The Parkmaker

"Frederick Law Olmsted was America's best known landscape architect. Writer, engineer, and visionary, he became a driving force behind many of America's urban parks."

"...How bitterly in his bouts of paranoia Olmsted must have scorned the memory of a handful of other clients who failed to carry out his plans, confound them! Or were there moments at Belmont when a fading mind might have recalled the prouder legacies of a gifted career? Surely he could not forget the parks that had brought light and air and community soul to the crowded poor of Boston and Buffalo and Louisville and New York, among a score of cities. No forgetting some of the other designs his genius had wrought: of campuses and great estates, cemeteries and arboretums, the serene grounds of the United States Capitol, the grand esplanades of the World's Columbian Exposition at Chicago in 1893, the nation's first parkway (in New York), one of the first planned suburbs with curvilinear streets (Riverside, Illinois), the reports demanding that Yosemite Valley and Niagara Falls be saved from the spoilers at a period in our history when commercial vandalism was even more in vogue than it is today."

[Editor's note: Only a small excerpt of the article is available on the website. The full text is only available in the print magazine.]

Thanks to Mindy Oliver