At 200, Olmsted Still a Fixture of the NJ Landscape – Community News

The National Association for Olmsted Parks is putting the word out that it is celebrating the 200th birthday of its namesake, preeminent American landscape designer, Frederick Law Olmsted.

Known widely for his role in co-designing New York City’s Central Park, Olmsted is also recognized as the founder of American landscape architecture and established the world’s first full-scale professional landscape design company.

And while his parks are found across the nation and into Canada, New Jersey has its share of Olmsted parks and designs, including several key works in the region.

But let’s first meet the man. Olmsted was born in Hartford in 1822 to a dry-goods merchant father and a mother who died when her son was 3. When his father remarried, he was sent away to school and became a moody child who found solace in walks in nature.

As an adult, Olmsted first tried his hand unsuccessfully at farming and being a sea merchant before finding some limited success with reporting on slavery and publishing. After experiencing trouble finding a wife, he married his brother’s widow and raised a family that included the children she had with Olmsted’s brother and their own. The sons would eventually join their father in maintaining the Olmsted Company.

As contemporary nonfiction writer and essayist Suzanna Lessard wrote for the New York Times, “In 1857, Olmsted managed to wangle a job as superintendent of the Central Park, as it was then called, in New York, a project that was just getting under way. A publishing venture had failed, and he was personally in debt. When the architect Calvert Vaux suggested that they enter the competition for the job of actually designing the park, he agreed: it is typical of Olmsted that he fell by happenstance into the work at which he became a genius. The jury was divided between Democrats, who, paradoxically, were attracted to formal European designs, and Republicans, who liked the English picturesque style that Olmsted had studied intensively in travels abroad. The Republicans were in the majority, and they all picked the submission by Olmsted and Vaux….This was Olmsted’s first attempt at landscape architecture, and the result was the treasure New Yorkers could not live without.”

Park commissions across the nation followed, including one for the Lawrenceville School.

The landscape architect was hired in 1883 by the trustees of the John Cleve Green Foundation to plan the expanding campus of an all-boys boarding school fashioned after the great English institutions.

According to Lawrenceville School information, Olmsted’s park-inspired design included the planting of 371 trees, several of which survive today.

An excerpt from an 1886 Olmsted letter regarding the Lawrenceville plan provides a peek into the designer’s approach:

“We are now so far advanced with the study that I can say that it appears possible to have upon the property a complete collection of all species of trees that it is known can be successfully cultivated in Central New Jersey. The idea we have is that aside from any value such a collection would have with reference to direct scholastic instruction, as to which it would serve as a combined library and Museum of Botany and Dendrology if each tree should be conspicuously labeled with common and scientific names, native ancestry, etc., boys would gradually, during their stay with you, absorb, as from object lessons, a good deal of information of a kind that is soon to be in a growing demand.

To work out the project to its last details, find the trees and have them properly planted, cataloged, labeled, etc., will be a good deal of trouble, and it will probably cost a little more than to plant the ground simply with reference to scenery. I should like to know how the idea strikes you, to know if you would think it likely to be acceptable to the trustees and, in short, worth the trouble.”

The next regional project was the design for Cadwalader Park in Trenton. It happened in 1890 through the initiative of Edmund C. Hill, a Trenton baker turned civic booster and city council member.

New Jersey Conservation Foundation co-director John Watson recently wrote an article where he referred to the Trenton park as Olmsted’s “most notable New Jersey Project.”

The reason, notes Watson, is that the nearly 110-acre park was the only New Jersey park personally designed by Olmsted, rather than by his company. He also considers it “Olmsted’s last great park, designed in 1891 toward the end of his career.”

Citing Randy Baum, a member of the Cadwalader Park Alliance, Watson writes that “Cadwalader Park was built mostly true to Olmsted’s original design, with rolling landscapes, open lawns and a high point with a sweeping view. While many Olmsted parks have been significantly changed over the years, Baum said Cadwalader has retained its historical design – largely due to inaction and lack of funding for landscape-altering capital projects.”

Highland Park author Jeanne Kolva elaborates more on Olmsted’s design approach in her 2011 book “Olmsted in New Jersey” (Schiffer Publishing) and shares some of the following characteristics of an Olmsted Park: They are works of art, have roots in the English romantic style of landscape design, provide a strong contrast to an urban environment, are characterized by the use of bold forms, contain artistically composed plantings, uses vistas as aesthetic organizing elements, integrate architecture into the landscape, and were built for recreation.

Kolva also mentions that Olmsted’s Trenton work at Cadwalader Park was expanded to the region and the creation of Cadwalader Heights, a Trenton neighborhood of 74 homes, personally designed by Olmsted, just east of Cadwalader Park. It was also instigated by Hill.

Around the same time that Olmsted was working in Trenton, he was also working in Princeton.

According to “Tracing Princeton’s Master Plans from the Campus to Tomorrow’s Campus,” in 1893, Princeton University, still using the College of New Jersey name, “hired the prominent architect Frederick Law Olmsted to build a model of the present campus in order to display the growing ‘Princeton College’ at the Columbian World’s Exposition in Chicago.

“The results of 20 years of a ‘go-as-you-please’ style of building is evidenced by the traipsing pattern of buildings across the vast amounts of land. Mr. Olmsted went beyond cataloging the present campus in the architectural model. He also gave form to buildings that had only just been proposed or considered. A careful look at the Olmsted model reveals the faint outlines of new dorms planned west and south of Whig and Clio as well as more dorms between Clio and Witherspoon and the anticipated wing additions to the art museum. Here was the embodiment of the first Trustee-sanctioned plan for the future of the College of New Jersey ready for display in Chicago under the name ‘Princeton College.’”

The only other trace of Olmsted work in the Trenton area comes from my experience working on the New Jersey State Council on the Arts led Urban Parks Design Competition.

During research we had access to materials from both the Olmsted National Historic Site in Boston and the Library of Congress in Washington that showed the Olmsted Company worked on two projects. The company designed seawalls on the Delaware River behind the Capitol Complex. There was also an unaccepted proposed design for a Greenway that extended from the Trenton train station to the river.

As noted, New Jersey also is home to several other Olmsted Parks.

That includes Branch Brook Park, Newark. As Watson describes, “Built between 1898 and 1911, 360-acre Branch Brook is the oldest of Essex County’s parks. The original design included a reservoir, lake, and formal gardens in the south end, ball fields and recreation spaces in the middle section, and gardens and smaller bodies of water in the north. One thing that can’t be credited to the Olmsted firm is the park’s famed cherry trees, whose pink froth of blossoms draw thousands of visitors each spring. They were a gift from several wealthy families in 1927 and are now an iconic feature of the park.”

Also in Newark is Weequahic Park, a 311-acre tract with a lake and recreational spaces and the state’s first public golf course.

With more than two dozen more New Jersey Olmsted small parks listed by Kolva and major examples around the nation, including Central Park, it is easy to connect to the designer during the Olmsted 200 celebratation.

Yet one can commemorate the designs by simply looking at landscape designs through a filter that one Olmsted scholar calls “The Seven S’s of Olmsted Design”: Scenery, Sustainability, Style, Subordination (aka to be natural), Separation (of areas of different designs), Sanitation, and Service (to the community).