Let it grow

Olmsted's landscapes and philosophies keep blossoming

By Seth Jovaag

A postcard from the 1890s captures Frederick Law Olmsted’s design of the Bow Bridge in Milwaukee's Lake Park. Images courtesy of Professor Arnold Alanen, Department of Landscape Architecture, University of Wisconsin-Madison

By the time he reached Wisconsin, the "father of landscape architecture" was nearing his end.

Plagued by toothaches, stabbing facial pains and insomnia, Frederick Law Olmsted in 1889 was hardly in peak shape when Milwaukee asked his Brookline, Mass., firm to do for the city's nascent parks system what Olmsted had already done for cities like Louisville, Boston, Buffalo and New York, said Arnold Alanen, a professor of landscape architecture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

During the 1890s, Olmsted's firm - Olmsted, Olmsted and Eliot - designed three parks in Milwaukee - Lake, West (later named Washington) and River (now Riverside). But before they were completed, Olmsted's career was over. By 1895, illness and a creeping dementia pushed him into retirement, Alanen said.

Still, Olmsted's influence in the Badger state looms large more than 100 years after his death in 1903.

"Certainly his impact here is just tremendous," Alanen said. "It's really his spirit that comes through in so many different ways."

The main staircase in Milwaukee's Lake Park serves as a centerpiece of an 1890s postcard.

Olmsted's influence can be seen in Tenney Park in Madison, Alanen said, in an arching pedestrian bridge spanning a man-made lagoon or in the way shoreline trees reflect off the water.

It's also in the designs for the 17-acre Lakeshore State Park on a man-made island just south of the Milwaukee Art Museum in Milwaukee. There, Madison landscaping firm JJR wants to install curvilinear sidewalks, preserve undulating hills and clear space for a "great lawn" for families and friends to gather.

"To me, so much of that goes directly back to Olmsted, with maybe a modern twist on it," said Dan Williams, landscape architect for JJR. "He was a visionary."

Olmsted's legacy is as textured as the sun-dappled paths and sloping meadows he envisioned for city parks, college campuses and arboretums across America.

A boathouse in Prospect Park in Brooklyn, N.Y., shows the effects of a recent restoration.

His best-known projects - Central Park in Manhattan, the Vanderbilt estate in Biltmore, N.C., the grounds of the 1893 Columbian Exposition and the Riverside subdivision in Chicago - still conjure awe among artists, engineers and architects more than a century later for the scope, style and Olmsted's ability to see "what [his plans] were going to look like in 100 years," Williams said.

But his famous designs are only part of the story.

Born in 1822 to a well-connected, wealthy Connecticut family, Olmsted lived a charmed early life. Williams said Olmsted dated a governor's daughter, knew the Vanderbilt family and as a young man traveled extensively in China and England, taking in the countryside and forever writing down what he saw.

He published a book about his travels through England, and in 1861 his two-volume chronicle about the pre-Civil War South - "The Cotton Kingdom" - brought more acclaim. He also co-founded The Nation, the country's longest-running weekly magazine.

A central water tower in Riverside, Ill., serves as a primary landmark in the community design created by Olmsted and architect Calvert Vaux.

Olmsted's early career as a journalist alone marked him for greatness. Alanen remembers reading Olmsted's essays when Alanen was a college sophomore in Minnesota.

"He was really one of the great intellectuals of the 19th century," he said.

But it was Olmsted's work in landscapes that brought him the most fame.

After a failed stint as a farmer, Olmsted's big break came at age 35, when his wealthy connections helped him land the job of designing New York City's Central Park, according to a March 2005 National Geographic Magazine article.

With architect Calvert Vaux, Olmsted - along with more than 3,000 mostly immigrant laborers - turned 770 acres of marsh and squatters' huts into what remains one of the world's most famous - and revered - public green spaces.

In Central Park and others, Olmsted's aim, Alanen said, was to inject beauty into the squalor and grayness of urban life. And he wanted parks to be for everyone.

"Olmsted really had a philosophy that parks should serve the greater good," Alanen said.

The Romantic style of a house in Riverside, Ill., reflects the features that Olmsted and architect Calvert Vaux instilled in their design for the community.

Over the years, Olmsted parks sprang up in places like Boston and Buffalo. And eventually, his firm - with a light touch from Olmsted - made its mark in Milwaukee.

Olmsted's role in Milwaukee's parks, Alanen said, was mostly for philosophical direction. Most of the work was left to his subordinates.

Those subordinates, however, were no slouches. Olmsted's son, Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., and his stepson, John C. Olmsted, carried the work forward. In fact, between the elder Olmsted's partial retirement in 1895 and Fred Jr.'s retirement 50 years later, the Olmsted firm carried out 3,000 commissions, according to "Frederick Law Olmsted: Designing the American Landscape."

"It's almost a seamless transition to his sons," Alanen said. "You can really see Olmsted's spirit throughout."

In Milwaukee, all but Lake Park drastically changed over the years. And like the parks, Olmsted's name was hardly recognizable for decades.

That changed in the 1970s when plans to revive Manhattan's Central Park gained steam, and more people realized Olmsted's impact, Alanen said. By 1980, his Brookline, Mass., home was restored and named a National Historic Site.

Other names loom large in the landscape field, particularly Jens Jensen and O.C. Simons in Wisconsin, who championed the use of native plants in landscape design.

But Olmsted still tops the list in design and landscaping classes.

"He's a completely central part of our curriculum," said Alanen, whose UW department annually teaches 20 to 25 graduate students and up to 100 undergraduates.

In honor of Olmsted's birth, April is now celebrated as landscape architecture month. In some ways that's ironic, as Olmsted considered the phrase "landscape architecture" too crude, said Williams, who is president of the Wisconsin chapter of the American Society of Landscape Architects.

"Originally, he thought it was a horrible name," Williams said. "He called himself a landscape artist."

In today's world, the variegated mission of modern landscape architects - components can include land analysis, design, management, preservation and rehabilitation - might not suit Olmsted. He was known more for his grand vision than as a meticulous draftsman, Alanen said.

Which begs the question: Would Olmsted be a landscape architect in 2007?
Maybe not, Williams said.

Olmsted did his best work in the time of robber barons and corrupt industrialists, a period when benefactors would gladly drop millions to beautify the grounds of their mansions. Likewise, Olmsted's hands were tied by few government regulations.

Times have changed, Williams said.

"I wish I had the clients that Olmsted did," he said. "You could do whatever you wanted to ... You could paint the picture."

Though Williams admits Olmsted might turn in his grave if he saw what passes for landscape architecture today, the comparisons, he said, are unfair.

Today, cost-cutting on new construction "tends to be taken out of landscapes first," Williams said. And the work leans toward the practical rather than the visionary.

"Take a Wal-Mart parking lot," Williams said. "Is that a good landscape? No. Is that a bad landscape? No. It's a way to make a living."

Perhaps Olmsted's best legacy, Alanen suggested, is the notion that public parks should serve the common good. It's no coincidence, for example, that Tenney Park - Madison's first city park and a sort of mini-replica of Central Park - was located on the city's blue-collar east side by designer O.C. Simons.

That's straight out of Olmsted's philosophy.

"It was first designed to serve the needs of working-class citizens of the city," Alanen said. "That's the type of thing Olmsted envisioned."