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Frederick Law Olmsted (April 26, 1822 – August 28, 1903) was a United States landscape architect, famous for designing many well-known urban parks, including Central Park and Prospect Park in New York City, the country's oldest coordinated system of public parks and parkways in Buffalo, New York, the country's oldest state park, the Niagara Reservation in Niagara Falls, New York, Mount Royal Park in Montreal, the Emerald Necklace in Boston, Massachusetts, Cherokee Park (and the entire parks and parkway system) in Louisville, Kentucky, as well as Jackson Park, Washington Park, Midway Plaisance in Chicago for the World's Columbian Exposition, and the landscape surrounding the United States Capitol building.
Life and career
Born in Hartford, Connecticut to a wealthy dry-goods merchant and the son of a farmer, Olmsted was fascinated with nature from his youth. After attending Phillips Academy, he studied agricultural science and engineering at Yale. After sailing to China in 1843 for a year, he worked on his farm in Connecticut, then moved to New York City and ran a 130-acre (0.5 km²) experimental scientific farm on Staten Island that his father acquired for him in January 1848. This farm, named "The Woods of Arden" by previous owner, Erastus Wiman, Olmsted renamed to Tosomock Farm. Olmsted also had a significant career in journalism. In 1850 he traveled to England to visit public gardens, where he was greatly impressed by Joseph Paxton's Birkenhead Park, and subsequently published Walks and Talks of an American Farmer in England in 1852. Interested in the slave economy, he was commissioned by the New York Daily Times (now the New York Times) to embark on an extensive research journey through the American South and Texas from 1852 to 1857. Olmsted took the view that the practice of slavery was not only morally odious, but expensive and economically inefficient. His dispatches were collected into multiple volumes which remain vivid, first-person social documents of the pre-war South. The last of these, "Journeys and Explorations in the Cotton Kingdom" (1861), published during the first six months of the American Civil War, helped inform and galvanize antislavery sentiment in New England. Olmsted also cofounded the magazine The Nation in 1865. He married his brother's widow Mary in 1859 and adopted her three sons.
Olmsted's friend and mentor, Andrew Jackson Downing, the charismatic landscape architect from Newburgh, New York first proposed the development of New York's Central Park as publisher of The Horticulturist magazine. It was Downing who introduced Olmsted to the English-born architect Calvert Vaux, whom Downing had personally brought back from England as his architect-collaborator. After Downing died a hero's death in a steamboat explosion on the Hudson River in July 1852, in his honor Olmsted and Vaux entered the Central Park design competition together—and won. On his return from the South, Olmsted began executing the plan almost immediately. Olmsted and Vaux continued their informal partnership to design Prospect Park in Brooklyn from 1866 to 1868, and other projects. Vaux remained in the shadow of Olmsted's grand public personality and social connections.
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Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site :: National Parks and Monuments
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Meta Description: [ The Park and Parkway System of Buffalo, New York, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and listed in the National Register of Historic Places. The system is the oldest coordinated system of municipal parks and parkways in the United States. Descriptions of Olmsted's designs, current status of the pa... ]
Olmsted, Frederick Law (1822-1903): American Landscape Architect - Rod Davis provides a photograph and brief biography, with related web links, most with short descriptions.
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Meta Description: [ Frederick Law Olmsted and Yosemite National Park, California ]
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