Central Park: Palace Grounds for Common People

If you’ve ever wandered through a beautiful, sprawling park in a large urban area, you have Frederick Law Olmsted to thank. Today, he is considered the father of landscape architecture in America. 170 years ago, he was a mere civil servant. We often take public parks and green spaces for granted these days, but they weren’t always part of the city landscape… and many that did exist were private, for the city’s moneyed classes only. Olmsted came from a group of thinkers who sought to change that. And, with partners like Calvert Vaux and Jacob Wrey Mould, he did.

Olmsted and Vaux were hired to plan and build “the central park” in 1857. This was an era where cities like New York were even more economically segregated than today… tenements and slums downtown, giving way to the beginnings of Gilded Age beauty in midtown, and far uptown, the estates of the elite. In the middle were unremarkable tracts of land, which Olmsted called upon first viewing, a “pestilent swamp”. It was on that land that Olmsted would create his legacy, and that would change New York City, and urban parks and landscaping, forever.

"We want a ground to which people may easily go after their day's work is done. And where they may stroll for an hour, seeing, hearing, feeling nothing of the bustle and jar of the streets. Where they shall, in effect, find the city put far away from them.” This was how Olmsted pitched his vision for what city parks should be. Palace grounds for common people, that was the laudatory praise heaped on his works in modern times. A park shouldn’t feel like part of the city, Olmsted believed. It should feel like an escape from it. And that is what Central Park remains today. Not to mention the 500+ other parks and green spaces that Olmsted designed in his lifetime. He was a man who helped make cities livable, and who changed America forever.

You can visit two of Olmsted’s greatest works on my tours. My Central Park tour is available several mornings each week, and remains my best-reviewed tour. My tour of Prospect Park is available on select Sunday mornings, or by private request on other days.

To gain a better appreciation of this legacy, outside of my tours, you watch this amazing documentary “Frederick Law Olmsted: Designing America”: