Oakland's Olmsted

"The story of the park's descent into a corpse of a place has been told many times, here and in other cities. Less familiar is the tale of its rejuvenation by a 45-year-old landscape architect who is becoming the Frederick Law Olmsted of the city's dispossessed neighborhoods.Walter Hood is a pioneer in a new approach to landscape design in which plazas, playgrounds and parks are fused into a jaunty new urban form, one resonant of a site's past."