Arts and Letters

It would be a pleasure, in this tribute, to be able to do full justice to the many achievements of Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., the distinguished son of a distinguished father; but without being guilty of one of his few faults, undue prolixity, it is rather difficult to condense his career.

He was born on Staten Island on July 24, 1870. His father, Frederick Law Olmsted, Sr., a landscape architect, was the genius who created, on a barren, rocky bit of land, our New York Central Park. Fred, Jr., was graduated from Harvard in 1894 and studied the profession of landscape architecture under his father's tutelage; in 1901 he joined the Harvard faculty, first as an instructor, then as professor of landscape architecture, remaining until 1914. He learned much from his father's example and training and, after he became a member of the firm of Olmsted Brothers (with his half-brother, John C. Olmsted) of Brookline, Massachusetts, one of his first commissions was to do for Boston what his father had done for New York, namely, to design a number of parks for the Metropolitan Park System. This association lasted until 1920. He began his distinguished national career early in life, when the Senate Park Commission, often called the McMillan Commission, after Senator James McMillan, the sponsor of the bill creating it, was appointed in 1901 and charged with the task of preparing plans for the orderly development and embellishment of the City of Washington. Fred, then thirty-one, was one of the group consisting, in addition to himself, of Daniel H. Burnham, Charles F. McKim, and Augustus Saint-Gaudens, sent abroad to study monumental civic design. This study led to what is generally known as the National Capital Plan of 1901 and Olmsted played an important part in the preparation of it. I have always understood that he had a large part in the design of the Mall, extending from the Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial, and that he was influential in selecting the site of that distinguished monument of Henry Bacon's to the martyred President. To carry out the plan for the central composition of the nation's capital he and his associates, with the cooperation of railroad officials, rid the area of the unsightly railroad station and the tracks that ran across what is now the Mall. Once this was done, the Pennsylvania and Baltimore & Ohio Railroads joined in building the Union Station; Olmsted designed the Station Plaza.

A full account of Olmsted's activities would be far too long for this tribute; I shall mention only a few of the highlights. His services were in constant demand to advise cities from East to West on their planning problems; he would wish, I believe, to be remembered particularly for his achievements in and around the nation's capital. Olmsted was also a distinguished designer of private estates and of their gardens, as exemplified by many on Long Island and in the Boston area in particular. He was a member of the group, under Daniel H. Burnham, that designed the Chicago World's Fair in 1892-93; in fact, Burnham gave Olmsted a large share of the credit for the success of that enterprise. He was a consultant to many park boards including, in addition to the one in Boston, the Roland Park Commission in Baltimore, and the Baltimore Park Commission. He laid out Forest Hills Gardens in New York City for the Russell Sage Foundation, the Palos Verdes Estates in California, and many other subdivisions of land for residential use, and served the City of Cleveland and other cities in the development of their parks and in the planning of areas that became important elements in the overall city plans.

In 1910 Olmsted was appointed by the President as the landscape architect member of the National Commission of Fine Arts, serving two terms of four years each, at the end of which he was appointed a member of the National Capital Park and Planning Commission. It was there that I came to know him. We served first under Frederic A. Delano and then under Major-General U.S. Grant, 3rd, Chairmen of the Commission. As hinted at the start, he did not spare words in analyzing a problem and explaining his proposed solution. He was so meticulous in going into every detail that I sometimes wished he had learned the art of presenting his views more concisely.

Fred Olmsted was elected a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1918 and of the Academy in 1943. An exhibition, showing the development of Washington, a work that he was deeply interested in and to which he made notable contributions, was held in our gallery in 1944.

The last years of Olmsted's life were spent largely on the West Coast, where he was concerned with preserving our national resources and in particular our national parks; he acted as a consultant to the National Park Service for many years.

In 1949, Olmsted was presented The Gold Medal of the Institute, then given to an architect (on this occasion to a landscape architect) every tenth year. I was asked to present it, and I shall repeat the closing sentence from my remarks on that occasion: "Like the medal I have the honor of handing him, Fred Olmsted is pure gold."