The Reformist Vision of Frederick Law Olmsted and the Poetics of Park Design

Abstract

W ITH all the renewed attention given in the last decade to Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903) as not only America's foremost practitioner of landscape design but as an important visionary critic of urban planning as well, he has still not been properly situated in American intellectual history. Because his chief legacies-parks and park systems-do not belong to the rigidly defined discipline categories of American education, being neither works of fine art, literature, or political or military history, they have remained outside the canon, untaught and unstudied except in specialized, professional contexts like landscape architecture or urban history. If we look at Olmsted's masterpieces, such as Central Park or Prospect Park in New York City or the Boston park system, within the broader context of nineteenth-century cultural history, however, Olmsted's contribution emerges as clearly central to any consideration of the period. Moreover, by viewing his achievements against the interrelated currents of romantic/transcendentalist attitudes toward nature, liberal Protestant reform, and the woman's moral influence movement, we can understand the ways in which his works continue to enrich us as expressions of a vision at once democratic, reformist, and, indeed, feminist.