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Introduction
Several cities in the United States went through a tremendous transformation in the 19th century. More than ever before, more and more people migrated to cities. Because of this mass exodus, cities that were merely meant for commercial purposes, the state had to do some significant transformations. City authorities as well as social leaders couldn’t afford the luxury of sitting back and watch the city operate without their active participation. More and more leaders investigated and adopted city beautification towards the end of the 1850s. Not only are people keen to live in an attractive city but they are happier as well. This was the logic that propelled the energy behind the movement.
Fredrick Law Olmsted is regarded as one of the main forces behind the City Beautiful movement. Recognized as the pioneer of American landscape architecture, Fredrick Law Olmsted was the most renowned landscape architecture of the post-Civil War generation. (Olmsted, pg15-30)
In Hartford, Connecticut, Fredrick Law Olmsted was born in 1822. As a gentleman, he became a very well-read man though he never fully attended college. Olmsted started his profession as a technical farmer after moving to New York while aged 18 years. Along with his brother, he travels around Europe, worked as a merchant seaman, and as a newspaper correspondent, he traveled the southern United States, publishing several books after his career as a scientific farmer failed to take off (Cronon, pg 211).In 1857, Fredrick Law Olmsted got selected as the Superintendent of Central Park, New York City during the initial stages of the development of the park project as a result of the many connections he amassed while working as a columnist with the New Yorker. While in the processes of planning parks in the US, Calvert Vaux and his associate Andrew Downing afterward met Olmsted. This has occurred when Vaux approached Olmsted regarding the idea of working jointly on the venture which was then known as the Greensward, their plan was eventually selected as the winning design.
Adopting her children, Olmsted later decided to marry the widow of his brother John and this occurred in the year 1859. The reason as to why he did this was so that he could be given the chance of serving as the head of administration of the Sanitary Commission of the United States; Olmsted later took leave from his work at the Sanitary Commission to take part in a civil war in 1861. He had the responsibility of aiding the soldier’s welfare of the Union Army during that particular war. The Sanitary Commission was what was later came to be known as the current Red Cross. Later on Olmsted left the Sanitary Commission at the time when a gold mining venture in north San Francisco presented him the administrative position at the Mariposa Estate in California in 1863. later on when the mining project failed, Olmsted went back to New York and to be united with Vaux in designing Prospect Park and that was from 1865 to 1873, Chicago’s Riverside division, the Buffalo’s park system (1868-1876), and the Niagara Reservation park at Niagara Falls (Olmsted, pg15-30).
With his practice, he left New York City and settled in Brookline Massachusetts in 1883. In due course, Olmsted focused a great deal of his time on Emerald Necklace. Later on Olmsted handed over the firm to his associates due to his ailing health in the year 1895 and prior to long senility confined him to the McLean Hospital in Waverly, Massachusetts whose grounds Olmsted had earlier designed. It was after long designs and dabbling in many different fields of professions did Olmsted realized his talent as a landscape architect in which he came to be known as one of America’s founders of landscape architects. During his youthful times designer Olmsted had different career interests, that included things like being a newspaperman, a public commentator and times being a scientific farmer. To produce a new breed of civil engineering that synthesized function and beauty, Olmsted merged his interest in rural life with a sense of democratic idealism. (Cronon, pg 213)
Increasing rapidly during the mid-decades of the 19th century, the designing of towns as well as industrialization was the age in which Olmsted grew up occurred to be a very transformative period for the country. A time came whereby several individuals who were among the consist elite thinkers and Reformers who came to realize that there was the need for city inhabitants to one way or another retain some nature aspects at hand as several cities in the U.S. became more developed which predestined that more people were moving to these cities. Parks developed only when open space ebbed as obvious as it may appear. Although he was born in Hartford, Connecticut and attended Yale, Olmsted overlapped between rural and urban territories. In his early adult life, he spent significant amount of time on Staten Island where his family procured a farm for him in 1848. Olmsted began traveling in Europe and the American South after his farming tryout failed. (Olmsted, pg15-30)
Surveying and Absorbing on the Road
Olmstead’s curiosity in rural issues and urbanization, he later came to realized that being on the road is what partly influenced his later work in landscape architecture. During his visit to Britain in the year 1850 Law Olmsted visited the Birkenhead Park located in Liverpool; this visit to the Birkenhead Park somehow proved to be vital in his designing career. One of the initial open spaces that were established by the British state was the Birkenhead Park, which had an important impact on Olmsted that made him propose a piece in Horticulturalist, in which Downing published about the park in the view of building public support for the replica of Central Park. During the same year after visiting Britain Olmsted’s friend Downing introduced him to Calvert Vaux, who was a young architect he had hired from England. The friendship between Olmsted and Vaux eventually turned out to be decades–long professional relationships between the two designers. (Olmsted, pg15-30)
Vaux spent forty years in the city of New York doing different designs such as designing private homes, other public utilities which included the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the American Museum of Natural History, and also different parks in the metropolis’s parks system. Vaux moved to the U.S. after his recruitment by Andrew Jackson for him to work for his landscaping company which was located in Newburgh in New York City. There were several articles which were later written by Olmsted in several journals such as the Downing’s Horticulturalist journal. Later on after Olmsted wrote several articles in the Downing’s Horticulturalist journal. It was after that when Vaux took over the management of Downing’s landscaping firm until later in the year 1856 when he moved to New York City and started working on the Central Park design and this was after Downing passed away on the steamboat tragedy in Henry Clay on July 28, 1852.
Olmsted was promoted to construction Superintendent of Central Park post in 1857 and this was through a series of lucky coincidences. Now known as the Greensward Plan, Vaux and Olmsted worked together on the eventual design for the park. These associates were able to design a number of other Parks such as the two parks situated at the heart of Manhattan which include; the Central Park and Morningside Park, they also planed the famous Prospect Park and the Fort Greene Park plus many other parks in the US. Through their knowledge in landscaping Olmsted and Vaux were able to design “parkways” and used them to join the uptown neighborhoods to the main park, the “Prospect Park”. The new-fangled designs were generated for a new form of highway which was meant to offset the incompetence of Brooklyn’s grid street system (Olmsted, pg15-30).
In the New York City area, Olmsted and Vaux collaborated on several other projects including plans for Morningside Park whose preliminary plans date to 1873 and Riverside Park with its preliminary plans that date to 1875. Including the parkway that ran through the area to take advantage of the site’s hilly bluffs, Olmsted’s plan for Riverside Park combined elements of the topography. By incorporating Samuel Parsons and Vaux, the English designed Rustic Park with casually arranged hedge plants and trees, distinguishing natural inclusions, and other open vistas that underlined Olmsted’s touches, for the next 25 years, the park were built up under the supervision of all these landscape architects. In the year 1865 Olmsted came back to returned to New York after he took part during the first years of the Civil War. At the time of war, Olmsted served as the senior secretary to the Sanitary Commission in the U.S. that is currently branded as the Red Cross. He later moved to California after he was offered a place in and mining firm (Olmsted, pg15-30).
Olmsted and Vaux were able to take full advantage of Prospect Park’s natural elements, including old-growth forests despite Central Park having several major impediments design-wise to accommodate its relatively narrow shape and the large reservoir in the center of the park.
Olmsted and Vaux are also said to be the designers of other gardens and parks such as the Carroll Park (1868), Washington Park, currently known as the Fort Greene Park, the Von King Park in Bedford–Stuyvesant built-in 1870.
The Central Park
Olmsted’s social consciousness and pledge to democratic ideals, swayed by Downing and his own observations on regards to social class in England, China and the South America, are the ideologies that made Olmsted deemed that the familiar green space must always be equally easily reached to all citizens. This, in a nutshell, is what embodies the Central Park design. Not presumed as essential by then, this principle is now essential to the design of a “public park” currently. (Olmsted, pg15-30)
The officials of the Central Park Board started the long journey of building it and this was after the New York State Legislature endorsed the establishment of Central Park in the year1853. An official on the board of Central Park, known as Charles Elliot, via family links, convinced Olmsted to apply for the Central Park superintendent post. It was then when Olmsted was appointed as superintendent in 1857, thanks in part to Elliot’s support (Cronon, pg 211).
After thinking of tendering for the designing of the Central Park, Olmsted and his colleague managed to submit their plan to the board central park board on April 1858. This happened after the two had started working on Vaux’s ideas for Central Park in the year 1857. The park “843-acre green oasis” in the center of Manhattan, Central Park is the New York’s most famous park, and perhaps the most renowned urban park in the world’s history. Amid the entries of a gala to decide the design for the park, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux’s “Greensward” plan was selected by the board.
An ecological Mecca which is inspired by English idealistic landscapes positioned within this metropolis, Central Park was built with 590 varieties of shrubs and 815 verities of Alpine and perpetual plants. In the year 1863, this happened to be the same year that the final acres of park was acquired, expanding it to its present border at 110th Street, New Yorkers flocked the central park, with over four million tourists making their way to the park soon after its completion. The extremely and one of the most popular sites among tourists as well as the citizens of New York today is the Central Park.
New York City is regarded as one of the most important cities in the United States of America today. The New York City serves as the center of world business, and also as the business herb of the United States. Also popular with tourists from all over the globe is the large number of sites with the beautifully designed Central Park occupying a significant place. The most frequently visited site by a large number of both locals and tourists is the Central Park in New York City. Some of the exciting places that one can visit while in the Central Park are the animal Zoo as well as the Wildlife Center; there are also a number of popular eating places and Bethesda Terrace. Central Park takes up a major place in the tourism sector of the US thus it is regarded as one of the major landmarks of the city (Olmsted, pg15-30).
Also formally known as Park Drive, it’s usually called the internal “loop” and it is closed to traffic on Monday through Thursday from 10am-3pm and 7pm – 10pm, and Friday night at 7pm to Monday morning at 6am and is approximately 6 miles around. The plan of the park is displayed on the 3rd-floor conference which is at the Arsenal of Central Park. The plan is considered to be remarkable due to its combined naturalistic and formal settings while the architectural designs such as the Bethesda Terrace and the ornate bridges assist in mingling traffic through the park. (Richard, pg 206-215)
Olmsted and Vaux’s designs for the park generated ways for people on foot and carriages to take pleasure in the park without upsetting each other are maybe the most important idea. Considered radical, the design’s crossways roads allow vehicle traffic to pass through the park without substantively disparaging from the park experience.
In 1873 Olmsted and Vaux presented a plan that was also rejected after the Board for Public Parks discarded the design tenders presented by Parks Engineer–in–Chief M.A. Kellogg. Later an architect by the name of Jacob Wrey was recruited by the park’s board so as to revise the plans which were put forward by Olmsted and Vaux’s and this was in the year 1880. it was after fourteen years when Olmsted and Vaux were later rehired by the Park’s board so as for them to carry on with the upgrading of the Morningside Park and this was after Mould’s death in 1886. By planting plants that could tolerate both dry and gravel settings, the plan managed to improve the park’s natural aspects.
The Parks board had been appointed by a Democratic governor and the government was in need of a token from the Republicans for them to meet the demands of the opposition. Because of this Olmsted was frequently caught up in political events due to his close affiliations with the Republicans. So when he submitted his application for the position of superintendent of Central Park, he found himself at the leniency of impulsive New York State and City politics (Richard, pg 206-215).
Olmsted tendered his resignation in 1873 after a debate over the Central Park administration, but after the depressed economic environment of 1873, he was forced to reconsider. At the Parks Department in 1878, he lost his job as an–house landscape architect, a demotion, but was retained on a per-project basis as a consulting landscape architect. Olmsted later moved to Brookline, Massachusetts in the year 1883 and this was after his affiliation with New York City parks board continued to decline. This was shortly after; he started working on one of his biggest projects ever, the Boston’s Emerald Necklace park system.
When his health declined, Olmsted was forced to retire in the year 1895. He then moved to Belmont, Massachusetts and he was later admitted as a patient at McLean Hospital whose gardens he had planed several years before. He was later laid to rest in the Old North Cemetery. Olmsted had left behind his two sons, who later took over the management of their father’s company and they did business under the name “the Olmsted Brothers”. The Olmsted’s firm is now being managed by his sons who went on to build designs for more parks such as Fort Dyker Beach Park in Brooklyn, and many others (Olmsted, pg 90-150).
Works Cited
Cronon, William. Uncommon ground. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1996.
John Spencer Bassett, Edwin Mims, William Henry Glasson, Project Muse, William Preston Few, Duke University, William Kenneth Boyd, William Hane Wannamaker. The South Atlantic Quarterly. Hogun : Duke University Press, 1904.
Kalfus, Melvin. Frederick Law Olmsted. New York: NYU Press, 1991.
Michael Southworth, Eran Ben-Joseph. Streets and the shaping of towns and cities. Ney York: Island Press, 2003.
Olmsted, Frederick Law. Frederick Law Olmsted. New York: G. P. Putnam’s son, 1922.
Richard T. LeGates, Frederic Stout. The city reader. London/ New York: Routledge, 2003.
Rybczynski, Witold. A clearing in the distance. Boston: Scribner, 1999.
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