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At the age of forty-five, Olmsted had finally found his vocation, or, rather, it had found him.
Never too late to find what you are meant to do.
His rejected San Francisco proposal had suggested a sunken promenade connecting several parcels of land.
“LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTS. The undersigned have associated under the above title for the business of furnishing advice on all the matters of location and Designs and Superintendence for Buildings and Grounds and other Architectural and Engineering Works including the Laying-out of Towns, Villages, Parks, Cemeteries, and Gardens.”
Olmsted would proudly describe Buffalo as “the best planned city, as to its streets, public places and grounds, in the United States if not the world.”
As time went on, as the firm continually took on new work, none of the earlier projects ever seemed to be put to rest. That’s the nature of landscape architecture.
The city hired Olmsted and Vaux to design a park system like what was underway in Buffalo. They proposed two large parks:
The Buffalo park system led to another project in that city. Olmsted and Vaux were commissioned to landscape the ample grounds (200 acres) surrounding the Buffalo State Asylum for the Insane.
Olmsted and Vaux wanted the building to face to the southeast so that as much soothing sunlight as possible would pour through the residents’ windows. When Richardson’s mental institution was built, it would be positioned exactly as Olmsted and Vaux had specified.
As for the grand boulevard to connect Riverside and Chicago, only a tiny stretch was ever completed. (A vestigial sliver of this roadway still exists today in the Lawndale section of Chicago.)
flo projects riverside
Riverside, with its curving streets and abundant common space, would become the template for a model suburban community.
In the aftermath of a terrible disaster, the idea of building a new park system in Chicago was just no longer a priority.
Horace W. S. Cleveland, a landscape architect who had worked on Prospect Park, supervised the construction of what came to be known as Washington Park.
” Boss Tweed installed Spider Sweeny in a plum job as president of the newly created Department of Public Parks.
Sweeny and his Tweed toadies had ambitious plans for the park. At the southern end, they planned a trotting course for horses. They also began work on a zoo on the grounds of the hourglass-shaped North Meadow, at that time the park’s most fetching open space.
Once again, the press-savvy Olmsted tried to engage public opinion, just as he had when Dillon and Belmont tried to overhaul the original Greensward plan. He wrote a series of articles attacking the Tweed Ring’s plans. But that only got the partners fired as consulting architects.
as a la need to write
“The Park has suffered great injury,” Olmsted lamented. Sweeny had run up $1.5 million in debts and had entered into another $500,000 worth of bogus contracts. Olmsted set to work razing the zoo structures that had been built on the North Meadow. (The familiar zoo that exists at the southern end of the park is a different, non-Tweed, creation.) He planted thousands of shrubs to replace ones that had been grubbed out by careless workers.
William Hammond Hall. Hall was a bold young engineer who had landed a big job, designing a park in San Francisco.
On October 18, 1872, Olmsted and Vaux dissolved their partnership. The pair’s relationship had always been heavy on squabbles.
John Olmsted died at one o’clock on the morning of January 25, 1873. He was eighty-one.
The brownstone was located at 209 West 46th Street, right off Longacre Square (now known as Times Square).
In the end, the terraces got built. The whole thing got built. Amazingly, the grounds surrounding the Capitol today are remarkably true to Olmsted’s original plan. Even the lovely Summerhouse remains, though sadly the carillon never worked properly and was removed long ago.
The city of Montreal wanted a public park. Oddly, this was his first proper park job since the break with Vaux.
he described how beleaguered city dwellers would benefit from the “power of their scenery to counteract conditions which tend to nervous depression or irritability.”
his park would be a “prophylactic and therapeutic agent of vital value.”
Finally, in the autumn of 1877, Olmsted arranged to travel to Montreal and take his case directly to the public. This had worked in Buffalo. He’d dazzled a large audience, setting the stage for a park-making coup. Maybe, he figured, he could sell the good citizens of Montreal on the merits of his plan and, in so doing, rescue some of its best elements. Olmsted was scheduled to speak in a hall with a capacity of eight hundred. At the appointed hour, only about ten people had shown up. Another thirty or so trickled in during his speech. He described the exercise as a “farcical failure” in a
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Regent’s Park in London, and on the Continent, they particularly enjoyed the Englischer Garden in Munich.
Salt marshes were a staple landscape when America was young, though they were fast disappearing as the country became more urban. Growing up, while ambling around Connecticut, Olmsted had seen plenty of salt marshes. He had always found them achingly beautiful. Now they reminded him of his departed father and of home in Hartford, where ties had been so cruelly cut by the estate battle.
a meeting with Boston’s city engineer. He wanted to make certain that the plan was feasible from a technical standpoint. The city engineer brought along the superintendent of sewers, and the men huddled for four hours. Once he was convinced, Olmsted was ready to move forward.
” Olmsted’s creation can fairly be called America’s first wetlands restoration.
Sargent had a dream of turning the arboretum into a public park. Although Olmsted admired Sargent’s resolve, he didn’t think this was a very good idea. An arboretum is essentially a collection of trees, where different species are grouped together, often following a scientific order. This would be so limiting, Olmsted felt, when it came to a park design.
arboretum
Boston’s Arnold Arboretum following the same path Olmsted originally designed for carriages. The trees are arranged in the exact same order. Some of the original trees are still alive, including a silver maple and a cherry.
Being the nation’s premiere landscape architect had made Olmsted famous. It hadn’t made him rich.
Belle Isle, an island park in Detroit. There was a land subdivision in Providence, Rhode Island, and he had just started designing the campus of the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey.
Franklin Park.
Experience had taught Olmsted that on those rare occasions when one is blessed with a truly fetching piece of land, the task is simple: Just leave things alone.
Olmsted was a landscape architect; designing a building was the province of architects. But Olmsted was nothing if not versatile. (Unfortunately, his terrace and shelter have fallen into ruin today.)
Commonwealth Avenue, in turn, connected with two established smaller parks, the colonial-era Boston Common and the Public Garden from 1837.
Taken together, this was a bountiful green space, 1,100 acres arrayed over nearly seven miles from downtown Boston. It was far and away the most ambitious park system of Olmsted’s career. Olmsted referred to the system as the “Jeweled Girdle.” He had a knack for nomenclature, but this was not a winner. An unknown someone came up with the name that stuck: the Emerald Necklace.
Richardson died as he’d lived, messily. He left behind a wife and six children. Though he was one of America’s most successful and prolific architects, he also left behind a mountain of debt, a final display of what Olmsted called Richardson’s “characteristic unconquerable recklessness.”
“changes in our time have been so great that while I feel myself in the full fruit of the life of today, I feel that the life of our early days was almost another life.”
“changes in our time have been so great that while I feel myself in the full fruit of the life of today, I feel that the life of our early days was almost another life.”flo life quote
It was Codman who forged the connection between Olmsted and Stanford. He also urged Olmsted to ask Stanford for $10,000 for a preliminary plan, an unheard-of amount.
Olmsted also paid his first visit to Golden Gate Park. He’d traded letters with its designer, William Hammond Hall, and offered him much useful advice, but had never actually seen the park.
Projects like the Buffalo park system and Boston’s Emerald Necklace were exercises in urban planning as much as landscape design.
working on a plan for the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey, and he had done discrete design tasks on existing campuses, including Amherst and Yale.
The quads and arcades were meant to create unity, architecturally, but they also served a subtler social-engineering goal. Olmsted was intent on providing ample common space, where students in diverse fields of study—literature, mathematics, philosophy—could meet and mingle their ideas. This was a hallowed Olmsted notion; he’d even coined a term for it: communitiveness. Mixing disciplines was the key to his professional success and the crux of his plan for Leland Stanford Jr. University. To bump up this concept further, Olmsted suggested that the students live in cottages. Intermingled with
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stanford concept
architecture firm to design the campus’s buildings: Shepley, Rutan & Coolidge.
Stanford’s main quad, one of the great pieces of university architecture, still retains such Olmsted touches as the arcades and the oasis plantings. But the idea of a connected row of quads was abandoned. Stanford made all manner of other changes, many of them sensible but also at odds with Olmsted’s original plan.
For an architect, Vanderbilt turned to Richard Morris Hunt.
