Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. (1870–1957), named Henry Perkins Olmsted at birth, was the only son of Olmsted and Mary Perkins Olmsted to survive infancy. His parents may have decided upon his career at the time they changed his name to that of his father when Rick, as he was affectionately known, was still a child. Thereafter he would bear the acclaim earned by his father but also the burden of expectations, and responsibility, that accompanied his name.

Rick’s youth was defined by usual childhood pursuits but also by the family business, as the Olmsted residence was also his father’s place of work. Rick graduated from Roxbury Latin School and matriculated at Harvard with the expectation that he would follow his father and stepbrother John in “the profession of landscape architecture.” Olmsted advised Rick on courses he believed were essential to a liberally educated individual and was fully engaged in his son’s professional education. Indeed, Rick’s education was surely the last of the great projects Olmsted undertook in the years of this volume. He [76]sent Rick to Chicago in the summer of 1891, where he worked closely with Daniel H. Burnham and other principals, and was his father’s eyes and ears, reporting on the progress of constructing the World’s Columbian Exposition. At the end of the summer Rick accompanied his father to Milwaukee to oversee continuing construction of that city’s park system, and, briefly, to Biltmore before returning to Harvard.

Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr.

In 1892 Rick traveled to Europe with his father, sister, and Philip Codman. In France, they saw the classic landscapes in the vicinity of Paris, met with Olmsted’s old friend Édouard André, and then traveled down the Loire Valley. In England Rick bicycled throughout metropolitan London, taking photographs of places and details of the landscape Olmsted suggested. His stepbrother John was delighted that Rick had the “opportunity of seeing picturesque England and France under Father’s guidance.”

During the summer of 1893, Rick visited the World’s Columbian Exposition. Otherwise he apparently remained in Brookline, as his father was very ill, to help at the firm office. This would explain why there are no letters between father and son during those months. By the time Rick was entering his senior year at Harvard, Olmsted described him as robust, “going creditably thro’ college,” and a “good boy, healthy, of fair ability, thoughtful of his mother and sister, industrious.”

Rick graduated from Harvard magna cum laude in 1894. He then spent the summer working for the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey in Colorado. But what Olmsted considered Rick’s “period of post-graduate university education” took place at Biltmore beginning that fall: he spent a year studying botany and dendrology with nurseryman Chauncey D. Beadle and other experts at the estate. Olmsted considered his own lack of comprehensive knowledge of plants his greatest shortcoming as a landscape architect, and he was determined that his namesake would be better prepared professionally than he had been or than any other living landscape architect. Olmsted wanted Rick to become “the best Landscape Architect in the world.”

Biltmore was a challenge for Rick. He was not yet a member of the firm but was living on an allowance provided by his father. He was younger and less experienced than the other principals involved in implementing the landscape plan, yet he was more familiar with his father’s ideas and aesthetic than the older men, and Olmsted thought of Rick as an intermediary who [77]could suggest to the Biltmore staff what he would want done. Olmsted also expected him to learn what his son considered a vast amount of botanical knowledge. Father relentlessly peppered son with letters, at times admonishing, at times encouraging, but always insisting that the knowledge he expected Rick to acquire at Biltmore was essential to his professional development. Olmsted was demanding if well intentioned, and their correspondence often left both father and son frustrated, Rick so much so that he briefly considered a career in something other than landscape architecture.

The year Rick spent at Biltmore was the time when his father’s mental deterioration became increasingly apparent. Olmsted’s inability to focus on detail was most obvious in the planting plans for the arboretum. In December 1894, Rick warned his father that the planting lists prepared by Warren H. Manning seemed to be drawn from nursery catalogues and included far more horticultural “monstrosities” than the typical scientific arboretum. When his father protested that Rick did not understand the goals he had established for the arboretum, Rick wrote to John and presented his case. Their father had entrusted too many decisions to Manning; worse, Olmsted did not “keep track of details” and gave “little more than general consideration of the groups” designated for the arboretum.

Shortly after John and Charles Eliot relieved Olmsted of any professional responsibilities with the firm in August 1895, they hired Rick as their newest employee. When the family decided to take Olmsted to England in the fall of 1895, John called Rick back from Biltmore, where he had recently been designated the firm’s representative, to say goodbye to his father. Instead of returning to Biltmore, Rick accompanied his parents and sister to England, where he found a comfortable house for the family, Crossway, in Devonshire. He left his father trapped in a physically deteriorating body with only occasional moments of lucidity. As frustrating as their relationship must have been for Rick over the previous year and a half, seeing the father he admired and loved in such a condition must have been devastating. He continued to be a dutiful son until his father’s death in 1903 and his mother’s in 1921.

Rick became a partner in the firm following Charles Eliot’s death in 1897, and he quickly assumed leadership of the profession of landscape architecture, just as his father had hoped. He was a founding member of the American Society of Landscape Architects in 1899, and the following year he began teaching the first course devoted to the profession at Harvard. In 1901 he was named a member of the Senate Park Commission’s team of experts to propose improvements in the plan of the District of Columbia, in which capacity he joined his father’s former collaborators from the World’s Columbian Exposition, Daniel Burnham, Charles Follen McKim, and Augustus St. Gaudens. Later work included Rock Creek Park and the National Cathedral in Washington, as well as a number of important communities, including Forest Hills Gardens in Queens, N.Y., Palos Verdes Estates in California, and Lake Wales, Florida. He was also a leader in the emerging profession of city [78]and regional planning in the United States, planned a comprehensive state park system for California, and helped conceptualize and write the legislation establishing the National Park Service in 1916. Rick continued to practice landscape architecture and planning until his retirement in 1949. His death in 1957 occurred exactly one hundred years after his father’s appointment as superintendent of Central Park.