National Park Service U.S. Department of the Interior

APPENDIX 6
THE HYDE PARK LANDSCAPE IN THE CONTEXT
Olmsted Brothers (1898-1961) 1484
OF COUNTRY PLACE ERA LANDSCAPE DESIGN
At the retirement of his stepfather in 1895 and the untimely death of Charles Eliot in 1897, John
Charles Olmsted formed a partnership with his young stepbrother Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. Between
his founding of the Olmsted Brothers partnership and John Olmsted's death in 1920, the practice of the
Olmsted firm grew from a list of 600 projects to over 3,500. Dozens of Olmsted Brothers projects in the
New York area including Long Island, Oyster Bay, Glen Cove, Great Neck, and the New Jersey suburbs
are mid- to late Country Place estates from the turn of the century up to 1930.
Percival Gallagher (1874-1934), first as a talented designer and later as a principal in the Olmsted
office, was clearly a contemporary of Greenleaf's. Gallagher was involved between 1906 and 1934 with
designs for Ormston, the country place of John Aldred in Lattingtown, NY. He was also involved with
Country Place projects for George Baker in Glen Cove, and H. H. Rogers in Southhampton. It is also
interesting that Gallagher enjoyed a professional affiliation with the Pratt family of Glen Cove, Long
Island, as did both Platt and Greenleaf.
Other regionally representative projects of the Olmsted firm contemporary with the career of
James Greenleaf include:
Stephen Olin property Rhinebeck NY 1905-1907
R.B. Mello Watch Hill, RI 1918-1930
H. D. Auchincloss Hammersmith Farm, 1909-1946
Newport, RI
Walter Jennings Cold Spring Harbor, NY 1915-1938
Marshall Field Lloyd Neck, NY 1924-1926
Charles Adam Platt (1861-1933) 1485
Trained as a fine artist, in 1892 Platt and his brother, an apprentice at the offices of Frederick Law
Olmsted, Sr., took a study tour of the gardens of Italy. As a product of that trip, Italian Gardens was
published in 1894, in which Platt paired photos and sketches with narrative. This book was one of the
first illustrated publications in English depicting the gardens of Renaissance Italy and heavily influenced
the emergence of a formal garden style in America. The book led first to garden design work for Platt,
then to work as an architect. Work contemporary to the Vanderbilts' development of Hyde Park include
the Faulkner Farm for Charles F. Sprague (1897-1898), and for the Weld, the Larz Anderson property in
Brookline, MA (1902). Platt's attention to the Larz Anderson property may be partially behind his
distraction from the preliminary 1901 survey of the Hyde Park garden for the Vanderbilts. Nevertheless
both Faulkner Farm and the Weld projects illustrate Platt's adaptation of the Renaissance villa garden to
North American conditions. Among the most influential of Platt's estate garden plans were those for
Gwinn for William G. Mather near Cleveland, OH (1907-1908), the John T. Pratt estate in Glen Cove,
NY (1909-1911), and the Villa Turicum for Harold and Edith Rockefeller McCormick in Wake Forest, IL
1484 Excerpted from Robin Karson, in Pioneers II, 71.
1485 Excerpted from Keith Morgan, in Pioneers II, 119-121.
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