ABSTRACT
Toward the middle of the nineteenth century, at the same time that Georges Eugène Haussmann was reconstructing Paris in his role as Prefect of the Seine during the reign of Napoleon III (p. 25), the works and writings of landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted (1822–1903) were spurring the American Parks Movement. In 1858, he and his partner Calvert Vaux entered and won the competition to design New York City’s Central Park, an 843-acre open space carved out of the city’s relentless gridiron. The heralded success of Central Park vaulted Olmsted, who was responsible for overseeing the park’s construction and also wrote annual reports which both articulated his design ideas and documented the park’s progress, into being the leading landscape architect of the day. Indeed, he is often considered the founder of the American landscape architecture profession. He went on to design Prospect Park (with Vaux) and a related series of parkways in Brooklyn as well as park systems in Boston, Buffalo, and elsewhere.
