This week’s resources focus on the work and legacy of one individual, Frederick Law Olmsted. You may remember that the CAC Virtual Book Club is currently reading an Olmsted biography, Genius of Place, by Justin Martin. Intrepid book club participant Jennifer McAllister, Docent Class of 2004, assembled a remarkable collection of online information about Olmsted. We are highlighting a few of the items she found. We will add all of her discoveries to the main Excel spreadsheet of digital resources and will circulate an updated version at the end of the summer. Many thanks to Jennifer for sharing these outstanding sites!
PBS has a well-produced hour-long video about Olmsted’s life and works:
They also have several brief “bonus” videos on specific projects, including one on Olmsted’s work in Chicago – the suburb of Riverside and the Columbian Exposition:
https://www.pbs.org/video/frederick-law-olmsted-designing-america-olmsted-and-chicago/
The NATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR OLMSTED PARKS has a wealth of information:
A few highlights include biographies of key people who worked with Olmsted, how the firm developed, and a summary of his design principles (all in the “Olmsted legacy” tab), as well as a collection of book reviews on related topics (in the “Publications” tab).
OLMSTED’S HOME AND OFFICE in Brookline, Massachusetts is a National Historic Site run by the National Park Service. They not only maintain the building and grounds, but are the custodians of the more than 100,000 plans that remain from the Olmsted firm.
The “Multimedia Presentations” page has at least two items of special interest.
https://www.nps.gov/frla/learn/photosmultimedia/multimedia.htm
One is an interactive map with more than 6,000(!) of the firm’s projects. (The firm, taken over at first by two sons, continued until the year 2000.) Follow the directions to open the map either in Google Earth if you have it, or directly in a browser. Clicking on a specific project provides a link to Flickr collections of images, often including historic photos or copies of plans and blueprints.
A second item is a “Ranger-Led Tour of the Olmsted Office,” conducted by Ranger Alan Banks, that includes explanations of how the firm organized their work, the primitive process of making “sun prints” to copy original plans, and the status of conserving the collection.
And speaking of FLICKR COLLECTIONS, there are hundreds of collections of Olmsted projects that can be accessed directly at:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/olmsted_archives/collections
As noted, they include a wealth of historic photographs and copies of plans, blueprints, etc. (This is a data-heavy page, so allow time for it to load. The collections are a little tricky to navigate, as there isn’t a search function within the collections. Ignore the search field on the top “Flickr” banner – it looks through all of Flickr, not just the collections. Instead, any general browser “search in page” function can help. For real diehards, the Olmsted Research Guide Online, http://ww3.rediscov.com/Olmsted/, provides a way to find the official “job number” for every Olmsted project. The Flickr collections are organized by those numbers.)