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Frederick Law Olmsted (April 27, 1822–August 28, 1903) was
a United States landscape architect, famous for designing many well known urban parks, including Central Park in New
York, New York, Mount Royal Park in Montreal, the Metropolitan Parks System in Boston, Massachusetts, Prospect Park in Brooklyn, New York, Audubon Park in New Orleans,
Louisiana, Beardsley Zoo in Bridgeport, Connecticut, Belle Isle Park in Detroit,
Michigan, Branch Brook Park in Newark, and Jackson and Washington Parks
in Chicago for the World's Columbian
Exposition.
Born in Hartford, Connecticut to a wealthy dry-goods
merchant and the daughter of a farmer Olmsted was fascinated with nature from his youth. He studied agricultural science and
engineering at Yale. After sailing to China in 1843 for a year he worked on his farm in Connecticut. Finally he moved to New York City and ran a 130 acre
experimental scientific farm on Staten Island that
his father acquired for him in January 1848 named "The Woods of Arden" previously owned by Erastus Wiman, Olmsted renamed it
Tosomock Farm. Considering himself a man of letters he also had a
career in journalism that included co-founding The Nation. He was
commissioned by the New York Daily Times (now the New York
Times) to write what eventually became a two volume work on plantation
life in the American South.
In 1850 he traveled to Europe to visit the many public gardens found there. After
returning from Europe he wrote Walks and Talks of an American Farmer in England which also helped launch his career as
the pioneer of landscape architecture in the United
States.
Olmsted's friend and mentor, Andrew Jackson Downing, the landscape architect from Newburgh, New York first proposed the development of Central Park as publisher of The
Horticulturist magazine. It was Downing who introduced Olmsted to English-born architect Calvert Vaux; Downing had died a tragic
death in 1852 and in his honor Olmsted and Vaux entered the Central Park design competition together and won. They continued in
informal partnership to design Prospect Park in Brooklyn from 1866 to 1868 and then onwards to other projects. Vaux remained in
the shadow of Olmsted's grand public personality and social connections.
After completing the Central Park project Olmsted served as Executive Secretary of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, a precursor
to the Red Cross in Washington D.C. which tended to the wounded during the Civil
War. After the war he managed the Mariposa mining estate in the Sierra Nevada mountains in California. In 1865 Vaux and Olmsted formed Olmsted, Vaux and Company. When Olmsted returned to New York,
he and Vaux designed Prospect Park, Chicago's Riverside subdivision, Buffalo, New York's park system, and the Niagara Reservation at
Niagara Falls.
In 1883 Olmsted established his landscape architecture firm in Brookline, Massachusetts, where he designed Boston's
Emerald Necklace, the
campus of Stanford University and the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago among many other of his projects. In 1895, senility forced him to retire. He moved to Belmont, Massachusetts and took up residence at McLean Hospital which he had landscaped several years before.
External link
References
- A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States; With Remarks on Their
Economy by Frederick Olmsted
(1856)
- Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the Nineteenth Century by Witold Rybczynski, (New York: Scribner, 1999).
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