Painting by John Singer Sargent, 1895
Frederick Law Olmsted, designer of Central Park in New York City, was born 200 years ago.
Olmsted was a landscape architect, journalist, social critic and public administrator. He is popularly considered to be the father of American landscape architecture.
Olmsted was famous for co-designing many well-known urban parks with his senior partner, Calvert Vaux. They included Central Park and Prospect Park in New York City, as well as Elm Park in Worcester, Massachusetts, considered by many to be the first municipal park in America.
His work, especially in Central Park, set a standard of excellence that continues to influence landscape architecture in the United States.
His second line of achievement involves his activism in conservation, including work at Niagara Falls, the Adirondack region of upstate New York and the National Park system.
Historic New England - Gift of Joseph Hudak, Firm of Olmsted Brothers, Brookline, Mass.
During the Civil War, Frederick Law Olmsted ran an agency called the United States Sanitary Commission, which delivered medical supplies, food and clothing for wounded Union troops, sometimes faster than the Army did.
Before all that, Olmsted did something completely different. In his early 30s, he was a correspondent for a not-yet major metropolitan newspaper. It would be called The New York Times.
But don’t look for his byline. The name that accompanied his dispatches was “Yeoman.” Like many newspapers in the 19th century, The Times used pseudonyms.
Yeoman’s dispatches in 1853 and 1854 were widely read and enduring. Half a century later, a correspondent for The Times of London said Olmsted’s work had been “more powerful and convincing than ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin.’”
Some historians call that an exaggeration, but his writing was impressive, considering that Olmsted’s claims to fame had been owning a farm on Staten Island and writing a book about his travels in England. He had no newspaper experience.
Olmsted was hired after a five-minute job interview with Henry Jarvis Raymond, who had founded The New-York Daily Times in 1851 with the banker George Jones.
Running a newspaper wasn’t Raymond’s only job. He was also the speaker of the New York State Assembly, and before long, he was nominated for lieutenant governor. He then played a significant role at the brand-new Republican Party’s first national convention in 1854.
Raymond went on to draft much of President Abraham Lincoln’s re-election platform in 1864, the year Raymond became the chairman of the Republican National Convention and was elected to Congress.
A.M. Rosenthal, who was the managing editor of The Times, wrote in 1971: “No, they don’t make editors like Henry J. Raymond anymore, and is that good or bad?”
An editor who doubled as an elected official? It wouldn’t happen now. “Journalists have no place on the playing fields of politics,” The Times’s handbook on ethics says — and, to its credit, The Times noted even when Raymond was in charge, the paper “was never used to promote its editor’s political fortunes.”
Raymond sent Olmsted to the South before the Civil War with instructions to send back his “personal observations,” and Olmsted did, sometimes with dense passages packed with details — too many details, Raymond complained.
Still, as John Stauffer, a cultural and literary historian at Harvard, said: “Olmsted illuminated the South for the North.” Olmsted portrayed conditions that belied the South’s reputation for elegant affluence. “One of the things that struck Olmsted in the South was the backward nature, the lack of roads, the lack of hotels for a stranger going to interview people,” Stauffer said. The contrast with a rapidly modernizing North was inescapable.
On the job, Olmsted did not always tell the people he encountered that he was a journalist. Anne Neal Petri of the National Association for Olmsted Parks — which is overseeing Olmsted200, the bicentennial celebration — told me that Olmsted essentially worked undercover and that not saying he was representing a Northern newspaper served him. (How different was this from what a correspondent should do now? The Times’s ethics handbook says that “staff members should disclose their identity to people they cover,” although it also says they “need not always announce their status as journalists when seeking information normally available to the public.”)
Olmsted could charm people into opening up in a way they probably wouldn’t have if he had shown up with a press card. “He was very disarming,” Stauffer said. “He didn’t alienate people. He showed this genuine curiosity. He came across as someone who didn’t have any preconceived ideas. He was antislavery, but he didn’t say that to planters. He probably would have been kicked out” if he had.
If Olmsted’s dispatches affected his readers, his travels for The Times also affected him. Stauffer told me that Central Park was what Olmsted wished a plantation in the South could have been, a place where everyone could mingle. But, as has been widely noted, when the land for the nation’s first great municipal park was cleared, the city moved out one of its first Black settlements.
Thanks New York Times