ABSTRACT
More quickly than if he had been solely occupied with park work, he became knowledgeable about the New York world which had grown in his absence. His old friends George William Curtis and Charles Dana were powerful men in this world. Through these and other friends, and through the magazine connection, Olmsted widened his circle of acquaintances beyond the inevitable architects, horticulturists, enlightened or unenlightened commissioners, politicians, and well-endowed owners of private land with whom his work in land design inevitably led him.
