of Public Parks that in 1870 replaced the Central Park board that had administered the park since the design competition of 1857, their protests went unheeded. The new regime was unsympathetic to the naturalistic design of the park: it trimmed up shade trees, removing the lower limbs and treated them like street trees. It also cleared out profuse undergrowth and shrubs in the interest of neatness and “free circulation of air.” In other places the park staff removed the dense border plantations that Olmsted and Vaux had carefully made in order to heighten the rural atmosphere of the park. They began construction of an extensive menagerie on the upper meadows, and built an expensive and ornamental “Sheep Fold” west of the Sheep Meadow, in a position that ruined the intended landscape effect of the area and that was accessible from within the park only by crossing the bridle path at a dangerous curve. Thus the Tweed Ring wreaked havoc on the three major landscape elements of the park that had been the focus of the dozen years of construction under Olmsted and Vaux’s nominal direction. These were the border plantations, the open stretches of greensward, and the densely planted hillsides that had been planned for “picturesque sylvan scenery.”

Following the overthrow of the Tweed Ring in 1871, the new park board requested Olmsted and Vaux to comment on the results of the Ring’s policies and to propose a program of recovery. Their response is contained in the two letters of 1872 published as the eighth document in this volume. The letters contain some of the designers’ most specific descriptions of design intent for the park. They spell out in particular the intended character of the Dairy area, which Olmsted and Vaux had planned as a secluded section for children and convalescents.

The letters also explain how Olmsted and Vaux planned extensive views northward across the playground and Sheep Meadow. They examine specifically the kinds of scenery that produced the atmosphere the designers wished the park to have, and analyze their psychological effect. There was the effect of picturesque scenery: “A cluster of horn beams and hemlocks, the trunks of some twisting over a crannied rock, the face of the rock brightened by lichens, and half veiled by tresses of vines growing over it from the rear, and its base lost in a tangle of ground pine, mosses and ferns”; or, more beneficial, there were pastoral scenes consisting of “a broad stretch of slightly undulating meadow without defined edge, its turf lost in a haze of the shadows of scattered trees under the branches of which the eye would range.”

[25]

Equally significant is the discussion of the lack of public understanding of the design of Central Park. As the Tweed Ring’s policies demonstrated, there were many who were willing to see the park become a great metropolitan fair ground, “a desultory collocation of miscellaneous entertainments.” In a striking analogy, Olmsted and Vaux illustrated the difference between the public’s understanding of architecture in contrast to its awareness of landscape design:

The new Court House has been a great deal discussed during the last few years, but, in all that has been written, a demand has probably not been made that certain of its rooms should be fitted up with billiard tables or suitably for religious services or public demonstrations in anatomy; the lack of a convenient carriage way to the roof or to the lunch-counter has not been complained of, nor has it been proposed to remedy the present cramped, inconvenient and unattractive arrangements for refreshments by devoting the more spacious of the court rooms to this purpose. . . . But propositions quite as fantastic are not unfrequently made with earnestness in regard to the Park.

The purpose of the park was to provide scenery that would counteract the psychological stress of urban life. The authors demonstrate how the three fundamental elements of the park — the border plantings, the open pastoral landscapes, and the profusely planted passages of picturesque sylvan scenery — produced the desired psychological effect. In the process, they show how even the numerous arches that they introduced to provide separation of ways intruded less upon the landscape than the traffic in the park without them would have done.

“General Order for the Organization and Routine of Duty
of the Keepers’ Service of the Central Park,” 1873

Olmsted and Vaux carefully designed Central Park so that people engaged.in different activities and traveling by different means would intrude as little as possible on the enjoyment of other park users. But careful design, however successfully carried out, would not by itself guarantee the success of the park. That success was most important to Olmsted. In 1858, as construction commenced under his supervision as architect-in-chief, he declared to his friend Parke Godwin, “it is of great importance as the first real park made in this country — a democratic development of the highest significance & on the success of which, in my opinion, much of the progress of art & esthetic culture in this country is dependent.” When, fifteen years later, he wrote the document on the Central Park keepers force published in this volume, he still believed that Central Park would provide the first demonstration in the country of the beneficial effect that a park could have, but regretted that “the demonstration of experience is lacking.” Part of the reason for this failure was that planting of the park was never completed under Olmsted’s direction, a shortcoming he tried repeatedly to rectify during the 1870s. Compounding [26] this problem was the extensive planting and maintenance work that the Tweed Ring board had done in a manner at cross-purposes with the intent of the designers. Since the advent of the Tweed Ring the park had also lacked an adequate keepers force. The importance to Olmsted of an effective force is indicated by his statement in 1873 that from the beginning he and Vaux expected the park to have a much more efficient keepers force than it ever had, and that “not a line of the Park would otherwise have been laid where it is, not a tree planted where trees now stand.” In the early days of the movement for the park, its opponents had expressed strong doubts that a successful public park could be created in the city. The classic dissent by James Gordon Bennett, editor of the influential New York Herald declared that the rowdy element of the city, epitomized by “Sam the Five-Pointer” from the dissolute area of Five Points, would overwhelm the respectable park users:

when we open a public park, Sam will air himself in it. . . . He will enjoy himself there, whether by having a muss, or a drink at the corner groggery opposite the great gate. He will run races with his new horse in the carriage way. He will knock any better dressed man down who remonstrates with him. He will talk and sing, and fill his share of the bench, and flirt with the nursery girls in his own coarse way. Now, we ask what chance have William B. Astor and Edward Everett against this fellow-citizen of theirs?”

Accordingly, Olmsted wished from the beginning to form a keepers force that was very different in training and purpose from the metropolitan police. He set up the force in early 1858 with twenty-two keepers and remained in charge of it until he left the park for service with the U.S. Sanitary Commission in June 1861. By that time the number of keepers had increased to fifty-five. Olmsted did not regain authority over the keepers until May 1872. At that time he also began a five-month term as temporary president of the park board. He found his system still in place, though working poorly. By then the new park board had fired the fifty keepers that the Tweed Ring board had added for patronage purposes. Even so, a physician who examined the remaining ninety-nine keepers declared a third of them to be in “decidedly unsound condition,” with nineteen “positively unfit for duty.” In October 1872 the board authorized Olmsted to reorganize the keepers force and reduce its expense of operation. His task was made more difficult by the dissipation [27] of discipline that had taken place during the year and a half of Tweed Ring rule in 1870–71. In addition, city employees were now subject to an eight-hour law. (Previously, keepers had been on duty at times for eighteen hours a day and gatekeepers had been required to be at their posts eleven to twelve hours every day of the week, a situation against which Olmsted had protested.)

Olmsted had long wished to supplement the uniformed keepers force with a group of “extra-keepers” who would wear less formal uniforms and whose responsibilities would be maintenance of the park and assistance of visitors. He now instituted such a category of keepers. While this met the need for economy, he still faced the problem of making the formally uniformed “patrol-keepers” more effective. Most of them had been assigned to “beats” consisting of large sections of the park, ranging from fifty to one hundred acres. Surveillance of them by the eight officers responsible for the task was difficult and they could easily avoid observation for hours at a time. Olmsted’s solution was to create four “all-day beats” and supplement them with two “rounds.” Each round was a seven-mile circuit of the park, during which a keeper observed all the gates and gatekeepers between 59th Street and 102nd Street. As a result, these keepers, being primarily on the drives, were far more visible than before. They also recorded their position eight times during each round as they performed “close inspection” of gatekeepers on their route. Olmsted scheduled the rounds to take two hours and forty minutes and allowed the keepers a ten-minute rest period between rounds. On a given day, sixteen of the thirty-six “patrol keepers” were to make three rounds, for a total of twenty-one miles, the others making two rounds. He later defended this rigorous regime by citing authorities who calculated that a walk of thirty miles was the equivalent of a day’s work for a laborer, and referring to the opinion of U.S. Army officers and surgeons during the Civil War that their soldiers improved in health when marching twenty miles a day.

In drawing up the new keepers’ regulations, Olmsted also instituted a strict discipline that, among other things, forbade casual conversation between keepers and required military bearing at all times. In the thirty-point “Revised and Additional Rules for the Conduct of Patrol and Post Keepers” that are part of the keepers report published in this volume, he sought to anticipate every situation that might reduce that discipline, even to the point (rule number 20) of directing the course to be pursued if two keepers came abreast of each other while walking in the same direction.

Olmsted’s new keepers’ regime was short-lived. From the time he instituted it, he met with hostility and recalcitrance from many of the keepers, as well as continual opposition from the captain in charge. Within a month of its commencement the New-York Daily Tribune published and endorsed a letter attacking the “Olmsted Chain-Gang System.” Because of it, the author claimed, visitors could no longer find pleasure or safety in the park. Olmsted [28] had transformed the keepers into “human velocipedes” who would hardly stop to suppress any crime short of murder, intent as they were on completing their rounds on time. While the keepers struggled on their course, young ruffians stole flowers and stoned visitors, libertines roamed the park “insulting unescorted ladies with practical impunity,” and break-neck horsemen threatened life and limb. Olmsted published a rejoinder asserting that the new system had secured good order in the park and that he had simply restored the old keepers system that the Tribune had considered a success.

However much Olmsted might protest, the newspaper controversy embarrassed him at a crucial time. A new city charter went into effect on June 1, 1873, leading to the appointment of three new park commissioners to the board. They soon proposed a reorganization of the park that stripped Olmsted of most of his authority. As a result, Henry C. Stebbins, perennial president of the board and an important supporter of Olmsted’s, resigned the presidency and Olmsted himself submitted his resignation. A complete rift was averted, but Olmsted testified that thereafter the new commissioners, though outwardly respectful, treated every proposal of his as though it was “in imminent danger of being used for disseminating a pestilence.” In late September the board abolished Olmsted’s round system and authorized the keepers to carry clubs. It would be a year and a half before he again exerted significant influence on the maintenance and keeping of Central Park.

While the larger part of the keepers document published below represents Olmsted’s attempt to meet the particular problems posed by the topography and politics of Central Park, the final section of “general observations” presents his more general concept of the purpose of a park keepers force. In this section he argued that vigorous enforcement of regulations by accosting and upbraiding park visitors would be counterproductive. There was, in fact, no way that the keepers could even keep the whole park under surveillance at a given time. The purpose for the rigorous discipline that he demanded was of another sort. Rapid movement and military bearing could heighten the impression that keepers might come in sight at any moment, but the larger effect of their bearing and discipline was to work by a more subtle process. By their actions the keepers must enlist the self-respect and civic pride of the park users. They must demonstrate that there was a continuous and consistent system designed to protect the users in the park, meet their needs, answer their questions, and lead them to consider the rights of others using the park. The keepers must, in all their dealings with the public, employ “a manner of studied official respect.” For, Olmsted explained, “this impression will be valuable for the purpose in proportion as it is uniform, and as it manifests systematic vigilance, order, discipline, considerateness and courtesy.”

Such a regime would lead park users to recognize the legitimacy of the authority of the keepers, and would dispose the public to support the enforcement of regulations. This would support the authority of government [29] in the matter. In his analysis Olmsted was drawing on the issues of loyalty and authority in a republic that had been a recurring concern for him during the years of secession and Civil War. He observed that protection of the park rested “almost wholly on the loyal disposition of the great body of visitors to side with the keepers in discountenancing its misuse.” The way they expressed that disposition would be not so much by strong actions as by a general, pervasive attitude and setting of example. In this area, as in his aesthetic thought, Olmsted emphasized the importance of the “silent and unconscious influence” of people on each other. Just as the unconscious influence of scenery was the most powerful way by which the park exerted its tranquilizing effect, so the same kind of influence, exerted by its visitors, would be the most reliable means of ensuring its proper use.

Olmsted realized that most of the keepers would not understand this, since they were disposed “in common with mankind in general, to have too little respect for or faith in influences which operate quietly and graciously, and to magnify the importance of acts of which the results are direct and obvious.” Thus, the complex system that he sought to establish was not directed toward enforcement of regulations by the keepers, but rather toward creation of an atmosphere, a sentiment, and a tradition, that would lead park users to respect the design purposes of the park and the rights of the other users without requiring direct intervention by the keepers themselves.

These issues of civic responsibility and unconscious influence were central to Olmsted’s thought: they emerged in his planning for the park keepers in yet another of the myriad ways they infused his career. The keepers’ regulations also express the crucial concept, which he frequently reiterated, that the purpose of a park was to have a beneficial effect on the health of its users, exerting a tranquilizing and restorative effect through the experience of scenery. Once again he asserted that any structure or activity that lessens that psychological effect is detrimental to the park and its prime reason for existence. The principal value of a park stems from its psychological influence: “the insensible advantage which is gained in this way by thousands who visit it without this purpose definitely in view, but whose strength and power of usefulness are thus increased, and whose lives thus prolonged, constitutes its chief value.” It therefore followed that “any conduct which tends on the whole to restrict this value is a misuse of the Park.” This theme would become more important as Olmsted continued to educate the American public concerning the true and universal value of parks.

“Park,” 1875

One medium for this instruction was the New American Cyclopædia, for which Olmsted wrote an article entitled “Park” in 1861, a discussion that he revised for the new edition in 1875. In 1861 he offered an extended description of parks in Europe, the British Isles, and America, including a history [30] of changes in gardening styles since ancient times. The value of his commentary stemmed in large part from his personal observation of many of these public parks and recreation grounds during his three trips to England and Europe in the 1850s. By 1875 his emphasis had changed; he focused more directly on what constituted a park and on situations where park-like treatment of landscape was desirable. His first step was to differentiate the park, as historically defined, from the garden and the wood. He also proposed more precise terminology for public recreation grounds that would differentiate between “parks,” “places,” “place parks,” and “parkways.” He added an original discussion, based in part on his and Yaux’s plan of 1868 for Tompkins Square in Brooklyn, concerning the way that public squares and small “places” in cities should be designed. As he had done in earlier writings, he emphasized the paramount importance of the park-like landscape:

Other forms of natural scenery stir the observer to warmer admiration, but it is doubtful if any . .. are equally soothing and refreshing; equally adapted to stimulate simple, natural, and wholesome tastes and fancies, and thus to draw the mind from absorption in the interests of an intensely artificial habit of life.

In the article Olmsted offered one of his clearest statements of why the picturesque style on steep and broken ground was less valuable for the purposes of a public park than was pastoral scenery. He also emphasized, as he had in the 1866 Prospect Park report, the difficulty of reaching a satisfactory compromise between scenic values and provision for intensive use of a park. This difficulty, he repeated, made it all the more desirable to exclude from a park any activities or institutions “which have nothing in common with that of tranquillizing rest and exercise, and to which the element of landscape beauty is not essential.”

Olmsted also addressed the problem of creating park-like scenery in areas of inadequate rainfall. The issue had recently been recalled to his attention when he reviewed William Hammond Hall’s plan for Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. Olmsted did not address the specific problem of semiarid landscape design but rather discussed the desirable approach for regions of only moderate rainfall. He recommended use of woods and water, rather than greensward, as the principal scenic features of public grounds in such places and illustrated his discussion with examples from French design practice.

Following his discussion of these general themes, Olmsted added a shortened and much revised version of the commentary on contemporary parks that he had included in his 1861 article. He expanded his discussion of the park movement in America and gave a more comprehensive view of the public spaces of London and Paris. He also moderated some of the praise he had offered fourteen years earlier for Birkenhead Park and Phoenix Park an’d the English Garden in Munich.

“A Consideration of the Justifying Value
of a Public Park,” 1880

In 1880, at a meeting of the American Social Science Association in Saratoga Springs, New York, Olmsted found the opportunity to make his most extended statement on the nature of the park movement and the park. His talk was published in the association’s journal, but with many errors. He was anxious that an accurate version be available to the public, and so published at his own expense the text of his speech “A Consideration of the Justifying Value of a Public Park,” presented below. The problem, as he defined it in the introductory section of the article, was the lack of clarity in public understanding of what a park should be. This was aggravated by lack of continuity in administration of parks and too frequent application of “practical commonsense” standards that evaluated parks according to commercial value rather than their value as places of “mental relaxation” for the public.

Olmsted noted that the park movement was a recent phenomenon: nearly all the significant public parks in Europe and America had been constructed since 1850. The term park and the concept of what was park-like was much older, yet even this historical element added confusion to the issue. Old game-parks like Windsor Great Park or Richmond Park near London, though gradually transformed from royal hunting grounds to places of public recreation, continued to be managed for their commercial value in timber and game. Compounding this confusion was the great variety of features in public parks constructed during the nineteenth century. The extent of agreement on the definition of a public park seemed to be that it was “a ground appropriated to public recreation.” In his article Olmsted illustrated the remarkable number and variety of features that had been included in parks under that broad definition. He observed that “usage accounts for nothing” in identifying the special qualities unique to a park. Many of these features need not be in a park at all and could better be placed in their own spaces, scattered throughout a city. Still other features, requiring more space, could best be placed in a long public promenade devoted solely to what Olmsted called “gregarious” activities.

Examining developments that had paralleled the park movement in order to find a clearer explanation of the role of the park, Olmsted identified “a great enlargement of towns and development of urban habits” that was attended by psychological stress, depression, and exhaustion. He cited with approval John Ruskin’s commentary that “this is an age in which we grow more and more artificial day by day, and see less and less worthiness in those pleasures which bring with them no marked excitement; in knowledge which affords no opportunity for display.” The parallel movement that took place in response to these problems was an increased appreciation of nature “in the broad combining way of scenery” as evidenced by the amount of time and money expended on tourism to areas of strikingly beautiful natural scenery. [32] In this propensity Olmsted saw a “self-preserving instinct of civilization” rather than a passing fad or fashion.

These facts provided the key to the justifying value of a public park, which was “the cultivation of beauty of natural scenery.” The problem of a park was continuity of administration that sustained “the reconciliation of adequate beauty of nature in scenery with adequate means in artificial constructions of protecting the conditions of such beauty, and holding it available to the use, in a convenient and orderly way, of those needing it.” Properly pursued, these aims would succeed in making a park “steadily gainful of that quality of beauty which comes only with age.”

“Mount Royal, Montreal,” 1881

In the fall of 1874 Olmsted began work on Mount Royal in Montreal, the first park that he designed after the end of his partnership with Calvert Vaux. At this time he was utilizing the architectural skills of Thomas Wisedell on the U.S. Capitol grounds in Washington and collaborating with the engineer George Radford in planning Parkside, a subdivision adjoining Delaware Park in Buffalo. He would make use of the talents of both men in his work on Mount Royal.

Mount Royal was the first park that Olmsted designed whose commissioners were a committee of the City Council rather than an independent, appointed body. While the leading members of the Mount Royal commission seem to have respected Olmsted and approved his general concept, he encountered a series of discouraging instances where public demand forced actions that he viewed as precipitous and unwise. The report of 1881 published in this volume chronicles both his concept for the park and the difficulties he encountered in carrying it out. It is a revised version of two public lectures that Olmsted delivered when he unveiled his plan for the park to the public in September 1877.

By the end of his first visit to inspect the proposed park site in November 1874, Olmsted had identified the principal elements of the design. These were: a road up the mountain from its north and northeast sides that would have gradual grades permitting easy movement of carriages and making the ascent of the mountain a pleasure even for convalescent patients; enhancement, by planting and pruning, of the wild forest character of most of the site; and an extent of open, park-like scenery on the higher elevations of the southern part of the mountain. He spelled out these ideas to the park commissioners in a report of November 21, 1874. In it he praised the site as offering “a larger measure than any other place equally near so large a population” for the two key elements of value for a park. These were “the change of air afforded” and “the power of their scenery to counteract conditions which tend to nervous depressions or irritability.”

Olmsted then awaited completion of a topographical map on which [33] to base his plan. But the city was in the throes of hard times following the Panic of 1873, and the City Council was impatient to begin the hiring of unemployed workers that park construction would make possible. By April 1875 the council was anxious to begin constructing the approach road. The topographical map for that section of the mountain was not completed until August, and in the interim Olmsted refused to produce a plan based on inadequate information. Within two weeks of receiving the map, however, he visited the site and by early October had completed his plan for the first two-mile section of the drive.

Construction began in early November and, despite bitter cold and heavy snow, was completed by early February. To celebrate this event a fleet of 106 sleighs containing the park commissioners and invited guests toured the new road and then went on by temporary roads to the top of the mountain.

From Olmsted’s point of view the whole procedure was a disaster. As he later complained, those directing the work failed to consult his detailed instructions and produced a road that “any boy who had been a year with a surveying party might have laid out & any intelligent farmer might have constructed. The opportunity of making such an attractive way up the mountain as I had designed,” he mourned, “has been lost forever.” In particular, the builders ignored his plan to limit the road’s lateral intrusion into the surrounding landscape, which he proposed to achieve by constructing walls along the uphill side of the road and steep embankments on the downhill side. They did not contour the drive as Olmsted proposed, and failed to construct the sidewalk and row of shrubbery on the outer edge that would have given a clear definition to the sides of the drive, producing the graceful sinuosity that was the hallmark of his drives in other parks. “Had it been desirable to display barrenness on its borders, and to make the fact apparent that the road was a rude and hasty construction, made with no regard to . . . considerations for local and foreground scenery . . ., ” he lamented, “the same amount of labor could hardly have been better applied to the object.” In a March 1877 letter to Horatio A. Nelson, president of the park commission, he made an offer (which he then crossed out) to contribute $1,000 to rebuilding that section of road, “so mortifying it is to me.”

Another disappointment soon followed the loss of the road up the mountain as an element of scenery. A major reason for Olmsted’s approval of the site on his first visit was the discovery of a large area on the upper mountain suitable for a passage of pastoral scenery. He envisioned a lake of four or five acres in the midst of “a piece of truly park-like ground, broad, simple, quiet and of a rich sylvan and pastoral character,” that would form “a harmonious, natural foreground to the view over the western valley” that would appear “in striking contrast to the ruggedness of the mountain proper.” Much to his chagrin, the city decided to place a twenty-acre reservoir in this area, (the site of present-day Lac au Castors, designed in the 1930s). Olmsted [34] accepted the decision and prepared a design for a geometrically shaped reservoir of seven acres. He proposed that it serve as the site for a promenade, with separate ways for carriages, equestrians, and pedestrians. He made it clear that nonetheless the reservoir would not be a part of the park experience, but was rather an “interpolation.” Still, this change enabled him to abandon a plan for a promenade near the top of the mountain, simplifying the system of ways in that section of the park and retaining a wilder quality in the landscape.

Through 1876 Olmsted was besieged by requests to proceed with various features on the mountain before he had completed his plan. The commissioners were anxious to continue their road-building to the mountain top, although Olmsted cautioned, “unless you can look further ahead and lay out your work with reference to its ultimate ends, instead of to the immediate gratification of the public, the work of properly improving the mountain will cost too much and will never be done.” He refused to plan the road to the top until it was definitely established that the reservoir would occupy the space intended. The commissioners also pressed for a temporary structure at the top of the mountain. Olmsted acceded to this proposal a year and a half before he finally presented his full plan. In April 1876 he supplied plans by Wisedell for a shingle-style structure with a metal-clad tower that would appear from a distance as the “crown of the mountain.” The following year he was distressed to learn that he must select a site for a new small-pox hospital in the park. He also warned against a plan to place a monument on the mountain, saying that all artificial objects in the park should be as inconspicuous as possible and should serve the single purpose of enjoyment of natural scenery.

The major barrier to completion of the plan seems to have been the question of land acquisition. In October 1876 Olmsted forwarded a general plan to the park commissioners, stating that further questions about boundaries and approaches must be settled before he could draw up a final plan. In early November 1876 he was baffled to learn that property essential to his plan for the northern end of the mountain, which he had understood to be in the possession of the city, had not been acquired and would not be. This affected the area where he intended to create residential lots along two access routes to the mountain — one along Bleury Street (present-day Park Avenue) and the other entering where present-day Pine Avenue meets University Street. “Had I received the information you now give me,” he wrote Nelson, “my whole design for laying out the mountain would have been very different. . . . “ Then, in early 1877, the worsening hard times caused the City Council to halt all construction on the park and make plans for selling off all property not absolutely necessary to it. By early summer Olmsted had completed his plan, which included the property at the northern end of the park that the city had not acquired but that he considered essential.

Olmsted did what he could to gain a favorable hearing from the [35] Montreal public. He offered to give two public lectures to accompany the unveiling of the plan, recommending that they take place after the summer vacation period. The commissioners agreed, but their reluctance to spend money greatly limited the effectiveness of his presentation. To reduce the cost, they issued invitations only to government officials and placed no advertisements in the newspapers. To secure the meeting hall at the cheapest rates, they scheduled the lectures at three p.m. — “a time,” one newspaper observed, “when our citizens cannot possibly attend.” Indeed, the audience for the first lecture, on the general topic of public parks, consisted of only thirty or forty persons. Only one newspaper carried an extensive account, which Olmsted described as “very injudicious & misprinted selections” from his manuscript. The audience was larger the next day, a Saturday, for the lecture detailing the Mount Royal plan, but the newspapers took no notice of it. There was little prospect that this effort would produce the groundswell of public support for completion of the park according to his plan that Olmsted had hoped for. But he took some comfort from the fact that the plan would be publicly displayed at the City Hall and that the commissioners intended to publish the lectures.

However, it would be three years before he completed revision of those lectures and saw them published. This was due in part to the agitation that he felt whenever he turned to the subject of Montreal and its park. In explaining his recalcitrance to Nelson in late 1879, he claimed that “whenever I have attempted to revise my discourse as you requested I have had a return of the symptoms which I first felt when engaged in its preparation and I have been obliged in consequence to defer the undertaking.” This debility was apparently similar to the “pen sickness” that had beset him following the intense two years of administration and letter-writing when he was general secretary of the U.S. Sanitary Commission during the Civil War. Events in his professional life that occurred soon after his lectures in Montreal added to this problem. Barely three months after those lectures, Olmsted was fired from his position as landscape architect with the New York City park board, bringing abruptly and painfully to an end a nearly continuous involvement of twenty years with the design and supervision of Central Park. He left immediately on an already-planned trip to Europe arid during that time, as he reported to Nelson in December 1879, “fell into a nervous illness from which I have never fully recovered.” Only after making the move from New York to Brookline, Massachusetts, and securing the opportunity to plan the Boston park system does Olmsted seem to have recovered his optimism and composure. “You can have no idea what a drag life had been to me for three years or more,” he wrote his friend Charles Loring Brace in March 1882, “I did not appreciate it myself until I began last summer to get better. The turning point appears to have been our abandonment of New York.”

Olmsted attempted to secure final payment from the Mount Royal commissioners without the painful rewriting of his 1877 lectures, but Nelson [36] assured him that the commissioners would hold him to the task of submitting a final report. Olmsted finally completed the report during the summer of 1881, but it was very different from his lecture of three years previous. While he seems to have made few changes in his second lecture, which describes his plan for Mount Royal and appears in the published report as the Appendix, he apparently threw out most of his first lecture and wrote new material for the body of the published report. His first lecture of 1877, as described in the local newspaper article based on his manuscript, had dealt primarily with erroneous concepts of what a park should be. In the final report he omitted such “argument against specific propositions adverse to the motive of the adopted design.”

In the first section of the report, Olmsted reviewed his involvement with the Montreal park and demonstrated the waste and inefficiency caused by the form of park board the city had created. This is the section that his brother-in-law William Woodruff Niles, Episcopal Bishop of New Hampshire, referred to as his “effective ‘showing up’ of the management” of the park. Sagely, Niles observed that this might “so wound the self-esteem of those having matters in charge as to set them against your wishes whatever may be their convictions.” Niles cautioned, “It is said, you know, that ’tis hard to forgive one who has injured us, but harder far to forgive one whom we have injured. I hope they won’t find it so with you.” Olmsted’s pressing of this issue must also have stemmed from his desire to warn the public about the danger of vacillating park administrations that failed to benefit from the professional advice of trained landscape architects. The following spring he would publish The Spoils of the Park, an impassioned indictment of the policies of the park board of New York City.

Still, Olmsted had another and more important task to accomplish in his final report on Mount Royal. This was to make a convincing case for his vision of the park. Economic recovery was finally underway in Montreal, which had made virtually no progress in constructing the park since the end of 1876. It was crucially important that he revive public support and direct it by the only means left to him. As he reminded the “owners of Mount Royal” in the concluding part of section V of his report, “the opportunities and advantages for producing certain charms of natural scenery which you hold as yet inert and unproductive in the mountain, are such as are possessed by no other city in any ground held for a public park.”

In the rest of the report, Olmsted spelled out for the citizens of Montreal how they could develop the charms of natural scenery of their mountain to the fullest extent. The true economy, he reiterated, was “economy in the ultimate development of resources of poetic charm of scenery.” His proposal presents many remarkable ideas and contains some of his most passionate statements concerning the power of scenery. Section VI is a particularly concentrated explication of the psychological effect of landscape. The diversity [37] of ways that Olmsted found to increase variety in the landscape experience of the mountain testifies to the fertility of his imagination.

At the same time, the report demonstrates how he managed to achieve the fundamental purposes of a park even on a site so different from the pastoral meadows he preferred. Particularly telling is the way he proposed to make the mountain beneficial to the sick and weak, even to the point of creating a full circuit of the mountain, bottom to top, that was accessible by wheelchair. For, as he observed, it was important “to cultivate the habit of thoughtful attention to the feebler sort of folk.” This meant asking, for instance, “can this or that be made easier and more grateful to an old woman or a sick child, without, on the whole, additional expense, except in thoughtfulness?” If so, he urged, “ten to one, the little improvement will simply be that refinement of judgment which is the larger part of the difference between good and poor art, and the enjoyment of every man will be increased by it, though he may not know just how.”

To make sure that the report reached at least the influential citizens of Montreal, Olmsted had one hundred copies printed at his expense, for free distribution. He sent fifty copies to men suggested by Niles, and requested the Montreal bookseller Samuel C. Dawson to distribute the others. He stereotyped the report and offered free use of the plates to the park commissioners for publication of the report as a public document for broader distribution. The commissioners did not accept his offer for use of the plates, and Olmsted’s formal involvement with the park of Mount Royal came to an end.

“Belle Isle: After One Year,” 1884

Just as he was ending his seven-year relation with the Montreal park commissioners, an opportunity developed for Olmsted to plan a park on Belle Isle in Detroit. The city had recently acquired the island, and after several contretemps a board of commissioners was appointed. Its chairman was James McMillan who, two decades later as a U.S. senator, would preside over the revival of the L’Enfant plan for the city of Washington and the ambitious park system conceived by Olmsted’s son and namesake, Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. In November 1881 McMillan approached Olmsted about planning Belle Isle, but when the commissioners proposed in December that he design only one-third of the park for them, he emphatically refused. Nor did he respond favorably at first to McMillan’s request that he examine the site and advise the commissioners concerning it free of charge. McMillan soon persuaded him to relent, however, and in February Olmsted visited the park, charging only for his expenses. The tactic was successful, and in April he received a contract to plan the park for $7,000 and to superintend work on the park for three years. The usual difficulties of securing an accurate topographical map delayed the design process, but by summer’s end he had [38] the necessary information and began the work. It soon became clear, however, that unless he could secure broad support for his plan, there was little prospect that it would be realized and maintained. This was due in part to the dependence of the park commission on the city’s Common Council, which had to approve every significant action of the commission. Moreover, the mayor and many others opposed financing the park through bonds or other dedicated sources of funding, which meant that progress of the work had to depend on annual appropriations by the Common Council. Strong suspicions also existed among the aldermen that Olmsted’s plan would be extravagantly expensive. To allay these fears and lay a solid groundwork of support, he wrote a long report concerning his concept for the park. In early December 1882 he offered the commissioners the chance to publish the report, but they did not act on the proposal. He then published one hundred copies of the fifty-eight-page report, entitled The Park for Detroit, at his own expense and distributed them to influential citizens.

Seeking to reassure the people of Detroit, he offered a simple and inexpensive scheme for the park. Most of it would consist of woods and meadows that would be kept open by the grazing of flocks of sheep. The landscape effect would be similar to that of Windsor Great Park in England. In addition to the woodland, he proposed to make an eighty-acre meadow on the east side of the island that would be the largest and best parade ground in any American city. “You must have a few simple, distinct objects in view, and must provide for these in a liberal, strong, quiet and thoroughly satisfying way,” he counseled, “guarding with all possible care against inconsistencies and discords.” In fact, consistency of policy was the best guarantee that the park would not be unduly expensive. In order to sustain simplicity of treatment in most of the park, Olmsted proposed to create a “City Fair” area with structures for a variety of activities at the end of the island closest to the city. Since much of the island was low and ill-drained, he proposed to dig a series of canals or “rigolets” into which a sunken drainage system would flow, and which would provide protected passage for small boats.

Having set forth the rationale for his treatment of the island, Olmsted went ahead in early 1883 to elaborate his plan. He further developed the proposed system of canals, using a “loop canal” to separate the City Fair section from the area of the park to be grazed, and adding a straight, mile-long avenue with a canal on either side. The most important feature that he added in his plan was the remarkable 1,600-foot pier and “gallery” that he proposed for the southern end of the island and which he described fully in Belle Isle: After One Year. It was to function as a two-level pier for access to steamboats, a shaded colonnade overlooking the bathing beach, a roofed viewing stand for athletic events, and a shelter from sudden storms. With its great size, multiplicity of uses, and sinuously flowing roofline, it was one of the most remarkable shingle-style structures designed in the decade when American architects, [39] most notably his friend and collaborator H. H. Richardson, were achieving such noted results in that idiom.

Upon completing his preliminary plan, Olmsted took it to Detroit, displayed it at the city hall, and (so he claimed) stood by it for two weeks answering questions. He also explained the plan to the park commissioners and to relevant committees of the Common Council. During the visit he did his best to convince the park commission and city engineer that the City Fair section and its boundary canal should be completed during the next working season. Work did begin, but he was greatly disappointed by how little was accomplished with the appropriated funds, meager though they were.

Olmsted spent the next winter attempting to secure construction of the pier and gallery. He realized that until all activities requiring structures could be concentrated at the southern end of the island the park commissioners would be constantly tempted to make permanent the temporary structures that had been set up in other parts of the park while construction of the City Fair facilities took place. He was also concerned that the Common Council’s process of doling out annual appropriations for park construction would prevent the building of the whole gallery structure. In this his fears proved correct.

By September 1883 the working plan for the pier and gallery was finished, and the next month Olmsted took the plans and drawings to Detroit. As discussion began concerning the amount to be appropriated for the working season of 1884, he had his apprentice Charles Eliot redraw a bird’s-eye view and then had an “architectural painter” in New York produce a large-scale version of it for exhibition in Detroit. He then spent some two weeks in the city in early March 1884, attempting to rally support for the $40,000 needed to construct the pier and gallery. But opposition began to develop in some local newspapers, with one editor condemning the gallery as a “colossal folly.” In response, Olmsted carefully explained to the park commission the importance of building the gallery in the coming year.

Opposition still persisted, especially in claims that the water was too shallow for steamboats to reach the pier. At the end of May, therefore, Olmsted felt compelled to demonstrate the inaccuracy of those reports. On a windy day he directed the largest of the Windsor Line’s steamers to a buoy marking the end of the pier and demonstrated with a lead line that he concocted that the water was twice as deep as necessary and that the bottom was not sandy, as critics had insisted, and would not need constant dredging to keep the pier approachable. He then met with the commissioners and after an intense, hour-long presentation led the president to respond, laughing, “I guess we shall have to build the pier, gentlemen, and the gallery also, but not this year.” The Belle Isle park commission then authorized their engineer to move ahead on construction of the pier section of the structure: but the future of the gallery remained uncertain.

[40]

In order to prove the viability of the gallery to the public, and to explain once again its crucial importance to his plan for the park, Olmsted wrote and published his second pamphlet on Belle Isle, entitled Belle Isle: After One Year. He reviewed the debate over the plan during the previous two years and offered an extended rationale for having a shelter like the gallery in the place he proposed. Work on the 400-foot pier at the western end of the gallery began in the fall and was completed early in 1885. But the superb design for the gallery was never carried out, and Olmsted’s plan of restricting buildings to the area south of the loop canal was soon abandoned. Nor was his canal system constructed. The mile-long avenue was built, but instead of running along it, the canals that were built connect three lakes placed in the lowest parts of the island where Olmsted had instead proposed to have meadows.

By April 1885 Olmsted no longer had an official relation with Detroit and Belle Isle. His infrequent later correspondence on the subject consisted of defending his plan against a widespread belief that it would have been outrageously expensive to carry out and that his fees had been too high. Much of this he attributed to the fact that the real grounds for hostility between the Common Council and the park commission — disagreements over fees, privileges, and patronage — could not be admitted. It was much safer, he observed, to blame an interloper from out of town. To queries from the new president of the board in 1887, he responded:

I have no connection with the park at Detroit, know nothing definitely about its history since my engagement with the Commissioners ended and . . . I wish to have nothing to do, directly or indirectly, with any public discussion of the matter, having at the outset seen the danger of just such difficulties as have since arisen, given warning of them not only to the commissioners but most strenuously, by carefully prepared publications, and by personal interviews with editors and others for the purpose, and in every way proper for me to employ, done my best to prevent work from being started except on a design the leading motives and conditions of success of which should be intelligently realized, accepted and approved, not only by the commissioners but by the people.

“Paper on the Back Bay Problem and its Solution,” 1886

The Back Bay Fens was the first section of the Boston park system that Olmsted designed. He began the work in 1878 after the city’s park commissioners had held a design competition and awarded the prize to an amateur who had no professional stake in the carrying out of his design. Olmsted had refused to play any role in the competition, either as competitor or as judge. He had, however, reviewed the sites that the commissioners proposed to include in a park system for the city. But as they prepared their report of 1876 they gave him no more creative role. “I have given you no complete service as yet,” he wrote the chairman as the commission was completing its [41] work of selection, “in fact I have not felt sure that you regarded my visits thus far as ‘business.”’ Only after the fiasco of the design competition for the Back Bay park did the commissioners finally make Olmsted their professional advisor.

The 100-acre site lay just beyond the fashionable section of Back Bay that was growing up on land filled beginning in the late 1850s. From the outset Olmsted had to contend with popular expectations that the site would become an expensively maintained floral display like the Boston Public Garden. Indeed, much of his work in Boston was an attempt to wean Bostonians from the artificialities of the Public Garden style of planting. During this period he also criticized the Public Garden for its cost of upkeep: in his first report on Belle Isle he pointed out that the cost per acre of maintaining the Boston Public Garden was twenty-seven times greater than that for the upkeep of the simple landscape that he and Vaux had created in Buffalo’s Delaware Park. He was also distressed to find many of his smaller public grounds in Boston described as parks when both their size and treatment were not park-like. He eventually succeeded in applying the name Back Bay Fens to that project, instead of Back Bay Park, but in other instances he failed to convince even the park commissioners. A prime example is the site on Boston Harbor that they insisted on calling Marine Park, instead of Pleasure Bay, as Olmsted preferred. Of all the public grounds he designed in Boston, only 500-acre Franklin Park qualified in his view as a park.

The basis of Olmsted’s opposition to the idea of an elegant, well-kept “park” on the Back Bay site was that any plan for it had to take into account the sanitary engineering issues to be solved. The site was a natural drainage basin for two major streams running through the backcountry of Boston — a basin consisting of mud flats at low tide and subject to flooding after heavy rains. The streams were open sewers, and the stench from the flats penetrated the surrounding residential area. As he indicated in the lecture published below, Olmsted believed that a tidal gate must be constructed that would allow water to cover the flats at all times. He was also convinced that only the restoration of salt marsh conditions within the basin would control destructive surf during floods while at the same time providing an attractive shoreline. His first step was to consult with Boston City Engineer Joseph P. Davis, with whom he had worked in 1866–67 when Davis was chief engineer of Prospect Park in Brooklyn. Davis agreed that the park commissioners had ignored essential preconditions for dealing with the area. During the next two years he worked closely with Olmsted to devise a workable solution.

Olmsted justified his design as a “natural” one that met all the city’s needs in the place better than the artificiality of the Public Garden would have done. He asserted that it was

a direct development of the original conditions of the locality in adaptation to the needs of a dense community. So regarded, it will be found to be, in the artistic sense of the word, natural, and possibly to suggest a modest poetic sentiment more [42] grateful to town-weary minds than an elaborate and elegant garden-like work would have yielded.

In his work in Boston, Olmsted often found some precondition of the site that made it ill-suited for decorative gardening. When he came to plan Charlesbank, a promenade with gymnastic facilities along the bank of the Charles River below the Fens, he assured the commissioners that the site was too bleak and exposed to permit successful flower gardening. When he outlined the preferred maintenance practices for the one true park in the system, he counseled that in Franklin Park “the urban elegance generally desired in a small public or private pleasure ground . . . be methodically guarded against.” In the same fashion, he criticized the desire to call Back Bay a park as an ill-considered bit of real estate “puffery” that would lead to constant dissatisfaction and criticism of the wild and natural appearance of his proposed design.

Olmsted believed that his method of design met both engineering requirements and psychological needs more effectively than did floral displays and exotic plants. His approach to the Back Bay Fens was similar to what he and Vaux had proposed seven years earlier for the marshy terrain of Jackson Park in Chicago. He proposed creating islands as bird sanctuaries, as he had in Chicago, and went on to consider including an aquatic collection within the basin as well. He considered having small steamboats make a three-mile circuit of the basin with pleasure parties — a precursor of the system of electric launches he developed for the Lagoon in Jackson Park during the Columbian Exposition of 1893.

While Olmsted’s collaboration with the city of Boston’s engineers was an important element of his planning, involvement of an architect in the process was also crucial. When he found City Engineer Davis undisposed to use an architect, he warned Charles Dalton, chairman of the park commission, that Davis’s views on such issues as the shape and materials of bridges would be unsatisfactory, “not intentionally or consciously but from the habitual drift of the engineering mind.” For, as he observed, “to an Engineer bridges are engineering works.” He therefore asked to plan the Boylston Street bridge crossing of the basin with his friend and close professional ally H. H. Richardson. “It is the first thing you have to do as a Commission in which striking success, giving artistic people confidence in your ability to lead the city, is practicable,” he told Dalton. The wildness of the landscape called for boulders or rough brick as the material for the bridge: “A natty, formal elegant structure would put all the rural elements of the Bay out of countenance,” he warned, “it would be a discord.” Instead, the bridge should “have a rustic quality and be picturesque in material as well as in outlines and shadows.” Richardson heartily adopted Olmsted’s concept, as he so frequently did in their collaborations. Richardson’s first plan was for “a very picturesque structure of fieldstone” that satisfied Olmsted’s desire for a rugged and rustic effect. But this approach was too unusual for Boston’s engineers and park commissioners. [43] So prominent a structure, according to the canons of taste of the day, needed to be more dignified and finished in appearance. Accordingly, Richardson’s final plan used cut blocks of granite and had a more elegant form. Olmsted regretted the change in design, believing that the bridge would have fitted the setting better “if it had not been quite so nice.” The commissioners did permit several boulder bridges at less conspicuous places, most notably Agassiz Bridge crossing the middle of the Fens.

The Back Bay project, with its solution of sanitary engineering problems through creation of a naturalistic landscape, marked the first step in the reconstruction and preservation of a whole stream valley for public recreation purposes. As Olmsted indicated at the end of the lecture published below, he went on to design the Riverway and other sections of the Muddy River between the Back Bay Fens and Jamaica Pond. Such preservation of watercourses and use of them as greenways had been a major concern of his since he proposed such treatment of Strawberry Creek in Berkeley, California, in 1865. Typically, in order to make sure that Public Garden–style decorative plantings were neither expected nor allowed in Boston’s Riverway, Olmsted insisted on calling the project the Muddy River Sanitary Improvement.

At the time that Olmsted delivered the lecture on Back Bay published below, construction of Richardson’s Boylston Street bridge had been completed. In addition, most of the dredging of the channel in Back Bay and much of the filling had also been done. Olmsted felt that the results belied the fears of those critics who had said that the salt marsh landscape he was creating would be “lamentably prosaic if not worse,” and that the Fens would be a prolific source of mosquitoes. The system had also withstood its first severe test in the storm and floods of February 1886. Equally important, Olmsted was gratified that the park commission had stood behind him even when his plans stirred up controversy. This was a welcome contrast to his recent experience in Montreal and Detroit. Olmsted’s ingenious engineering scheme and the landscape he created to accompany it continued to function and flourish until 1915, when the Charles River dam further downstream did away with the salt water and tidal action on which he premised his plan.

“Notes on the Plan of Franklin Park and Related Matters,” 1886

The single great scenic park of the Boston system was 500-acre Franklin Park in West Roxbury. Olmsted’s official role in its creation began in September 1884, when the park board authorized him to prepare a design for the park for the sum of $5,000. By April 1885 he had drawn up a preliminary plan, but the commissioners to whom he made his presentation were about to be replaced. The election season of late 1884 that produced the first Democratic president of the United States in nearly twenty-four years also [44] transformed Boston politics. In December 1884 Bostonians elected their first Irish mayor, Hugh O’Brien, and Yankee Boston feared the worst. Olmsted’s patrician friend Charles Eliot Norton predicted a dark future. “The Irish dynasty has fairly settled itself on the throne in Boston,” he mourned, “the old Boston has disappeared.” The new park board appointed by O’Brien, which included the city’s most powerful Democratic boss, Patrick Maguire, took office on May 1, 1885. It immediately rescinded Olmsted’s contract but then quickly reinstated him on terms similar to his contract with the old park board. His relations with it thereafter were cordial, and at the end of O’Brien’s time as mayor he gave strong testimony that he had found the park commissioners during his tenure to be intelligent, concerned, and disinterested men.

The problems with making progress on Franklin Park came not from O’Brien, who had been a strong supporter of parks from his days as an alderman, but rather from his Republican opponents. Through the rest of 1885 and all of 1886 the Common Council refused to appropriate funds for construction of Franklin Park and the rest of the proposed park system. A possible alternative was issuance of long-term bonds by the city. A bill to authorize such a bond issue was before the legislature in early February 1886, when Olmsted successfully presented his plan for Franklin Park to the mayor and park board. “The plan is accepted without a murmur,” he wrote Charles Eliot, “but the fact is neither the commissioners nor the public look at it or take any intelligent interest in it.” Within a month the commissioners published his report, Notes on the Plan of Franklin Park and Related Matters.

Olmsted realized that once again he must educate both public and officials if his plan were to be realized. Part of his task was to spell out the long-term benefit of a park in order to justify the legislature’s authorization of fifty-year park bonds. “You will see that my paper is indirectly all an argument for its doing so,” he wrote Harvard president Charles W. Eliot. He was also concerned that even many of Boston’s well-informed citizens were convinced that other cities had “been led into the most reckless extravagance & to add enormously to their burdens of taxation by their park enterprises.” Part of his purpose in writing the report was to demonstrate the true conservatism of park-making and the great social benefits a park could confer on a city. He also emphasized how inexpensively a park could be constructed and maintained. He illustrated this by the history of the Buffalo parks and by his description of the simplicity of his design for Franklin Park. Finally, he needed to describe his plan for the park in a way that would win informed public support.

In the section of the report describing that plan, Olmsted took simplicity of treatment as the key to his discourse. As with Back Bay, he cited the natural conditions as reason enough for avoiding decoration or any attempt at elegant treatment. The soil was thin and rocky and could not sustain, except at great expense, either fancy gardening or turf thick enough to withstand athletic sports. This justified devoting the largest portion of the space [45] to what he called the Country Park, a term Mayor O’Brien had used to describe the West Roxbury park in one of his early speeches. Little more than the clearing of rocks and planting of scattered trees would be needed to achieve the landscape he envisioned, Olmsted assured the people of Boston.

The structures in the Country Park section would also reflect his theme of rustic simplicity. He conceived them as having “the general aspect of the simplest style of English rural cottages.” This meant that eventually he desired thatched roofs instead of the tile roofs he describes in the 1886 report. A shelter near Ellicottdale was to have rough stone walls, while the nearby pedestrian entrance under the carriage drive would be faced with large boulders that were partially covered by shrubs and vines. On Schoolmaster Hill he designed rough stone picnic bays sheltered by simple wooden arbors. Next to these was a dairy building of field stone for which he planned a thatched roof of eccentric shape (“curve and quiddle, twist, undulation, hog’s back, dormers, gable and pent,” as he described it). Olmsted extended this rusticity of structures to the Playstead area, which with the adjacent Greeting served the same purpose as the “plaisances” of the Chicago South Park fifteen years previous — that is, areas that were to be kept open and lighted at night and provided for activities that would have been intrusive in the open landscape of the park. The Valley Gate separating the Playstead from the Country Park consisted of metal gates separated by small fieldstone lodges with tile roofs. Overlooking the Playstead’s thirty acres of playing fields was a carriage concourse faced with boulders that covered an area 500 by 300 feet. At one end of the concourse stood the Playstead Overlook shelter, a remarkable structure for whose design Olmsted was primarily responsible. Measuring 120 by 60 feet, it served as a locker room, shelter, and restaurant for the athletes using the Playstead and for spectators. The walls were of fieldstone and shingle, creating a varied texture that, combined with the shadows cast by overhanging dormers and roof, produced a constantly changing camouflage effect. Over the whole structure rose the shingle roof that park commissioner Sylvester Baxter described as “quiet and gray in tone like a huge rock, and with gentle convex curves.”

From the Back Bay Fens to the Country Park and Playstead of West Roxbury, the Boston park spaces that Olmsted designed were passages of naturalistic landscape, with no provision for active recreation, children’s entertainment, or formal promenading. Charlesbank eventually provided some of these elements, but it was an exposed site next to a working-class section of the city. Olmsted decided that he must plan a section of the Franklin Park for these activities, as he had done in the Chicago South Park and at Belle Isle. The Greeting that he proposed was near the main entrance of the park, at the point closest to town and with direct access from the city by carriages and horsecars. The area he selected was a long, narrow upland that connected at its far end with the Playstead and was separated from the Country Park by a steep, thickly wooded hillside. Visitors to the Country Park would not be [46] aware of its existence. On that tableland he planned a Promenade half a mile long — nearly twice the length of the pedestrian Mall in Central Park — and 300 feet wide. It had a central carriage drive flanked on each side by a walk and a bridle path. A deer park and small athletic field took up the space between the Greeting and the park boundary, while along the other side ranged the Little Folks’ Fair and the Music Court. Near the end of the Greeting farthest from the Playstead was the Refectory, set on a massive boulder foundation and surveying the open valley of Nazingdale. Olmsted planned to abandon his rustic architectural style for the building itself, envisioning a story-and-a-half structure reminiscent of the simple antecedents of Moorish architecture, with much of the terrace being taken up by a trellis on terra-cotta columns. As constructed, following plans by the Boston architectural firm of Hartwell and Richardson, this building had instead the kind of finished and elegant quality that Olmsted had hoped at all costs to avoid in Franklin Park. Most of the other structures, however, were close to his concept. His plan was carried out for the most part, except that the Greeting was not constructed. (The park commissioners planned to finance it with the long-awaited windfall when Benjamin Franklin’s bequest to the city of Boston matured after a century in 1891, but the funds were not made available to them.) Moreover, the park was constructed according to a revised plan by the Olmsted firm of 1891 that added several ponds in the lower section of the Country Park.

“General Plan for the Improvement
of the Niagara Reservation,” 1887

In 1887 Olmsted collaborated with his old partner Calvert Vaux in preparing a report and plan for the state reservation at Niagara Falls. Nearly a decade of agitation, in which Olmsted played a leading role, preceded this event. His interest in creating a reservation at Niagara dated back even further, to at least August 1869. In that month he had visited the falls with H. H. Richardson and William Dorsheimer while engaged with them on projects in Buffalo. During a walk on Goat Island, in the Niagara River between the Canadian and American falls, he raised the question of creating a public scenic reservation in the area of the falls. That evening the discussion expanded to include several men active in the campaign for the Buffalo park system who were also visiting Niagara. The group concluded that the state government was not prepared to use its resources for such a purpose, but they agreed that those assembled would work for creation of a reservation if a serious threat to the integrity of the scenery near the falls should develop.

Olmsted’s interest stemmed in part from his recent involvement with the federal grant to the state of California of the Yosemite Valley and Mariposa Big Tree Grove. In the summer of 1865, while serving as chairman of the commission that administered the grant, he had drawn up a comprehensive [47] report concerning the scenic value of the grant and the facilities that should be constructed for the convenience of its visitors. His official connection with Yosemite had lapsed after he returned to New York in the fall of 1865, but as recently as June 1868 he had circulated petitions opposing a bill passed by the u.s. House of Representatives that approved a California law permitting private ownership of several hundred acres in Yosemite Valley. At that time he also wrote a letter to the New York Evening Post repeating the statements in his 1865 report emphasizing the transcendent beauty of the valley and the importance of keeping it in public ownership.

The central element of Olmsted’s appreciation of Yosemite was not the granite peaks and towering sequoias alone. He emphasized the botanical diversity of the area and urged that scientists be officially involved in oversight of the grant. Even more important to him was the unique ensemble of landscape elements that made up the special scenic quality of Yosemite Valley. He praised the pastoral beauty of the valley, calling it such a place as Shakespeare delighted in. Amidst the dry Sierra foothills in autumn, the quietly flowing Merced and its green meadows seemed like an oasis, strongly reminding him of England. It was no single feature, no particular peak or tree, that constituted the special beauty of Yosemite, but rather the totality of the landscape experience it provided.

This analysis, characteristic of Olmsted’s approach to scenic reservations, was consistent with his general aesthetic theory. In the same way that he avoided specimen plantings and intrusive structures while designing public parks, he sought in scenic reservations to draw attention away from spectacular individual elements — such as EI Capitan, Half Dome, or Yosemite Falls at Yosemite. Indeed, the notebooks in which he recorded his early experience of Yosemite testify to his preference for views of the Yosemite peaks when they were partially obscured by fog or smoke. At such times they possessed the “obscurity of detail” of distant forms that he considered an essential element of scenery. As with his urban parks, it was immersion in the landscape, letting it work by an unconscious process, that was the most valuable experience. “I felt the charm of Yosemite much more at the end of a week than at the end of a day,” he testified, “much more after six weeks when the cascades were nearly dry, than after one week, and when, after having been in it, off and on, several months, I was going out, I said, ‘I have not yet half taken it in.”’

Olmsted returned to these themes when he came to deal with Niagara. The great falls were only one element of the “distinctive charms” of the place. They were specimen-objects that awed the viewer, but the most rewarding experience of Niagara came from immersion in the scenery of the rapids and islands in the half-mile stretch above the falls. The vegetation of the islands was remarkable: the mist from the falls fostered a profusion of plants, while the ice that formed on them in winter pruned them to an unusual density of foliage. Botanists testified that Goat Island, the large island [48] between the falls, had a greater variety of vegetation than any equal space of ground in Europe or in America east of the Sierra Nevada. The Englishman William Robinson, whose concept of the “wild garden” Olmsted admired, wrote that “the noblest of nature’s gardens that I have yet seen is that of the surroundings and neighborhood of the Falls of Niagara.” “All these distinctive qualities,” Olmsted concluded, “the great variety of the indigenous perennials and annuals, the rare beauty of the old woods, and the exceeding loveliness of the rock foliage, — I believe to be a direct effect of the Falls, and as much a part of its majesty as the mist-cloud and the rainbow.”

The raging rapids on either side of Goat Island formed an accompaniment to the vegetation and were a remarkable scenic element in their own right. Olmsted approvingly quoted the description by the Duke of Argyle of the view of the rapids from the edge of the falls:

No indication of land is visible — nothing to express the fact that we are looking at a river. The crests of the breakers, the leaping and the rushing of the waters, are still seen against the clouds, as they are seen in the ocean, when the ship from which we look is in the trough of the sea. It is impossible to resist the effect on the imagination. It is as if the fountains of the deep were being broken up, and that a new deluge were coming on the world.

It was the totality of these elements of scenery that made up the Niagara that Olmsted wished its visitors to experience — not simply the falls, but also the scenery of Goat Island and the shores of the American rapids, an expanse that made it possible to wander for hours at a time enveloped by the lush foliage, the sound of cascading water, and the mist-like spray from the falls.

Olmsted made his first public statement on these matters in 1880 as part of a report on preservation of the scenery of Niagara Falls that he drew up for the New York State Survey in collaboration with its director, James T. Gardner. This development came as part of a campaign that began in 1878 when Lord Dufferin, governor-general of Canada, made a public appeal for creation of an international park at the falls. He pressed the idea on New York governor Lucius Robinson, who responded by urging protection of the falls in his last annual message in January 1879. The New York legislature in turn authorized the State Survey commissioners to report on the measures needed to carry out the governor’s proposals. The survey board directed Gardner to work with Olmsted in preparing a report assessing the effect of private land ownership on the scenic resources of Niagara and indicating the steps the government should take to protect the scenery there. The two men had already worked together on a scenic reservation, since in 1864 Olmsted had hired Gardner to prepare a map of the Yosemite grant.

In the report they submitted in March of 1880, Gardner wrote a strong condemnation of the desecration of scenery at Niagara that private [49] profit-seeking had caused. He described the unsightly mills that covered Bath Island in the American Rapids and the miscellaneous hostelries that lined the American shore. Further, he warned that the one pristine feature of the New York area of the falls, Goat Island, would soon be sold and devoted to other incongruous and intrusive activities. He supplemented his diatribe with a series of photographs of the “disfigured banks” of Niagara. In a short separate statement, Olmsted offered an analysis of the “distinctive charms” of Niagara scenery. He quoted the landscape gardener William Robinson on the beauty and delicacy of the vegetation near the falls, the botanists Joseph Hooker and Asa Gray on the variety of that vegetation, and the Duke of Argyle on the powerful impression created by the rapids.

In their report Olmsted and Gardner also described the area that should be taken for public ownership in order to restore and preserve the scenic beauty of Niagara. They proposed a seventy-seven-acre reservation, consisting of Goat and Bath islands and the other small islets in the American rapids, and a strip 100 feet wide along the mainland bank, where seventeen structures would be demolished, the shore replanted, and a barrier of trees introduced between the river and the city of Niagara Falls. Moreover, a large area at Prospect Point on the mainland edge of the American Fall would be used for shelter and preparation of visitors for their visit to the reservation. In addition, Olmsted and Gardner proposed that the state secure the right to maintain a narrow belt of trees along the top of the gorge for at least a mile below the falls. Preparation of the report challenged Olmsted to consider how a public reservation could be managed so as to make the scenery accessible to large numbers of visitors without destroying it in the process. To Gardner he confided, “I feel as I get nearer to it and the likelihood of its becoming real increases that if not the most difficult problem in landscape architecture to do justice to, it is the most serious — the furthest above shop work — that the world has yet had.”

Not content with presenting the statements and proposals in their report, the two men submitted to the governor a lengthy petition, signed by 172 dignitaries from the United States, Canada, and Great Britain, calling for creation of public reservations on both sides of the falls. Included were the names of the vice president of the United States, the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court and seven associate justices, leading American literary figures, including Emerson, Longfellow, Whittier, James Russell Lowell, Francis Parkman, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, and the two English writers Olmsted revered most, Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin. This petition marked the resumption of a collaboration between Olmsted and Charles Eliot Norton, professor of fine arts at Harvard University, that had begun during the Civil War years with mutual involvement in Reconstruction programs and the founding of the Nation magazine. Over the next few years Olmsted and Norton played a leading role in the campaign that led in 1883 to creation [50] of a state reservation at Niagara. Norton, in particular, secured the support of many leading figures in Great Britain. A parallel movement in Canada bore fruit in the form of a provincial reservation at the same time.

The report and petition campaign of 1880 promised well at first. The New York Assembly passed a bill to create a reservation at Niagara in April, with Olmsted listed as one of the commissioners. The bill failed in the senate, however, and the outspoken opposition of Governor Ezra Cornell doomed the attempt in any case. By the next year, Norton was contemplating creation of a private joint-stock company to acquire the property near the falls and so protect it without the complexities of politics. Instead, he worked with Olmsted to hire journalists Henry Norman and Jonathan B. Harrison to write articles for the press exposing the current state of affairs and urging creation of a public reservation. The situation improved markedly in November 1882, when Grover Cleveland was elected governor of New York. In preparation for a new legislative campaign, Olmsted and Norton helped in January 1883 to form the Niagara Falls Association, which led the successful campaign of the following months. That April a bill to create the reservation passed the legislature and was signed by Governor Cleveland. Assessment of the value of land to be acquired began, but the hurdle of authorizing funds for land purchase and construction still remained. Powerful opposition soon developed, since purchase of the necessary property required issuing one million dollars worth of bonds — nearly equal to the entire debt that the state could legally assume. The supporters of the reservation prevailed, and on April 30, 1885, the legislature authorized the bond issue and the new governor, David B. Hill, signed the bill into law.

By this time, however, Olmsted’s role had been considerably reduced. New problems developed even amidst the victory of 1883. He was acutely embarrassed by the fact that one of the five commissioners of the reservation appointed by Governor Cleveland was his old antagonist on Central Park, Andrew H. Green. As the meticulously cost-conscious controller of the park before the Civil War, Green had constantly restricted Olmsted’s freedom of action. When negotiations were under way after the war for Olmsted and Vaux to resume their position as landscape architects to the Central Park commissioners, Green was very reluctant to accept Olmsted’s return. As Vaux described it, he “shyed of course at the idea of countenancing the return of that overwhelming personality FLO.” (Conversely, when during his time in California Olmsted leafed through his correspondence books from the early construction period of Central Park, he confided to Vaux that “it made me boil with indignation to see how cruelly and meanly Green had managed me .. . and what a systematic small tyranny, measured exactly by the limit of my endurance, he exercised over me. It was slow murder.”)

Olmsted feared in 1883 that Green would immediately move to gain control of the Niagara commission. In particular, he would oppose any involvement by Olmsted in the design and construction of the reservation. [51] Green was doubly dangerous because he was a law partner of Samuel Tilden, still a powerful figure in the New York Democratic party even after his narrow defeat in the presidential campaign of 1876. Olmsted realized that Tilden could turn the legislature against the commission and the reservation if Green wished him to do so. Accordingly, Olmsted abruptly dropped all involvement with the reservation. He even declined an invitation to join the commissioners on their first examination of the scenery at Niagara — saying, lamely, that he had to be present at the opening of bids on the U.S. Capitol terraces in Washington. His friends were dismayed by this turn of events and sought to allay his fears concerning Green’s involvement. Norton partially understood Olmsted’s position but was unwilling to forego his counsel. “You cannot ‘escape from your interest’ in the matter,” he declared, “although you may decline all further responsibility.”

Green’s first action was to oppose adoption of the boundaries of the reservation proposed by Olmsted and Gardner. He pressed instead for acquisition of the gorge below the falls at least as far as the Devil’s Whirlpool. The other commissioners, unwilling to endorse the increased expenditure required, adopted Olmsted and Gardner’s report, “Green protesting and being ‘ugly’ to the last.”

There followed a power struggle within the commission between Andrew H. Green and Olmsted’s longtime friend and ally William Dorsheimer over the question of planning the reservation. Green wanted to award the planning of the reservation to Calvert Vaux, whom he had supported in previous years as landscape architect to the New York City parks department. He had also presumably played a role in securing for Vaux the commission to remodel Samuel Tilden’s house on Gramercy Park in Manhattan. Green and Dorsheimer were the only commissioners who felt the need for the expertise of a landscape architect, which made the situation even more difficult. As early as May 1883, Vaux’s partner, the engineer George Radford, had queried Olmsted on his willingness to have the firm of Vaux & Radford plan the reservation, given the danger that Green posed for the whole undertaking should Olmsted be put forward. Olmsted responded simply that he would accept no remunerative position from the commission.

The issue became more pressing after authorization of the bond issue in May 1885. Dorsheimer’s first proposal as chairman of the commission was that Olmsted, Gardner, and Vaux should collaborate on a plan for laying out the reservation; but Green rejected the idea, observing that Olmsted “was a man particularly offensive to him.” There was no resolution of the issue during the next year. As the commissioners’ meeting of June 1886 came near, Vaux informed Olmsted that Green had informally approached him concerning his terms, to which he had replied that he would prefer to have his firm carry out the work, but that he wished to have Olmsted join him as “Consulting Landscape Architect.” This was the sort of subordinate position that Vaux had endured during the early years of Central Park, when Olmsted [52] was architect-in-chief and Vaux was merely consulting architect. Olmsted remained noncommittal, saying that he had consistently distanced himself from the question of planning the reservation. “It seems to me a very big affair,” he stated, “and unless I am called to I don’t want to spend any more of myself upon it.” The maneuvering continued for several more months, with Green attempting at every stage to hire Vaux alone. Finally on November 3, 1886, the other four commissioners overrode Green’s objections and voted to employ Olmsted and Vaux together to prepare the plan for the reservation.

Although Olmsted appears to have assumed primary responsibility for writing the report, Vaux was an active participant in the process. Olmsted testified that “in the Niagara report he helped me and I helped him and at some points each of us crowded the other out a little.” The work began quickly, and before the end of November Olmsted had sent Vaux a considerable portion of text and Vaux had returned the first section with some stylistic changes. They continued to exchange text and comments through the next three months, and by the end of February 1887 Vaux apparently was reassured that he could in good conscience co-sign the report with Olmsted. The Olmsted Papers collection in the Library of Congress contains numerous undated exchanges between the two men, some of which show Olmsted’s painstaking replies to Vaux’s critique. He labored over the report, revising and rephrasing right up to the time of presentation, which caused Vaux some concern that significant changes would occur after his last reading. As late as a week before they presented the report, Vaux was sending comments and corrections to Olmsted. The scheduled date for the presentation was Tuesday, February 22, 1887, but on Saturday the 19th came news that the meeting of the commissioners had been postponed for a week. John C. Olmsted described Olmsted’s harried last days of preparation:

He worried a good deal over the opening of the report and was rather “cut up” about the postponement of the meeting. Being all primed and cocked he naturally wanted to fire. Then, too, he had been working every night and getting but little sleep saying to himself that it would all be over on Tuesday and thinking that he could stand it till then. He can’t take writing easily. He must worry over it till the moment when it is delivered and he can alter no more.

Olmsted and Vaux submitted their report and plan on March 1, 1887, and the commissioners formally submitted the report and plan to the state legislature on March 19. The commission approved the report and sought an appropriation to begin construction, but that was denied during the year 1887. The text presented here is taken from a version of the report that was published in March in New York City in an edition of 300, for circulation to influential citizens and the press.

Construction was slow to begin thereafter, in part because of the small size of appropriations provided by the legislature. In fact, Olmsted was [53] convinced that a whole new campaign would be required, similar to the one for creating the reservation, in order to secure adequate funding to carry out his and Vaux’s plan. By 1889, however, the unsightly structures had been removed from Bath Island and the mainland shore. By the time of Vaux’s death in 1895 and Olmsted’s retirement the same year, a circuit carriage drive had been constructed on Goat Island. Olmsted and his firm had little to do with the construction, while Vaux was involved in road building and architectural work. He designed the two principal stone bridges on Goat Island, one to Luna Island and the other to the first Sister Island. He also designed the simple iron railing that was installed at places overlooking the falls. His son Downing Vaux designed at least two shelters on Goat Island.

Although the report of 1887 published below was Olmsted’s last statement concerning the Niagara Reservation in New York, he later consulted with commissioner C. S. Gzouski about the plan for the Canadian reservation that was acquired in the summer of 1887 and opened in May 1888. Olmsted was concerned that the Canadian reservation would have a “garden park character rather than a forest sceneric character” and that the intention to have the reservation pay for itself “by restaurants and playthings and to draw business by attractions to picknickers” would result in proliferation of the kinds of artificial entertainments that it had been his purpose to abolish on the American side. Gzouski approached Olmsted concerning his fee for helping plan the reservation, and Olmsted replied that he would engage to do so if Vaux were to join with him. No such project developed, but Olmsted did visit the Canadian reservation with Gzouski in August 1887. Seeking to have the Canadian reservation supplement that on the New York side, he urged that the carriage drive be moved close to the edge of the gorge instead of running it 300 yards inland, as was being planned. This would provide the best access to the direct view of the falls that Olmsted and Vaux had emphasized in their 1887 report as the special advantage of the Canadian side. The area back of the road to the steep wooded slope on the border of the reservation should, Olmsted recommended, appear as “a broad quiet, simple unbroken park-like body of land.” Since the Canadian reservation was so large, requiring a five-mile walk to make a circuit of it, he proposed two large picnic grounds with shelters. In connection with these he wished to provide limited restaurant service, something he had excluded from the smaller New York reservation. Olmsted’s concept for the Canadian reservation, therefore, called for treatment quite different from that on the American side of the Niagara gorge: one would complement the other. But no such coherent and unified plan for both reservations has ever been fully articulated.

“Plan for a Public Park on the
Flats South of Buffalo,” 1888

At the time that Olmsted rejoined Calvert Vaux to plan the Niagara Reservation he also returned, without Vaux, to planning the Buffalo park system. This opportunity came in 1887, after a hiatus of a dozen years. The growth of industry and population in the southern part of the city had led to growing demands for parks and parkways in that section. A petition from citizens led the Common Council in February 1887 to request the park commissioners to create a park and parkways. The commissioners turned to Olmsted, who visited the city in March. At the public meeting held during his visit, most of the advocates who spoke were more interested in the route of parkways to the new lakeside park site than they were in the park itself. Part of their interest stemmed from the fact that abutting owners would be assessed for only half the cost of streets that were defined as parkways. The remaining cost would be funded by general taxation, since parkways were considered to benefit the entire City.

In a report of April 1887 Olmsted urged the importance of addressing the barrier to travel posed by the one-half-mile-wide swath of railroad tracks that separated the south side of Buffalo from the older city north of Buffalo Creek. Such a situation was dangerous as well as inconvenient. He cited the testimony of one park commissioner who said that in order to visit a nearby suburb it was necessary to make twenty-four crossings of railroad tracks at grade. Fatal accidents at the crossings were all too frequent, and the time lost while conveyances waited at track crossings was becoming increasingly costly. As a solution, Olmsted urgeathat the city and the railroad companies work out an agreement to combine and relocate some of the lines on the south side. Then a single “grand trunk” viaduct should be constructed spanning the belt of railroads. The viaduct should have separate ways for different conveyances — one for carts and wagons, others for carriages and street railways. Several parkways could then be constructed running through the southside ward: one would lead to the new park, while Olmsted held out the prospect that numerous broad avenues would lead in other directions “so that, eventually, without excessive indirectness, branches from them would really come to every man’s door, and all the country beyond be made conveniently accessible.”

In his final report on the subject in 1888, Olmsted proposed such a crossing at Abbot’s Corners Road, a mile east of the lake and two miles south of Niagara Square. The crossing would provide a route by which a carriage could be driven to the new south park “from a point on an average nearest to the homes” of the whole city. A parkway 90 to 120 feet wide would run to the new park along the route of existing streets.

However, Olmsted believed that the ready access to the park offered [55] by railroad lines running through the eastern section of the site would provide more significant access. Another route, more pleasant than either the parkway or the railroads would be along the edge of the lake. Like the proposed parkway, its development was closely tied to larger issues of city planning on Buffalo’s south side. Much of that section was low and poorly drained, a situation aggravated by the many railroad embankments being constructed in the area. Olmsted was convinced that a comprehensive plan must be adopted that would control further building in the area. Otherwise the problem would grow increasingly expensive to solve. Accordingly, he requested the city engineer to examine the two most likely solutions. One was to raise the level of land by filling to the point where storm drainage and sewer systems could operate by gravity flow; the other was to construct a series of levees against flooding and secure adequate drainage by pumping, as practiced in Holland. The engineer concluded that filling to a minimal height would cost one million dollars, while a pump-driven drainage system would cost a third of that sum. Olmsted accordingly recommended the latter solution. It had the added benefit of creating a particularly attractive route of access to the new park. The levee to be constructed along the lake would create a grand five-mile promenade, providing a fine view of the lake and permitting access by carriage, horseback, and street railway. The dredging required to build the levee would produce a canal on its inland side by which private boats and commercial launches could carry visitors to the park.

The park itself would have a large area of waterways and islands for pleasure boating, created by the same procedure of dredging and filling. This area of lagoons would also be tied to another element of the city planning of the south side — the diversion of Cazenovia Creek. Flooding by the creek was growing increasingly dangerous, and the city engineer had already proposed diverting it directly to the lake. The new route could, bring a source of water to the new park for the boating facilities that Olmsted had in mind.

Olmsted’s plan for the park itself, as set forth in the report published below, reflected his desire to make this second park for Buffalo distinctly different from the first, Delaware Park. The fact that he and Vaux had planned the Front and the Parade at the same time that they designed Delaware Park had enabled them to dedicate that park exclusively to quiet recreation and the enjoyment of the scenery of meadow, grove, and lake. Still, the original northside system had contained only one park. Now, for the first time since he and Vaux had planned the Chicago South Park in 1871, Olmsted had the prospect of designing two parks of several hundred acres for a single city. The new park had the added advantage of being at the opposite end of the city from Delaware Park. The question, as Olmsted phrased it in his report of 1888, was: “Twenty years hence shall Buffalo have one park, of a poor, confused character, or two, each of a good, distinct character?” Without the new park, there was danger that the desire for a place where “gayety, liveliness, and a [56] slight spirit of adventure” was stimulated would lead to demands to supply such facilities “by a succession of small, feeble, imperfect and desultory interpolations” upon the design of Delaware Park.

In general, the plan for the new park resembled the one that Olmsted and Vaux had drawn up for Jackson Park in Chicago in 1871, as Delaware Park resembled the open greens, picnic areas and Mere of Washington Park. But Olmsted offered a new concept in the Buffalo South Park. Previously, his concern had been the exhaustion caused by the stress of application to business and economic activity. Now he observed that something more than “tranquilizing natural scenes” was desired by workers in industrial enterprises — those, as he phrased it, “who pass most of their time in monotonous occupations and amid sombre surroundings.” The previous year he had addressed this problem in his first plan for Charlesbank in Boston, a recreation ground near the tenement district of the West End. There he planned extensive open-air exercise facilities. These included a gymnastic ground for men and a playground and running track for women. The final design of 1892 included a gymnastic ground for women. These were the first “scientifically designed and administered open-air gymnasiums to be operated free of charge in a public park.” In keeping with this new concern, Olmsted’s plan for the Buffalo South Park design included an oval “athletic ground” or “out-of-door Gymnasium” with a bicycle and running track around the perimeter. There were also facilities for bathing, both in Lake Erie and in a sheltered interior pool. For the eighty-five-acre section of the park east of the railroad embankment that bisected it, Olmsted proposed more active, even exciting, recreation. He suggested that the area be used as a firing range by local militia during the summer. In winter it would be flooded and adapted for skating, sledding, and toboganning.

Finally, the South Park gave Olmsted the opportunity at last to create a large park in Buffalo that took advantage of the city’s situation on the shores of Lake Erie. His first, and last, desire for the city was to make this happen, and the thirty-two-acre Front that he and Vaux had included in their original park system plan was too small to permit many of the activities that Olmsted wished to foster. His concept for Jackson Park in Chicago had not been realized, and there was no prospect that it would be, at least under his guidance. This must have made him all the more anxious to seize the occasion in Buffalo to create a park with lakeshore bathing activities and extensive interior lagoons for boating. For those not wishing to row and paddle amongst the numerous islands in the lagoons, Olmsted proposed a system of public launches that would make a four-mile circuit in three-quarters of an hour.

However, it was in Chicago’s Jackson Park, rather than Buffalo, that Olmsted finally realized his dream of a great water park. The Buffalo park commissioners were reluctant to act on his proposal. They felt that the cost of construction would be too great and the risk of frequent damage from storms on the lake too high. They also felt that the site was too far from the [57] residential areas on the south side and were concerned by the absence of good building sites for residences in the low-lying area adjoining the park. Instead, they selected two inland sites that Olmsted described as “too large for local grounds, too narrow and cut up for parks — dilemmas.”

His successors in the Olmsted firm drew up the plans for these in the late 1890s, creating a small area for boating in 76-acre Cazenovia Park by damming the creek running through it, and making an arboretum of 150-acre South Park. Thus, the park system developed by the firm for Buffalo’s south side differed greatly from Olmsted’s vision of a great boating park and lakeside promenade embankment and canal.

Advice to the People of Cincinnati, 1894

Olmsted’s last major report that combined an explication of the nature of the urban park with a description of a particular plan was Notes on the Plan of Franklin Park and Related Matters of 1886. Thereafter, his reports on parks, like that for the South Park in Buffalo, concentrated on the design issues of the particular project in hand. In other situations, however, he continued to explain the nature of parks, the responsibilities of park commissions, the role of professional landscape architects, and the psychological effect of scenery. In 1886, for instance, he visited Minneapolis, where H. W. S. Cleveland had just begun to design a park system. The report Olmsted wrote to the park commission dealt primarily with the purpose of a park, the responsibilities of park commissions, and the importance of securing prime park sites while the land was still inexpensive. Among Olmsted’s papers relating to the Rochester park system are many pages of fragmentary and apparently never-completed statements concerning the nature of parks and the duties of park commissions that he wrote c. 1890. The laborious rewording and reworking that he imposed on himself is evident in these fragmentary and repetitious remains. Likewise, when the park commissioners of his city of birth-Hartford, Connecticut — finally approached him during his last year of professional practice to guide them in planning a park system, he undertook first to explain to them the nature and purpose of landscape architecture. He never completed this discourse, and the many pages of fragmentary beginnings and revisions reveal both how seriously he viewed the task and how difficult it still was for him to write on theoretical topics. But the urgency, the sense of importance of once again clarifying the nature of his art and the role to be played by park commissioners and their professional advisors, was strong.

The most complete of the numerous attempts that Olmsted made in his last years of practice to explain his art once again to new groups of park commissioners is the report he wrote for Cincinnati in 1894. In early January of that year he visited the city at the invitation of the park commissioners. They originally had asked him to inspect their parks, offer suggestions on the [58] treatment of Eden and Burnet Woods parks, and comment on the suitability of some new land the commissioners were thinking of acquiring. Subsequent opposition by local businessmen led them instead to ask him only for advice on improving existing parks. During his visit, the commissioners were distressed that he refused to provide them instantly with instructions concerning certain details of the parks he visited. It became clear to him that even if funds were available for improvement of the parks and acquisition of new sites, no coherent landscape treatment over time would be possible under the existing park administration. The problem was of long standing and had led Cincinnati’s preeminent landscape gardener, Adolph Strauch, to resign in 1876 as superintendent of the parks after a difficult three years in that position.

This was reason enough to move Olmsted to attempt to educate the people of Cincinnati in proper park management. By the time he completed his report at the end of January, moreover, the state legislature had abolished the park commission and put Cincinnati’s parks under the control of a board that was responsible for numerous other public works in the city. These developments gave added importance to Olmsted’s report, and he asked his partners John C. Olmsted and Charles Eliot to read his draft of it carefully. “The circumstances give us possibly a rare opportunity to say something for our faith, & we should use it,” he wrote John. Since he wished to convince the city’s businessmen of the rationality and true economy of his approach, he sought to make his statement “moderate and sensible, cool and quiet.”

On the day Olmsted completed his report, the commission to which he wrote it ceased to exist. But he hoped to rally public support by having the report printed in the city’s newspapers. He instructed his partners to have it translated into German and sent several copies to the superintendent of parks, R. H. Warder, for distribution. “What we want is to do the best thing we can under the circumstances for the public interests, for the spread of sound ideas, and for the good standing of our art and profession . . ., ” he explained to Warder. Accompanying the report, Olmsted included a note addressed to “the Citizens of Cincinnati” saying that since the park commission had been abolished he felt “that it should be placed directly before you.”

The report addressed once again the vexing issues o( the nature of a park, the evils in cities that parks are designed to counteract, the need for continuity of administration and employment of professional landscape architects by park boards. In the process Olmsted included a stern indictment of the city’s failure to follow the plans of Adolph Strauch. The problems of the park system stemmed from a failure to use common sense in recognizing the purpose of a park commission and then applying “ordinary business principles” to that purpose. It was this, rather than advice on design by outsiders, that the parks needed. Rely on the professionals that you already employ, he counseled, and clearly define their responsibilities so that they have no excuse for not meeting them, “especially no excuse of that class of excuses commonly [59] referred to in political affairs as ‘influences,’ of which the effect always is a practical dissipation of official responsibility.” Such had been Olmsted’s theme for over a decade, since well before his dismissal from the New York parks department and the publication of The Spoils of the Park that followed.

There is no evidence that any Cincinnati newspaper published the report, although copies may have been circulated privately. The following year the park department included an innocuous and extensively excerpted portion of Olmsted’s statement in its annual report. His attempt to rally the people of Cincinnati to the cause of good government and responsible park administration had not succeeded. Still, this was but one battle of many, each charged with real significance for the future of Olmsted’s vision of public parks in the American democracy.

As the documents in this volume illustrate, Olmsted had many such battles during his career. Over a period of nearly half a century, from the publication of his article on Birkenhead Park in the Horticulturist in 1851 to his retirement in 1895, he found many occasions to explain the principles of park design, use, and administration to the public. During those years he and his partners created more than a dozen major parks and nearly one hundred other recreation grounds and parkways. With a carefully defined set of basic principles, he sought to create landscapes with powerful and beneficial psychological effect, while at the same time providing adequately for the need of people to come together in large numbers. In addition, he strove to place responsibility for managing the parks in the hands of park boards that were independent of political pressures and thus able to pursue long-term policies that would permit the realization of his design concepts. He placed this work within the broader setting of his historical concept of the evolution of the city and his firm belief that the park movement of the nineteenth century represented a “self-preserving instinct of civilization.” While he considered such universal elements, he also sought in his individual designs to develop a unique solution based on the nature of the site and the social need it served, giving clear individuality to each design.