The self-invented man

Lewis Mumford called Olmsted's combination of travel, shrewd observation, and intelligent reading "American education at its best." He suggested that Olmsted could be considered representative of a mid-nineteenth-century American type: the self-invented man.

Witold Rybczynski, A Clearing in the Distance

Many young men who don't know what to do with their lives never find a satisfactory answer. Frederick Law Olmsted had the good fortune to have a father affluent enough and patient enough to allow his son the time he needed to find his career, and eventually the career found him, as Witold Rybczynski tells the story in a fine biography, A Clearing in the Distance (1999).

Olmsted spent a year as a merchant seaman, became a farmer and then a nurseryman, tried his hand at journalism and wrote some influential books, with his father making up the deficits in his various enterprises. Today we associate Olmsted primarily with the design of New York City's Central Park, assuming it to be the culmination of his career. Instead it was the beginning, where he discovered his true calling.

Olmsted and Calveret Vaux were hired to make a park out of a few blocks of mostly vacant land in the city. Olmsted had been to Europe and remembered parks he had seen in England and France. These observations, plus the knowledge he had gained working with plants and trees on his farm, led to the design of a park that surpassed expectations. Yet Olmsted was frustrated by New York politics, everyone trying to cut funding or change the plan. Some politicians wanted to plant flowers in the park, while Olmsted thought flowers had their place, but that place wasn't Central Park. He wanted a more natural look to the park.

He was glad to finally be rid of Central Park, but by then he had plenty of other opportunities for his thriving new business in what he called landscape architecture. Over the next decades he designed numerous public parks, grounds for public buildings, college campuses and private estates, including most famously Biltmore in Asheville, N.C. Other projects he worked on included Belle Isle in Detroit, the World's Fair in Chicago, the U.S. Capitol grounds in Washington, National Zoological Park, Smith College, Notre Dame University, Duke, Vasser, Yale and Stanford. A more complete list takes up three pages in Rybczynski's book.

Olmsted saw himself as an artist, not a landscaper. His art has changed through the years, much of it no longer recognizable, yet enough of his work remains, including Central Park, to still impact American culture more than a century after his death.