Essex County Park System

The first county park system in the country, Essex County served as a model for all of New Jersey’s future park planning. Taking inspiration from Charles Eliot and the Metropolitan Parks Commission in Boston, the state employed the Olmsted Brothers to design their county park systems for six decades. Today, the Essex County Park System consists of more than 6,000 acres, the majority of which are Olmstedian in influence.

The scenic advantages to develop park space in Essex County were first noted in the 1867 report by F.L. Olmsted, Sr and Calvert Vaux. Although their efforts were mostly concentrated on a large swath of land in Newark (now Branch Brook Park), nearly three decades later in 1894, J.C. Olmsted, prepared recommendations to the newly formed County Commission, including South Mountain as a reservation.

The Park Commission initially chose Nathan Barrett & John Bogart to be the planners of record for an Essex County system, as the Commission acquired suitable land. The designs produced by Barrett & Bogart between 1895 and 1897, in great detail for Branch Brook but schematically for South Mountain and other parks, proved to be ‘fussy,’ very expensive to implement and maintain, and thus impractical for the Commissioners who were trying to make their initial investment stretch over the county-wide area. Their contract was terminated, and the Olmsted firm was hired in 1898 to develop a large and varied system, establishing a professional relationship which lasted until the 1960s. Early maps of Essex County show several proposed parkways, many never built, connecting South Mountain Reservation (02128), Eagle Rock Reservation (02122), Branch Brook Park (02121), Weequahic Reservation (02132), and Orange Park (02126). Currently, there are 33 Olmsted designed parks in the Essex County Park System.