THE MAN WHO GREENED AMERICA

      MANHATTAN — 1850s — From its seaside Battery to the northern rim of its urban jungle, chaos and commerce control the city.  Gangs rule the streets, cadging fruit from  vendors, knocking off top hats and stealing purses, slugging it out for turf. 

      The city of 800,000 has almost no greenery, no open square larger than a city block.  The rest is tenements and trash, with the occasional mansion and townhouse.  America’s other cities, from Boston to Philadelphia to D,C,, are no better. Then in the summer of 1857, America begins to go green. 

After purchasing 800+ acres on the edge of the squalid sprawl and evicting 1,600 squatters, Mayor Fernando Wood announces a design contest for “the Central Park.”  Thirty-three firms enter.  The winners, promoting a plan they call “Greensward,” are an architect who has never designed a park, and a journalist who has never designed anything.

      Before he began greening America, Frederick Law Olmsted journeyed through human anthills.  Shipping out on merchant vessels, he saw the teeming hordes of China and India.  He roamed the American South and sent back scathing indictments of chattel slavery.  Olmsted’s  travels taught him that civilization, rather than conquering Nature, desperately needs it.  And people need parks.

      A park, Olmsted wrote, is:

       — “a work of art, as much as a painting or a sculpture;”

      — “not simply a place to escape the hustle and bustle of the city; it is a sanctuary for the human spirit;”

      — “a canvas on which the people can paint their dreams and aspirations;”

      — “a place where the human spirit can soar, where dreams take flight.”

      Olmsted had no formal training in the field he would name “landscape architecture.”  He had no college education, no construction work behind him.  The son of a prosperous merchant whose step-mother taught him the joys of Nature, he had spent his first adult decades traveling and writing.

      Yet along with anthills, Olmsted had toured England and seen its luscious parks built not around but into entire cities.  And in August 1857, working with architect Calvert Vaux, who had hired him based solely on his vision and drive, Olmsted began “translating democratic ideas into trees and dirt.”

      Vaux, a European trained architect and new American citizen, designed the park’s bridges and buildings.  Olmsted shaped and reshaped its land.  “He paints with lakes and wooded slopes,” architect Daniel Burnham noted, “with lawns and banks and forest-covered hills; with mountainsides and ocean views.”  Yet carving design into the earth took muscle.

      Building Central Park required:  removal of 5 million cubic feet of soil and rock; more gunpowder than would soon be used at the Battle of Gettysburg; 20,000 workers, mostly Irish immigrants; and nearly 20 years on the job. 

     Infuriated by those who could not see his vision, Olmsted resigned — twice.  During the Civil War, he headed the U.S. Sanitary Commission, pre-cursor to the Red Cross, to minister wounded soldiers.  He journeyed to California, but returned to New York to finish “Greensward.”

      Lakes were dredged and filled, canopies of trees thinned and sculpted.  Meadows.  Gardens.  Esplanades.  “It was lousy land,” architect Robert Stern observed, “but they built a paradise on it.”

      And when it was done, New Yorkers simply swooned.  Though the park was not yet central, the city began to grow around it, making a green oasis in a grey urban grid.  By 1867, though only half its acreage was open to the public, three million people came to the park.  And the new firm of Olmsted, Vaux, & Co was moving on to design:

      Brooklyn’s Prospect Park.  Interlacing parks called “emerald necklaces” in Boston and Rochester, Milwaukee and Louisville.  New college campuses including Stanford, UC Berkeley, Mount Holyoke, Trinity, Smith, and the University of Chicago.  The grounds surrounding the U.S. Capitol and Niagara Falls, the first management plan for Yosemite. . .

      When he died in 1903, Olmsted had 6,000 projects to his name.  “His influence,” the New York Times wrote, “extended from Canada to Texas and from Sandy Hook to the Golden Gate.”  But his crowning achievement remained his first design.  Central Park, one observer wrote, was “19th century America’s greatest work of art.”

  Today, revived from darker days of crime and muggings, Central Park has 42 million visitors a year.  Along with picnics and casual strolls, Olmsted’s vision hosts Shakespeare and other theater, concerts, a zoo, a castle, a carousel, 21 playgrounds, baseball diamonds, John Lennon’s Strawberry Fields, lakes, ponds, hope. . .

      “Nature is not a luxury,” Olmsted noted, “but a necessity.  We need the calming influence of green spaces to cleanse our souls and rejuvenate our spirits.”

Thank you.