An Assignment I Needed: Frederick Law Olmsted’s Legacy - The New York Times

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One day in January, I stood on the 71st floor of 111 West 57th Street, a luxury skyscraper in Manhattan. Below me, Central Park was a vast, frosty oasis hemmed in by tall buildings. Skaters were followed by their shadows in the morning sunlight as they glided on the ice at Wollman Rink.

Central Park was designed in part by Frederick Law Olmsted, the 19th-century landscape architect who designed many public spaces around the country. He was born 200 years ago on April 26, and in commemoration of his bicentennial, I traveled around the country photographing many of his works, including Manhattan’s gem, for a photo essay that was published by the National desk on Saturday, with text by my colleague Audra D. S. Burch.

This project originated in 2020, after the pandemic had upended everything. The idea came to me after I had finished covering the presidential campaign. As a photographer for The Times’s National desk, I had left my home in Seattle and temporarily relocated to Pennsylvania to better position myself near the swing states in the East and Midwest. After the election, I embarked on a meandering drive across the country back to the West Coast, photographing America as it celebrated its first holiday season amid Covid-19.

One of my stops was Asheville, N.C., and the Biltmore Estate, whose grounds Olmsted designed. LeeAnn Donnelly, from Biltmore’s public relations team, emailed me a couple of months later, mentioning that the estate would be part of a yearlong celebration honoring Olmsted’s 200th birthday.

A light bulb went off. As a native New Yorker, I have long cherished Central Park, which Olmsted shaped with his partner Calvert Vaux after winning a design competition in 1857. I was already contemplating projects to pitch for the year and was ready for something lighter than the previous year’s bruising presidential election, civil unrest and waves of Covid-19. I thought about the frustrations and restrictions of living in a pandemic, and about the discussions the virus had generated about green space, equity and public health. I imagined photographing Olmsted’s projects in seasons throughout the year. I wanted to explore his vision of democratic spaces for people from all walks of life.

With my editors’ blessings, I embarked on another journey, following in Olmsted’s footsteps to see what had endured of his work.

We narrowed the scope of the project to some of his most beloved parks, although we did include a sampling of other spaces, like the grounds of the U.S. Capitol in Washington and Stanford University in California. It was difficult to choose which projects to include and which to leave out, but our goal was to give our readers a sense of his legacy in different regions of the country. In the 1800s, as cities grew rapidly, the need for public green space became more urgent. In those days, city dwellers used cemeteries for picnics and gatherings. For that reason, we included Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland, Calif., with its stunning views of San Francisco Bay.

Over the course of the year, I read two biographies of Olmsted and listened to webinars and spoke with experts about his work and legacy. I planned my trips around holiday weekends, when I thought the parks would be busiest: New York on Memorial Day, Detroit and Louisville, Ky., during the Fourth of July weekend. In all, I visited 15 locations, finishing this past February.

With each trip, I found myself more impressed by Olmsted’s vision and the generosity of his foresight. He designed these spaces and supervised the planting of hundreds of thousands of seedlings. He knew he would not see his plans fully implemented or enjoy the shade of these trees once they matured. In Niagara Falls, I was moved that he fought to preserve not only the waterfalls themselves, but the shoreline along the rapids leading up to them.

My favorite part of the project was meeting the people around the country who enjoyed the spaces that Olmsted designed but who didn’t recognize his name when I explained what I was working on. I loved watching their eyes light up when I told them he was the guy who designed Central Park, as well as seeing the admiration they expressed when they realized that he had designed a place that had meaning for them, too.

source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/26/insider/frederick-law-olmsted-legacy.html

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