National Park Service U.S. Department of the Interior

Analysis of Historical Significance and Integrity by Resource Type
The significance of subsequent modifications to Greenleaf's Italian Garden at the hands
of Thos. Meehan and Sons and Robert Cridland, while compatible with Greenleaf's earlier
design, cannot be adequately evaluated at this time because of the relative obscurity of the body
of work of these subsequent practitioners. The later Meehan/Cridland modifications to the
Italian Garden, taken with other Vanderbilt modifications to the property, including buildings,
roads, bridges, stone walls, and plantings, represent a vast manipulation of the landscape
purchased from the Langdon family. Outside of the context of landscape architecture, these
collective changes may be found to be significant for their association with the economic
prosperity of the Gilded Age, as the work of other gifted designers, or in association with the
Vanderbilts themselves. In any case, the Vanderbilt modifications to the property would
certainly be counted among a list of its contributing resources. Upon further evaluation, the
same might also be said regarding development work by the federal government to the site,
especially the work of the Civilian Conservation Corps. However, within the context of
landscape architecture as a design profession, beginning 1895 to the present, there is currently
only enough information on the Greenleaf intervention at the Italian Garden to make a case for
its significance in its own right.
When the American Society of Landscape Architects was created in 1899, four years
after the Vanderbilts' purchase of Hyde Park, there were only eleven founding members. Two
of those members had Olmsted as a last name, one was the son of Olmsted's partner in the
design of New York's Central and Prospect Parks, and another, Warren Manning had
apprenticed with the Olmsted firm for eight years. As the profession of landscape architecture
developed during the twentieth century, the Olmsted firm would continue to dominate the field.
Only a few other landscape designers, such as Platt, Manning and Farrand, would attain a
practice of national scope, and none would achieve the breadth and volume of practice that the
Olmsted firm enjoyed up until World War II. Most practitioners were regionally focused, such
as Alling de Forest, in the Rochester, New York area, who was responsible for the grounds of
the George Eastman residence, or practitioners such as A. D. Taylor in Cleveland, Ohio, Hare
and Hare around Kansas City and the Central Plains, Bryant Fleming in Kentucky and the
Midwest; and Charles Gillette in Virginia, Washington, D.C., and North Carolina. Other than a
couple of commissions outside of Chicago, such was the practice of James L. Greenleaf who
focused his attention on residences of the greater New York City metropolitan area, including
suburban New Jersey and the "Gold Coast" of Long Island.
THE COUNTRY PLACE ERA IN AMERICAN LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE
The Country Place Era in American Landscape Architecture has been defined by
landscape historian Norman Newton as that period of landscape design practice between 1880
and 1929 when the profession of landscape architecture was preoccupied with residential design
commissions for the wealthy. This fifty-year period spanned stylistic sub-periods, trends, and
labels including Romantic, Victorian, Neoclassical, and Beaux-arts, as well as the inevitable
reactions to Neoclassicism inherent in the Arts and Crafts and Prairie Schools. Within the broad
context of this eclectic era, which in the context of landscape architecture is generally associated
with the design of home and grounds as an integrated whole, the Neoclassical elements and
architectonic garden spaces introduced into Hyde Park as a pre-existing designed landscape in
the Romantic style, are in themselves significant as a local instance of wealthy Americans
purchasing and refitting pre-established properties to meet their contemporary requirements
and aesthetic taste.
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