Notas del episodio
Frederick Law Olmsted was born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1822, lost his mother to a laudanum overdose before he was four, and gave up on Yale when sumac poisoning damaged his eyesight so badly he could not read. He sailed to China as an apprentice seaman, tried merchant work, and farmed on Staten Island. In 1850 he visited Joseph Paxton's Birkenhead Park in England, a green space paid for with public money for public use. The New York Times then sent him through the antebellum South and Texas, where he documented how about 8,000 plantation owners held most of the wealth while most white citizens lived without schools or civic amenities, and he concluded that a democracy needs shared public spaces.
After Andrew Jackson Downing died in a steamboat fire, Calvert Vaux chose the inexperienced Olmsted as his partner, and their Greensward plan won the Central Park competition in 1858. During the Civil War Olmsted ran the U.S. Sanitary Commission, burned out, and resigned in late 1863. He went west to manage the Rancho Las Mariposas mining estate, which went bankrupt, and joined the first Yosemite commission after Abraham Lincoln signed the 1864 Yosemite Grant. He went on to design Prospect Park, Boston's Emerald Necklace, the Biltmore grounds, Stanford, and the 1893 World's Fair before retiring in 1895 and dying in 1903 at McLean Hospital, on grounds he had designed.
- His wartime routine of working until 4 a.m. and living on strong coffee and pickles
- The 1865 Yosemite report arguing that scenery has value for the human mind, not just for mining and timber
- The pastoral and picturesque styles, and his rule of subordination that banned flashy exotic plants
- Why the formal Central Park Mall existed to contain carriage traffic, and the sunken transverse roads blasted through Manhattan schist
- The contradiction of a champion of public parks also designing walled private estates for the very wealthy