Frederick Law Olmsted
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Olmsted and America's Urban Parks a one hour documentary, examines the formation of America’s first great city parks in the late 19th century through the enigmatic eyes of Frederick Law Olmsted (1822 – 1903), visionary urban planner and landscape architect.
- Parks
Olmsted and America's Urban Parks — Film. Parks, Parkways,...
- Parks
Olmsted and America’s Urban Parks, a one hour documentary, examines the formation of America’s first great city parks in the late 19th century through the enigmatic eyes of Frederick Law Olmsted (1822 – 1903), visionary urban planner and landscape architect.
Apr 21, 2011 · This film examines the creation of America's great city parks in the late 1800s through the enigmatic eyes of Frederick Law Olmsted, visionary urban planner and landscape architect.
- Overview
- The power of public open spaces
- Cars vs. community
- A green revival
Pioneered more than a century ago by landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, greenways are nature-filled city hikes that point to the future.
As a result of record visitation in recent years, America’s wide-open spaces are feeling mighty cramped. To manage their teeming crowds, some of the most popular national parks have instituted advance reservation requirements, with some packed state parks looking to do the same.
But what if going for an epic hike or bike ride didn’t involve driving hundreds of miles to the mountains? What if you could amble through a maze of flora and fauna right in the heart of a city, savor the aroma of white violets, refuel with local gelato, and ride public transportation back home?
Urban greenways could be the answer. Fueled by climate change concerns, car-free corridors dotted with woodlands, parks, and local sights are taking shape in cities including St. Louis and Detroit.
Urban greenways were the brainchild of Frederick Law Olmsted, the legendary landscape architect who designed New York’s Central Park in 1858. A decade later, Olmsted designed the nation’s first greenway in Buffalo, New York, known today as the Buffalo Olmsted Parks system.
(These are some of America’s most beautiful urban parks.)
Soon after came the Emerald Necklace in Boston, Massachusetts; it was a bigger, more ambitious greenway project integrating 16 neighborhoods and seven miles of parks. The completed project takes people past the reedy marshes near Fenway Park, through the nation’s oldest victory gardens, and across classical revival stone bridges to Harvard University’s Arnold Arboretum, where more than 2,000 tree species reside.
In the Emerald Necklace, Olmsted saw more than a refuge from daily life. “Olmsted often spoke about the power of public open space to bring people of all walks of life together, and how they could be seen coming together,” says Karen Mauney-Brodek, president of the Emerald Necklace Conservancy. “On top of being this landscape architect, Olmsted had been a journalist—he founded The Nation with abolitionists after the Civil War. He was an expert on the scourge of Southern slavery. He believed that through public parks, like the Emerald Necklace, the American people could become better participants in the republic.”
Greenways were a radical idea in the wake of the Civil War and stood apart from a parks boom across the U.S. Pioneered in Boston and Buffalo, Olmsted’s greenway concept seemed primed to flourish in more cities. This idea partially manifested in some of his lesser-known projects, including in Atlanta’s Druid Hills suburb, where his Olmsted Linear Park still links people to the city’s urban core.
But during the 20th century, Olmsted’s vision collided with two antagonistic forces: the rapid rise of the automobile and the persistence of structural racism.
The curvature of these nascent greenways, and some of the parks within them, made them ideal for road and highway development. Beginning in the 1920s, roads sliced through greenways to the detriment of pedestrians.
“The automobile played a huge role in changing parks,” says Alan Banks, a landscape historian who served as a park ranger at the Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site for 30 years. “In Boston, there’s this very busy road called the Jamaicaway that runs along part of the Emerald Necklace, and at a public meeting about road work, someone got up and said, ‘Olmsted designed all these beautiful parks with views. What if we removed some trees so that drivers could see Jamaica Pond from the road?’ To which someone else replied, ‘You want to give people traveling 60 miles per hour a nice pond view to look at?’”
The trees by Jamaica Pond were not cut down. But in Boston’s lower-income multiracial neighborhoods, shade trees had become scarcer in the wake of the city’s urban renewal surge in the 1950s and 1960s. Bustling boulevards cleaved predominately Black communities such as Dorchester and Roxbury, while predominately white neighborhoods such as Brookline gained a disproportionately hefty share of the city’s greenery.
This trend wasn’t limited to Boston. Across the U.S., urban development in the mid-20th century separated people of color from green spaces. Rising rent and real estate prices, active roads, and insufficient pedestrian infrastructure created barriers between underserved citizens and parks. A 2019 University of British Columbia study found that affluent white neighborhoods still enjoy easier access to parks and green spaces in U.S. cities.
(Low-income neighborhoods are especially vulnerable to rising heat.)
One of Boston’s busiest multilane roads—Columbia Road, in Dorchester—had almost become the concluding link of the Emerald Necklace. Olmsted had desired to build pathways connecting Franklin Park to the beaches at Dorchester Bay. But dense architecture and the trolley system that once ran along the road made the “missing link” of the Necklace untenable.
These days, American cities are rediscovering Olmsted’s greenway vision. The trend is partly due to widening recognition of how urban planning has devastated communities of color, depriving them of green space and transit options. The other factor behind this “greenway stimulus” is worsening climate change and an emerging consensus that Americans must move away from cars as the default mode of transit.
(Here’s how parks help cities adapt to climate change.)
National and local sustainability plans like the Green New Deal are reimagining car-congested cities as places where people can thrive without cars. This means not only extending public transportation throughout cities, but also constructing more greenways to connect urban and suburban communities.
In St. Louis, Missouri, city agency Great Rivers Greenway is building the Brickline Greenway, a network of urban trails that could be nearly 20 miles long when it’s completed in seven to 10 years; three segments are set to open by 2025.
“Before COVID, our city parks saw about two million users a year, but last year alone, we went to three million,” says Susan Trautman, CEO of Great Rivers Greenway. The finished Brickline paths will accommodate the surging interest in greenways and increase access equity to green spaces, which Trautman adds is the project’s backbone. ”Our goal is to blur the spaces between neighbors,” she says.
In Atlanta, Georgia, planners are building on former railway corridors for the BeltLine, wooded walking and biking paths that encircle the city, with tributaries to historic neighborhoods and parks. The project will stretch 22 miles once it’s completed in 2022.
Olmsted and America's Urban Parks — Film. Parks, Parkways, Recreation Areas and Scenic Reservations. Hot Springs Reservation – Hot Springs, AR. Yosemite Valley – Mariposa. Beardsly Park – Bridgeport, CT. Bushnell Park – Hartford, CT. Goodwin Park/South Park – Hartford, CT. Keney Park – Hartford, CT. Pope Park – Hartford, CT.
Sep 30, 2022 · 151 years after Frederick Law Olmsted designed New York City’s Central Park with Calvert Vaux, it remains an undisputed haven of tranquility amidst one of the largest, tallest, and most unnatural...
- 57 min
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- Speedwell Foundation
Mar 5, 2014 · Part 1 of a documentary celebrating the legacy of Fredrick Law Olmsted - designer of Central Park in New York City and many other great urban parks and developments across the United...
