Charles Eliot (1859–1897), son of Harvard president Charles W. Eliot, joined Olmsted’s firm as a partner in February 1893. Eliot graduated from Harvard in 1882 and, after studying for a year at the Bussey Institution, Harvard’s department of agriculture and horticulture, entered Olmsted’s office as an apprentice. Over the next two years he traveled with Olmsted frequently. Upon completing his apprenticeship in April 1885, Eliot toured the eastern and southern parts of the United States and on November 5 departed for a year of study in Europe. With the invitation to design the campus of Leland Stanford’s new university looming, Olmsted invited Eliot, who had been studying landscapes in the Mediterranean region, to return and join the firm in that venture, but Eliot decided to continue his study tour and declined.

Upon his return Eliot decided to practice independently and opened an office in Boston in December 1886. In succeeding years he established a modest but growing business, concentrating principally on the grounds of suburban houses and smaller public places. He also began writing about landscape architecture, which Olmsted had urged him to do. Perhaps his most [71]important early essay was a call for the preservation of the Waverly Oaks, a majestic stand of trees in a steep moraine at Belmont and Waltham, Massachusetts. After calling for additional neighborhood parks throughout Boston and adjacent suburbs, Eliot then advocated the preservation of places “characteristic of the primitive wilderness of New England,” and suggested that a private corporation be organized and “empowered by the state to hold small and well distributed parcels of land free of taxes, just as the public library holds books and the art museum pictures—for the use and enjoyment of the public.” That suggestion became, with Eliot’s leadership, the Trustees of Public Reservations. Eliot then tackled the daunting problem of jurisdictional boundaries in the highly fragmented metropolitan region. Taking as its model the early success of the Metropolitan Sewerage Commission, he called for the creation of a park commission authorized to assemble and develop parks and reservations on a metropolitan scale. When state legislation established the Metropolitan Park Commission in 1892, Eliot was named its landscape architect. Eliot called for the commission to embrace five types of areas: beaches, the shores and islands of the bay, tidal rivers and estuaries, large expanses of forest, and smaller parks in densely inhabited areas of the metropolitan region. In important ways Eliot, like his mentor, had begun to envision city and suburb as interrelated parts of a metropolitan region.

Charles Eliot

Even as Eliot’s career was taking shape, he was often in Olmsted’s thoughts, not as a competitor but as a colleague. In 1891, when a potential client contacted Olmsted for a small job, the firm, already overcommitted, recommended Eliot. After reviewing Eliot’s preparation for a career in landscape architecture the letter stated, “we have full confidence in his ability,” and included one of his advertising circulars. With Biltmore and the World’s Columbian Exposition consuming most of Olmsted’s and Henry Sargent Codman’s time, and with John increasingly feeling the burden of work at Brookline, Olmsted wondered if the firm should “combine with Eliot.” While no surviving documents indicate that Olmsted and his partners pursued this idea, Codman’s death in January 1893 forced the issue. Olmsted and John Charles Olmsted each visited Eliot and invited him to join the firm as partner, and in February Eliot made the first trip on the firm’s behalf, with Olmsted, to Chicago to oversee improvements at the World’s Columbian Exposition [72]and park work in other Midwestern cities. According to his father, Eliot had decided to join the Olmsted firm prior to February 1, and the partnership, Olmsted, Olmsted & Eliot, was announced March 1, 1893. Seven months later, Olmsted wrote his friend Frederick Kingsbury and informed him that Eliot had joined the firm: “He is clever; has a fine cultivated taste and some special talents,” he wrote, but added, he “does not yet fill Codman’s place.”

Eliot brought important work to the firm. When Olmsted was thinking about the firm’s most important public work in November 1893, he included Eliot’s projects at the Blue Hills, the Middlesex Fells, the Waverly Oaks, the Charles River, and Revere Beach. These, along with the Muddy River Improvement, would “be points to date from in the history of American Landscape Architecture,” Olmsted predicted, “as much as Central Park.” He also brought energy, much needed as Olmsted’s health and mental acuity declined. As a partner Eliot became immersed in the firm’s ongoing projects but also continued his work with the Trustees of Public Reservations and the metropolitan park system. He also brought to the firm the commission to design the Cambridge, Massachusetts, park system. Other projects that are principally or solely the work of Eliot include the Copp’s Hill Terrace, in Boston, and the subdivision adjacent to Palmer Park in Detroit, as well as the Revere Beach Reservation, the first public oceanfront beach in the United States. Revere Beach is the only park in the metropolitan system for which Eliot developed complete plans prior to his untimely death from meningitis in 1897.