Whether flying a kite in Franklin Park, gardening in the Fens, or jogging along the Riverway, today's Bostonians are greatly indebted to the legacy of Frederick Law Olmsted, America's premier landscape architect. Zaitzevsky's book is a richly detailed, fully illustrated account of the design and construction of Olmsted's Boston parks.

These papers document the personal and professional life of the foremost landscape architect in American history. Frederick Law Olmsted relocated from New York to the Boston area in the early 1880s. With the help of his stepson and partner, John Charles Olmsted, his professional office grew to become the first of its kind: a modern landscape architecture practice with park, subdivision, campus, residential, and other landscape design projects throughout the country. During the period covered in this volume, Olmsted and his partners, apprentices, and staff designed the exceptional park system of Boston and Brookline—including the Back Bay Fens, Franklin Park, and the Muddy River Improvement. Olmsted also designed parks for New York City, Rochester, Buffalo, and Detroit and created his most significant campus plans for Stanford University and the Lawrenceville School. The grounds of the U.S. Capitol were completed with the addition of the grand marble terraces that he designed as the transition to his surrounding landscape. Many of Olmsted’s most important private commissions belong to these years. He began his work at Biltmore, the vast estate of George Washington Vanderbilt, and designed Rough Point at Newport, Rhode Island, and several other estates for members of the Vanderbilt family. Olmsted wrote more frequently on the subject of landscape design during these years than in any comparable period. He would never provide a definitive treatise or textbook on landscape architecture, but the articles presented in this volume contain some of his most mature and powerful statements on the practice of landscape architecture.

Frederick Law Olmsted (1822–1903) planned many parks and park systems across the United States, leaving an enduring legacy of designed public space that is enjoyed and defended today. His public parks, the design of which he was most proud, have had a lasting effect on urban America.

The Olmsted Papers project is supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, the National Trust for the Humanities, the National Association for Olmsted Parks, as well as private foundations and individuals.

This definitive, first full-scale biography of Olmsted--famed designer of New York's Central Park--reveals him also as a brilliant political and social reformer.

Historians, landscape architects, conservationists, city planners, students, and citizens' groups continue to turn to Olmsted for ideas about the development and conservation of green spaces in urban areas. "The park throughout is a single work of art, and as such, subject to the primary law of every work of art, namely, that it shall be framed upon a single, noble motive, to which the design of all its parts, in some more or less subtle way, shall be confluent and helpful."—Frederick Law Olmsted For decades Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903) designed parks and park systems across the United States, leaving an enduring legacy of designed public space that is enjoyed, studied, and protected today. Olmsted’s plans and professional correspondence are a rich source for understanding his remarkable contribution to the quality of urban life in this country and the development of the profession of landscape architecture. His writings also provide a unique record of society and politics in post-Civil War America. Historians, landscape architects, conservationists, city planners and citizens’ groups continue to turn to Olmsted for inspiration in their planning and protection of public open space in our cities. This latest volume of the Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted presents the record of his last years of residence in New York City. It includes reports on the design of Riverside and Morningside parks and Tompkins Square in Manhattan, as well as his comprehensive plan for the street system and rapid transit routes of the Bronx. It records his continuing work on Central Park and presents his final retrospective statement, “The Spoils of the Park.” In addition, the volume contains an annotated version of the journal in which Olmsted recorded instances of political maneuvering and patronage politics in the years prior to his dismissal from the New York parks department in 1878. Later chapters chronicle the early stages of his planning of the Boston park system—the Back Bay Fens, Arnold Arboretum, and Riverway. Other major commissions, each with its own political complications, were the grounds of the U. S. Capitol, the completion of the new state capitol in Albany, the designing of a park on Mount Royal in Montreal, and construction of the park system of Buffalo, N. Y. The volume also presents Olmsted’s commentary on issues of the times including Reconstruction policy and Civil Service reform. The Olmsted Papers project is supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, the National Trust for the Humanities, the National Association for Olmsted Parks, as well as private foundations and individuals.

On April 28, 1858, municipal officials announced the winner of the design contest for a great new park for the people of New York City--Plan no. 33, "Greensward" by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux. Though the appropriated ground for what was to become Central Park was nothing more than a barren expanse occupied by squatters, in a matter of a few years, Olmsted turned the wasteland into a landscape of coherence, elegance, and beauty. It not only surpassed the design ingenuity of its existing European counterparts but gained the designer national acclaim in a profession that still lacked a name. Olmsted was an American visionary. He foresaw the day when New York and many other growing cities of the mid-nineteenth century would be plagued by what we presently term "urban sprawl." And he was convinced of the critical importance of adapting land for the recreational and contemplative needs of city dwellers before the last remnants of natural terrain were engulfed by "monotonous, straight streets and piles of erect, angular buildings." As a result of his early efforts to revolutionize the design of public parks, many cities today are able to preserve the recreational space and greenery within their urban limits. In addition, his thoughts and words on wilderness areas still echo across a century of preservation in the wild. This lively and insightful account of his prodigious life features many of his outstanding landscape projects, including the Biltmore Estate, Prospect Park (Brooklyn), the capitol grounds in Washington, DC, the Boston Park System, the Chicago parks and the Chicago World Fair, as well as measures to preserve the natural settings at Niagara Falls, Yosemite, and the Adirondacks. It traces his early years and describes events that were to form his artistic, intellectual, and deeply humanistic sensibilities. And it restores this lost American hero to his prominent place in history. In addition to being the acknowledged father of American landscape architecture, Frederick Law Olmsted helped shape the political and philosophical climate of America in his own time and today. Elizabeth Stevenson is the author of the Bancroft Award-winning Henry Adams: A Biography; The Glass Lark, a biography of Lafcadio Hearn; and Babbitts and Bohemians: From the Great War to the Great Depression, all available from Transaction.