The Atlantic.com, will be publishing an article in their September issue on how Olmstead altered New York City by designing Central Park. A century and a half ago, city dwellers in search of fresh air and rural pastures visited graveyards. He thought it was a bad arrangement. The processions of tombstones interfered with athletic activity, the gloom with carefree frolicking. Nor did mourners relish having to contend with the crowds of pleasure-seekers. The phenomenon particularly maddened Frederick Law Olmsted.
That public parks should exist at all was a radical idea. Olmsted’s solutions—Central Park, Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, Boston’s Emerald Necklace, among dozens of others, many designed with his longtime collaborator Calvert Vaux—were just as radical. Until Olmsted created a new occupation for himself—he and Vaux were the world’s first professional landscape architects.
A park should also be faithful to the character of its natural terrain. It was in “bad taste,” for instance, to grow lawns in the arid western United States or palm trees in New England. Beauty was to be found not in decorative plants, as one might expect from a florist’s display window, but in general effects. Trees should be grouped in such a way that “their individual qualities would gradually merge harmoniously.” To read more about the man, his childhood and life, click here, to read the article in its entirety.