Frederick Law Olmsted

Frederick Law Olmsted was one of the great creative figures of America, and his masterpieces are to be found not on the walls of museums but in the open air, in the public spaces he designed to provide “a specimen of God’s handiwork” for the whole population: New York’s Central Park, Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, Boston’s Emerald Necklace, and many other projects that brought a wholly new vision to urban planning, dedicated to encouraging “that which is most apt to be lost or to become diseased and debilitated among the dwellers in towns.” He was a man of extraordinary energies and wide-ranging concerns, with the fighting spirit to go up against forces of compromise and corruption; a reporter who traveled through the antebellum South to investigate the effects of slavery on economic conditions; an active participant in the Civil War as executive secretary of the United State Sanitary Commission; a campaigner for establishing national reservations at Niagara Falls and Yosemite. Summing up his concerns, he wrote: “The test of prosperity is advance in civilization; the test of civilization is delicacy. The test of delicacy in civilized progress, I may add, is whatever shows ability to finely see truth and to follow it in an exact way.”