Olmsted at 200: Exploring Lesser-Known New York Connections on the Bicentennial of His Birth

Story by Michelle Sutton

Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903)—and the firm that his sons and associates continued long after his retirement—designed more than 6000 landscapes across North America. For many people, Central Park is the first and most iconic of those achievements that spring to mind, the development of which occupied Olmsted Sr. and his business partner Calvert Vaux (pronounced “vox”) from 1858-1976. (For important historical context, see recent Council blog post about Seneca Village that shows both how the predominantly Black community came about and how that community was displaced from the land that became Central Park.)

To learn about Olmsted Sr., the range of projects the Olmsted firms undertook, and the profound significance of their work to society, see the superb book, A Clearing in the Distance, by Witold Rybczynksi. Further, the National Association for Olmsted Parks created the excellent olmsted200.org to learn about Olmsted as the bicentennial of his birth is celebrated on April 26, 2022. Additionally, Central Park Conservancy, Buffalo Olmsted Parks Conservancy, Highland Park Conservancy, and Olmsted City of Greater Utica are among the organizations readers can explore to learn more about the Olmsted legacy in New York City, Buffalo, Rochester, and Utica.

Olmsted Sr. was a landscape architect, journalist, farmer, social reformer, urban and suburban planner, and con who contributed significantly to the movement to create the national park system.  There exists a vast digital repository of information about Olmsted Sr., his sons John Charles and Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., and their Olmsted firm associates. I found myself wondering, what are some of the lesser-known Olmsted connections with New York outside of NYC?

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By his early 20s, Olmsted had spent just one semester at Yale, but having been unhappy in a classroom setting, left college to find himself through work and travel, including two harrowing and mostly unhappy years as a seaman. Once back on land, he became interested in agronomy (then called “scientific agriculture”) and in 1846, at age 24, Olmsted went to live with the Geddes family in the Hamlet of Fairmount in the Town of Camillus, just west of Syracuse.

An agronomist and civil engineer, a state congressman, a pacifist and abolitionist, George Geddes had received the 1846 New York State Agricultural Society award for the best-run farm in the State. This award recognized his science-based practices with cattle on his 300-acre* farm called Fairmount, named for its location. (*The Fairmount farm’s acreage is variously reported in sources).

As celebrity horticulturist of the time Andrew Jackson Downing had also done, Geddes became an important mentor to Olmsted, who accompanied Geddes to local agriculture fairs, took notes, presented to the local agriculture society on farming equipment, and installed an irrigation system for the Geddes family vegetable garden. In Genius of Place: The Life of Frederick Law Olmsted, Justin Martin wrote:

The long hours of farmwork were followed by a ritual that Olmsted found immensely appealing. Geddes ended each day by scrubbing up and sitting down to a large and sumptuous meal. It was often lamb or veal, fresh milk flowed freely, and there might a currant pie for dessert. Sometimes there were even pineapples, an exotic delicacy grown in hothouses on neighboring farms. The table was set with “silver forks every day,” Olmsted noted with wonder. Subsistence farming, this was not.

At dinner, Geddes invariably held forth on a variety of topics. He was a man of broad interests who made a point of staying informed about issues of the larger world, far beyond the realm of farming. In 1846, war had just broken out between the United States and Mexico. Geddes believed that both armies (all the world’s armies, for that matter) should be disbanded. He was an avid follower of Elihu Burritt, a blacksmith who was one of the founders of the pacifist movement. Just as the food at Fairmount wasn’t typical, Olmsted noted, neither was the conversational fare.

According to Rybcyznksi in A Clearing in the Distance, after his six-month apprenticeship with Geddes, Olmsted wrote to his best friend from Yale, Charles Loring Brace: “This has been a good place for me. I have looked on and talked more than I’ve worked, but I’ve considerable faith that I shall make a good farmer.” Olmsted went on to buy a farm of his own on Staten Island, with assistance from his father. There, influenced by his mentor Andrew Jackson Downing’s passion for fruit trees, Olmsted, too, became obsessed with growing them—a gateway into a lifelong passion for trees and the larger landscape.

A note about Syracuse. Former Onondaga Historical Society Director Dennis Connors said in a 2010 interview for the Syracuse New Times, “[There is a] persistent legend that Olmsted … designed Onondaga and its sister parks. He did not. There’s no indication that he ever did any work on [Onondaga] Park … the only connection with Olmsted here is with the Geddes farm in Fairmount. Central New York had a role in educating Frederick Law Olmsted, rather than the other way around!”

Olmsted and associates designed portions or all of hundreds of college campuses, including Stanford, Yale, Bryn Mawr, Gallaudet, and Smith. In a fascinating article by David Schuyler called “Frederick Law Olmsted and the Origins of Modern Campus Design” (Planning for Higher Education Volume 25, Winter 1996-97), the author synthesizes Olmsted’s philosophy for campus design. One key principle was, “The quadrangle is generally inappropriate for campus design because it is too inflexible and cannot accommodate future growth and changing spatial needs.”

In 1867, first Cornell University President Andrew Dickson White asked the busy Olmsted to visit the Ithaca campus and draw up a landscape plan. There was a major hitch, however. Cornell Founder Ezra Cornell wanted a quadrangle on the hill overlooking Cayuga Lake, and building had already begun based on that concept. This was frustrating to Olmsted.

From Schuyler’s article:

Olmsted urged White to avoid making the “same mistake which all the large colleges of the country are now repenting.” If built, Olmsted predicted, the quadrangle would stand as “another monument of shortsightedness, inconsideration & complacency with our little present.” Olmsted foresaw a successful future for Cornell University and feared that its original formal arrangement of buildings would prove overly restrictive as the need for additional facilities arose. Instead of the row of buildings Ezra Cornell wanted, Olmsted suggested their placement according to a “more free, liberal, picturesque & convenient” plan.

While integrating, where they could, other aspects of Olmsted’s guidance over a period of six years, Cornell President White and the Trustees forged ahead with the quadrangle, and Schuyler writes, “As the university grew in succeeding years, the quadrangle could not accommodate the various uses and new buildings the university needed, just as Olmsted had warned.”

Most readers will closely associate Buffalo with Olmsted, whose approach to his work there was a national first. Olmsted prepared landscape plans for Buffalo beginning in 1868 at a time when Buffalo was one of the ten largest cities in the U.S., prospering thanks to the Erie Canal and the industries that grew around it. This was Olmsted’s most ambitious project to date, because when Buffalo’s leading citizens presented him with three parcels of land to choose from for the creation of a park, Olmsted urged that all three be utilized to make a park system—connected by treed greenways.

Witold Rybczysnki writes:

His [Olmsted’s] highly original plan was a complex and refined network of parks, parkways, avenues, and public spaces that represented a degree of sophistication in city planning previously unknown in the United States. He distributed parks throughout the city to make recreation more accessible. Elsewhere, broad avenues and parkways brought trees and greenery into the congested grid of streets. In Buffalo, Olmsted showed how the burgeoning American industrial city could be made livable.

The City of Buffalo retained the services of Olmsted Sr.—and then his sons—until 1915. According to the Buffalo Olmsted Parks Conservancy, the Buffalo Olmsted Parks system includes six parks, seven parkways, and eight circles.

In Buffalo, Olmsted and Vaux’s talents extended to the then 203-acre landscape of the then-called New York State Asylum for the Insane, which opened in 1880 and was notable for its holistic treatment of patients, including provision of opportunities to work in the gardens, relax, and socialize on the park-like grounds. This now 42-acre National Historic Landmark has been more recently known as the Richardson Olmsted Campus (the architect of the series of buildings was Henry Robson Richardson). The Cultural Landscape Report for the site makes for fascinating reading and can be found through richardson-olmsted.com.

In 1888, Olmsted Sr. began work on designs for a Rochester park system he called “The Emerald Necklace,” envisioned as a greenway that would encircle the city and connect its parks. He drew plans for the truly ambitious Genesee, Highland, and Seneca Parks; for the in-depth history of these “big three,” I refer readers to the marvelous April 1988 volume of Rochester History, edited by Ruth Rosenberg-Naparsteck, in which authors Marjorie Wickes and Tim O’Connell explore “The Legacy of Frederick Law Olmsted.” It’s an online resource from which I learned that the only section of the Olmsted-designed Emerald Necklace that was realized was Seneca Parkway.

Olmsted Sr. is less well known for redesigning city squares in Rochester, like Jones Square in the Edgerton neighborhood. According to an article written by RIT student Terri O’Connor for the Democrat & Chronicle in 2015, seven acres of land for Jones Square was donated to the City in 1837. The space had been a rustic public square, a training ground for the Union Army, a baseball park where the local amateur team, the Rochester Alerts, played, and then—when baseball got so popular that the Alerts had to move to the Monroe County Fairgrounds to play—aided by Olmsted’s design, it was reopened as a public square in 1903 with benches, walkways, sophisticated gardens, and a circular pool and fountain. For decades, until funding waned, Jones Square was a source of pride, where City staff and volunteers planted 100,000 tulip bulbs yearly.

The role of Olmsted, Sr. and the Olmsted Brothers in shaping the University of Rochester campus is also fascinating and is explored by the Cultural Landscape Foundation (tclf.org).

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About six years ago I spent a night in a B&B in Utica, and I had the absolute pleasure of exploring the Utica park system, which was designed by the Olmsted Brothers. In the early 1900s, city benefactor and hotelier-businessman Thomas R. Proctor and family donated 540 acres of land for the Olmsted-designed effort as well as additional lands for other parks.

The Proctors had envisioned parks in a traditional and formal European mold, but Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. and his colleague E.C. Whiting were able, over a series of conversations, to convince the Proctors about the uniquely American qualities and benefits of the Olmstedian approach of using wide-open spaces and more naturalistic plantings. Fortunately for Utica, the Proctors were open-minded and receptive.

Olmsted City is a project of the Landmarks Society of Greater Utica. Olmsted City Director Philip Bean wrote a superb feature about the Olmsted firm’s contributions to Utica; in it, Bean writes:

Covering 600 acres, the Utica system of parks and parkways designed by the Olmsted Brothers Firm is approximately 70% of the size of Central Park (for a city with 1/26th as many people as Manhattan), and it consists of three parks tied together by a three-mile-long parkway that gently winds across the southern end of the city.

Philip Bean and team have completed a six-part short video series about “the origins, development, and evolution of Utica’s rich Olmsted heritage—the parks and parkway system and six neighborhoods designed by renowned America landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., and his firm, Olmsted Brothers.” Part 1 of the series is up now, and the rest will roll out shortly. ♦