Shared Spaces

Prospect Park gardener Jesse Brody offers insights on maintaining a positive outlook while facing challenges in Olmsted’s beloved Brooklyn park.

Meet Phillip Loughlin, a member of our Olmsted 200 Honorary Committee!

As we celebrate the many accomplishments of Frederick Law Olmsted, Olmsted 200 also examines how his values and principles can help address challenges facing public parks today. For his time, Olmsted espoused some fairly radical perspectives — believing that parks belonged to all people and contributed to public health and well-being. More than 100 years later, his dynamic ideas about democratic spaces live on.

Rochester, NY is one of only four cities in the U.S. with an entire park system designed by Frederick Law Olmsted. Olmsted was commissioned in 1888 to design the first park for the city on 20 acres of donated land. However, Olmsted recommended the addition of lands along the Genesee River, north and south of […]

Prospect Park Gardener, Jesse Brody, here muses on the London Plane Tree that provides the canopy in Prospect Park’s Concert Grove.

Central Park, the first joint venture of Olmsted and Vaux, from its first years, has also inspired many artists to depict its scenery and the ways people enjoy it, giving us, as a few early examples show, another way to appreciate the park’s design and social impact.

Frederick Law Olmsted, Sr. (1822-1903) is one of my favorite figures in American history. Not only was he the nation’s pre-eminent landscape architect, but he made significant contributions as an author, conservationist, abolitionist, and social reformer. Frederick Law Olmsted and his sons–the Olmsted Brothers–had important ties with Chicago that are often overlooked.  At 6:00 p.m., […]

As part of the bicentennial, NPS issues a Call for Papers to examine the multi-faceted work of the Olmsted firm. Abstracts due by November 21, 2021

The current effort to restore the Carlton Street Footbridge (CSF) started in 1998 with a Request for Proposal (RFP) posting by Brookline, Mass.  It stated that “deferred maintenance over the past several decades has left the structure in a deteriorated and vulnerable state.” Brookline, home to some 60,000 people, borders Boston and shares the Muddy River […]