The Spoils of the Park: With a Few Leaves from the Deep-laden Note-books of "a Wholly Unpractical Man"

"The testimony of a wounded man over his twenty-year fight to save the park from New York's politicians." -The Physical City: Public Space and the Infrastructure (2013)
"Olmsted was left to fight alone in his battles against a corrupt system. Eventually he ran out of the strength and will necessary..." The Rhode Island Historical Society (1995)
"The 'representative man' of Tammany's harshest gentleman critics." -The Park and the People: A History of Central Park (1992)
"America's foremost practitioner of landscape design, an important visionary critic of urban planning." -The New England Quarterly (1989)

Central Park in New York was first approved in 1853 as a 778-acre park. In 1857, landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted won a design competition to construct the park with a plan they titled the "Greensward Plan". Construction began the same year, and the park's first areas were opened to the public in late 1858. Olmsted would later serve as park superintendent.

In his 1882 book "Spoils of the Park," Olmsted recounted abuses and political maneuvering associated Tammany Hall patronage politics in the years prior to his removal from the New York parks department in 1878.

Even though Olmsted had attained a great national reputation, he could not combat the politicization of New York City's Park Board. Tammany boss "Honest" John Kelly successfully removed Olmsted from office even though he had made an effort to be a nonpartisan public servant.

Olmsted would tell his side of the story in "The Spoils of the Park," detailing how Central Park was coopted by Tammany Hall's political machine. While Tammany Hall bureaucrats viewed park works in terms of patronage and rewards system, Olmsted preferred a team of trained and skilled assistants to guide a labor pool of diligent, low-wage, long-hour workers. In his book, Olmsted vents over many workers being derelicts and deadbeats.

In recalling one encounter with the machine, Olmsted writes:

"I have heard a candidate from a magisterial office in the city addressing from my doorsteps a crowd of such advice-bearers, telling them that I was bound to give them employment, and suggesting plainly that, if I was slow about it, a rope round my neck might serve to lessen my reluctance to take good counsel."

Eventually fleeing the Tammany Hall political machine to Boston, Olmsted would later write:

"However I was able to carry myself by day it will not be thought surprising that I should have had sleepless nights, or that at last I could not keep myself from over-wearing irritation and worry. . . . It has taken me four years to recover the strength which I then lost within a week. In view of this loss, I was advised by three well-known physicians to seek at once a change of air, scene, and mental occupation."

About the author:

Frederick Law Olmsted (1822 1903) was an American landscape architect, journalist, social critic, and public administrator. He is popularly considered to be the father of American landscape architecture. Olmsted was famous for co-designing many well-known urban parks.

Other books by the author include:

A Journey Through Texas
A Journey in the Back Country

Dettagli