Frederick Law Olmsted was an American landscape architect, journalist, social critic and public administrator.
Background
Frederick Olmsted was born on April 26, 1822, in Hartford, Connecticut, the son of John Olmsted and Charlotte Hull-Law. His father was a successful merchant with a strong love for nature, people, and places. Frederick’s mother died when Frederick was quite young and his father remarried soon after.
Education
He was a good student and graduated from the Phillips Academy in 1838. He was aspired to pursue his higher studies from the Yale College but sumac poisoning.
Unable to get a college education, he struggled for a few years working at different jobs as a sailor and a farmer. After his sight improved slightly, he started attending lectures in science and engineering at Yale University.
Olmsted travelled throughout Europe in 1850 and visited public gardens in England which greatly impressed him. He subsequently published Walks and Talks of an American Farmer in England in 1852 which got him noticed for his writing skills and helped him embark on a career as a journalist.
The New York Daily Times commissioned him to conduct an extensive research on the slave economy in the American South and Texas. He routinely sent his reports to the publication which were published in three volumes: A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States (1856), A Journey Through Texas (1857), A Journey in the Back Country in the Winter of 1853-4 (1860).
During the 1850s, his career took an interesting turn for the better. He became acquainted with the famous landscape architect Andrew Jackson Downing, who introduced him to the English-born architect Calvert Vaux. Olmsted and Vaux participated in the Central Park design competition together and were announced as winners, in 1858.
In 1858 he became chief architect of the park, and from then until 1861 he worked assiduously in one of the first attempts in the United States to apply art to the improvement of nature in a public park. The work attracted widespread attention, with the result that he was engaged thereafter in most of the important works of a similar nature in the United States: Prospect Park, Brooklyn, New York; Fairmont Park, Philadelphia; Riverside and Morningside parks, New York City; Belle Isle Park, Detroit; the grounds surrounding the Capitol at Washington, D.C., between 1874 and 1895; Stanford University at Palo Alto, California; and many others. He also designed Mount Royal Park, Montreal.
From 1864 to 1890 Olmsted chaired the first Yosemite commission, taking charge of the property for California and succeeding in preserving the area as a permanent public park. Plans for the Niagara Falls park project, among the last in which Olmsted and Vaux collaborated, did much to influence New York state to preserve the Niagara reservation.
After 1886 Olmsted was largely occupied in laying out an extensive system of parks and parkways for the city of Boston and the town of Brookline, Massachusetts, and in working on a landscape improvement scheme for Boston Harbor. He was commissioned in 1888 to design the grounds for Biltmore, the estate of George W. Vanderbilt (grandson of the railroad magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt) near Asheville, North Carolina. It was one of Olmsted’s last great efforts in the picturesque style. In the late 1880s, when the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition was being planned for 1893, Olmsted was chosen to head the landscape project, which he later redesigned as Jackson Park. He spent his last years mainly at his home in Brookline. Frederick Law Olmsted died on August 28, 1903, at the age of 81.
Quotations:
"The possession of arbitrary power has always, the world over, tended irresistibly to destroy humane sensibility, magnanimity, and truth."
"The enjoyment of the choicest natural scenes in the country and the means of recreation connected with them is thus a monopoly, in a very peculiar manner, of a very few very rich people. The great mass of society, including those to whom it would be of the greatest benefit, is excluded from it. In the nature of the case private parks can never be used by the mass of the people in any country nor by any considerable number even of the rich, except by the favor of a few, and in dependence on them."
Membership
Frederick Olmsted was one of the six founding members of the Union League Club of New York.
Connections
On June 13, 1859, Frederick Olmsted married Mary Cleveland Olmsted, the widow of his brother John, who had died in 1857. He adopted her three children (his nephews and niece), John Charles Olmsted, Charlotte Bryant (Olmsted) and Owen Olmsted. Frederick and Mary had two children together, who survived infancy: a daughter, Marion, and a son Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. Their first child, John Theodore Olmsted, was born on June 13, 1860, and died in infancy.