Frederick Law Olmsted is my new hero.

I’ve known of Olmsted for many years. He designed the Emerald Necklace, a string of parks through the city of Boston. I’ve spent a lot of time in these parks for work, and leisure – planting trees, walking along the Muddy River, watching ducks on the various ponds, letting the pup run free in one of the more wooded areas. I knew nothing of Olmsted beyond this, other than the somewhat fervent (maniacal?) portrait of him in Erik Larson’s Devil in the White City. My visit to the Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site taught me a lot about Olmsted’s vision and design practice.

The National Historic Site is based in the building that Olmsted used for his home and offices in the 1880’s, well after his work on Central Park and the US Capitol had established his firm’s reputation. This was the first professional landscape design practice in the United States. Olmsted, and then his sons and their partners, would build the practice over the next 90-odd years, always keeping close to Olmsted’s original vision – design with the appearance of a purely natural or wild setting. The firm worked on thousands of projects, and the framed plans on the walls are a sampling of some of the best known parks in the country – Prospect Park in Brooklyn, Belle Isle in Detroit, Grant Park (where Obama spoke after he was first elected President) and Lincoln Park in Chicago.

The tour started, appropriately, outside. Our guide lead us to the entryway into the property, where the fence focused our sights not on the large home, but the large hemlock tree in the center of the circular drive. Right away we began to get a taste of what Olmsted was going for when designing. Our guide then took us to a winding path, which she called the “shortest trail in the National Park System.” The trail is probably fifty feet long and leads from the driveway to the backyard. Along the way, we passed the largest magnolia tree I have ever seen, and a verdant landscape of different greens and shapes. It was quintessential Olmsted – naturalistic, rather than natural.

Our guide pointed out how, while Olmsted’s property was not large, he made it appear larger by “borrowing the view” of his more wealthy neighbor, Isabel Stewart Gardner (her country house, I presume). He removed some trees along the property boundary, opening up a view across Gardner’s acreage. It made it appear as though his land spread much further than it did, and made the property seem wilder than suburban Brookline, Massachusetts could have been. This is what Olmsted was going for – the illusion of wildness. He created the illusion that I wasn’t standing in the city, just a few hundred yards from a major highway. The landscaping isn’t manicured, but feels like it has been curated.

When the firm moved out of the building in the 1970’s (the Olmsted brothers were long dead, but their partners carried on the business), they gave the building and plans to the National Park Service. In some ways, the office looks untouched, but it has been restored to how it would have looked in 1920. Draft materials are set out on the desks like the draftsmen (and they were all men) had just gone to grab a cup of coffee. Collectors of old office supplies would like this place – fans, typewriters, label makers are everywhere.

Making copies of plans was a challenge. Since they were without Xerox, the firm investigated many different means of copying plans. My favorite was the use of photosensitive paper. The original plan was drawn on transparent paper and then laid over the photosensitive paper, placed on a wooden rack, and shoved out the window. The plans sat in the sun for a while and when pulled back in, they paper had reacted, and they were left with a blueprint.

The offices are beautiful, with gorgeous cypress paneling. The room in which site photographs were catalogued and stored looks like you’ve stepped into a giant card catalog, and the drafting rooms have a summer camp sort of feel with the rafters and wood paneling. I kept repeating how cool each room was. The photo storage room was exceptionally beautiful, and probably was my favorite part of the house. The archivist librarian on the tour was in heaven. She kept repeating archivist terminology and getting excited about things like archival storage boxes, so I didn’t feel too bad for blurting out how cool the place was.

She was especially appalled by the filing system they used. I was familiar with this organizational style from one of my old jobs where plans going back a hundred years were stored rolled up and shoved together next to fall out shelter supplies (gas masks and giant cans of grape jelly!). I think it would have been hard to find the plans if any of the Olmsted staff ever needed to go back and review a previous plan. Of course, I thought this about the system used at my previous job, but the old guy who managed things usually found stuff if you gave him enough lead time.

This room was quite a contrast with the photograph storage, in which every drawer was numbered, labeled and recorded. The Park Service is busily cataloguing and scanning the documents, but there are thousands and only three librarians to handle the work. The archivist was pleased to see the special boxes behind the glass door where the librarians work. She also commented that the new shelving units, which could be moved by turning a big crank, really made it easier to store a large number of documents. I knew my wife would like this part of the tour, too.

So what makes Olmsted my new hero? Olmsted had a strong belief in social equality. Perhaps he developed this during the years he traveled the South, witnessing the cruelty of slavery. Perhaps he interpreted “all men are created equal” as all people are equal, regardless of social status, wealth or race. However he developed this conviction, he saw access to nature as a fundamental right for citizens of a democracy, and especially essential to urban residents. He was right about this, his parks reflect this vision, and I really wish more people of influence felt the same way.

Nature is simply not a priority for most of us, and urban nature is a foreign concept to many. Can we even imagine what Manhattan would be like without Central Park? And can we even imagine a huge public works project like Central Park happening today in a rapidly growing city in the United States? I can’t. No one would want to pay taxes for that sort of thing, especially when so many people don’t have a strong connection to nature.

In his book Last Child in the Woods, Richard Louv tells a story of asking a child to draw his favorite place to play. The boy drew a picture of his room. When asked why he liked to play in his room, he responded, “That’s where all the electric sockets are.” Children are spending less time in nature, and many have a complete disconnection from the natural world. Where Olmsted saw nature as a respite urban life, where people are soothed and find peace, many children I worked with over the years had fear or disdain. The reasons for this disconnection are vast and are not all rooted in modern society’s devaluing of nature, but that is another post.

My experience was that these same children, after a few experiences outside, began to build a connection to nature, lost their fear and some even started loving it. For a kid growing up in an urban area, one of Olmsted’s parks provides places to throw rocks in the water, climb a tree or stare at the clouds. While these sorts of activities may seem unimportant compared to learning multiplication tables, they play a critical role in preparing children to learn about science. We all need nature, and we all have a right to it.

One of the best parts of our visit to the national historic site was not at the site at all, but a small section of the Emerald Necklace, the Jamaica Pond. We decided to celebrate our right to nature and take the pup around the pond – well as far as she wanted to go, anyway. This is a familiar place for us. The Pond is the site on one of my favorite festivals, the Lantern Parade, and my wife loves the walk around. The pup always enjoyed wading in the water and scaring the geese. The day was beautiful, the park full of people (but not too full), the pond was shimmering, and the pup did not want to come out of the water. This was one of our last weekends with her, and I am happy we let her enjoy the water as long as we did. We came home, the pup slept, and we were all a bit happier for having spent part of our day celebrating our right to nature in one of Olmsted’s grand parks.