Frederick Law Olmsted: from anti-slavery reporter to public place maker
June 7, 2017 11:12 PM   Subscribe

20 years ago, the New York Times published an article titled Carving Green Out of Urban Gray, in which Richard B. Woodward elevates Frederick Law Olmsted's parks as well-aging works of art, with Central Park as "perhaps the finest public art ever created in North America". To expand the scope of what Olmsted accomplished, Olmsted's Trip appeared in The New Yorker, where Adam Gopnik laid out a slightly abbreviated story of how a very vocal and influential anti-slavery news reporter turned into one of the best known designers of public spaces, and tied the creation of Central Park as "a democratic playground, a liberal common, the ideal anti-plantation."

New York Times book review, by David Herbert Donald in 1981: Word from the Old South
On February 16, 1853, the New-York Daily Times published the first in a series of letters titled ''The South,'' written by its special traveling correspondent, who signed himself ''Yeoman.'' Henry J. Raymond, the editor of The Times, proudly predicted that the letters would meet the great need for ''an accurate, complete and dispassionate statement of facts concerning the industrial, social, educational, religious and general interests of the Southern United States.''

Frederick Law Olmsted, the author of the ''Yeoman'' letters, proved ideal for this Southern assignment. A native of New England, he was anything but parochial; he had already traveled extensively in Europe and the Far East. As a gentleman farmer settled on Staten Island, he had a professional interest in the methods of Southern agriculture. His recently published ''Walks and Talks of an American Farmer in England'' showed that he was both an acute observer and a concise reporter. Like most Northerners, he was opposed to slavery in principle, but he was no abolitionist and detested the ''spoony fancy pictures'' of the South that Harriet Beecher Stowe painted in ''Uncle Tom's Cabin.'' In short, he was just the kind of middle-ofthe-road, objective correspondent that the Times wanted to report on a region of the United States that was as remote and unfamiliar to Northerners as, say, Uzbekistan is to Americans today.

So successful was Olmsted's series of reports on the seaboard states of the South that the Times commissioned him to explore the western and interior parts of the slave region. In 1854 the Times carried Olmsted's letters describing his trip through Texas, and three years later a final series of reports on the Southerners in the backcountry appeared in the New York Daily Tribune.
He collected those "Yeoman" articles into three publications, to compile the three series of reports into individual books, as noted in a New York Times opinion piece from 2011 by Louis P. Masur, titled Olmsted's Southern Landscapes:
In February of [1861], he agreed to edit his three earlier volumes, “A Journey in the Seaboard States” (1856), “A Journey Through Texas” (1857) and “A Journey in the Back Country” (1860) and reissue them as a two-volume work titled “The Cotton Kingdom: A Traveller’s Observations on Cotton and Slavery in the American Slaves States.” [Bonus link: a large scan of the detailed district-level Map of the Cotton Kingdom and Its Dependencies in America]

The idea came from his London publisher, who assumed that the secession crisis would create great interest in such a work in England; Olmsted’s New York publisher quickly agreed. There was reason to believe they were right: one influential journalist and admirer later concluded that Olmsted’s writing “was more powerful and convincing than ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin.’” While that overstates the case, the book drew a wide readership keen to learn about the nature of Southern society.
But the renown for his articles and reporting from that period did not fade so completely as to leave no lasting mark in the following century. In fact, Malcolm X recounted learning more details of the history of slavery from Olmsted's writing in his autobiography:
I never will forget how shocked I was when I began reading about slavery's total horror. It made such an impact upon me that it later became one of my favorite subjects when I became a minister of Mr. Muhammad's. The worlds most monstrous crime, the sin and the blood on the man's hands, are almost impossible to believe. Books like the one by Frederick Olmstead [sp] open my eyes to the horrors suffered when the slave was landed in the United States.
Frederick Olmsted's news career didn't end there, and he helped found The Nation, the oldest continuously published weekly magazine in the United States. His view was that “a newspaper may well be the only substitute for whatever, in a society more elaborately civilized, keeps a man’s commonplace civilization alive.” Still, his current legacy comes from a shift in his career path, which Gopnik connects through an interesting summary of Olmsted's view on the need for and support of "commonplace civilization":
Olmsted saw that glee clubs could be the foundation of a truly democratic society, but only if people accepted the notion that there would be other glee clubs, making other music, which they might have to pretend to like, even if they didn’t. For Olmsted, fireworks and hypocrisy were the foundations of liberal government: on the one hand, a commonplace civilization of people playing their own games; on the other, an organized pretense that one group’s games were just as good as the next group’s.
Enter the park, but not the park of the European nobility, with its unnatural geometries and forced hierarchies and order, as seen in Jardin du Luxembourg (Luxembourg Gardens) in Paris. Instead, it's Central Park: an artificially natural, rambling space with a myriad of elements and no one center (embedded Google map with all attractions pinned, plus other static map options). For those having difficulty navigating the park, look to the lamps.

If you want to take a stroll through time, NYC Parks has an archive of historical reports, press releases and minutes, back to 1857. And to read more of Frederick Law Olmsted Sr.'s theories on landscape gardening (though lacking mention of his history as a reporter and writer), the National Association for Olmsted Parks has His Essential Theory on the topic.
posted by filthy light thief (3 comments total) 27 users marked this as a favorite
 
My wife and I just moved to Jamaica Plain last November, in what feels like the bosom of Olmsted's Emerald Necklace. On weekends, we've taken to walking from Jamaica Pond, through Olmsted Park and along the Riverway, all green spaces that he designed, to make our way to the Museum of Fine Arts, or kick around the South End or Back Bay. Since the Necklace utilizes the waterways that eventually feed into the Charles, it just feels like a sculpted extension of the local geography, groomed and husbanded to sit alongside the apartment buildings and hospitals, and walking through these corridors, the impression is that we live in an urban enclave surrounded by green spaces instead of visiting a green space isolated in a city canyon.

I am grateful to Olmsted, and feel privileged to be a beneficiary of his vision.
posted by bl1nk at 5:18 AM on June 8, 2017 [4 favorites]


One of the joys I got from living in Buffalo for two years was exploring the Olmsted park system there, the first one that Olmsted (and his partner Calvert Vaux) designed. It is a lovely network of parks and parkways, particularly around Delaware Park, and I encourage everyone to visit it if you ever find yourself in Buffalo.

I HIGHLY recommend Witold Rybczynski's excellent biography of Olmsted and his impact on America, A Clearing In The Distance, if you would like to learn more about the man. He was one of those quiet legends of American history and has left a great legacy.

Excellent post, Filthy Light Thief
posted by KingEdRa at 5:53 PM on June 8, 2017 [2 favorites]


Thanks for the suggestion, KingEdRa!
posted by filthy light thief at 12:49 AM on June 9, 2017


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