Prints & Photographs Division The Mall, Central Park. Their winning “Greensward” plan (1858) allowed New Yorkers to experience the beauty and benefits of the countryside without leaving the island city. Olmsted was engaged in clearing Central Park’s 770-acre Manhattan site when architect Calvert Vaux suggested collaborating on a plan for the park’s design competition. Encouraged to apply for the superintendency of New York City’s nascent Central Park, Olmsted embarked on a new career that tapped his managerial skills and his knowledge of engineering and horticulture while providing an opportunity to recreate the beautiful landscapes he had seen at home and abroad. Olmsted’s keen observations created the most complete contemporary portrait of the American South on the eve of the Civil War, wherein he concluded that slavery harmed the whole of Southern society.īy the late 1850s, a publishing house Olmsted joined had gone bankrupt, disappointing his hopes for a literary life. His articles were subsequently published as A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States (1856), A Journey through Texas external (1857), A Journey in the Back Country external (1860), and in a two-volume compilation of material from all three books, The Cotton Kingdom external(1861). Raymond, engaged Olmsted to report on conditions in the slaveholding states. That year, the founding editor of the New-York Daily Times (soon renamed the New York Times), Henry J. The Evolution of the Conservation Movement, 1850-1920Ī tour of England and the Continent inspired Olmsted’s Walks and Talks of an American Farmer in England of 1852, and a new career in journalism. in The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, New York: The Century Co., Oct. Johnson from a photograph by James Notman. Instead, young Olmsted studied engineering and scientific farming, eventually putting his agricultural and managerial theories into practice on a Staten Island farm his father purchased for him.įrederick Law Olmsted, “Address to Prospect Park Scientific Association” (May 1868). Weakened eyesight due to illness forced him to abandon plans to attend Yale University. Son of a well-to-do Hartford, Connecticut, merchant, Olmsted spent much of his childhood enjoying rural New England scenery. Frederick Law Olmsted, America’s foremost landscape architect of the nineteenth century, was born on April 26, 1822.

Edit trees in chief architect library