1. Starrucca Viaduct, Pennsylvania (Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, Ohio) was completed in 1865, but the first sketch was made as early as 1853; see Carrie Rebora's discussion in Howat, John K. et al. , American Paradise: The World of the Hudson River School (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1987), pp. 210–13.Google ScholarThe Lackawanna Valley (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.) was painted in 1855. For a recent discussion of railroad paintings, see Marx, Leo, “The Railroad-in-the-Landscape: An Iconological Reading of a Theme in American Art,” Prospects 10 (1985): 77–117.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

This essay was originally written for Dr. Jack Salzman's seminar in American Studies at Columbia University in 1987; I am grateful to him for his assistance and to Herbert Mitchell for permission to use as illustrations some of the early photographs of Central Park in his collection. I am especially grateful to James Zetzel for his advice and to Sara Cedar Miller of the Central Park Conservancy for her help in selecting and identifying the photographs reproduced here. Although specific debts will be noted below, I wish to acknowledge the importance for this study of two works in particular: Marx, Leo, The Machine in the Garden (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964)Google Scholar; and Schuyler, David, The New Urban Landscape: The Redefinition of City Form in Nineteenth-Century America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986).Google Scholar

2. Marx, , The Machine in the Garden, p. 25.Google Scholar

3. The full text of the terms of the competition is given in Olmsted, Frederick Law Jr., and Kimball, Theodora, Frederick Law Olmsted, Landscape Architect, 1822–1903: Being the Professional Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted, Senior (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1928), vol. 2, pp. 41–42.Google Scholar (The second volume only was reprinted as Forty Years of Landscape Architecture: Central Park [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1973].)Google Scholar There is as yet no complete edition of Olmsted's works, and citations will henceforth be given in abbreviated form as follows:

Olmsted, and Kimball, , Frederick Law Olmsted = O&K.Google Scholar

Olmsted, Frederick Law, A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States with Remarks on Their Economy (New York: Dix and Edwards, 1859Google Scholar; rept. New York: Negro Universities Press, 1968) = Seaboard.

The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted, vol. I: The Formative Years, 1822 to 1852, ed. McLaughlin, C. and Beveridge, C. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977) = Papers I.Google Scholar

The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted, vol. III: Creating Central Park, 1857–1861, ed. Beveridge, C. and Schuyler, D. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983) = Papers III.Google Scholar

Sutton, S. B., ed., Civilizing American Cities: A Selection of Frederick Law Olmsted's Writings on City Landscapes (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971) = Sutton.Google Scholar

Fein, Albert, ed., Landscape into Cityscape: Frederick Law Olmsted's Plans for a Greater New York City (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967) = Fein.Google Scholar

4. For a description of the Greensward plan and its differences from the 32 rejected proposals, see O&K II 45–48; and Schuyler, , New Urban Landscape, pp. 83–95.Google Scholar

5. For the events mentioned here, see O&K passim, Schuyler, , New Urban Landscape, pp. 77–100Google Scholar; and Stewart, Ian R., “Politics and the Park: The Fight for Central Park,” New-York Historical Society Quarterly 61 (1977): 107–40.Google Scholar The text of the quotation from the New York Herald given here is that given by Olmsted, , “Public Parks and the Enlargement of Towns,” Sutton, p. 88.Google Scholar Olmsted slightly misquotes and abridges the original; among other changes “great beer-garden” is substituted for “huge bear garden.”

6. It is not generally observed that even the acceptance of Olmsted and Vaux's plan had an element of politics: Olmsted was a Republican, and although the submissions were anonymous, the Greensward plan received the votes of all six Republicans on the Park Commission, while three of the four Democrats voted for the design of a Democrat. See Beveridge, in Papers III, p. 26.Google Scholar The New York Herald of 05 31, 1858Google Scholar, deplored the partisan motives behind the award and called it a sham competition.

7. Quoted by Schuyler, , New Urban Landscape, p. 96.Google Scholar

8. Unpublished fragment, cited by Schuyler, , New Urban Landscape, p. 94.Google Scholar On the use of the terms “frontier” and “pioneer” by Olmsted and his contemporaries to describe the condition of the urban poor, see Lewis, Robert, “Frontier and Civilization in the Thought of Frederick Law Olmsted,” American Quarterly 29 (1977): 388–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9. Sutton, , p. 83.Google Scholar

10. See Miller, Ross L., “The Landscape's Utopia Versus the City: A Mismatch,” New England Quarterly 49 (1976): 179–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Machor, James L., Pastoral Cities: Urban Ideals and the Symbolic Landscape of America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), pp. 167–71.Google ScholarSimutis, Leonard Joseph, in “Frederick Law Olmsted's Later Years: Landscape Architecture and the Spirit of the Place” (Ph.D. diss., University of Minnesota, 1971Google Scholar; Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms, 1973), on the other hand, takes an approach comparable to that of this essay. He argues that, in his park designs, Olmsted attempted to reconcile the pastoral myth and the counterforce of urbanization; see particularly pp. 20–24.

11. The phrase is taken from Genovese, Eugene D., Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Vintage, 1976), p. 49.Google Scholar

12. Quoted by Schuyler, , New Urban Landscape, p. 99.Google Scholar

13. Blodgett, Geoffrey, “Frederick Law Olmsted: Landscape Architecture as Conservative Reform,” Journal of American History 62 (1975–1976): 878, 872.Google ScholarBlodgett, and Lewis, , “Frontier and Civilization,” pp. 385–403Google Scholar, in two important articles cited frequently here, have rigorously revised the impression of Olmsted, as a “liberal social activist”Google Scholar upheld by earlier scholars. Their view seems to be the prevailing one at present: see Schuyler, , New Urban Landscape, pp. 228–29Google Scholar; Bender, Thomas, Towards an Urban Vision (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1975), pp. 164–87Google Scholar; and Machor, , Pastoral Cities, p. 171.Google Scholar Olmsted himself only reluctantly conceded the need for any gates and barriers at all around the park (O&K II, pp. 394–97), and the document which assigns the names to the various gates was written not by Olmsted himself but by the Commissioners of Central Park, Stebbins, Russell, and Green in 1862 (O&K II, pp. 398–403).

14. Lewis, , “Frontier and Civilization” pp. 386–87.Google Scholar

15. The quotations are taken from Hofstadter, Richard, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Knopf, 1962), pp. 187–88.Google Scholar Conkling's attack was directed against G. W. Curtis, on whom see below.

16. For fuller accounts of the genteel reformers, see Hofstadter, , Anti-Intellectualism, pp. 172–96Google Scholar; and Sproat, John G., “The Best Men”: Liberal Reformers in the Gilded Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968).Google Scholar

17. For these names and others, see Blodgett, , “Frederick Law Olmsted,” p. 871.Google Scholar

18. Hofstadter, , Anti-Intellectualism, p. 178.Google Scholar

19. For a criticism of this prosopographical approach to social history, see Stone, Lawrence, “Prosopography,” in Historical Studies Today, ed. Gilbert, F. and Graubard, S. (New York: Norton, 1972), pp. 121–22Google Scholar: “The second danger which threatens every prosopographer is that he may fail to identify important subdivisions, and may thus be lumping together individuals who differ significantly from one another.”

20. See Stevenson, Elizabeth, Park Maker: A Life of Frederick Law Olmsted (New York: Macmillan, 1977), p. 289Google Scholar; and Roper, Laura Wood, FLO: A Biography of Frederick Law Olmsted (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), p. 340Google Scholar; see also Bender, Thomas, New York Intellect: A History of Intellectual Life in New York City from 1750 to the Beginnings of Our Own Time (New York: Knopf, 1987), p. 200Google Scholar, on Olmsted's disagreement with Godkin. What Olmsted was writing in the Nation was very different from what Godkin wrote as editor: see Roper, , FLO, pp. 338–40.Google Scholar

21. Quoted by Blodgett, , “Frederick Law Olmsted,” pp. 870–71.Google Scholar

22. The same careful distinction appears when Olmsted, in a letter to James Fields (the editor of the Atlantic Monthly) of 10 21, 1860Google Scholar, describes Henry Bellows as “one of yours” (Papers III, p. 269)Google Scholar; the editors comment, “By the phrase ‘one of yours,’ Olmsted is suggesting that Bellows, like Fields, was a man of letters and gentleman-reformer” (p. 270).

23. The first letter to Norton is in Stevenson, , Park Maker, p. 275Google Scholar, the second in Papers I, p. 134.Google Scholar

24. On the civil service controversy, see particularly Hofstadter, , Anti-Intellectualism, pp. 179–85.Google Scholar He points out that the proposals of the reformers were not nearly so self-interested as their British equivalents: “What was mainly at issue for them was a cultural and political ideal, a projection of their own standards of purity and excellence into governmental practice” (p. 187).

25. The subtitle of “The Spoils of the Park” is “With a few leaves from the deep-laden note-books of a wholly unpractical man” and the words “practical” and “unpractical” run like a refrain through the whole pamphlet. Olmsted also refers to himself as “unpractical” in the title “Passages in the Life of an Unpractical Man” (O&K I, pp. 45–63).Google Scholar When Blodgett asserts (“Frederick Law Olmsted,” p. 888)Google Scholar that Olmsted's career “forecast the process by which cosmopolitan elites, deprived of grass-roots political power, learned to assert their authority in public life through specific technical expertise in the higher echelons of urban governance,” he is right about Olmsted's “specific technical expertise” but wrong about “higher echelons.”

26. Letter to Brace, of 11 1, 1884Google Scholar; printed by Roper, , FLO, p. 401.Google Scholar

27. Brace, Charles L., The Dangerous Classes of New York, and Twenty Years' Work Among Them, 3rd ed. (New York: Wynkoop and Hallenbeck, 1880; rept. Montclair, N.J.: Peter Smith, 1967).Google Scholar Brace too is briefly pilloried by Lewis, (“Frontier and Civilization,” p. 396)Google Scholar for his use of the phrase “dangerous classes” to refer to the criminal poor; but in fact Brace puts the phrase in quotation marks, to suggest that there really is no such thing. The phrase “dangerous classes” is found in quotation marks on pp. i, iii, and passim. It is perhaps indicative of Lewis's unconscious bias that, in citing the title of this book, he leaves out the word “work.”

28. See Riis, Jacob, How the Other Half Lives (1890; rept. New York: Hill and Wang, 1957), pp. 138–40, 152–57.Google Scholar For a sympathetic assessment of Brace's practical reforms, see Bender, (New York Intellect, pp. 194–99)Google Scholar, who quotes Paul Boyer's assessment: Brace became “an incisive, original, social thinker,” a genuinely innovative force in urban moral reform (cited from Urban Masses and Moral Order in America [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978], p. 197).Google Scholar

29. Neil, J. Meredith, “Olmsted: A Dubious Heritage,” Journal of Popular Culture 8 (Summer 1974): 186.Google Scholar The quotation is from Fabos, Milde, , and Weinmayr, , Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr.: Founder of Landscape Architecture in America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1968), p. 12Google Scholar, one of the books that Neil is reviewing in this article. Note also Blodgett's similar view: “He had special trouble coping with the demands of the active young working-class male” (“Frederick Law Olmsted,” p. 881).Google Scholar

30. Blodgett, , “Frederick Law Olmsted,” pp. 881–82.Google Scholar

31. It should be noted that Olmsted regretted greatly the difficulty that the poor had in reaching the park in its early years, because of its distance; see “Public Parks and the Enlargement of Towns”: “For every-day purposes to the great mass of people, the Park might as well be a hundred miles away” (Sutton, , p. 92).Google Scholar He knew that that problem was temporary, and would be remedied in time both by the construction of public transport and by the movement of the city population to the north. See the letter to William Robinson cited by Olmsted, and Kimball, (O&K II, pp. 96–97).Google Scholar

32. Note Blodgett, , “Frederick Law Olmsted,” p. 883Google Scholar: “The peculiar topography of Boston combined with its social and political environment to help Olmsted resolve many of the conflicts precipitated by Central Park.” Note also Olmsted's own view that because athletic sports are engaged in by relatively few people at a time it is not reasonable to destroy the benefit accruing to the many from the park for their sake; see “Public Parks and the Enlargement of Towns” (Sutton, , pp. 73–74).Google Scholar It is also worth suggesting that Blodgett's emphasis on the anti-working-class bias of Olmsted's rejection of athletics from the park is peculiarly biased itself: “In his writings he repeatedly dwelt on the needs of ‘town-strained’ women, invalid children, busy merchants and their confined wives, and families in search of Sunday relaxation” (Blodgett, , “Frederick Law Olmsted,” p. 881).Google Scholar Blodgett thus dismisses the needs of women and children in favor of “the active young workingclass male” (ibid.). It might also be suggested that the accusations of effeminacy levelled against Olmsted (quoted above, p. 297) possibly reflect the fact that Tammany's constituency was entirely male, as women could not vote. Olmsted's attitude towards women contains some elements of Victorian patronizing, but is far more complex; see his discussion of women in “Public Parks and the Enlargement of Towns” (Sutton, , pp. 57–60).Google Scholar

33. See “A Review of Recent Changes” (1872), O&K II, p. 249Google Scholar, a passage of considerable importance in connecting the specific design of the park to Olmsted's larger purpose. Critics of Olmsted object most strenuously to his use of “tranquil” and “tranquilizing,” as though Olmsted meant somehow to drug the working classes into passive acceptance of an iniquitous social and political hierarchy. Reed, Henry Hope and Duckworth, Sophia, in Central Park: A History and Guide (New York: C. N. Potter, 1967), p. 41Google Scholar, rightly insist that the terms be understood in their historical context: “Currently, of course, the word to tranquilize is associated with a pill,” while in Olmsted's time it had no such connotation. It is interesting to see how Richard Wright uses the word (Native Son [New York: Harper and Row, 1966], p. xvi)Google Scholar: “I still feel that the environment supplies the instrumentalities through which the organism expresses itself”; and if that environment is “warped, … the mode and manner of behavior will be affected toward deadlocking tensions.” But if it is “tranquil,” then “orderly fulfillment and satisfaction” are likely to ensue. Here Wright seems far closer to Olmsted's understanding both of “tranquil” and of the effect of environment on behavior than some modern historians. The novelist and the landscape architect also understand that peace, order, and tranquillity need not be an invidious restriction of human rights.

34. Evidence given by Lewis, , “Frontier and Civilization,” p. 398.Google Scholar

35. “Public Parks and the Enlargement of Towns” (Sutton, , p. 99Google Scholar, my italics).

36. Fein, A., “The American City: The Ideal and the Real,” in The Rise of an American Architecture, ed. Kaufmann, Edgar (New York: Praeger, 1970), pp. 78ff.Google Scholar

37. For the varied uses to which the legend of Jefferson has been put, see Peterson, Merrill D., The Jefferson Image in the American Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960).Google Scholar

38. Jefferson, Thomas, Writings, ed. Peterson, Merrill D. (New York: Library of America, 1984), pp. 290–91.Google Scholar See Marx, , Machine in the Garden, pp. 116–44Google Scholar, to which the present discussion is deeply indebted.

39. Quotations in Marx, , Machine in the Garden, pp. 133–34 and 139Google Scholar, respectively. The second is from a letter to Benjamin Austin of 1816.

40. Papers I, pp. 217–220.Google Scholar Olmsted knew the Notes on the State of Virginia; for an adaptation of part of the passage quoted above, see below, pp. 308–9.

41. “Appeal to the Citizens of Staten Island” (12, 1849)Google Scholar, Papers I, p. 333.Google ScholarRoper, , in FLO, p. 64Google Scholar, emphasizes the connection with Emerson, and points out that Olmsted was at this time recommending Emerson, 's NatureGoogle Scholar to his friends.

42. His brother reports that “his head is much fuller of Carlyle than it is of farming” (Roper, , FLO, p. 53).Google Scholar

43. Olmsted commissioned Daniel R. Goodloe to abridge the three volumes into one, The Cotton Kingdom, for publication in England in 1861 (rept., with an introduction by Schlesinger, Arthur M. Sr., New York: Knopf, 1953).Google Scholar The abridgment left out all historical digressions (cf. Schlesinger, , introduction to Olmsted, , The Cotton Kingdom, p. xxxi)Google Scholar; it also omits all the passages cited here.

44. For Olmsted's views on primogeniture, see Seaboard, pp. 258–61.Google Scholar

45. The material from Jefferson's correspondence is too complicated to deal with fully here. What is of interest – and ironical – is that in the case of two of Jefferson's correspondents, Banneker, Benjamin and Coles, Edward (Seaboard, pp. 262–65)Google Scholar, evidence which undermines Olmsted's view of Jefferson as an ardent proponent of emancipation is omitted or suppressed. In dealing more fully with the same body of material, Miller, John C., The Wolf by the Ears: Thomas Jefferson and Slavery (New York: Free Press, 1977), pp. 75–77 and 205–9Google Scholar exposes Jefferson's suspicions of the intellectual endeavors of black people and his reluctance to act upon his professed ideals. Instead, Miller says, Jefferson preferred to rely on time alone to cure society's ills.

46. Allen, Lewis F., Rural Architecture (New York: C. M. Saxon, 1852), pp. 16–17Google Scholar, quoted by Schuyler, , New Urban Landscape, p. 29.Google Scholar

47. Curtis, George W., “The Editor's Easy Chair,” Harper's New Monthly Magazine 11 (1855): 272Google Scholar, partially quoted by Schuyler, , New Urban Landscape, p. 35Google Scholar, who also cites other examples of the same view. Olmsted's description of New England is in “Public Parks and the Enlargement of Towns” (Sutton, , p. 54).Google Scholar

48. Bellows, Henry, “Cities and Parks: With Special Reference to the New York Central Park,” Atlantic Monthly 7 (04 1861): 420.Google Scholar Olmsted himself associates the development of most modern democratic institutions with the growth of cities in “Public Parks and the Enlargement of Towns”: “I will refer but briefly to the intimate connection which is evident between the growth of towns and the dying out of slavery and feudal customs, of priestcraft and government by divine right, the multiplication of books, newspapers, schools, and other means of popular communication, transportation, and of various labor-saving inventions” (Sutton, , p. 56).Google Scholar

49. Bellows, , “Cities and Parks,” p. 420.Google Scholar Compare also Olmsted himself: in the country, he said, “I have found women living more confined, dull, and dreary lives than in any barbarous country; caring less for simple, natural pleasures than any other women in the world; … it has been in such homes that insanity, consumption, typhoid fever, and diphtheria have found more victims than in those even of the densest and dirtiest of cities” (Nation, 01 22, 1874Google Scholar, cited by Stevenson, , Park Maker, p. 327).Google Scholar

50. Note in this connection Curtis's pointed remark that “poets and other people who have been so enthusiastic about the country have lived in the city, and wrote their eulogies within brick walls” (“Editor's Easy Chair,” pp. 271–72).Google Scholar

51. Bellows, , “Cities and Parks,” p. 429.Google Scholar For other expressions of the positive effects of nature, see Schuyler, , New Urban Landscape, pp. 27–28Google Scholar; for Olmsted himself, see “Public Parks and the Enlargement of Towns” (Sutton, , pp. 65ff).Google Scholar

52. See Van Rensselaer, M. G., “Frederick Law Olmsted,” Century 46, n.s. 24 (1893): 865.Google Scholar

53. “Passages in the Life of an Unpractical Man” (O&K I, pp. 45–63). Olmsted seems to be creating a sort of myth of his own childhood; it corresponds to the image of the “American Adam” which is central to “the American preference for the native, the immediate, the new and the practical over the European, the customary, the theoretical and the ‘intellectual’” (Hildebidle, John, Thoreau: A Naturalist's Liberty [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983], p. 2).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

54. In fact, newspaper articles by William Cullen Bryant as early as 1844 preceded Downing, 's article “The New-York Park” in The Horticulturist 6 (08 1851): 345–49.Google Scholar See O&K II, pp. 22–28.

55. For the memorial, see Papers I, p. 93.Google Scholar It was never built, but in 1889 Olmsted and Vaux collaborated in designing a park in Downing's memory in his home town of Newburgh, N.Y. (still extant).

56. Downing's other books are Cottage Residences (New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1842)Google Scholar, The Fruits and Fruit Trees of America (New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1845)Google Scholar, The Architecture of Country Houses (New York: D. Appleton, 1850; rept. New York: Dover, 1969)Google Scholar – which sold more than 16,000 copies in fifteen years – and the posthumous Rural Essays (New York: G.P. Putnam, 1853; rept. New York: Da Capo, 1974)Google Scholar, a collection of his editorials from The Horticulturist edited with a memoir by Olmsted's friend George W. Curtis. A brief biography and assessment by J. Stewart Johnson is included in the reprint of Architecture of Country Houses. The last two works will be referred to hereafter as Arch, and RE.

57. Bremer, Fredrika, Homes of the New World (1850)Google Scholar, cited by Tatum, George in “The Beautiful and the Picturesque,” American Quarterly 3, no. 1 (Spring 1951): 36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

58. Quoted by ton, Ann Leigh, American Gardens in the Nineteenth Century (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987), p. 173.Google Scholar Downing also played in Peoria, the source of a letter to Downing cited by Tatum, , “The Beautiful and the Picturesque,” p. 37Google Scholar: “I no longer feel myself an isolated being. … [After receiving Downing's journal, I am] in the midst of highly gifted and refined minds sensibly alive to the best interests of our common country.”

59. The first quotation comes from Olmsted's appendix to the Annual Report of the Architect of the United States Capitol for the Fiscal Year Ending June 30, 1882, the second from the draft of his introduction to a reprint of Downing, 's Cottage Residences.Google Scholar Both are taken from Papers I, pp. 76–77. Although as will be demonstrated below, Downing was an extreme social conservative, his stress on the connection of architectural form and function (tied, in his writings, to a rigid hierarchical order) has seemed useful and modern to more recent critics than Olmsted; see Ward, John W., “The Politics of Design,” in Who Designs America? ed. Holland, Laurence B. (Garden City, N. Y.: Anchor, 1966), p. 55.Google Scholar For his reputation, see also Newton, Norman T., Design on the Land: The Development of Landscape Architecture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), pp. 260–66.Google Scholar

60. Downing, (Arch., p. 345)Google Scholar allows that the picturesque was his favorite style. On these terms and classifications, see Tatum, “The Beautiful and the Picturesque.”

61. The extent of Downing's reliance on symbolic architecture can be illustrated from a few examples. The twisted column is a symbol of “affectionate embrace”; “it is the delicate, clinging for support to the strong … the poet's own type of affectionate, loving, trusting womanhood” (Arch., pp. 346–47).Google Scholar The round arch symbolizes “refined culture” while the pointed arch symbolizes “upward, aspiring, imaginative feeling” (p. 354).Google Scholar “Distinctly American expression” can be attained by using as decorative elements indigenous plants, such as cotton, tobacco, or corn (p. 362).

62. Arch. p. 268.Google Scholar Cf. also RE, p. 127Google Scholar: “Servants are so unworthy in this country, where intelligent labor finds independent channels for itself, that the lord of the manor finds his life overburdenesd with the drudgery of watching his drudges.” His admiration of the British estates with up to 100 servants is manifest in RE, p. 496.Google Scholar

63. Note also Downing's view that it is in the houses of the gentry “that we should look for the happiest social and moral development of our people” (Arch., p. 258).Google Scholar

64. Olmsted, Frederick Law, Walks and Talks of an American Farmer in England (London: D. Bogue, 1852), pp. 78–82Google Scholar, reprinted in Chadwick, George, The Park and the Town (New York: Praeger, 1966) pp. 71–89.Google Scholar See also O&K I, pp. 95–110.

65. The influence of Birkenhead on Olmsted's park designs is very clear; see particularly Zaitzevsky, Cynthia, Frederick Law Olmsted and the Boston Park System (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 73.Google Scholar Blodgett is therefore misleading when he says that Olmsted had a problem in “translating an eighteenth-century, aristocratic concept of sculptured pastoral space into the American vernacular” (“Frederick Law Olmsted,” p. 879).Google Scholar

66. The “Letters from England” were reprinted in RE; the quotations are from pp. 553, 494, and 495.

67. Curtis, , “Memoir,” in RE, p. xlv.Google Scholar The passage of Downing quoted is from RE, p. 481.Google Scholar

68. For a devastating collection of passages, see Newton, , Design on the Land, pp. 263–64.Google Scholar

69. Loudon was a copious and immensely influential writer on all aspects of landscape and horticulture. For some assessments of his theories and of his influence on Downing, see Chadwick, , The Park and the Town, pp. 55ff.Google Scholar; Newton, , Design on the Land, pp. 261–65Google Scholar; Leighton, , American Gardens, pp. 152–72.Google ScholarLeighton, , in American Gardens, p. 300Google Scholar, indicates how very much more expensive the system of formal bedding-out is than the use of hardy perennials.

70. Hovey, C. M., in The Magazine of Horticulture for 11, 1841Google Scholar, cited by Leighton, , American Gardens, pp. 175–77.Google Scholar

71. This and the following quotations are from RE, pp. 192–208.Google Scholar

72. O&K II, p. 472, citing Olmsted, 's “mature opinion on buildings in landscape parks,” written in 1895.Google Scholar The entire imaginary dialogue is in capital letters.

73. O&K II, p. 473, from the annual report of the Park Commissioners in 1872. See also O&K II, p. 253.

74. I cite the plans for the Mall from the discussion in Schuyler, , New Urban Landscape, pp. 69–76.Google Scholar

75. Thoreau, Henry David, Walden and Other Writings, ed. Atkinson, Brooks (New York: Random, 1937), p. 41.Google Scholar All quotations from Walden, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, and “Walking” are identified hereafter by short title and page of this edition. Thoreau's Journal is cited from the edition of Torrey, Bradford and Allen, Francis H. (Cambridge, Mass: Houghton-Mifflin, 1949).Google Scholar For a more detailed study of Thoreau's objections to Downing's architectural theories and designs, see Fink, Steven, “Building America: Henry Thoreau and the American Home,” Prospects 11 (1987): 327–65.Google Scholar

76. Walden, pp. 41–42.Google Scholar As Matthiessen, F. O. showed (American Renaissance [New York: Oxford University Press, 1941], p. 153)Google Scholar, the passage derives from a discussion in Thoreau, 's Journal for 01 11, 1852Google Scholar, of a letter from Greenough to Emerson.

77. Downing quotes this same prescription from Reynolds in an article in The Horticulturist of 05, 1847Google Scholar, entitled “On the Color of Country Houses” (see RE, p. 256).Google Scholar It seems likely that Thoreau was familiar with one of these citations.

78. Cf. Harris, Neil, The Artist in American Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), p. 211Google Scholar, who refers to Downing, 's “Transcendentalist aesthetics placed in the service of conservative goals.”Google Scholar

79. There is, however, clear evidence that each man was aware of the other's work. Thoreau knew at least two of Olmsted's three volumes on the South (cf. Thoreau, H. D., Correspondence, ed. Harding, W. and Bode, C. [New York: New York University Press, 1958], pp. 480, 483Google Scholar, and Fact Book, ed. Cameron, Kenneth [Hartford: Transcendental Books, 1966], vol. 2 p. 377).Google Scholar Olmsted was the managing editor of Putnam's Magazine at the time when Thoreau, 's Cape CodGoogle Scholar was published in it; cf. Roper, Laura Wood, “Mr. Law, and Putnam's Monthly Magazine: A Note on a Phase in the Career of Frederick Law Olmsted,” American Literature 26 (03 1954): 88–93.Google ScholarFein, , in Landscape into Cityscape, p. 7Google Scholar, note 16, observes that Olmsted and Thoreau “moved in the same circles and their paths crossed on at least two occasions,” and that “it seems likely that Olmsted read Walden, published in 1854, three years before he began work on Central Park.” It is also perhaps worth recording that G. W. Curtis, Olmsted's friend and partner in Putnam's, helped Thoreau build the Walden cabin in 1845 and in 1853 edited Downing, 's posthumous Rural Essays.Google Scholar

80. Olmsted's Preliminary Report for the Park, Brooklyn (1866)Google Scholar, in Fein, , pp. 100–101.Google Scholar The italics are Olmsted's.

81. Beveridge, Charles E., in “Frederick Law Olmsted's Theory on Landscape Design,” Nineteenth Century 3, no 2 (Summer 1977): 39Google Scholar, cites a letter to Mrs. Van Rensselaer written in 1893 on the need for distinguishing “between what is meant in common use of the words garden, gardening, gardener, and the art which I try to pursue.”

82. Quoted by Beveridge, , “Frederick Law Olmsted's Theory,” p. 42.Google Scholar

83. Beveridge, and Schuyler, (Olmsted, Papers III, p. 181, note 17)Google Scholar explain that the Mall was constructed so as to draw attention to the Ramble, which became the focal point of the whole of the lower park. In 1864 Vaux described the Ramble as “the picture that people would come to see” (Papers III, p. 185, note 23).Google Scholar 84. O&K II, p. 22: “rhododendrons, andromedas, azaleas, kalmias [mountain laurel], rhodoras &c.” Compare Thoreau, , “Walking,” p. 615Google Scholar: “high-blueberry, panicled andromeda, lamb-kill, azalea, and rhodora.” “Walking” was not published until 1862, but was delivered as a lecture in 1849. It is not a question of influence of one man on the other, but of shared botanical preferences.

85. Quoted by Beveridge, , “Frederick Law Olmsted's Theory,” p. 42.Google Scholar

86. “Walking,” p. 613.Google Scholar A number of Olmsted's later instructions and letters to the gardeners reinforce this; see particularly O&K II, pp. 353–58. With a letter to the superintending gardener Mr. Fischer in 1875 (quoted by O&K II, p. 353, note 1) he sends a copy of Robinson, 's Wild GardenGoogle Scholar to be used in the planting of the Ramble. Robinson, an English opponent of the “gardenesque,” is still influential in landscape design; he was a friend and admirer of Olmsted. Note also that when it came to planning Prospect Park, Olmsted sought the same effect: “We may even secure some slight approach to the mystery, variety and luxuriance of tropical scenery by an assemblage of certain forms of vegetation, gay with flowers and intricate and mazy with vines and creepers, ferns, rushes and broad-leved plants” (in Fein, , pp. 106–7).Google Scholar

87. Cf. O&K II, p. 435: “We saw keepers repeatedly pass by a group, mainly of children, who in their play were trampling upon and about a piece of rockwork, the crevices of which were filled with delicate plants in bloom and the edges fringed with ferns and mosses. The life of these was stamped out, and in places the ground was left beaten hard, and without a tinge of green remaining.”

88. Beveridge, , in “Frederick Law Olmsted's Theory,” p. 43Google Scholar, comments that Olmsted persisted in this resistance to the gardening fashions of his day and “encountered the opposition of those who found his style too rough and unkempt.” See also the sarcastic comment in “Spoils of the Park”: “The present [Tammany] Commissioners think any thing like sylvan seclusion unsanitary. … All the natural growth of rock-bushes, vines, perennials, and mosses has … been cleaned away as exhibiting a low, depraved, and unpractical taste” (O&K II, pp. 133–34).

89. “Public Parks and the Enlargement of Towns” (Sutton, , p. 82).Google Scholar Compare also “Spoils of the Park”: “Europe has been swept by a mania for sacrificing natural scenery to coarse manufactures of brilliant and gaudy decoration under the name of specimen gardening: bedding, carpet, embroidery, and ribbon gardening, or other terms suited to the house-furnishing and millinery trades” (O&K II, p. 143).

90. Introduction to Olmsted, , Cotton Kingdom, p. xlvi.Google Scholar