Masterson Thesis

Towards a Democratic Greenspace: A Sociohistorical Perspective on the Public Park From Ancient Rome to Modern Seattle Andrea Masterson Spring 2019
Towards a Democratic
Greenspace:
A Sociohistorical Perspective on the Public Park
From Ancient Rome to Modern Seattle
Andrea Masterson

Towards a Democratic
Greenspace:
A Sociohistorical Perspective on the Public Park
From Ancient Rome to Modern Seattle
Andrea Masterson

Towards a Democratic Greenspace:
A Sociohistorical Perspective on the Public Park
From Ancient Rome to Modern Seattle
A Senior Essay in Architecture
Andrea Masterson
Spring 2019
Cover image: Green Lake Park, Seattle. Image used under license from istockphoto.com
Endsheets: Planting Plan for Volunteer Park. Olmsted Brothers. "Volunteer Park Seattle,
WA Planting Plan." Map. February 16, 1910. Job #02695. Seattle Municipal Archives.
Epigram: Curtis, George William. "Editor's Easy Chair." Harper's New Monthly Magazine
11, (June-November 1855): 125.

“A Park is not for those who can go to the country, but for those who cannot. It is a civic
Newport, and Berkshire, and White Hills. It is fresh air for those who cannot go to the seaside;
and green leaves, and silence, and the signing of birds, for those who cannot fly to the
mountains. It is a fountain of health for the whole city.”
-George William Curtis

Acknowledgements
First and foremost, I would like to thank my advisor, Bryan Fuermann, who proved
encyclopedic in his knowledge of European landscape history and connected me with countless
sources along the way. His exactitude and patience made working with him an absolute pleasure.
Marta Caldeira, my Senior Research Colloquium Professor, taught me how to frame such
an ambitious project, and directed my research throughout. DUS Bimal Mendis has worked
tirelessly to improve the urban studies program at Yale, and future generations of Yale students
have the opportunity to major in urban studies as a result. Rosalie Bernardi, the unsung hero of
YSOA, makes the entire department function smoothly and efficiently. Dean Ferando and Head
Saltzman of Jonathan Edwards College provided me with a generous Richter Fellowship, which
allowed me to conduct my research on the Seattle parks system. The Librarians at the Seattle
Central Library proved tremendously helpful, and I have the wealth of resources available
through Yale University Library and the Seattle Public Library, in addition to the Seattle
Municipal Archives to thank for many of my sources.
My urban studies classmates Andy and Mary Catherine provided four years of moral
support, invigorating discussions, and much-needed perspectives on the role that urban studies
plays in the field of architecture and within the architecture major at Yale. I thank them for
refusing to be overlooked and striving to give urban studies at Yale the attention it deserves.
My beloved New Haven has provided a home, an education, and a field study for the past
four years. It is the reason I chose to study architecture, and the reason I will always feel that I
have a home on the east coast.
Yale Track and Field has taught me the value of patience, commitment, and having a
level perspective. I am indebted to my teammates, who are my closest friends and constant
support system. My coach, Amy Gosztyla, has made countless opportunities possible in my time
at Yale, and has always had the utmost faith in my abilities.
My best friend, Arvind, has been my number one ally through my four years at Yale. I
have grown the most because of him, and I have learned an incredible amount just from
watching him strive to always do better.
My parents, Mark and Wanda and my brother, Brian are my team and the center of my
universe. The love and support that I receive from them and try give in return means the world to
me. They are the reason that Seattle will always be home, and why I want to do what I can to
make it a better place.
Finally, to Aunt Mary, thank you for instilling in me a love of our parks, the outdoors,
and the city that we call home. I will always treasure your stories of your days on the trails of the
Cascades, as an athlete in the days before competitive sports were available to women, or as a
trailblazer in the Seattle community. You have taught me to find beauty in the world around me,
and to appreciate every opportunity that comes my way.

Table of Contents
Introduction………..………...………………………………………………………………………………………..2
Section 1–History of the Public Park in Ancient Rome.….…...…………..……………….…………...7
The Domus Aurea………………..….…………..…….……………....…………………..……10
Baroque Parks in 17 th Century Rome…...………………..…...………...……………………...14
The Villa Borghese…...……….....…………………..…………….…...……………………....16
Hunt’s Three Natures and the Villa Borghese....…………………………...…...……………...19
Section 2—English Park Design in 16th-19th Century London...……...…………………………….23
Public Patronage of Peri-urban Fields.....……….……………………………………………...23
Town Gardens and Square Gardens...……………...…….…………………………………….24
Rus in Urbe in the London Square....…...………………..……...……………………………..32
The Rise of Public Parks in Victorian London...…………...….……………………………....34
The Royal Parks of London ….………………..………...…………………………………….35
The Serpentine…....………………..…………………………………………………………..38
Making a Case for Public Parks: The Public Health Movement…...………………....……….41
Frederick Law Olmsted and Birkenhead Park: Bringing the English Park to America......…...43
Section 3—The Roots of the American Parks System…………....………….………………………..46
The London Square and Early Park Planning in America….......….……………….………….46
Rural Cemeteries and Transforming Attitudes toward Public Space in 19 th Century
America........…………………………………………………………………………………...52
Frederick Law Olmsted and Central Park..………………..…………………………………..54
Prospect Park…..……………….....…………………………..……………………………….61
Section 4—The Formation of Seattle’s Public Parks System...………………………………………66
John Charles Olmsted...................................…………...……………………………………...68
First Annual Report of the Board of Parks Commissioners for Seattle, 1903.......….......…….69
Woodland, Green Lake, and Ravenna Parks...…...…….....…………………………………...78
The Three Natures Redux…...………...…………..…………………………………………..86
Volunteer Park......………………………………….…………………………………...…….87
Conclusion…..…………………………………….………………………………………………………………….94
Appendix I: Works Cited..……...…………………...………………..…………………………………………...106
Appendix II: Index of Images.....………………………………….………………………………………………112
1

Introduction
In 1859, the thirty-seven-year-old Frederick Law Olmsted was in the midst of carrying
out his first commission as a landscape architect. It was a toilsome process, which required
developing a run-down tract of Manhattan Island bedrock and man-made refuse into a vast and
idyllic park. Just two years before, he had grumbled, “a suburb more filthy, squalid, and
disgusting can hardly be imagined.” 1 It was impossible for him to know at the time that the
construction of this park would serve as the launching point for a storied career that would
establish him as the preeminent landscape architect of the nineteenth century. As the
Superintendent and Architect-in-Chief of Central Park, Olmsted was responsible for overseeing
its development, and ensuring that it would be laid out according to his vision. Though there was
no way of ensuring its success, the park that Olmsted and his partner, Calvert Vaux had
envisioned in their competition-winning Greensward plan, if executed properly, had the potential
to be the most significant park in the city of New York and the United States, on par with the
most exquisite parks in England and Western Europe. Most of all, it would be a park, as the
architect wrote during that trying period, for “those who have no means to go into the country for
relief from the heat and turmoil of the city.” 2 In an 1858 letter to the New York Park
Commissioners, Olmsted described the chief objective of the park as to provide a space of refuge
for all, writing, “it is one great purpose of the Park to supply to the hundreds of thousands of
tired workers, who have no opportunity to spend their summers in the country, a specimen of
God's handiwork that shall be to them, inexpensively, what a month or two in the White
1
Olmsted, F. L. and Calvert Vaux, “Greensward.” In The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted: Vol III: Creating
Central Park 1857-1861. Edited by Beveridge, Charles E. and David Schuyler. Baltimore: John Hopkins University
Press, 1983, 205.
2
Olmsted, Frederick Law. Letter, 1859.
2

Mountains or the Adirondacks is, at great cost, to those in easier circumstances.” 3 Though it took
on the visual trappings of an English pleasure park, the park that Olmsted eventually produced
successfully subverted expectations for the use of the space, taking a design that had been
originally laid out for Royal enjoyment and transforming it into one that was made available to
the most humble laborer. The extent to which this Olmstedian democratic vision for public
greenspace has been carried into the present day is the subject of this study, and its ultimate
efficacy remains to be assessed.
Public parks are a versatile tool in urban planning, with ranging benefits, from improving
public health (Godbey, 1998; Ho, 2003; Kruger, 2008) to perceived levels of wellbeing, in
addition to providing space for leisure, physical activity (Godbey, 1983; CDC) and escape from
the crowding and constraints of the city. 4 These advantages are felt across age (Godbey et al.
1983; CDC, 1997), race (Tinsley et al. 2002), and socioeconomic groupings (Payne et al. 2002). 5
Parks provide important stages for youth, from stages for social display (the skate park) to stages
for achievement and competition (the athletic field). However, these spaces, while public, cannot
immediately be understood to be democratic; their urban histories reveal that they were designed
to prioritize certain groups, and were geographically distributed without considerations of access
3
Olmsted, Frederick Law. Letter to Board of the Commissioners of the Central Park, May 31, 1858.
4
Godbey, G., Roy, M., Payne, L., & Orsega-Smith, E. “The Relation between Health and Use of Local Parks.”
National Recreation Foundation, 1998.
Ho, Ching-Hua, Laura Payne, Elizabeth Orsega-Smith, and Geoffrey Godbey. “Parks, Recreation and Public
Health.” Parks & Recreation 38, no. 4 (2003): 18.
Kruger, Judy. “Parks, Recreation, and Public Health Collaborative.” Environmental Health Insights vol. 2 (3 Dec.
2008): 123-5.
5
Godbey, G., & Blazey, M. “Old People in Urban Parks: An Exploratory Investigation.” Journal of Leisure
Research 15, no. 3 (1983): 229–244.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Guidelines for School and community Programs to Promote Lifelong
Physical Activity among Young People.” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 46 (1997): 1-36.
Tinsley, H. E. A., Tinsley, D. J., & Croskeys, C. E. “Park Usage, Social Milieu, and Psychological Benefits of
Park Use Reported by Older Urban Park Users from Four Ethnic Groups.” Leisure Sciences 24, (2002):
199-218.
Payne, L. L., Mowen, A. J., & Orsega-Smith, E. “An Examination of Park Preferences and Behaviors Among
Urban Residents: The Role of Residential Location, Race, and Age.” Leisure Sciences 24, no. 2 (2002): 181–198.
3

to all. As such, while public parks may be equitable in name, they are nonetheless spaces of
exclusion—prioritizing the able-bodied and those in proximity to their resources, for instance, or
those who have access to transportation and leisure time (Scott et al. 1994). 6 Studies show
decreasing rates of physical activity with increasing age for minority and low-income youth
(Gordon-Larsen et al, 2000), and lower rates of vigorous exercise among youth with less parental
support and less education on the benefits of physical exercise (Zakarian et al. 1994). 7
Furthermore, urban patterns of physical activity and park use demonstrate that there are many
social and environmental barriers to participation in organized sports, exercise, and access to
community park resources (Scott et al, 1994). In order to better understand how public
greenspaces and these conditions of unequal access came to exist, it is necessary to first examine
the historical context in which today’s public parks were produced. This project sets out to study
how history has produced uneven conditions of accessibility and equity in public parks, in order
to understand how cities serve diverse, heterogeneous populations, or fail to do so.
Seattle provides an important case study on the changing public nature of parks. In 1903,
John Charles Olmsted’s master plan for Seattle sought, rather than to simply replicate the
picturesque landscape parks that had made the Olmsted firm successful in the East, instead to
reference, highlight and capture the natural scenery unique to the Pacific Northwest, while
constructing a network of parks on the scale of Boston’s Emerald Necklace. In an environment
that still remained largely untamed, Seattle in 1903 was vastly different from the large industrial
6
Scott, D. Munson, W. “Perceived Constraints to Park Usage among Individuals with Low Incomes.” Journal of
Park and Park and Recreation Administration 12, (1994): 52-69.
7
Zakarian, J.M. Hovell, M.F. Hofstetter, C.R. Sallis, J.F. Keating, K.J. “Correlates of Vigorous Exercise in a
Predominantly Low SES and Minority High School Population” Preventive Medicine 23, (1994): 314-321.
Gordon-Larsen, P. McMurray, R. G. Popkin, B.M. “Determinants of Adolescent Physical Activity and Inactivity
Patterns.” Pediatrics 105, (2000): 1327-1328.
4

cities east of the Mississippi, and thus the motivations behind the design of its parks differed in
nature.
Seattle was at that time a small city with large aspirations, which had been put on the map
as a stop on the route to Alaska during the Klondike Gold Rush. It sought to grow its population
and importance, first on the scale of West Coast cities like Portland and San Francisco, but
ultimately to rival the Chicagos and Bostons of the east. Olmsted’s master plan for Seattle was
not a counterpoint to the horrors of industrialization, but rather a way of city-building, an
assertion of its equality to its east coast rivals, and a way of forming its own identity.
Today, Seattle has grown into a city whose identity is inextricably linked to its
geography, whose urban landscape is best captured in its public parks and university campus
(also an Olmsted design). The city’s rich tradition of public park planning in many ways
stemmed from John Charles Olmsted’s vision, and the relationship between its landscape and the
public remains one that, while providing a cultivated and immersive experience for visitors,
cannot be automatically understood to harbor a truly democratic nature. In order to properly
assess the democratic nature of Seattle parks in 1903 and today, a history of the western origins
of the public park and the social milieux in which they were produced must be conducted. The
ultimate goal, then, is not to provide a solution for existing inequality in urban public space, but
rather, to understand how the definition of the dual terms “public” and “park” have changed
through time, and how their modern definition shapes conditions of access and equity today.
This project begins by conducting a broad historical survey of park planning precedents
from Rome through the year 1903. It will focus on concepts such as lex hortorum and rus in urbe
as they respectively pertained to the public use of private gardens and parks, and the
conceptualization of parks as bringing elements of nature and the pastoral aesthetic into the city.
5

These ideas in turn proved consequential for the discourse and thought that went into the
planning of parks in eighteenth and nineteenth century England. The design of English squares
and parks like Covent Garden and Sir Joseph Paxton’s 1847 Birkenhead Park, influenced and
informed the design of Frederick Law Olmsted’s Central and Prospect Parks in New York, in
turn proving instrumental for the designs of Seattle parks in the early twentieth century. Beyond
speaking to ideals of romanticism and wilderness, parks like John Charles Olmsted’s Green Lake
Park and Volunteer Park serve as examples of the production and preservation of a naturalistic
landscape for the recreation and pleasure of the public. How these ideas about public greenspace
came to be is the subject of the present investigation.
6

Section 1—History of the Public Park in Ancient Rome
The concept of the urban park has been present since before common era, but the western
roots of public park patronage first emerged in Rome, in the form of privately held estates known
as horti. The Roman hortus is the first formal antecedent to the public park in the West. Horti
were the private gardens of military leaders that were designed to showcase the illustriousness
and wealth of their owners. They were peri-urban sites, meaning that they were located outside
of the Roman walls, and thus took on an aesthetic consistent with their rural surroundings. These
greenspaces were not characterized by the careful planning and sequencing of views as with the
formal urban garden parks that were to follow, but rather took on varied forms, from paradisal
hunting parks to small villa gardens. 8 Taylor et al. write, “Initially, owning one was the
prerogative of men who had distinguished themselves in the public or martial sphere [...]
naturally, then, horti functioned simultaneously as elite retreats and public signifiers of power
and ideology.” 9
The origins of porticus are somewhat different from those of those of the hortus. The
porticus was an outgrowth of an architectural development—before taking on its present
association with the urban garden, it simply signified a colonnaded porch at the entrance of a
temple or other building, a concept adopted from the Greek which, to this day, remains the
common western usage of the term portico. The term porticus, meaning colonnade, refers to a
distinct garden typology, whereas the hortus could take on any number of aggregate forms, with
8
Taylor, Rabun, Katherine W. Rinne, and Spiro Kostof, eds., “Rus in Urbe: A Garden City,” in Rome: an Urban
History from Antiquity to the Present, Cambridge, 2016, chapter 11, 108.
9
Ibid, 109.
7

no expense spared in their opulent articulation. Specifically, the porticus developed out of the
Hellenistic peristyle garden that was common to Greek villas. 10 While the peristyle garden often
consisted of a colonnaded courtyard or ornamental garden, the porticus was characterized by a
grove of plane trees, known as a nemus, surrounded by a colonnade, the effect of which provided
a “new, unified spatial organization” that was distinctive from the hortus on the surrounding hills
of Rome. 11 The impact of the porticus on garden design was tremendous: it represented a highly
ordered design, in which views and procession were orchestrated by the architectural and natural
elements.
The porticus was a distinct development that instead integrated the garden within an
urban site. In “Porticus Pompeiana: a new perspective on the first public park of ancient Rome,”
Kathryn Gleason describes the way in which the porticus differs from the hortus. She notes that
while both hortus and porticus were associated with gardens of military landowners, the porticus
had a greater function than demonstrating wealth and providing enjoyment for its owner. Instead,
it took on a political role, due in part to its location in, rather than adjacent to the city, and its
frequent proximity to important civic and social spaces. 12 The classical porticus design emerged
in 55 BC, commissioned for Rome by the general Pompey the Great. 13 Situated in the Campus
Martius, the park and its surroundings became known as the Opera Pompeiana. The surrounding
buildings, including many of the elements of a classical Roman forum, became part of the
composite public space. This composition not only transfigured the relationship between the city
10
Ibid, 103.
11
Gleason, Kathryn L. “Porticus Pompeiana: A New Perspective on the First Public Park of Ancient Rome.” The
Journal of Garden History 14, no. 1 (1994): 13.
12
Gleason, 13.
13
The term porticus refers to the specific organization of formal gardens: the colonnaded nemus. While this term is
the technical way to refer to this particular park typology, it is sparingly found in common usage. For this reason,
excepting where it is used as a proper noun, the term porticus will heretofore be referred to as parco, the broader
term used to describe Italian parks.
8

and the landscape, but elevated the status of the park as a political and socially implicated space,
due to its contact with the surrounding civic structures. The positioning of the parco in an urban
context in proximity to important civic and social buildings such as a senate house and a market
was a move on the part of Pompey to assert political power, but also imbued the park with an
important public function to provide space for gathering outdoors, much like an Italian piazza.
Fig. 1: Plan of the Campus Martius,
with the Porticus Pompeiana highlighted in red
Fig. 2: Plan of the Porticus Pompeiana in
Lanciani’s 1893 Forma Urbis Romae
reconstruction of ancient Rome
In The Park and the Town, George Chadwick succinctly traces the concept of the
porticus as parco to another location in ancient Rome, that of the Porticus Livia, stating, “the
open area for public use is no recent idea—the town square or place is probably almost as old as
settlement itself, starting as a mere space between dwellings which became used as a place for
gatherings—even in Roman times we find gardens such as the Porticus Livia which were laid out
for public use.” 14 The Porticus Livia, dedicated in 7 BC, stands as a prototypical example of the
porticus type. The garden featured a double colonnade, or more likely a colonnade with an arbor,
where a “single prodigious grapevine covered the entire portico.” 15 Additionally, fountains were
14
Chadwick, G. F. (1966). The Park and the Town: Public Landscape in the 19th and 20th Centuries. F. A. Praeger.
15
Taylor, et al. 107.
9

located in the corners and center of the park, demonstrating a “prevailing taste for symmetry,
rectilinearity, and orthogonality in Roman gardens.” 16
The Domus Aurea
With the Domus Aurea, a shift in park design occurred. The “Golden House of Nero” is
an important example of the imperial parco that demonstrates the principle of rus in urbe.
Though the Domus Aurea served as the imperial palace for the Emperor Nero (AD 37-AD 68), it
is best known for its extensive and opulent gardens, and series of artificial landscapes that
showcased the political might and the unparalleled wealth of the emperor. While the Domus
Aurea was in itself an incredibly elite space, it also served a more public function as a space for
urban gathering, feasting, and ceremonial events. Katherine Welch writes in The Roman
Amphitheatre: From Its Origins to the Colosseum that the Domus Aurea served as a “quasipublic
park,” where “people could at times come and go freely, and the upper classes perforce
had to rub shoulders with everyone else whether they wanted to or not.” 17 Welch draws a
distinction between an urban park such as the Domus Aurea and other pleasure spaces such as
the Colosseum, where the upper class were spatially segregated and afforded the best views in
the amphitheater, denying the possibility for interaction between classes.
The gardens of Nero’s vast palace complex, built adjacent to the Forum Romanum, did
not possess the deliberate symmetry and carefully orchestrated perspective of the porticus.
Rather, the opulent, overwrought assemblage of building and landscape styles is the antithesis of
16
Ibid.
17
Welch, K. E., & Cambridge, U. of. The Roman Amphitheatre: From Its Origins to the Colosseum. Cambridge
University Press, 2007, 159.
10

the Porticus Pompeiana. Nero had based the plan on a seaside villa, quite literally importing a
foreign landscape into the heart of the city, and thereby undermining essential Roman ideas of
Fig. 3:
18 th century
perspective of the
Domus Aurea, with
the colossal
Stagnum Neronis
visible at the
center. Tiny figures
can be seen milling
about the villa,
showing the public
function of Nero’s
villa.
order, perspective, and symmetry. In addition to providing a space for public diversion and
interaction, the Domus Aurea also embodied the concept of rus in urbe, a principle which, as
will be discussed later, provided the conceptual organization for many of the parks in Victorian
England. The term rus in urbe was originally coined by the epigrammist Martial (AD 40-AD
104) who describes with envy in epigram LVII the luxury of the home of Sparsus, “whose
mansion, though on a level plane, overlooks the lofty hills which surround it; who enjoy[s] the
country in the city (rus in urbe).” 18 Martial contrasts the relentless clamor and disruption of
Rome with the home of Sparsus, which, despite being located in the very same city, by nature of
its sprawling views and seclusion through its gardens and spatial separation, creates the illusion
of being in the quietude of the countryside, or rather, perhaps, of bringing the countryside into
the city.
18
Martial, Epigrams, ed. & tr. D.R.Shackleton Bailey, Cambridge, 1993, vol. III, Book XII, 59, 139.
11

Nero’s Domus Aurea epitomized this landscape typology through the construction of an
artificial lake, the Stagnum Neronis, in addition to groves, vineyards and pastures. As the Domus
Aurea is no longer extant, and its remains, though preserved underneath the heart of the modern
city, are largely inaccessible, the most detailed accounts of the site can be found in the Roman
biographer Suetonius’s Life of Nero (AD 121) and historian Tacitus’s Annals (AD 109).
Suetonius describes the Domus Aurea as:
A palace extending all the way from the Palatine to the Esquiline [...] large enough
to contain a colossal statue of the emperor a hundred and twenty feet high; and it
was so extensive that it had a triple colonnade a mile long. There was a pond too,
like a sea, surrounded with buildings to represent cities, besides tracts of country,
varied by tilled fields, vineyards, pastures and woods, with great numbers of wild
and domestic animals. 19
Suetonius’s description of the grounds of the Domus Aurea demonstrates precisely what the term
rus in urbe denotes, and Tacitus corroborates with his description of Nero’s landscape:
A palace, the marvels of which were to consist not so much in gems and gold,
materials long familiar and vulgarized by luxury, as in fields and lakes and the air
of solitude given by wooded ground alternating with clear tracts and open
landscapes. 20
Above all, these two depictions of the Domus Aurea demonstrate the existence of rus in urbe as
a concept guiding landscape design dating back to Roman times and recurring as a landscape
typology well into the Nineteenth Century in Europe, and ultimately in America.
19
Tranquillus, C. Suetonius. 31, In The Life of Nero. Translated by Bill Thayer., 137.
Originally published as De Vita XII Caesarum.
20
Tacitus. "42." In Book XV, 281. Translated by J.C. Rolfe. Vol. 5 of The Annals of Tacitus. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University, 1937.
12

Fig. 4: Lanciani’s Map of Rome overlaid with the plan of the Domus Aurea.
The Coliseum is visible at lower left.
The Domus Aurea cannot be read as a publically available parco due to its sprawling,
multi-use nature and Imperial ownership. However, it can certainly be read in tandem; although
it would be difficult to claim that the Domus Aurea was designed specifically to suit the needs of
the public in mind, it demonstrates a consciousness of common usage. This is demonstrable
through accounts of the spectacle that occurred on the palace’s grounds, including lavish feasts
and the staging of entertainment along the Stagnum Negronis. Welch concedes that the claiming
of the center of Rome for Nero’s Domus after the great fire of 64 AD drew intense criticism,
particularly from the Roman elite, but she maintains that this criticism was for the most part
because the land that he appropriated was occupied mostly by the elites themselves, rather than
by the poor, as Martial claimed. 21 Rather than undertake a reading of the Domus Aurea as a
21
Martial, qtd. In Welch, 152.
13

space purely of private indulgence, then, in Welch’s view, the Domus takes on a more nuanced
role in the urban landscape of Nero’s Rome. Moreover, the construction of the Domus Aurea had
the effect of making available exclusive territory for the enjoyment of the public. “To some
extent,” writes Welch, “[Nero] seems to have been using coveted property in the heart of the city
as a public park that extended to the Roman people, at least some of the time, pleasures hitherto
restricted to extra-urban horti and villas of the elite.” 22 Such an intersection of class and public
and private space would have been unlikely prior to Neronian Rome, but Nero’s actions, though
soundly criticized and often considered megalomaniacal, fortunately made a strong case for
making central Rome available to the public, as it later was with the construction of the
Colosseum in its place. For the purposes of the present study, Nero established a landscape
typology that would in turn influence spaces in England and finally, in Frederick Law Olmsted’s
ideas of landscape use and design.
Baroque Parks in 17th Century Rome
During the Renaissance, the public nature of the parco became further cemented with the
emergence of a vocabulary to discuss the domain of parks. David R. Coffin traces the earliest
instance of lex hortorum to the late fifteenth century, summarizing its principle to be “that
gardens are created not only for the personal enjoyment of their owners, but to afford pleasure to
their friends and even to strangers and the public, diminishing the concept of private property.” 23
The term lex hortorum thus can be understood to describe the informal, though often explicit
public right to the use of private parks and villas. In private parks like the Villa Borghese and the
22
Welch, 157.
23
Coffin, David R. “The ‘Lex Hortorum’ and Access to Gardens of Latium During the Renaissance.” The Journal
of Garden History 2, no. 3 (1982): 201-232.
14

Domus Aurea, the landscapes served to display the wealth and prominence of their patron;
however, unlike the Domus Aurea, the grounds were laid out with visitors in mind in the Villa
Borghese. Before the emergence of lex hortorum, the right to patronize private gardens was
informal at best. After, public patronage of private gardens became much more common, to the
extent that there existed written acknowledgements of the practice, though it was still not
codified by law. An appeal to exercise lex hortorum can be found on the inscription on the
entrance to the Villa Borghese, which reads, among other text:
Whoever you are, if you are free, do not fear here the letters of the law.
Go where you wish, pluck what you wish, leave when you wish.
These things are provided more for strangers than for the owner. 24
As such, it was common practice for the public to visit the park within the villa four days a week.
Further demonstrating the de facto public nature of the Villa was the means of entry: the Villa
could be accessed by the public via a separate gate, while guests and family used a private
entrance.
Fig. 5. Plan of the
Villa Borghese before
1695. The public
entrance is
highlighted at lower
right, with the private
entrance shown
above.
Private entrance
Public entrance
24
Ibid, 202.
15

The Villa Borghese
The Villa Borghese, though a later product of the Renaissance, continued to operate
along the principles of rus in urbe and lex hortorum; despite its being designed and built for the
Borghese family, it took on an important public function after it was constructed. The original
plan, laid out starting in 1606, was more garden than park; immediately surrounding the villa
were formal gardens planted in a highly ordered, rectilinear manner. Adjacent to the Villa was a
rustic hunting ground. 25
Fig. 6. Oil painting by Heinz the
Younger of the formal gardens of
the Villa Borghese before the
landscape was transformed.
In what Coffin describes as the second phase of the Villa’s design evolution, beginning
around 1620, the park was laid out to provide even greater contrast between formal and rural
landscapes. This was accomplished by converting the gardens into formal tree gardens and
planting sections of the hunting park to resemble a rustic wilderness, while retaining the pastoral
aspect in others, including a meadow that was mowed just twice a year. 26 This transformation
effectively brought intentionally unkempt nature into contact with the city via artificial means.
25
Ibid, 1.
26
Ibid, 2.
16

Though the terms “park” and “garden” are used somewhat interchangeably by historians
(Gleason, 1994; Welch, 2007; Taylor et al. 2016) to refer to Roman imperial horti and porticus,
Mirka Benĕs makes the claim in “The Social Significance of Transforming the Landscape at the
Villa Borghese, 1606-30: Territory, Trees, and Agriculture in the Design of the First Roman
Baroque Park” that the Villa Borghese stands as the first parco in Rome. 27
The Villa was commissioned in 1606 by Cardinal Scipione Borghese, whose authority
was only outranked by his uncle, Pope Paul V, and designed by the architect Flamonio Ponzo.
Located on the northern border of Rome, the villa covered a 160 acre expanse, a feat of private
ownership that would not have been possible if not for the gradual acquisition of land on the part
of Scipione, and the villa’s position on the periphery of the city, which allowed for the ambitious
plan to be laid out without the conflict of land usership as arose with the Domus Aurea. The
result was a park that “consisted of two major parts: the giardini, which surrounded a palace and
Fig. 7. Perspective of the
Villa Borghese in phase
two after the
transformation of the
formal gardens into a
tree garden, with views
of rural fields beyond.
27
Benes, Mirka. "The Social Significance of Transforming the Landscape at the Villa Borghese, 1606-30: Territory,
Trees, and Agriculture in the Design of the First Roman Baroque Park." In Gardens in the Time of the Great Muslim
Empires: Theory and Design, edited by Attilio Petruccioli, 1-31. Leiden; New York: E.J. Brill, 1997.
17

which were formally ordered gardens constructed on leveled ground; and the barco, adjacent to
these gardens, which was a hunting park laid out on mostly unaltered terrain.” 28 The giardini,
with its fountains and manicured greeneries, stood in direct contrast to the barco, with lakes,
groves, grazing livestock and wild game, which “recalled the landscape of the Roman
countryside, where large farms (casali) were endowed with grassy meadowlands devoted mostly
to grazing and partly to hunting.” 29
Benĕs notes that Borghese looked to the royal gardens in Paris and Madrid for
inspiration, and the construction of a spectacular park within the city of Rome was thus a gesture
intended to align the Borghese family with the likes of European royalty. By building a private
park, the Borghese family in effect placed a premium on the land, demonstrating their wealth to
be so extravagant as to allow land within the city to be undeveloped and available for pure
leisure and visual enjoyment as opposed to development and habitation. Before this time,
suburban villas or hunting parks well outside the city would have been the only kind that
matched the type of park that Cardinal Scipione Borghese sought to create within the city. The
construction of the Villa required the complete fabrication of a forested area with careful
landscaping, as Rome’s interior had for a long time been deforested. 30 Benĕs writes, “the
artificial re-creation of rus in urbe in the Villa Borghese represented a typological nov-elty: an
artificially re-created rural landscape, which imi-tated aspects of genuine rural landscapes
situated in an-other zone of territory.” 31 Scipione’s villa was used to host extravagant banquets
28
Ibid, 1.
29
Ehrlich, T. L. Landscape and Identity in Early Modern Rome: Villa Culture at Frascati in the Borghese Era.
Cambridge University Press, 2002, 41.
30
Benĕs, 2.
31
Benĕs, 3.
18

and hunting trips for nobility and foreign dignitaries alike, but also was made available for public
admiration and visitation.
Hunt’s Three Natures and the Villa Borghese
The presence of formal gardens, hunting park, and grazing meadow in the design of the
Villa Borghese coincides with a movement that English landscape historian John Dickson Hunt
describes as “three natures.” In this concept, first, second, and third natures refer to different
states of human interaction and/or interference with the landscape. First nature refers to the
wilderness, or nature as untouched by humans, whereas second nature is agrarian, and third
nature is the highly cultivated landscape, or the art of landscape design. He traces the idea of
third nature to the Italian Humanists Bonfadio and Taegio, who both write of a “third” nature in
works dating from 1541 and 1559 respectively. 32 Bonfadio writes in a letter to a colleague,
For in the gardens...the industry of the local people has been such that nature
incorporated with art has made an artificer and naturally equal with art, and from them
both together is made a third nature, which I would not know how to name. 33
Bonfadio seeks to describe something beyond the cultivation of land and uncultivated nature
alone, but rather what exists when the two come together. In his reading, the garden is thus not a
separate entity altogether, but a composite of nature and artifice.
Second nature is a term that was coined in Roman times by Cicero. He describes the
cultivated land as a way “by means of our hands we try to create as it were a second nature
within the natural world.” 34 Hunt extends this definition to include not only the agrarian
landscape, but also to include infrastructure. The manipulation of land on the part of humankind
32
Hunt, J. D. Greater Perfections: The Practice of Garden Theory. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000, 32.
33
Bonfadio qtd. In Hunt, 33.
34
Cicero, qtd. In Hunt, 33.
19

to support the needs of humankind, urban or rural, produces nature of a secondary form. While
Cicero does not explicitly name the first form of nature, it is implied within his observation; it is,
as Hunt describes, a “primal nature” that exists before and beyond human interference.
The concept of three natures is an idea that was circulated during the Renaissance, but it
should not be mistaken as a guiding principle for landscape design. Hunt writes, “It must be
emphasized that the arithmetic of “three natures” is symbolic, not literal and certainly not
prescriptive, nor does it necessarily privilege the third over the other two natures. It is meant to
indicate [...] that a territory can be viewed in the light of how it has or has not been treated in
space and time.” 35 What it lent to architects was a way of conceptualizing landscape design as an
artistic pursuit, and furthermore, one that could incorporate all three natures within confined
spatial boundaries. While it is possible that parks like the Villa Borghese existed beforehand, it
was not until the articulation of this theory that it became possible to describe and apply its
concepts. In Renaissance Italy, the parks that made use of the first, second, and third degree
marked a shift in man’s relationship with nature. In the production of third nature parks and
gardens, perspectives and geometry reigned, but it was also possible, as with the Villa Borghese,
to produce, by means of artifice, a first nature—one that recalled the wilderness in an aesthetic
sense, but which was entirely fabricated. This also extended to second nature; both ways of
quoting nature and the rural landscape were a means of producing and recalling rus in urbe.
Through its construction in urban Rome, the Villa Borghese can thus be read as a
translation of the concepts of first, second, and third nature. The hunting park, with forested
areas and shrubbery that created space for birds and animals to take refuge and provided game
for hunters, was a fabricated form of first nature, whereas the central meadow provided second
35
Hunt, 35.
20

nature, and axial walkways and formal gardens were of the third nature. The precedent for the
incorporation of second nature in the Villa Borghese was drawn directly from the design of the
Domus Aurea, with its pastures and fields that had the effect of producing rus in urbe. The Villa
Borghese reignited the concept of rus in urbe by drawing on the landscape principles which
Suetonius and Tacitus used to describe the Domus Aurea, producing hunting grounds, ploughed
fields and a formalized garden all within an urban context. The rural aesthetic upon which the
design of the second nature section of the villa was based drew a connection with the extraurban
roots of the Italian aristocracy to which the Borghese belonged. The tradition of apportioning
land to military leaders and elected officials had produced the peri-urban horti that surrounded
the city of Rome, and conferred social and monetary status to landowners. For this reason, the
choice to draw upon a pastoral aesthetic had the effect of gesturing back to a family’s propertied
lineage, in addition to providing a visual and sensory retreat for the Borghese family. 36
This implicit agreement for public use of the villa proved to be contentious when, in
1885, the Prince Marcantonio Borghese attempted to close the grounds of the villa to the public,
an act which resulted in the legal rebuke of the city, and the state’s eventual acquisition of the
park in 1901. This conflict demonstrates the difficulty inherent with such an informal agreement:
in the instance in which common practice diverges from actual legal right, the course of action
becomes much more fraught. Such debates continue to exist today, proving a further difficulty of
determining where public right falls on a basis both legal and precedential.
In Landscape and Identity in Early Modern Rome, Erlich notes, “In the environs of the
palace Scipione developed a park that foreshadowed English landscape gardens of the following
century.” 37 The design of the Villa Borghese, in reproducing elements of the pastoral in the
36
Benĕs, 5.
37
Erlich, 43.
21

urban setting, had the same effect two centuries later with the pastoral English garden, which
transformed the conception of public space in Victorian London. The tradition of lex hortorum
had a lasting impact in the conceptualization of parks across Europe, and the villa park typology
of the Villa Borghese established a paradigm that was translated into parks in England and
eventually Paris. Likewise, the concept of making privately owned parks available to the public
served as a key precedent for the later proliferation of public parks in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries in Europe and the United States, thus marking a shift from a societal
understanding of parks as elite, private spaces to their containing a prerogative for public use.
22

Section 2: English Park Design in 16th-19th Century London
Italian ideas of rus in urbe and making parks and gardens available to the public left a
lasting impact on parks across Europe, and most notably, in London. The public parks that define
London’s identity today evolved along two separate trajectories: those of the town square and the
royal garden. The private-use-only squares constitute many of the city’s smaller greenspaces, and
provide a foundation around which much of the city’s architecture was built, whereas the parks
and gardens owned by the Crown were much larger and detached from urban life. However, as a
result of mounting pressure to make greenspaces available to the working classes of industrial
London, both of these types became incorporated into the public domain in the Victorian era.
Public Patronage of Peri-urban Fields
Although the term lex hortorum did not arise until the late fifteenth century in Italy, as
previously indicated, the Romans were accustomed to visiting the Domus Aurea and other
private parks even before such common rights were codified. England was much the same;
though public squares such as Covent Garden and royal parks like Hyde Park were not made
public until the 1630s, 38 it was common for Londoners to make public use of the fields to the
north of the city, which were known as the Moorfields. 39 During that time, public access to green
spaces was uncommon, and the Moorfields became a popular place for citizens to ‘walke in, to
take the ayre and for Merchants’ maides to dry clothes in, which want necessary gardens at their
38
Covent Garden was a public plaza from the outset, but it was not constructed until 1630; Hyde Park was a royal
hunting garden that was made available to the Public in 1635 by King Charles 1.
39
Alternatively Moorefields, Morefields, Morefeildes, or Moore-fields.
23

dwellings.’ 40 The Moorfields were acquired by the city of London in the twelfth century, and the
earliest record of public use dates to 1173. 41 In 1606, the city went so far as to plant tree-lined
walks, drained the moor, and landscaped the fields “in the fashion of a crosse, equelly divided
fooure wayes, and likewise squared about with pleasant wals: the trees thereof makes a gallant
shew, and yeelds unto [the] eye much delight.” 42
The resulting site contained all of the ingredients of a park as it might be understood
today; it featured walkways, open space, and benches, trees and other plantings. 43 Its location on
the periphery of the city brings to mind the peri-urban horti of the Roman military elite, and its
transition from rural to landscaped design recalls the transformation of the Villa Borghese.
However, further reading of the site is ill-advised, as it was not understood to be either park or
garden by its users of the time. Instead, it should be understood to be an early example of public
use of green space, and in its seventeenth century improvements and usage, an English example
demonstrative of the principles of lex hortorum.
Town Gardens and Square Gardens
Preceding the development of the English Landscape Movement and the public pleasure
garden and walk of Victorian England was the development of a vernacular of members-only
town squares within the city of London. Before these private communal spaces arose, however,
there existed a vibrant tradition of residential gardening. Ranging from modest vegetable gardens
to ornate and fanciful pleasure gardens in miniature, these gardens arose to occupy the negative
40
Johnson, R., & Collier, J. P. The pleasant walkes of Moore-fields: being the guift of two sisters, now beautified, to
the continuing fame of this worthy city, 1607, 6.
41 Longstaffe-Gowan, Todd. The London Square: Gardens in the Midst of Town. The Paul Mellon Centre New
Studies in British Art. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012, 19.
42
Ibid, 7.
43 Longstaffe-Gowan, 19.
24

space that resulted from the proliferation of terraced housing in eighteenth and early nineteenth
century London. The urban landscape of London in the early eighteenth century was a
piecemeal composite of terrace housing, a technique first employed in London by Nicholas
Barbon (1640-1698). Early examples of this technique of uniting housing in a continuous facade
exist in Grosvenor Square, beginning in 1727, and later Carlton House Terrace on St. James’
Park. Todd Longstaffe-Gowan writes in The London Town Garden, “The formula transformed
the structure of old (infill) and new residential quarters of the city and made the terrace house —
usually run up in short, discontinuous strings—the dominant housing form for both urban and, in
many cases, suburban housing well into the nineteenth century.” 44
An outgrowth of the development in housing was the formation of small private gardens
for growing vegetables or for the simple pleasure that gardening afforded the middle-class
renters who took up residence in London. A town garden was a means of displaying one’s status,
an expression both artistic and aspirational. These gardens were limited in scale to the space that
was not occupied by terraced housing, and by the means of their owners—that is to say, they
were not the gardens of the aristocrats, per se, but rather those of the middle-class, albeit a wellto
do group of Londoners. 45 Because residential gardening constituted a private and hobbyist’s
pursuit, the impact of these gardens did not extend far beyond their walls. However, this tradition
of engagement with the land tied urban London to an agrarian and rural tradition in a way that
should not be overlooked. The residential garden on the small scale was not a mere claiming of
infill space, but a deliberate insertion of greenery within the city, and a claiming of the tradition
of gardening and landscape design that had long flourished in the English countryside. Though
44
Longstaffe-Gowan, Todd. The London Town Garden, 1700-1840. The Paul Mellon Centre New Studies in
British Art. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001.
45
Ibid.
25

the practice of residential gardening was restricted to the middle- and upper-classes, the ability to
train and cultivate the land was made available to a swath of the city’s population in a way that
larger pleasure gardens and royal gardens were not until the mid-nineteenth century.
The garden square, on the other hand, played a much larger role in defining London’s
built landscape, and as a result, was instrumental in the city’s development of parks and public
space in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As with Roman villas like the Villa Borghese,
London’s squares were first laid down during the mid-seventeenth century by aristocratic
landowners who sought to amass wealth through land holdings. Sigfried Giedion cites Covent
Garden as the first square in London, designed to be a garden for the Earl of Bedford in 1630. 46
Taking cues from Paris’s Place des Vosges, both gardens in turn drew from the model of the
Italian piazza. Covent Garden Piazza 47 , like the Place des Vosges, featured a paved and open
central space surrounded by arcaded houses. In “The Greening of the Squares of London:
Transformation of Urban Landscapes and Ideals,” Henry W. Lawrence describes an
irreconcilable tension that arose as a result of the public nature of the square and its intended role
a residential square, asserting that “by failing to provide a separate market square, [the Earl of
Bedford] had condemned the residential square itself to a public commercial role that ultimately
would be its undoing as an elite residential quarter.” 48 It was not until the Georgian period of the
early eighteenth century that London’s squares would become standardized, planted with grass
instead of paved, and surrounded by fencing, a practice that claimed them for the middle class
46
Giedion, S. Space, Time, and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1962, 722.
47
Demonstrating its direct descent from the Italian piazza, Covent Garden was initially called Covent Garden
Piazza. From this point forward it will be referred to as Covent Garden, which is the name that it goes by today.
48
Lawrence, Henry W. "The Greening of the Squares of London: Transformation of Urban Landscapes and
Ideals." Annals of the Association of American Geographers 83, no. 1 (1993): 94.
26

and sealed their legacy as such. 49 Longstaffe-Gowan describes this legacy in The London
Square: Gardens in the Midst of Town: “The residential or garden square is a uniquely English
device. It is, in fact, pre-eminent among England’s contributions to the development of European
town planning and urban form, as it introduced the classical notion of rus in urbe.” 50 Though the
Italians originated the notion that elements of the natural landscape and pastoral aesthetic belong
in the city, the English take credit for adapting this concept for an unmistakably English setting,
in a way that would eventually have significant implications for American park design.
Drawing from ideas of rus in urbe in Italian parci and public space in Italian piazzas,
London’s planners sequestered undeveloped parcels of land and apportioned them for the
eventual construction of parks. It was around these parcels that residential London’s core of
terraced housing arose. 51 In Space, Time and Architecture, Sigfried Giedion references an 1887
definition of “the square” as “a piece of land in which is an enclosed garden, surrounded by a
public roadway, giving access to the houses on each side of it.” 52 This definition serves as a
practical template for many of London’s squares. Notable in this definition is the word
“enclosed”—one of the most significant features of these gardens was that they were indeed
enclosed by fences and intended to be used only by the inhabitants of the houses lining the
square. While the London square gardens developed as a dominant type in during the eighteenth
century, they were sites of exclusion: many of the squares were gated and required paid
membership; only those who possessed keys were allowed to roam freely within their bounds.
Further cementing the status of squares as private gardens, residents of London’s squares were
49
Lawrence notes that it was not until later that the practice of locking gated squares arose, but the effect of erecting
fences was enough to send a potent message to the public to keep out (97).
50
Longstaffe-Gowan, 2012, 2.
51
Ibid, 4.
52
Giedion, 718.
27

able to petition for legal permission to enclose them. Parliamentary acts preceded the formation
of many private squares, the likes of which included St. James’s Square, Lincoln’s Inn Fields,
Berkeley Square, Grosvenor Square, and Red Lion Square, for which acts were passed in in
1725, 1734, 1766, 1774, and 1737 respectively. 53 Once a legal precedent for the privatization of
squares was established, the square typology radiated throughout the city. As Giedion points out,
the result of developing the city in the repeating pattern of garden square flanked by stately
domiciles brought new form to a city without guiding axes or “comprehensive unity.” 54 The
overall effect of reshaping residential London around garden squares was to create a city
“determined by the building activities of the upper middle class.” 55 While this practice elicits
little shock today, at a time in which many American cities are being overwritten by the likes of
real estate developers, gentrifiers, and tech companies, this movement must be read in its own
historical context. London of the early nineteenth century was a city that had been completely
transformed by industrialization. It was one of profound disparity, whose lower classes bore the
marks of the complete reshaping of urban life. The architecture of a city of closed gardens and
upper middle class residences was not reflective of the advantages of society at large, but the
privileges of a powerful and elite minority. Even as some of these spaces later became available
to the public, London’s garden squares were by design intended to keep the lower classes out.
James Ralph comments on Leicester Square, one of the earliest squares in London, in A Critical
Review of the Publick Buildings, Statues and Ornaments In, and about London and Westminster,
describing the relationship between the the gated square, laid out by the Earl of Leicester in
1635, and its unwelcome neighbors. “Leicester-Square has nothing remarkable in it,” muses
53
Longstaffe-Gowan, 2012, 55.
54
Giedion, 717.
55
Ibid, 716.
28

Ralph, “but [for] the inclosure in the middle, which alone affords the inhabitants round about it,
something like the prospect of a garden, and preserves it from the rudeness of the populace
too.” 56
Fig. 8. Leicester Square, circa 1750.
Implicit in the idea of the square is the exclusion it was meant to foster. As Ralph demonstrates,
the pervasive sentiment among those perpetuating this exclusion was that public space fostered
criminal activity and objectionable behavior, crowding and filth. The proper maintenance of
gardens, and finally, their enclosure, could keep these behaviors out, and in doing so, would send
a strong message: gardens were a privilege of the wealthy, and allowing the lower classes to
patronize them would be an invitation to disease and crime, and would place such spaces at risk
of falling into disrepair. Even before London squares were made private, Lawrence argues that
they were designed to be spaces of exclusion, stating: “A maintained garden, then, became an
asset in efforts to control the public use of these open spaces. In this we can see one of the seeds
for the later use of gardens, viz., as ways of expressing control over socially contested space.” 57
56
Ralph, J. A Critical Review of the Publick Buildings, Statues and Ornaments In, and about London and
Westminster: To which is Prefix’d, the Dimensions of St. Peter’s Church at Rome, and St. Paul’s Cathedral at
London. C. Ackers, 1734, 30.
57
Lawrence, 97.
29

This concept continues to hold weight today, and will be further discussed in relation to Seattle’s
public park system. Moreover, Lawrence’s observation raises an important question of who
exercises control over public space, and how landscape can be used in the service of those in
power.
In addition to keeping others out, the effect of enclosing garden squares was to create a
standard of conduct within and upkeep for these spaces. 58 By paying membership, residents were
granted access to flora, landscaped walkways, and a community sharing equal social privilege.
Unlike residential town gardens, users were not responsible for the upkeep of these spaces, and
as a result, the emphasis shifted away from landscape cultivation as an artistic and leisurely
pursuit, and toward landscape as a facilitator of social interaction. For the children who formed
friendships and were allowed to play safely without the need for adult supervision, the square,
forming a communal space for play outside of the house, was the center of the social
community. 59 For residents of London’s squares, access to private gardens afforded them
security and increased property values in the neighborhood. Additionally, in belonging to a
singular class of people whose codes of conduct and social mores were already well understood,
emphasis was placed less on the policing of these spaces or their use for public display, and more
on their role as spaces for private leisure. “The squares became extensions of the private lives of
their occupants,” writes Lawrence. “In short, they had become domesticated, transformed from
public piazzas into private parks.” 60
The enclosure of squares inflicted further damage to the right of commons that had
existed for centuries in open spaces such as the Moorfields. In eighteenth century London,
58
Longstaffe-Gowan, 2012, 4.
59
Ibid, 2.
60
Lawrence, 108.
30

greenspace was rarefied ground, an amenity that was extremely limited for the lower classes. At
the end of the eighteenth century, social and religious unrest led a Methodist revival and anti-
Catholic rioting in 1780. The Moorfields provided a staging ground for these activities, and the
political charge that this public space had taken on was condemned by the city. As a result, the
Moorfields were converted to the private Finsbury Square in the 1790s, ending its tenure as a
public space. 61 The public health movement would mark a transformation in the view of open
space from a luxury of the rich to a human right, and Finsbury Square would once again
transition to public use, but until this moment in time, the fate of many parks and greenspaces
were subject to the whims of the ruling class.
61
Ibid, 99.
31

Rus in Urbe in the London Square
In the early days of the development of London’s squares, the tenants occupying the
surrounding residences were frequently wealthy country estate holders who spent the winter
months in the city. It is unsurprising, then, that early garden squares developed out of a rural
aesthetic. Early squares such as Lincoln’s Inn Fields and Hanover, Grosvenor, and Soho Squares
were located on the periphery of the city, and easily drew visual linkages to the countryside just
beyond.
Fig. 9. View of Soho Square in 1731
looking north. The uniform terrace
housing enclosing the square, while a
carriage road skirts it. There is
sparse planting, with few trees,
which is consistent with early
English squares. Visible behind the
housing is open countryside. The
visual axis of the road at center
draws a visual link between the
landscaped square and the
countryside beyond.
The proximity of rural land allowed squares to mediate the relationship between city and
country, and in cases like Queen’s Square, built in 1708, and Hanover Square, built in 1714,
newly minted squares often were designed to preserve views of the hills surrounding the city,
thereby “strengthen[ing] the suggestion that the garden was an extension of the neighboring
countryside.” 62 Additionally, as Parliamentary acts gave jurisdiction of squares to their residents,
their design was also in their control, and as a result, the landscaping of squares naturally took on
62
Longstaffe-Gowan, 2012, 44.
32

the rural aesthetic that appealed to the country-dwellers who took up residence there during the
winter.
In 1722, Thomas Fairchild, a London Gardener, published The City Gardener, giving his
recommendations for designing London squares in the “country manner.” Besides describing the
best trees and plants with which to adorn them, he advocates for the creation of gardens in town
that would provide city-dwellers a taste of “the pleasures of their Country Gardens.” Fairchild
contends that instead of “laying out Squares in Grass Platts and Gravel Walks [...] some sort of
Wilderness Work will do much better, and divert the Gentry better than looking out of their
Windows upon an open Figure.” 63 This conclusion demonstrates an important shift in thinking in
the ornamentation of squares: instead of leaving them as paved, grassy, or with unobstructed
views, the planting of London planes or other shade-giving trees evoked the groves of hunting
parks and rural landscapes. Today’s squares generally reflect this legacy to the extent that
Giedion maintains that “the main constituent of all the London squares is a central garden of
grass and plane trees.” 64 Lawrence notes the evolution from Georgian gardens that were “based
on the composition of framed views” to gardens at the end of the century, whose “goal was to
evoke an image of nature itself, using broader views over the countryside framed by trees and
woodland.” 65 This change can be read as a transition from the constraints of formal gardens to
one that was increasingly influenced by rus in urbe and a pastoral aesthetic, and finally which
evoked a conceptual link to wilderness or first nature.
63
Fairchild, T. The City Gardener: Containing the Most Experienced Method of Cultivating and Ordering Such
Ever-greens, Fruit-trees, Flowering Shrubs, Flowers, Exotick Plants, &c. as Will be Ornamental, and Thrive Best in
the London Gardens. T. Woodward, 1722, N. pag.
64
Giedion, 719.
65
Lawrence, 104.
33

The Rise of Public Parks in Victorian London
The history of public English gardens can be traced to an origin similar to those in Italy.
The tradition of landscape architecture and park planning was largely a royal pursuit, with much
of the large-scale parks and gardens belonging to or financed by the royal family. Still, following
the Roman precedent, many of these parks designed and belonging to the Crown were made
available to the public, a tradition dating to 1635, when Hyde Park was opened to the public by
King Charles I. Nonetheless, this making available of royal spaces does not characterize the
general nature of English parks. While many were built by the Crown, those predating the
Victorian Era were not designed with public use in mind. Thus, while the history of public parks
in England does not begin in the Victorian Era, this period can nonetheless be understood as
foundational in the establishment and design of many of the public parks that exist in London
today.
George Chadwick traces the concept of public park to the Victorian era, noting, “The
creation of useful landscapes within the town for the use and enjoyment of the public at large is
essentially a Victorian idea, due in the first place to the phenomenal growth of the “insensate
industrial town” which created the basic need for such areas.” 66 Although in earlier times private
parks and gardens were understood to be part of the public domain via the concept of lex
hortorum, Chadwick notes that “it was not until the nineteenth century that we find the public
park as we know it, an area of land laid out primarily for public use amidst essentially urban
surroundings.” 67 This functional definition of the public park as an urban greenspace devoted to
the use of the public efficiently articulates our modern understanding of the term. As will be
discussed later, the ownership of public parks—whether publicly or privately owned—in
66
Chadwick, 19.
67
Ibid.
34

addition to their funding—whether governmentally funded or supported by a private
organization or conservancy—further complicates this definition, but nonetheless does not affect
our understanding of these parks as fundamentally for public use.
The Royal Parks of London
Despite the fact that most Royal parks were established exclusively with private use in
mind, St. James’s Park stands out as an example of a Victorian park that was intended to be for
public use. Chadwick makes the claim that for this reason, it stands as the first public park in
England, despite the fact that it was not part of the movement that produced many of the public
parks of the era. 68 It was consistent, however, in the image of the English landscape movement
in which it was produced, and an example of the Reptonian landscape which proved influential
in the imagination of park designers across England. This was a style based on the aesthetic
influences of Humphry Repton, an eighteenth century English landscape gardener (1752-1818)
who envisioned parks as an artistic pursuit that drew influences from the scenes of “idyllic, even
mythic nature” 69 that constituted the European landscape painting tradition. Repton’s landscapes
harkened to an ideal landscape, “the whole contrived so as to produce an appearance of nature in
the midst of art,” 70 but “modified the ideal landscape thus conjured up to meet essentially
practical considerations.” 71 While Repton executed few park designs in his lifetime, his ideas
proved to be extremely influential, and his vision was eventually realized by the hands of
landscape architect John Nash in Regent’s Park and St. James’s Park.
68
Chadwick, 34.
69
Lawrence, 100.
70
Chadwick, 29.
71
Ibid, 23.
35

The Plan for Regent’s Park was produced in 1811, the resulting park featured a “large
open park surrounded by a circular drive with buildings facing the drive and looking over the
park.” 72 Nash’s plan for the park—which had existed as a hunting park known as Marylebone in
the 17th century—transformed it from a tract of farmland into something which preserved the
rural qualities of the English landscape. Aiding in the production of an agrarian environment was
an artificial canal that opened to a man-made lake, upon which boats would ferry passengers
back and forth for pleasure. A central circus built with villas was a formal element, but the lake
was bifurcated to wrap around the crescent, and could be viewed through the thickets of trees,
giving the scene a pastoral quality. Chadwick attributes the idea for the design that juxtaposed
formal elements (the villa) with natural and organic ones (trees and fields) as one that was
inspired by Repton, and compares Nash’s boating lake to Repton’s “use of cattle to give interest
and scale in a park.” 73 Though the resulting park was complete in 1826, it was not made public
until 1838. Nash’s park designs had garnered criticism for creating a “garden city for an
aristocracy,” 74 and the pressure to open them to the populace eventually succeeded, though the
park is still a royal holding. The park underwent significant modifications to its original form;
the number of villas were reduced and the vegetation sacrificed such that the original “rich,
dressed interior scene with its alternate concealment and revelation of villa or terrace was to be
exchanged for the present open, duller landscape with its scattering of trees.” 75 Though many
future parks, including those in John Charles Olmsted’s plan for Seattle, would be subject to
tremendous changes in the interim between the production of plan and the final outcome, it is in
the drawings of Nash and Repton, and later F. L. and J. L. Olmsted, that an ethos begins to form.
72
Ibid, 30.
73
Ibid, 31.
74
Ibid, 32.
75
Ibid.
36

The plan for St. James’s park had similar origins. Originally a deer park built by Henry
VIII, it was transformed into a formal park with a canal and patte d’oie designed by Andre
Mollet under the reign of King Charles II in 1662. 76 It was Nash who, in 1828, converted the
space into a park that transformed the formal canal into an irregular man-made lake, and Nash
who transformed the areas around the lake into meandering pathways through a series of terraces
and planted groves. The new scheme provided shaded walks and changing perspectives, and,
rising through the trees to the west beyond the lake, a vantage of the magisterial profile of
Buckingham Palace. 77 A suspension bridge added in 1857 spanned the lake and provided a
unique perspective of the park and the waterfowl paddling across the water. 78 Though it was
another Crown park, the new St. James’s Park was open to the public from the outset, and
designed with public patronage in mind. The Royal ownership of the likes of St. James’s and
Regent’s Park proved to be crucial in the formation of London’s large parks in that they were
amply funded, and advantageous in their eventual role as public parks in that they allowed
landscape designers such as Repton and Nash to experiment with a new kind of gardening and
aesthetic that would be extremely influential for landscape architects to come. Under the
guidance of Nash, St. James’s park transformed from a kind of first nature as a royal hunting
park to a third nature formal gardens of the seventeenth century, and finally into a second nature
park as it stands today. As an organic space, it has by nature evolved and been modified since
Nash’s time, yet it retains its essential character as a naturalistic and fundamentally English park.
Kensington Garden and Hyde Park stand as two paradigmatic examples of the English
landscape movement in Victorian London, and the transition from Royal Park to public park that
76
Ibid, 33.
77 Ibid, 34.
78
Ibid.
37

defined it. Hyde Park was originally a deer park, a rural hunting ground acquired by Henry VIII
in 1536. The purchase of the land that would become Hyde Park was part of an ambitious effort
on the part of the monarch to create one uninterrupted stretch of hunting ground from his palace
in Westminster to Hampstead Heath. 79 This measure, while serving the purpose of facilitating
the leisure of the King, was prescient of a thoroughly English attitude toward urban greenspace.
Before the squares of London established a blueprint for a city built around residential gardens,
members of the Royal family for centuries been setting aside land for hunting and leisure. In this
way, London’s identity has since medieval times been linked to its greenspaces, and is perhaps
the reason why the English landscape movement was so influential in the United States, where
urban planners and architects encountered the same opportunities in real time. London’s Crown
parks have long been known as London’s “green lungs,” demonstrating an understanding of the
park as an important tool in community health, and as vital to the function of the city. The effort
on the part of Henry VIII to create an unbroken swath of open space would leave a lasting
legacy, thus providing the conceptual roots for public park systems in the United States, from
Frederick Law Olmsted’s Emerald Necklace for Boston, to John Olmsted’s park system in
Seattle.
The Serpentine
By 1730, the Royal Parks had for some time existed as well-established, formal gardens.
In Kensington Gardens, King George II launched efforts to loosen the tight, formal plantings,
while in Hyde Park, Queen Caroline, who had already occupied herself with improvement efforts
to other Royal gardens, set her sights on Hyde Park. She envisioned a central river that would
79
Larwood, Jacob. The Story of the London Parks. London, UK: Chatto and Windus, 1874.
38

eplace several existing ponds and would widen the existing Westbourne brook into a grand
watercourse, cementing Hyde Park’s status as the chef d’oeuvre of Crown Parks. Furtively
appropriating £20,000 from the Royal treasury, Caroline used the funds to construct what
became known as the Serpentine. 80 She appointed Charles Withers, Surveyor General of his
Majesty’s Woods and Forests to the task. Withers proceeded to dam and dredge the Westbourne
stream, using the excavated soil to form a vantage of the newly formed Serpentine from
Kensington Gardens. 81 The river eventually was expanded into Kensington Gardens, and the
project was completed in 1733. Despite the fact that the Serpentine spanned between Hyde Park
and Kensington Park, it was not available entirely for public use: Kensington was open only to
the upper classes on Saturdays or when the Royal family was at one of their country estates,
while Hyde Park was open to all. Caroline succeeded in appropriating nearly 300 acres within
Hyde Park and adding it to Kensington, making them even more inaccessible. 82
Fig. 10. Detail of Rocque’s 1746 Map of London showing the Serpentine and Hyde Park
80
Ibid, 99.
81
Rabbitts, P. Hyde Park: The People’s Park. Amberley Publishing, 2015.
82
Ibid.
39

The additions to Hyde Park continued in the 1820s under King George IV, when
Decimus Burton, who was also responsible for collaborating with Nash on St. James’s Park,
undertook improvement efforts in Hyde Park. Burton installed an emblematic screen of ionic
columns designed by John Henning Sr. and Jr. at Hyde Park Corner, and improved carriage roads
along the Serpentine. 83
Fig. 11. Hennings’ ionic screen entrance to Hyde Park
Burton’s new scheme was designed to be experienced by carriage, and thus by the wellto-do
carriage owner, meaning that the Serpentine could be experienced in a panoramic fashion
rather than from limited vantages as it would be observed by foot. A quintuple-arched bridge,
designed by John Rennie, created a formal boundary between Kensington and Hyde Park,
creating visual interest and preventing the viewer from looking beyond, making it difficult to
appraise the true expanse of the lake.
83
Rabbitts, P. London’s Royal Parks. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014.
40

The design of the Serpentine was significant in that it brought to the public a kind of rural
sensibility that that emerged in the English landscape movement. The word “serpentine”
conjures an image of a winding, picturesque stream, with trees and vegetation occluding its
banks and concealing its full dimensions. In reality, the river only had one bend, but the overall
impression it created was not so different from the landscape paintings being produced in the
English Landscape School of painting.
Making a Case for Public Parks: The Public Health Movement
The rise of these public walks and pleasure gardens in England coincides with the a
burgeoning public health movement intent on making spaces for leisure and recreation available
to the public, and not limited to the Royal family or upper-class patrons. Longstaffe-Gowan
writes, “Squares have been appreciated not merely as garden oases or open figures in the dense
city fabric but as the purveyors of light and air, whose evolution is closely tied to the provision
of spacious residential development and the improvement of the city’s streets.” 84 Outbreaks of
typhus in 1838, and cholera in 1832, 1848, and 1853, raised attention to the poor sanitation,
overcrowding, and deleterious health effects of living in urban areas. 85 These effects were
particularly hard on the lower classes, who often did not have clean water supplies or privvies,
and many of whom were forced to labor in unsafe and often unsanitary workspaces. It was in this
atmosphere that the attentions of social reformers such as Sir Edwin Chadwick (1800-1890) were
turned to issues of public health and the living conditions of the urban poor. Chadwick’s
writings, namely his 1842 Report on The Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of
84
Longstaffe-Gowan, 2012, 4.
85
Chadwick, 49.
41

Great Britain, 86 led to urban sanitation reforms, including the Public Health Act, introduced by
Parliament in 1848, which ensured that homes across England would have access to a clean and
constant water supply, and paved the way for a nationwide water infrastructure. 87 Coinciding
with the public health movement sweeping across England, attention was turned to the dearth of
public greenspaces and walks, which in 1833 became the focus of the Select Committee on
Public Walks, which noted:
It cannot be necessary to point out how requisite some Public Walks or Open
Space in the neighborhood of large Towns must be; to those who consider the
occupations of the Working Classes who dwell there, confined as they are during
the weekdays as Mechanics and Manufacturers, and often shut up in heated
Factories: it must be evident that it is of the first importance to their health on
their day of rest to enjoy the fresh air, and to be able […] to be out in decent
comfort with their families. 88
The idea that parks are capable of affecting the public health of cities is thus by no means a new
idea, nor is the concept of making spaces such as these available to the populace. As with today,
one of the major obstacles to building new public gardens and walks in Victorian England was
the simple lack of funding. The Royal parks of London had seen no expense spared in their
construction, and over time the public came to benefit from this, but as much as the Committee
on Public Walks advocated for the construction of new public access to outdoor spaces, their
funding required the contributions of private donors or fundraising, which would have required
the contributions of those who often already had access to gardens and squares of their own.
While efforts were made to institute legislation to undertake public works projects in villages
that requested the creation of public gardens by majority vote, they failed when brought before
86
Parliament Home Department. Report on the Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring Population of Great
Britain. By Edwin Chadwick. London, UK: W. Clowes and sons for H. M. Stationery off., 1843.
87
Binnie, G. M. (1981). Early Victorian Water Engineers. T. Telford.
88
Parliament House of Commons. Report from the Select Committee on Public Walks. London, 1833.
42

Parliament. 89 For this reason, while this period in the mid-eighteenth century saw progressive
attitudes toward public green spaces take shape, most parks remained in the domain of an elite
minority, leaving the working poor still vulnerable to the oppressive strains of the industrial city.
Frederick Law Olmsted and Birkenhead Park: Bringing the English Park to
America
In 1850, American landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903) made a trip to
England, a visit that would prove to be extremely consequential. It was his first time in Europe,
and the voyage opened the eyes of the young professional, then a journalist, to the rich history of
landscape design in England. After visiting Birkenhead Park, laid out by Sir Joseph Paxton in
1847, Olmsted wrote a letter recording his visit, which had made a deep impression on the
architect who, at twenty-eight, was still early in his career:
The baker had begged of us not to leave Birkenhead without seeing their new park,
and at his suggestion we left our knapsacks with him, and proceeded to it. [...]
Walking a short distance up an avenue, we passed through another light iron gate
into a thick, luxuriant and diversified garden. Five minutes of admiration, and a
few more spent in studying the manner in which art had been employed to obtain
from nature so much beauty, and I was ready to admit that in democratic America
there was nothing to be thought of as comparable with this People's Garden.
Indeed, gardening had here reached a perfection that I had never before dreamed
of. I cannot undertake to describe the effect of so much taste and skill as had
evidently been employed; I will only tell you, that we passed by winding paths
over acres and acres, with a constant varying surface, where on all sides were
growing every variety of shrubs and flowers, with more than natural grace, all set
in borders of greenest, closest turf, and all kept with most consummate neatness.
At a distance of a quarter of a mile from the gate, we came to an open field of
clean, bright green-sward, closely mown, on which a large tent was pitched, and a
party of boys in one part, and a party of gentlemen in another, were playing
cricket. Beyond this was a large meadow with rich groups of trees, under which a
flock of sheep were reposing, and girls and women with children, were playing.
While watching the cricketers, we were threatened with a shower, and hastened
back to look for shelter, which we found in a pagoda, on an island approached by
89
Chadwick, 50.
43

a Chinese bridge. It was soon filled, as were the other ornamental buildings, by a
crowd of those who, like ourselves, had been overtaken in the grounds by the rain;
and I was glad to observe that the privileges of the garden were enjoyed about
equally by all classes. [...] Besides the cricket and an archery ground, large valleys
were made verdant, extensive drives arranged, plantations, clumps, and avenues
of trees formed, and a large park laid out. And all this magnificent pleasureground
is entirely, unreservedly, and for ever the people's own. The poorest
British peasant is as free to enjoy it in all its parts as the British queen. More than
that, the baker of Birkenhead has the pride of an owner in it. Is it not a grand good
thing? But you are inquiring who paid for it. The honest owners — the most wise
and worthy townspeople of Birkenhead — in the same way that the New Yorkers
pay for "the Tombs" and the Hospital, and the cleaning (as they amusingly say) of
their streets. 90
Olmsted’s visit to Birkenhead provided a direct source of inspiration for the 1858 competitionwinning
Greensward Plan for Central park that kick-started his acclaimed career as a landscape
architect. In Birkenhead Park, Olmsted saw something that was without precedent in the United
States in the English mastery of gardening, the overall effect that it produced, and its appreciable
status as a democratic space. Furthermore, the public ownership of the space further impressed
him, in that it fostered a communal sense of stewardship and pride. That a park could exist not
only for the well-heeled middle class residents of a city or the elite, upper class residents who
had the privilege of retreating to country estates to experience the catharsis and salubrious effects
of returning to nature, but also for the working man and woman was groundbreaking.
Furthermore, the park was entirely funded by the public, a move which was unprecedented at the
time; Birkenhead Park is understood to be the first publicly-funded park in England. 91 The
concept of opening the landscape such that the “privileges of the garden were enjoyed about
equally by all classes” would remain at the core of the Olmsted firm’s designs, that formed the
90
Olmsted, Frederick Law. Frederick Law Olmsted, Landscape Architect, 1822-1903. Edited by Frederick
Law Olmsted, Jr. and Theodora Kimball. Vol. 1. New York, NY: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1922. 95-98.
91
Brocklebank, Ralph T Birkenhead: An Illustrated History. Breedon, Derby, 2003.
44

core of a system of public parks that by the middle of the nineteenth century, had triumphantly
unfurled across urban America.
45

Section 3: The Roots of the American Parks System
By the middle of the nineteenth century, the ideas of park planning and garden aesthetics
that had been laid out in England began to percolate across the Atlantic, and city planners took
notice. Olmsted’s visit to Birkenhead Park marks a key moment of contact, but in reality, English
parks had already been influencing the design of parks and gardens in colonial American cities
for two centuries. The first notable instances of this were in the squares of eastern metropolises,
which, more than simply adopting gardening techniques, played a role in the planning of cities
like Philadelphia. The impact of the English square garden on the early American city is
profound and demonstrable, underscoring the way in which (green) public spaces have been
linked with the identity of American cities since their conception. Furthermore, a history of the
American public parks movement would be incomplete without an examination of the social,
spatial, and aesthetic influences that shaped the early formation of urban America, and the
precedents for landscape design that were translated from England to the States.
The London Square and Early Park Planning in America
New Haven’s nine square plan, depicted as early as 1641 by colonist John Brockett,
shows the city’s plan as organized around a central square of greenspace, which exists today as
the New Haven Green. The organization of a residential town around a green square hearkens
back to the English tradition, and in this way, the square can be seen as a progenitor of the
English settlers’ vision of the New Haven Green as a central meeting space. In the United States,
the green took on a new function: in its role as a meeting space, it also served as a space of
worship for the Puritan settlers, who were free in the new world to practice their faith without
46

isk of persecution. While the Green was developed at the same time as the emergent squares and
parks of England, and as such is not a direct descendant of the tradition, its contemporariness
with the earliest squares like Covent Garden is worthy of note. The first settlements in the
colonies are certainly not independent of the English milieu from which they originated, and the
mark of the English is perhaps most visible in the aesthetic development of the Green.
The English landscape aesthetic is evident in the transformation of the New Haven
Green; though it was not planted in the formal way of many English squares, it took cues from
the British in its use of trees to provide shade and visual interest, though in this instance, elm
trees replaced the plane trees that were in vogue in England. In the nineteenth century, a fence
was erected around the Green, though it has existed since its inception as a fundamentally public
space. While the Green cannot be understood to be modeled directly off of the London square,
the influence of British landscaping of the eighteenth century, and the quintessentially British
idea of the green space as essential to the identity of the city is indelible.
Fig. 12. John Brockett’s 1641 nine square map of New Have
47

The London square garden became popular in the United States at a time when its
influence in England was waning—after the U.S. gained independence, the square became a
strategic tool in imbuing public space with a civic function, and creating a central space for
meeting and spatial layout of the town. Perhaps a more apt analog to the Georgian square can be
found in New Haven’s Wooster Square, which was laid out in the 1820s in a well-to-do
neighborhood that retains its residential nature to this day. 92 In other cities, such as Philadelphia,
the British landscape played a significant role in the formation of the city, even before the
English square became a dominant typology. It was not the earliest squares in London, but rather
the Moorfields, that inspired William Penn: he proposed a central civic square, with four squares
each of eight acres in the residential quadrants of the city that were, in the words of his surveyor,
Thomas Holme, “to be for the like uses of the Moore-fields in London.” 93 The public nature of
Fig. 13. Thomas
Holme’s 1683 map
of Philadelphia’s
squares
92
Lawrence, 113.
93 Penn, W. A Letter from William Penn, Proprietary and Governour of Pennsylvania in America, to the Committee
of the Free Society of Traders of that Province, Residing in London. A. Sowle, 1683. [Tottenham, Re-printed by J.
Coleman, 1881].
48

Philadelphia’s squares in addition to Penn’s vision of Philadelphia as a “greene Country Towne”
show how it was designed with the usage of all citizens in mind. 94 This seems somewhat
inconsistent with contemporary London squares, in that many were designed from the outset by
and for a rather elite group. Indeed, this may be true; they are in truth not identical in all aspects,
but perhaps indicative of an essentially American interpretation of the square. Rittenhouse
Square in particular stands out as an example of the deviation from the English model, despite
the presence of many of the essential qualities of the square garden. The park, laid out in 1683,
was originally named Southwest Square by Penn, and from the outset drew some of the city’s
wealthiest residents. Located in an upper class residential area, and surrounded by Victorian
mansions, its design for well-heeled users is clear. The exception to this is that the park was
made available to the public from the outset; as a result, the American interpretation of the
square takes on a role as a community meeting space more along the lines of the New Haven
Green than as an extension of the residential space as in private Georgian squares such as
Grosvenor, Berkeley, and Leicester. 95
James Oglethorpe’s plan for Savannah, Georgia took cues from Penn’s plan for
Philadelphia, and employed the square as a modular unit for residential organization that could
be used to grow the fledgling colony. Each square, designated as a ward, contained forty
residential lots surrounding a central greenspace, with additional “trustee lots” reserved for
commercial and civic use. 96
94
Penn, William. "Some Account of the Province of Pennsilvania in America; Lately Granted under the
Great Seal of England to William Penn, &c.," translated by Samuel Hazard. In Annals of
Pennsylvania, from the Discovery of the Delaware River, 1609-1682. Translated by Joshua Francis
Fisher. Philadelphia, 1850, 531.
95
Lawrence, 112.
96
Reps, J. W. (1992). The Making of Urban America: A History of City Planning in the United States. Princeton
University Press.
49

Fig. 14. View of Savannah, Georgia by Peter Gordon, 1734.
In The Making of Urban America, John Reps posits that the plan for Savannah was drawn from
the English tradition, rather than as a mere reproduction of existing squares in Philadelphia or
neighboring colonies. By the time that Savannah was in the process of being laid out, the likes of
Covent Garden, Grosvenor Square, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and St. James’s Square had come to
existence, and London was rapidly being seeded with residential squares. Reps notes,
Some of the Georgia trustees were active participants in the development of these
squares. Sir William Heathcote built what is now Chatham House in St. James’s Square
in 1734 [...] No doubt other trustees, generally persons of affluence, had similar first-hand
familiarity with the residential square as a unit of urban growth. 97
97
Ibid, 199.
50

While based at least conceptually on the squares in London, the Savannah plan succeeded in
providing a community based on neighborhood participation rather than the elite withdrawal
from it. Reps concludes, “The Georgia settlements constituted real innovations in urban design.
The basic module—ward, open square, and local streets [...] served as a practical device for
allowing urban expansion without formless sprawl.” 98 The legacy of the Oglethorpe plan lives on
in present-day Savannah, demonstrating the ultimate success of such a community-minded and
public space-driven city, in contrast to the class-oriented and exclusionary nature of England’s
squares, which have made the transition to public domain with mixed success.
Additionally, city planners in cities like Boston and New York drew inspiration from the
landscape movement that was developing across the pond. Charles Bullfinch took note in his
plan for Boston, laying out Tontine Crescent and Franklin Place in 1793, while in 1791, Pierre
L’Enfant established Lafayette Square in Washington D.C., not in the image of the architectures
of his French countrymen, but instead as an English square garden, which was designed to be for
public use. In New York, Union Square was laid out in 1811, Gramercy Park in 1831, and
Washington Square in 1851. Gramercy Park remains to this day a locked private square available
to paid members only. 99
The transition from private, residential parks to public squares that often are so
thoroughly embedded into the fabric of cities as to escape observation is a process that occurred
in England to some extent, but which is mostly an American phenomenon. This adaptation to
suit the urban needs of the fledgling nation shows the way in which the early American square
was not a direct copy of its English parents, but went through a process of translation, while still
98
Ibid.
99
Ibid, 113.
51

emaining fundamental to the identity of the city in question. Furthermore, the earliest American
park demonstrated the ability of the park to be used as a tool for sustainable urban development.
Rural Cemeteries and Transforming Attitudes toward Public Space in
Nineteenth Century America
Drawing from the tradition of the English landscape movement, Olmsted’s visit to
Birkenhead Park served as the inspiration for what would later become known as the Greensward
plan for Central Park. However, prior to the unveiling of the Central Park plan in 1857, the
design of rural cemeteries in the picturesque style was gaining traction in the United States. The
landscapes of Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, and
Laurel Hill Cemetery in Philadelphia, in their rural location and romantic aesthetic, served as
important precedents for the development of suburban America and park systems nationwide.
Many rural cemeteries were located on the rural margins of cities, and took advantage of the
space and proximity to nature to develop verdant park-like spaces replete with rolling hills,
winding drives, and contemplative groves. 100
Fig. 15. Plan of Green-Wood Cemetery,
Brooklyn, New York, by David b.
Douglas, 1839.
100
Schuyler, D. The New Urban Landscape: The Redefinition of City Form in Nineteenth-Century America. Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1988.
52

This emergent form of landscape design helped to make the rural landscape aesthetic that had
originated in England more compatible with patterns of American urbanism. In The New Urban
Landscape, David Schuyler maintains that the social impact of proto-suburban cemeteries like
Mount Auburn and Laurel Hill was to transform the idea of how a park within the city should
function, and what form it should take. Gradually, the square or plaza was superseded by a
preference for large open parks that captured the notion of rus in urbe. “The park, then,” argues
Schuyler, “embodied a new urban symbolism—the curvilinearity of the natural landscape—and
stood in sharp contrast to the straight lines and rigid angles of the gridiron, a pastoral counterpart
to the urban environment.” 101
In 1851, landscape designer and architect Andrew Jackson Downing (1815-1852)
lamented the lack of emphasis placed on the “sanitary value and importance of these breathing
places for these large cities, or the powerful part which they may be made to play in refining,
elevating, and affording enjoyment to the people at large. 102 Over the course of the next several
decades, the recognition that existing squares and small open spaces were not sufficient to
provide the public health service that was needed in accordance to Downing’s recommendations
would finally be made, leading to a general revision of urban public space. The sanitary need for
better greenspaces was compounded by the twin revelations that the urban population in cities
across the country was rapidly increasing, and, of the decrepit and often untenable conditions of
tenements and the factories and workplaces of the urban poor. Looking to the way that parks
were employed, if to a somewhat limited extent, for democratic purposes in Europe, landscape
architects like Downing and Olmsted recognized the potential for the full realization of
101
Ibid, 66.
102
Downing, A. J., Curtis, G. W., & Bremer, F. “State and Prospects of Horticulture.” In Rural Essays. Leavitt &
Allen, 1858, 81.
53

democratic public spaces in cities across the United States. Furthermore, in the latter half of the
nineteenth century, the American public caught wind of the advocacy of urban reformers and
enthusiasm of landscape designers, leading many cities, including Seattle, to push for their very
own park systems.
Frederick Law Olmsted and Central Park
Andrew Jackson Downing’s 1851 plan for the Washington Mall, predates the
Greensward plan by seven years, and serves as the first example of a large-scale city park to
emerge in the United States out of concerns for public health and articulation of an attempt to
“achieve a reconciliation of man and nature.” 103 Both Downing’s Mall and Central park
demonstrate the creation of artificial, second nature landscapes in the service of a goal to provide
something close to the experience of true rural first nature. Downing died in 1852, before his
plan for Washington was complete; as a result, the Mall never reached the full qualities of
romantic landscape park that it was intended to be. Nonetheless, the plan demonstrates an early
attempt to synthesize the ideas of English landscape design and experiments in rural cemetery
design in America in a large public park. The ideas for landscape design that Downing set forth
in his plan for Washington and writing of the time capture the spirit of a movement toward
establishing urban parks in the United States. In particular, Downing laid out a persuasive
argument in favor of constructing a large public park in the center of New York City. Drawing
from the same design sensibility that he had envisioned for Washington, Downing asserted that
the state of New York’s existing squares was insufficient to suit the needs of the rapidly growing
metropolis. Writing that the great city’s parks were “little door-yards of space,” Downing
lamented that the city “[had] not hitherto been able to afford sufficient land to give its citizens
103
Schuyler, 67.
54

[...] any breathing space for pure air, any recreation ground for healthful exercise [...] or any of
that lovely and refreshing natural beauty.” 104 In the place of those “mere grass-plats of verdure,”
Downing envisioned for New York a park of five hundred acres, located between thirty-fifth
street and the Harlem River, which would bring into the city “broad reaches of park and
pleasure-grounds, with a real feeling of the breadth and beauty of green fields, the perfume and
freshness of nature.” 105 This park, in addition to providing “a breathing zone” for New Yorkers,
would preserve for future generations an open space in the heart of the city, and would provide a
truly democratic space for all users, rather than an elite few. 106 The park, as Downing envisioned
it, would enable the city—and when replicated, the country—to achieve the true Republican
vision of the country’s founders. Such a dream would entail the opening of cultural, social, and
civic institutions to all, a lofty ideal, but a noble objective nonetheless. Central Park, at a
sweeping eight hundred and forty acres, captured in every sense Downing’s vision for a large,
democratic public park in the picturesque style, positioned at the heart of the city.
In 1857, after Egbert Viele, the Chief Engineer for the project was fired, the Central Park
Commission announced that a competition would be held for the design of Central Park.
Frederick Law Olmsted, thirty-five years old at the time, was serving under Viele as the
Superintendent for the Central Park Project. Olmsted, keen to try his hand at landscape design,
was introduced by his colleague, Andrew Jackson Downing, to Downing’s partner, Calvert
Vaux. Together, Olmsted and Vaux joined forces to collaborate on an entry for the Central Park
design competition. The plan that the team produced was drawn from Olmsted’s impressions of
his travels to Europe, from Birkenhead, from the practice and theory of Downing, and from the
104
Downing, A. J., Curtis, G. W., & Bremer, F. “The New York Park.” In Rural Essays. Leavitt & Allen, 1858,
147.
105
Ibid, 150.
106
Ibid, 149.
55

omantic styling of rural cemeteries and the Washington Mall. 107 The Greensward plan, as it was
known, was intended to provide a natural escape while existing in contrast to, yet still within the
city. The reaches of development had not yet subsumed the open land, but the planners correctly
anticipated that the area surrounding Central Park would soon be coveted real estate. Schuyler
writes, “This rus in urbe would provide the opportunity for relaxation in rural surroundings for
the less fortunate New Yorker; it would also keep for ever the natural contours and varied
surface of Manhattan Island as a reminder and a contrast.” 108 Indeed, though the final park was a
landscape of almost complete fabrication, the exposed bedrock, diverse plantings and artificial
waterscapes and vistas produced a park that appeared entirely natural. The name “greensward,”
evoking the undulating fields and meadows of the countryside, and more specifically the “open
field of clean, bright green-sward” of Birkenhead Park, drew upon a specific identity and set of
associations for the urban park.
Fig. 16. As-built plan of Olmsted and Vaux’s Greensward Plan for Central Park, 1871.
The plan consisted of five discrete landscapes that worked in tandem to maximize the
impression of space within the park, with transverse roads sunken into the terrain allowing traffic
107
Chadwick, 184.
108
Ibid.
56

to circulate through it while preserving views and “entirely conceal[ing] both the roads and the
vehicles moving in them, from the view of those walking or driving in the park.” 109 The park
was divided into upper and lower sections, with “bold and sweeping” slopes in the upper park
designed to be left in contrast to the “confined and formal lines of the city,” with asymmetrical
plantings throughout, and little or no ornament or architecture that might distract from the
naturalistic appeal of the space. 110 The lower park would be more diverse in landscape,
interspersed with an occasional “alluvial meadow,” and featured a rocky hillside known as the
Ramble, which served to direct attention toward this space for “rest and leisurely contemplation”
and away from the borders of the park. In the center was what Olmsted and Vaux described as an
“irregular table-land composed of a series of graceful undulations, suggesting a lawn or
gardenesque treatment,” that provided a transition from the rugged Ramble to the pastoral upper
meadow. 111 At the center, the preexisting Croton Reservoir provided a slight incongruence, but
the man-made lake nonetheless provided some variation to the terrain, and allowed visitors to
contemplate and circumambulate it. The park’s borders were planted with broad trees that
screened its interior from the city, with a broad boulevard encircling the entire scheme.
From the main entrance at Fifth Avenue, visitors would be guided toward the interior of
the park by a series of seemingly natural rock formations (which were in any case placed there
by the park engineers) and gentle rises in the terrain (again the product of careful landscaping)
until they arrived at an elevated central plateau called the Great Lawn, from which the visitor
could observe the far reaches of the park, unaware that the invisible hand of the park’s designers
had directed him there.
109
Olmsted, F. L. and Calvert Vaux, “Greensward.”
110
Ibid.
111
Ibid.
57

The most formal element of the park was a grand promenade, a feature that, according to
Olmsted and Vaux, contained “so many elements of grandeur and magnificence” as to deserve
recognition as an “essential feature in the arrangement of any large park.” 112 The promenade was
seen by the architects as an “artificial structure on a scale of magnitude commensurate with the
size of the park,” and thus a notable exception to the desire to preserve the natural appeal of the
park for the pleasure of weekend carriage rides, leisurely strolls, and the overall impression of
elegance and refinement. The promenade was a nod to a distinctly European attitude toward park
patronage and the roots of the design. Several other formal and programmatic elements, such as a
parade ground, a music hall, a playground, and a flower garden provided the more traditional
services of a neighborhood communal space. However, on the whole, the impression of the
landscape was one much more unstructured and unchoreographed. 113
One of the most striking features of Central Park is its large southern meadow, initially
called the Green, but which quickly assumed its present name, Sheep Meadow. The meadow best
encapsulates the second nature aesthetic in which Olmsted and Vaux styled the park. Though the
days in which sheep grazed in the park are long gone, the space has since become one of the
city’s most beloved spots for picnicking, sunbathing, and general recreation in the warmer
months.
112
Ibid.
113
Ibid.
58

Fig. 17-18. Central Park Sheep Meadow in 1864 vs. the meadow today.
59

This shows the effective repurposing of the pastoral style within the urban landscape; not only
does it demonstrate the success of rus in urbe as an aesthetic achievement, but also shows how
the pastoral has transitioned from the purely picturesque as a meadow for sheep grazing, to a
functioning social and civic landscape, as a meadow for human leisure. Though the English
precedent is made most clear in Sheep Meadow, it is also exemplary of the Italian legacy of park
design; both in its expression of rus in urbe and as a direct descendant of parks such as the Villa
Borghese, with its meadow that was mowed twice a year.
It is the park’s central space—the expansive fifty-five acre Great Lawn—that is the
designers’ shining achievement: it is a natural point of confluence, whose grassy void provides a
sense of freedom that is hard to find within the megalopolis. Likewise, the open plan of the Great
Lawn, and the ancillary Sheep Meadow, allows for all variety of unscripted human interaction,
while also providing a staging ground for concerts, political demonstrations, and the like.
Fig. 19. Image of a Central Park lie-in protest of the Vietnam War in 1969.
The activation of these stretches of rus in urbe imbues the park with a social responsibility, in
addition to its recreational one.
60

Prospect Park
The legacy of Central Park is indelible: it served not only to inform the works of the Olmsted
firm in later years, but in addition, created a precedent in the United States for the design of
public parks in large urban metropolises. Olmsted’s legacy can be seen in his design for Prospect
Park, which was laid out by the Olmsted Brothers’ firm ten years after Central Park, in 1867. The
immediate success of Central Park led the New York State Legislation to commission a park in
Brooklyn. The design was again spearheaded by Viele, who, despite the failure of his plan for
Central Park, was selected nonetheless. However, much as with Central Park, Viele failed to
reconcile the practical needs of the park—how to mitigate noise and disruption from the busy
Flatbush Avenue that cut through the property, and the role that the park was expected to play as
a social and civic space for the growing borough. Though Viele had already been paid for his
work, the plan was cast aside when James S. T. Stranahan, the president of the Brooklyn Park
Commission, asked Vaux to step in. 114 Vaux’s plan for Prospect Park was submitted in 1865;
later that year, Olmsted agreed once again to partner with him, taking over the design in May of
1865. The architects’ solution to the Flatbush Avenue issue was to cut out the eastern portion of
the park entirely, so as to preserve the “sense of enlarged freedom” of the park without bisecting
it with a major thoroughfare. 115 Unlike Central Park, Prospect Park was to be kept largely in its
natural state, preserving its “great diversity of surface” and existing trees and topography. 116 In
the First Annual Report of the Commissioners of Prospect Park, published in 1861, the following
rules were described in the plan to improve Prospect Hill in order to transform it into an effective
new public park:
114
Schuyler, 117.
115
Olmsted, Frederick Law. Annual Report of the Commissioners of Prospect Park. Brooklyn : The Commissioners,
New York, 1861, 13-14.
116
Ibid, 10.
61

First, studiously to conceal every appearance of art, however expensive, by which
the scenery is improved; secondly, carefully to disguise the real boundary,
however large or small the area; thirdly, to hide the natural defects and to display
the natural beauties to the utmost advantage, fourthly, to obtain from the most
favorable points the greatest possible extent of view, and to conceal all objects,
which limit or obstruct the view; fifthly, by so blending all the parts, that while
the beauties of each are distinctly visible, there are no abrupt contrasts painful to
the eye, and destroying the symmetry of the whole; thus securing the unity and
harmony so essential to the perfection of the design. 117
By planting trees around the entire perimeter of the park, Olmsted and Vaux once again sought
to blur the boundary of the park, while its irregular shape added to the sense of discovery within
and suggested a nebulous border.
Fig. 20. Image of Prospect Park Lake, Brooklyn, from the First Annual Report of the Commissioners of Prospect Park, 1861.
117
Ibid, 42.
62

As with Central park, the park was divided into distinct regions, known in the plan as “The
Glen,” “The Lake,” and “The Forest,” among others. The presence of “rustic seats and arbors,”
“wooded dells” with small ponds, and above all, a sprawling meadow (today known as Long
Meadow), produced for the site a pastoral quality that was both distinct from Central Park in its
execution of a secluded romantic landscape, and similar in its composition—a Central Park in
miniature. 118
Fig. 21. Plan of Prospect Park, by Olmsted & Vaux, 1901.
Olmsted and Vaux’s design for Prospect Park once again merges the elements of the
three natures in the service of a rural, second nature sensibility. By deciding to alter the
landscape as little as possible, both to economize and for the sake of improving upon the existing
scheme, the forested areas were left intact. The “stony ravines shaded with trees and made
118
Ibid, 46.
63

picturesque with shrubs,” whose “forms and arrangement remind [oneself] of mountain scenery”
recalled a first nature wilderness, while deer paddocks to the southeast were an homage to the
Royal hunting parks of England. 119 In addition, the vast Green brought to mind once again the
second nature meadows of Birkenhead and Hyde Park. The rugged woods, set against the
arcadian landscape, provided a striking backdrop and variation in perspective. Likewise, the
artificial lake, with is irregular form and shaded banks, provided a naturalistic and romantic
contrast to the more dramatic sylvan ravines. 120 Finally, the presence of zoological gardens, a
plaza, and other architectural additions hinted at a more formal, third nature organization,
indicating that there were certain elements that were understood by Olmsted and Vaux to be
essential ingredients to even the most naturalistic park. 121 The Royal parks were clearly sourced
as an inspiration for the arrangement of Prospect Park, and the Park Commissioner’s report goes
so far as to connect Crown Parks to the very definition of the word “park” itself. The report
notes, “the word park has different significations, but that in which we are now interested has
grown out of its application centuries ago, simply to hunting grounds.” 122 The architects concede
that the parks that have emerged from this tradition have evolved away from their original
purpose of hunting, but instead exist to provide pleasure to visitors, regardless of social stature,
and the advantages of good health and fresh air that are wanting in the city. This demonstrates
not only the nineteenth century definition of park, as Olmsted himself articulated it, but also the
way that it outgrew its origins as an elite space for hunting and entertainment. Implicit in
Olmsted’s definition of the park is an understanding of it as a public space, and one that provides
119
Ibid, 21.
120
Ibid.
121
Zoos in Olmsted-designed Central Park, Prospect Park, Woodland Park in Seattle and Franklin Park in Boston
support this notion.
122
Ibid, 15.
64

a landscape for the activation of common users. The supplanting of sheep with humans in
Central Park demonstrates Olmsted’s understanding of parks as subject to transformation
through time, not in form, but rather in function. This definition makes apparent the agency that
individual users claim over public spaces, a much more democratic alternative to the private
communal ownership of London’s squares. Of course, there are inherent risks to this approach:
as the proponents of privatizing London squares had surmised, public ownership and upkeep, ran
the risk of developing into a tragedy of the commons. Yet a more realistic and pressing concern
pertained to how parks would be able to afford this necessary upkeep, without the Royal coffers
or the collective wealth of a neighborhood of upper-class tenants. The solution that Central Park,
Prospect Park, and many others like it set forth was to form nonprofit conservancies dedicated to
raising funds for the management of large public parks. It was not until 1980, after years of
mismanagement, poor upkeep, and general decline that the Central Park Conservancy was
formed. 123 Today, the Conservancy attracts the philanthropy of many of New York’s most
influential residents, and its nearly $80 million operating budget is managed by the Central Park
Conservancy, in contract with the City of New York. 124 The continued private investment in
Central parks has set a strong precedent for cities across the country, thereby elevating the public
park to the stature of the countless civic institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the
Guggenheim, and the Lincoln Center, that benefit from their proximity to this Crown Jewel of
American Parks.
123
Yarrow, Andrew L. "Private Money Is Keeping Central Park Healthy." New York Times, October 29, 1990, B3.
124
Central Park Conservancy, "About Us." Last modified 2018.
65

Section 4: The Formation of Seattle’s Public Parks System
Frederick Law Olmsted’s initial success in New York catapulted his Brookline,
Massachusetts firm to the elite ranks of America’s foremost architects and urban planners. The
Olmsted firm was responsible for the realization of over five hundred projects, including public
parks, private residences, and university campuses nationwide. One of the most important
legacies that Frederick Law Olmsted Sr. left in the course of his thirty-plus-year career as a
landscape architect was to establish a paradigm for urban parks systems across the United States.
Harboring the conviction that “a large park should not be the sole object in view,” but rather that
a “comprehensive arrangement” of several smaller parks and spaces for recreation—in other
words, a system of parks—would best serve cities with a dearth of urban greenspaces, allowed
for a particular mode of park production. Buffalo, New York, was the first example of this
method of landscape planning. 125
Olmsted effected a continuous stretch of green space by connecting individual sites via a
system of parkways that were planted with trees and greenery, thereby providing scenic carriage
drives and access to the same kind of leisure and verdure for locals beyond the reach of the larger
parks. 126 This kind of program gained even more traction in Chicago, whose South Parks, now
Lincoln and Jackson Parks, were ingeniously joined by the Midway Plaisance (now known
simply as the Midway), a narrow, mile-long pleasure drive that provided a contiguous stretch of
greenery for Hyde Park residents. Jackson Park, located on the shore of Lake Michigan, did not
immediately receive the rustic landscape treatment that Central and Prospect Parks had achieved,
125
Olmsted, Frederick Law. Preliminary Report Respecting a Public Park in Buffalo. Buffalo, NY:
Matthews & Warren, 1869.
126
Schuyler, 131.
66

ut rather remained desolate and swampy until Chicago was chosen as the site of the 1893
World’s Columbian Exposition—what would eventually go down as a world’s fair unparalleled
in history. Olmsted’s transformation of Jackson Park to create a vast, 700 acre pleasure garden in
the span of less than two years was—and still is—a remarkable feat, and moreover demonstrated
the potential for the adaptive reuse of struggling parks. 127 The transition from styling parks in a
naturalistic manner a ceremonial, often idealistic one that fit the aesthetic and civic aspirations of
the City Beautiful movement is a hallmark of this time, and Chicago is a prime example. The
White City, as the fair was termed after the uniform white styling of its neoclassical buildings,
was one of the pioneering agents of the City Beautiful movement that transformed parks like
Downing’s Washington Mall into their modern configuration. While this particular architectural
moment was not lasting, it promoted an understanding of the landscape in service of the
beautification of cities, in addition to assuming a civic and moralistic function.
In the years following the adoption of the Greensward plan in 1857, the role of the park
shifted from being an independent structure to becoming an instrumental tool in the arsenal of
city planners. Schuyler observes that the role of landscape architecture took on a new dimension
in the latter half of the nineteenth century, writing “What began as an attempt to provide city
residents with large open spaces that would promote public health and afford opportunities for
recreation gradually embraced the planning of the metropolis as a totality.” 128 This critical shift
of the park as an individual unit to the park as part of a larger system underpins an important
transition from the nineteenth century conception of the role of the park within the urban
landscape to something that approaches our modern-day understanding of it. It is at this point
that considerations of access become more germane, and that the park takes on a role akin to that
127
Chadwick, 195.
128
Schuyler, 182.
67

of museums, theaters, and concert halls as a cultural institution. The World’s Columbian
Exposition put American parks on the map as part of a new tradition of park planning, and
landscape designers worldwide—often, in those very same places in Europe that had provided
the inspiration for Olmsted in the first place—took note.
John Charles Olmsted
By 1895, at age seventy-three, Frederick Law Olmsted Sr. retired from his active role in
the Olmsted firm. By the end of his career, the firm, often referred to as the Olmsted Brothers—
named for Olmsted Sr., his son, Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., and to his stepson, John Charles
Olmsted—had cemented its status as the preeminent landscape architecture firm in the United
States. Olmsted Sr.’s failing health and withdrawal from public life allowed the pair, who had
both been trained by and had worked alongside their father for decades, to take over the
operation in his tradition. Of the brothers, John Charles Olmsted is the focus of our attention, as
he was ultimately responsible for the laying out of Seattle’s public park system.
John Charles Olmsted was born in 1852 to John Hull Olmsted and Mary Perkins
Olmsted. When John Charles was five years old, his father—Frederick Law Olmsted Sr.’s
brother—died, leaving the young boy and his two sisters in the care of his mother and Frederick
Law Olmsted Sr., who soon married each other to keep the family together. John Charles, thus
Olmsted Sr.’s nephew-cum-stepson, graduated from Yale in 1875, and apprenticed under his
stepfather, eventually joining the team in Brookline. 129 As Frederick Law Olmsted’s health
declined, he remained the figurehead of the firm, but John Charles took over work on many of
the firm’s projects, making a name for himself through his own skill as a landscape architect. In
129
Hockaday, J. Greenscapes: Olmsted’s Pacific Northwest. Washington State University Press. 2009, 1.
68

1899, he was elected the first president of the American Society of Landscape Architects,
marking his distinguished position within the field.
The First Annual Report of the Board of Parks Commissioners for Seattle,
Washington, 1903
With eastern cities reaching saturation after the previous century’s rapid growth, many
easterners turned to the west for the opportunity to make social connections and to help the
young cities of the west to develop. Seattle, Washington, at the time a small city known for its
sawmills and lumber industry, had experienced a period of tremendous growth and economic
prosperity with the advent of the Klondike Gold Rush, which lasted from 1896-1899. As an
outpost on the way to Alaska, Seattle was able to profit from the many prospectors who
sojourned there.
In addition to the economic wealth that the city gained, it also garnered name recognition,
putting it on the map as one of the major (albeit small) cities of the west. Thus, it was around
1900 that the city government began to look for ways to secure Seattle’s status as an important
urban center in the northwest. In 1900, Portland, Oregon had reached a population of over
90,426, slightly outnumbering Seattle, which had a population of 80,671. 130 By 1910, Seattle’s
population outpaced Portland, increasing by 194% to a total population of 237,194 in 1910,
compared to Portland’s 207,214 citizens. 131 These two cities sought to grow their populations
and expand their global recognition, and both saw parks—with their extensive and illustrious
history as symbols of royal and imperial wealth as in Rome and London, and their success as
130
"Population of the 100 Largest Urban Places: 1900." Table. United States Census Bureau. June 15, 1998.
131
"Population of the 100 Largest Urban Places: 1910." Table. United States Census Bureau. June 15, 1998.
69

urban cultural centers in the United States—as the key to establishing that they possessed the
cultural institutions and refinement on par with cities in the east. Portland was the first to reach
out to the Olmsted Brothers firm in Brookline. By that time, the firm’s accolades in landscape
design spoke for themselves, making them the most desirable candidate for cities dedicated to
achieving an urban park system on par with Boston, Buffalo, or Chicago. With Frederick Law
Olmsted Sr. out of commission, the firm sent John Olmsted to Portland in 1903. The City of
Roses had just begun preparations for the 1905 Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition, and
sought the Olmsteds’ expertise on the matter after the resounding success of the World’s
Columbian Exposition. 132 Just a month later, out of a combination of competitive impulse and
ambition, Seattle park commissioners invited Olmsted to visit their own rising city.
The conception for a park system for Seattle predates Olmsted by several decades, but
John Olmsted was the one to put a comprehensive plan into effect. If Olmsted’s plan has left the
strongest legacy, its success is because of the fortunate timing in which it was produced.
Seattle’s first park was Denny Park, a former cemetery that was converted into a park and laid
out in a rudimentary manner in 1884. It was redesigned and landscaped by local landscape
architect E. O. Schwagerl a decade later. In 1892, Schwagerl, then serving as Park
Superintendent for Seattle public parks, produced a plan for a park system in Seattle. 133
However, the plan lacked the sufficient funding, and the economic and physical devastation of
the Great Fire of 1889 made it impossible to proceed. The city was focused on rebuilding the 100
acres in Seattle’s central business district that had been devastated by the fire. 134 Schwagerl’s
efforts, while prescient of the comprehensive park system that was to come, were inopportune in
132
Hockaday, 13.
133
Mendelson, Kathy. “Edward Otto Schwagerl and the Golden Age of Seattle Park Planning.” Pacific Northwest
Garden History, Nov. 9, 2009.
134
City of Seattle. "The Great Seattle Fire of 1889." Seattle Municipal Archives.
70

their timing. Furthermore, the setbacks were compounded by the sweeping depression that
became known as the Panic of 1893. The plan was abandoned in 1895. 135
The impetus to reexamine the possibility for producing a parks system in Seattle was
produced by the booming economy and rapid growth that came as a result of the 1896 gold rush
in Alaska and the Yukon, new trade prospects in the Pacific, and freshly constructed railways. 136
Correspondence between the city and the Olmsted firm was initiated by J. D. Blackwell, an
engineer for the Seattle Electric Company. Fearing that the construction of new parks would be
“in danger of being butchered by persons unskilled in park work,” Blackwell wrote to Percy
Jones, an assistant to the Olmsted Brothers, inquiring as to “under what conditions we could get
Mr. Olstead [sic], or some good landscape architect, to design a scheme of general improvement
for the parks here.” He continues, “The natural park features of most of this land are as good as
any I have ever seen and with the proper treatment at the present time would place Seattle well to
the front as a place of beautiful Parks.” 137
135
Blackford, M. G. The Lost Dream: Businessmen and City Planning on the Pacific Coast, 1890-1920. Ohio State
University Press, 1993.
136
Hockaday, 38.
137
Blackwell, J. S. Letter to P. R. Jones, March 21, 1902. Job #2690. Friends of Seattle's Olmsted Parks
Collection. Seattle Central Library, Seattle, WA.
71

Fig. 22.
72

Upon the receipt of the letter from Blackwell, the firm responded with some doubt, maintaining
“our employment to prepare a general plan even on the reduced terms which we have named,
would involve so large an expenditure that it seems hardly probable that the Park Commission
and City Government would agree to it.” 138 In December of 1902, the Brookline firm received an
additional letter, this time from Charles Saunders, the Secretary to the Seattle Board of Parks
Commissioners. Saunders noted the firm’s partnership with Portland to devise a scheme for
parks, and pledging the Board’s support for a general plan for Seattle. The city recognized that
the construction of a parks system could not come at a better time: the local economy was
thriving, and real estate prices in undeveloped areas, including north Seattle, remained low. The
correspondence reads:
Acting upon the suggestions you made to the Portland Board, since the reorganization of
the Seattle Board of Park Commissioners, we have been using efforts—First, to secure an
adequate appropriation to acquire land for park ways and boulevards. Secondly, [...] it is
our aim to secure such an [sic] one to advise us in the proper laying out of a system by
which we can not only improve the land owned by us for park purposes, situated in the
different portions of the city, but also to devise a series of roadways and parkways which
will tie these isolated tracts together, as well as suggest an improvement of the squares
and open places under our control. 139
The response of the Olmsted firm came on December 23, 1902, as a reply to Saunders, noting
that “Mr. F. L. Olmsted, Jr., is employed by Harvard University to deliver lectures and otherwise
direct the course on Landscape Architecture.” Instead, they suggested, “Mr. John C. Olmsted,
our senior member, has the designing of parks and numerous other works on hand but can
arrange to visit Seattle at almost any time.” They continued, “We should like, if your Board does
not object to the expense involved to have our most experienced assistant, Mr. Percy R. Jones, to
138
Olmsted Brothers to Blackwell, J. S., 1902. Job # 2690. Friends of Seattle's Olmsted Parks
Collection. Seattle Central Library, Seattle, WA.
139
Saunders, C. W. to Olmsted, F. L., December 16, 1902. Job # 2690. Friends of Seattle's Olmsted Parks
Collection. Seattle Central Library, Seattle, WA.
73

go to Seattle to assist Mr. Olmsted. Mr. Blackwell of the Seattle Electric Company knows Mr.
Jones.” 140
On April 30, 1903, Olmsted arrived in Seattle. He met with Charles W. Saunders, the
Secretary of State and Captain John F. Pratt of the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, along with
E. F. Blaine, Chairman of the Seattle Board of Park Commissioners, and Charles Saunders,
Secretary and Commissioner. Olmsted writes in his field notes on that day: “With Jones we went
first to the County Court House Cupola and later to the Washington Hotel Cupola to get a bird’s
eye view of the city.” The group then visited Lincoln, Volunteer, and “the street railway park
called Madison Park.” 141 Olmsted’s initial impressions of the city’s existing parks were not
extremely favorable, as he felt that early spaces like Schwagerl’s Denny Park were treated with
disregard to the context of local flora and geography, and produced irregular, formalistic, fusty
spaces that were outdated in their styling. 142 Ironically, it should be noted that the designs for
Schwagerl’s parks were influenced by the work of Frederick Law Olmsted Sr. 143
The city as John Olmsted first encountered it in 1903 was drastically different from the
way he left it upon his final visit in 1911. In 1903, there were only a handful of notable public
parks, including Volunteer Park, Woodland Park, and Washington Park (that would eventually
become the Washington Park Arboretum), though, as Hockaday astutely notes, there were
several privately owned parks in existence. 144 In the span of eight years, Olmsted succeeded in
laying out an ambitious plan for a system of parks, scenic boulevards, playgrounds, and formal
140
Olmsted Brothers to Saunders, C. W., December 23, 1902. Job # 2690. Friends of Seattle's Olmsted Parks
Collection. Seattle Central Library, Seattle, WA.
141
Olmsted, John Charles. Letter, "Seattle Parks," April 30, 1903. Job # 2690: Seattle park system
(1902-1907). Friends of Seattle's Olmsted Parks. Seattle Central Library, Seattle, WA.
142
Klingle, M. W. (2008). Emerald City: An Environmental History of Seattle. Yale University Press.
143
Mendelson, n.p.
144
Hockaday, 41.
74

gardens, to name some of elements that it contained, in addition to landscaping the grounds for
the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific-Exposition on the University of Washington campus, and
assisting in the northward development of the city.
In 1903, the Seattle Board of Parks Commissioners published The First Annual Report of
the Board of Park Commissioners, a report written by Olmsted that delineates his vision for “a
comprehensive scheme of parks and parkways.” Olmsted notes the wealth of natural scenery and
vistas of Lake Washington, Puget Sound, the “snow-capped peaks” of the Olympic and Cascade
mountain ranges, and “wooded hills” of yet undeveloped neighborhoods like Queen Anne. 145
The park plan was not so much intended to cultivate a sense of rus in urbe as in eastern parks,
because in many senses, the country—or in this case, the first nature wilderness—was still
present in the young city. Olmsted describes with reverence the presence within the city of the
“valuable remains of the original evergreen forests which covered the whole country and which
[...] have a very dense and beautiful undergrowth.” 146 The main objective of the plan, then, was
one of preservation, coupled with sustainable expansion. Olmsted writes:
In designing a system of parks and parkways the primary aim should be to secure and
preserve for the use of the people as much as possible of these advantages of water and
mountain views and of woodlands, well distributed and conveniently located. An ideal
system would involve taking all the borders of the different bodies of water [...] and to
enlarge these fringes at convenient and suitable points, so as to include considerable
bodies of woodland, as well as some fairly level land, which can be cleared and covered
with grass for field sports and for the enjoyment of meadow scenery. 147
The main agenda of the report was to describe the proposed system of parks, noting present
conditions and topographic considerations, the potential parkways that could be used to connect
145
Olmsted, John Charles. First Annual Report of the Board of Park Commissioners (Seattle, WA: Board of Park
Commissioners, 1903). In Parks, Playgrounds and Boulevards of Seattle, Washington. Seattle, WA: Board of
Park Commissioners, 1909, 75.
146
Ibid.
147
Ibid.
75

them, proposing recommendations for the improvement of existing parks, and recommending
tracts of land that could be purchased by the city to construct future parks. Olmsted conceded in
the plan that to adopt all of the measures that he recommended would be prohibitively expensive.
Instead, he argued for the strong consideration of a number of parkways, including developing a
tree-lined boulevard and improving existing bicycle paths along Lake Washington, producing a
scenic drive along the Magnolia Bluffs, and building playgrounds along Mercer, Jefferson, and
Rainier streets, the latter of which was a scheme “especially needed” because the proposed
locations were “close to or surrounded by a large population of a class most requiring such
playgrounds.” 148 Finally, the report made its top priority to secure land in “portions of the city
which are not already provided with parks,” 149 in order to ascertain that as many citizens as
possible should at the very least have access to a parkway or small neighborhood park.
A year after Olmsted’s report was published, the Seattle City Council held a vote to grant
independence to the Seattle parks commission. Upon the successful approval of the amendment,
John W. Thomson was elected to serve as the city’s Park Superintendent, and was therefore
responsible for the carrying out of Olmsted’s plan. James Frederick “Fred” Dawson was sent by
the firm to assist Thomson in laying out the scheme. 150 Olmsted returned to Brookline in the
intervening years while his plans were carried out by a local team, until he was summoned to
Seattle once again in 1906 by planners for the Alaska-Pacific-Yukon-Exposition, which was to
take place in the summer of 1909. By this time, significant progress was made, although the
majority of new constructions would not be completed until the 1910s.
148
Olmsted, John Charles. First Annual Report of the Board of Park Commissioners, 79.
149
Ibid, 81.
150
Hockaday, 44.
76

Fig. 23. 1909 map of existing and proposed parks following Olmsted’s work in Seattle.
77

The transformation of two parks—Green Lake Park (with its neighbor, Woodland Park)
and Volunteer Park—are of particular interest because they demonstrate the almost complete
redesign of two preexisting parks under Olmsted’s landscape principles. Their ultimate success
as public spaces can be traced to John Olmsted’s work, in particular to the diversity of program
that they contain, and the connectivity with other greenspaces that the architect sought to foster.
Woodland, Green Lake, and Ravenna Parks
One of the most appreciable legacies of Olmsted’s time in Seattle can be seen in the
greenbelt that extends from Woodland Park in north central Seattle to Green Lake Park
immediately adjacent to it, along the tree-lined greenway of Ravenna Boulevard to the east, and
finally through Cowen Park and the Ravenna Park Ravine to the University of Washington
Campus. The history of Woodland Park predates the 1903 plan, while the other spaces were until
then undeveloped tracts of nature. Guy Phinney, an English real estate developer, moved to
Seattle in the early 1880s and set about acquiring land in the neighborhood now named as
Phinney Ridge after its namesake. Phinney set out to construct a park in the English landscape
tradition on the grounds
of his estate, complete
with a picturesque deer
meadow, formal rose
garden, and a small
menagerie.
Fig. 24. Postcard of Woodland Park before Olmsted redevelopment,
With formal walks, flower beds, and animal menagerie.
78

In 1889, six years after Phinney’s death, the city of Seattle acquired Phinney’s estate, and
the menagerie was converted to a small zoo. 151 Little was done to improve the site until 1903. 152
Blackwell’s original contact with the Olmsted firm was in fact spurred by a conflict over the
construction of a road for an electric streetcar that bisected the park, which drew concern from
the public, including Blackwell, over the improper treatment of current and future parks in the
developing city. As the Phinney Ridge location of Woodland Park was at the time located along
the northern fringes of the city, a streetcar line devised by developer Guy C. Phinney had
previously been built to bring visitors from the central parts of the city to the new park, with its
small zoo that had been founded by Phinney in 1899. In response to the December 23, 1903
correspondence between the Olmsted firm and the Board of Parks Commissioners, the Board
agreed to enter into a contract with the Olmsted Brothers, stating that they had already set out to
“ascertain, if possible, what could be done at that time to harmonize the interests of the City and
the railroad company in the proposal of the electric road to cross the park.” The missive noted,
“Since then the city’s and railroad’s interests have been amicably arranged.” The agreement
allowed the railcar to remain, but Olmsted fought hard to ascertain that there were no new
electric streetcar routes or high-volume roads built, contending, “As it is not likely to be
changed, every effort should be made to minimize the objectionableness of the railroad in the
park.” 153 This conviction that can be traced back to Frederick Law Olmsted Sr.’s efforts to
151 Jones, Grant R., John Charles Coe, and Dennis R. Paulson. Woodland Park Zoo Long-Range Plan,
Development Guidelines and Exhibit Scenarios. Seattle, WA: Jones & Jones, Architects &
Landscape Architects Ltd., 1976.
152
However, it should be noted that Schwagerl’s 1892 plan proposed a similar parkway joining Ravenna and
Woodland Parks and the university campus, though the plan was never carried out.+
153
Olmsted, John Charles. First Annual Report of the Board of Park Commissioners, 119.
+Sherwood, Don. Interpretive Essay on the History of Seattle's Parks and Playgrounds. Seattle, WA:
Seattle Parks Department, Seattle Central Library, 1979.
79

prevent unnecessary disruption form carriage drives in Prospect and Central Parks. 154 Despite
Olmsted’s efforts, the disturbance caused by the insertion of the electric road was irrevocable; in
1930, the city council proposed to extend State Route 99 through the park over the existing
streetcar route, launching a highly contentious debate over the ordinance, which was eventually
voted into existence. In 1933, the expressway was constructed, much to the chagrin of park
proponents and preservationists, casting a permanent rift between the zoological gardens and
Upper and Lower Woodland Park. 155
In transforming Woodland Park, Olmsted maintained the essential components of
Phinney’s English landscape, but sought to translate the romantic style into the northwest
vernacular. On Phinney’s gardenesque 156 estate—the part of the park where the Woodland Park
Zoo would eventually be constructed—Olmsted mused:
There being less natural beauty in the upper portion of the park, since it is flat and has no
view [...] it would be comparatively unobjectionable, if it be thought desirable, to devote
part of this portion of the park largely to a collection of hardy wild animals. Sufficient
space should, however, be provided for field sports, and also for a formal garden when
this can be afforded. 157
As Olmsted predicted, this westernmost part of the park was converted to a zoo, the rose garden
maintained, and the grassy lawns planted for recreational purposes. The portion of the park
known as Upper Woodland, Olmsted found, still held the traces of a first nature wilderness. He
remarked in the 1903 report, “a large portion of this park is covered with the remains of native
woods. Most of the largest and best trees have been cut, but what remain are amply sufficient to
154
Hockaday, 47-48.
155
Ibid, 47.
156
The term gardenesque was first used by John Claudius Loudon in 1832, describing a garden that is treated in a
manner that resembles the picturesque, but which is highly maintained, and preserves formal symmetries where a
rural garden relies on its asymmetry to achieve its aesthetic effect.+
157
Olmsted, John Charles. First Annual Report of the Board of Park Commissioners, 119.
+Earliest usage in Loudon, John Claudius. "Preface." The Gardener's Magazine 8 (1832): iv.
80

preserve the typical characteristics of the woods which originally clothed all the region.” 158 By
preserving the woods, Olmsted correctly anticipated that by the end of the century, the sliver of
nature would be one of the few remaining [reasonably] untouched thickets in the city. Finally, in
the area encompassing Lower Woodland Park and the southern shores of Green Lake, Olmsted
designed a second nature landscape, providing a rus in urbe that echoed the sheep meadow of
Central Park or the green surrounding Prospect Park Lake. For this area, he concluded, “much of
the ground in the park should be covered with grass [...] as this will be one of the most attractive
places for crowds to ramble and sit under the trees.” 159 The park—with its formal gardens,
idyllic meadows, and rugged wilderness—can be seen as encompassing Hunt’s three natures,
and, as emerging out of the English landscape tradition as part of a lineage that includes Central
Park and Birkenhead Parks that inspired it. In the deer meadows, there are echoes of the Royal
parks such as Hyde and St. James’s; however, in the case of Woodland, the three discrete
territories that compose it are not in the service of an overall impression of rusticity. However,
the most remarkable parallel that can be drawn is not with an English park, but rather with the
Villa Borghese. In this park more than any other, the juxtaposition between wilderness,
formalistic, and bucolic landscapes is strong, and allow the visitor to navigate between these
spaces at will. Each space contains its own set of programs and thus, rather than relying on
varied perspectives or invoking spaces beyond, the park—or as it should rather be considered,
parks—brings together a diverse set of landscapes and permutations of plan, in a way that is not
activated by the visitor, per se, but rather which activates the visitor.
158
Ibid.
159
Ibid.
81

Fig. 25. Olmsted’s 1910 preliminary plan for Woodland Park, with formal gardens, zoo and open lawns in the west,
wooded rambles in the middle, and grassy open space connecting to Green Lake Park to the east.
If Woodland Park represents a landscape of action like the Villa Borghese, then Green
Lake is a landscape that is acted upon, like Central Park. Green Lake was named for the algae
that gave the lake a greenish tint, and made it a rather unexpected place for settlers to begin to
develop homesteads along its murky shores. The area was not annexed to Seattle until 1891, by
which time it had become a desirable place to live. 160 When Olmsted first encountered the park
160
Sherwood, Don. Green Lake & Park. Seattle, WA. Don Sherwood Parks History Collection.
Seattle Municipal Archives, Seattle, WA, 1968.
82

in 1903, it was in much the same as it had been found, although limited development in the
neighborhood had already occurred. Seeking to expand the acreage available for lakefront real
estate, Olmsted proposed dredging the lake to lower the water level and create regular banks. 161
This was achieved in 1911, when the lake was lowered by six feet. 162 Additionally, Olmsted
advocated connecting existing boulevards to produce a single pleasure drive encircling the lake.
In the treatment of the landscape, Olmsted proposed a picturesque scheme, with a few small,
irregular wooded islands near to the shore, spread around the lake. 163 He described “a gentle
beach of gravel” for the recreation of swimmers and sunbathers, the importation of swans and
other elegant waterfowl, and the strategic placement of boat houses so as not to distract from the
overall panorama, but placed for convenient access of boaters. Finally, by strategically enlarging
land between the scenic boulevard and the lake, this space could be used for the same kinds of
summertime activity as the grassy fields of Woodland Park—the gently sloping lawn dotted with
evergreen trees produced a bucolic landscape of second nature perfect for picnicking, wandering,
and spending time by the lake.
Green Lake Park is Olmsted’s most ambitious example of a naturalistic landscape
facilitated by man. From angling willow trees to ducks plying its surface, is difficult to see past
Olmsted’s English landscape to the glacial lake that existed before. A grand plane tree-lined
161
Olmsted, John Charles. First Annual Report of the Board of Park Commissioners. 100.
162
Sherwood, Don. Green Lake & Park. 1968.
163
A single island, known as Duck Island, was constructed by the Depression-era Works Progress Administration.
In the 1930s, the WPA also oversaw the construction of a wading pool at the Park’s northern tip, and a small
ornamental footbridge in the same location. +
+Sherwood, Don. Green Lake & Park. 1968.
83

walk off Ravenna Boulevard serves as
the unofficial entrance to the park,
recalling the formalized elm walk in
Central Park, and the tree-lined gravel
footpath that follows the lake’s
curvilinear borders brings to mind the
walk along the Serpentine in Hyde
Park. Additional modifications
included a bathhouse on the northwest
side of the lake (now a theater),
constructed in the 1920s, and a
Fig. 26. Olmsted’s Preliminary Plan for Green Lake, 1910
recreation center on the northeast,
built in the 1950s, including basketball courts and a swimming pool that opened onto the
swimming beach. A grand plane tree-lined walk further developed the park into a space where
the hand of its builders is unmistakable.
It is a space that is animated by its
users, as the throngs of city dwellers
that gather there on languid summer
days for all forms of outdoor
activities—paddle boarding,
rollerblading, playing soccer, jogging,
and sunbathing, to name a few—
Fig. 27. Swimmers at Green Lake in 1936.
demonstrate. While some of these
84

activities are facilitated by the program of the park, with the exception of the swimming beach
and boathouses, they were not developed from the outset, but rather adopted gradually
throughout the century.
The third component of Olmsted’s north central Seattle park trifecta is Ravenna Park, a
forested ravine that boasted colossal old growth trees and a meandering creek that fed into Green
Lake. While much of the surrounding territory had already been deforested, the steeply graded,
perpetually damp Ravenna woods had been too difficult to fell or burn, and preserved a great
deal of their natural character, to the extent that “there [had] been much less destruction of the
large trees by woodchoppers, and of the undergrowth and trees by fires than at any other equally
accessible point in or about the city.” 164 Though the park was at the time privately owned,
Olmsted advocated for its purchase by the city, with the intention of creating a string of parks not
unlike Frederick Law Olmsted’s Emerald Necklace scheme for an interconnected system of
parks and parkways in Boston. John Olmsted envisioned a drive running from the grounds of the
University of Washington to—and possibly through—Ravenna, if such a drive from campus
were constructed, and “a liberal strip of land of varying width,” with drives on either side, wide
enough in places be used “as a local
playground or for field sports”
connecting Ravenna Park to Green
Lake. 165 The Ravenna neighborhood was
eventually incorporated into the city in
Fig. 28. Postcard of Ravenna Park before Olmsted’s landscape
transformation, showing a free-flowing Ravenna Creek, circa 1908.
1907, and the park was purchased by the
164
Olmsted, John Charles. First Annual Report of the Board of Park Commissioners, 98.
165
Ibid, 99.
85

parks department in 1911. In accordance with Olmsted’s vision, 166 in 1911, a drive was cut
through the park at the base of the ravine, thereby drawing the missing link in the campus-to-lake
system. In clearing the land to make room for the drive, many of the old-growth trees were lost,
but the design managed to avoid the catastrophic fate of Woodland Park with respect to Highway
99, as the path was never paved over, and now is only open to pedestrian use. The most negative
byproduct of the construction of the Ravenna drive and boulevard was that it required municipal
engineers to bury the creek underground, thus greatly reducing its flow through the park and the
natural beauty that it produced. 167 In the 1930s, the city created a grassy sports field at the
southeastern end of the park, and in the 1961, when Interstate 5 was being routed through the
Roosevelt neighborhood, dirt from the construction site was heaped to street level and planted
with grass to create Cowen Park, a playfield and playground at the northwest end of the park. 168
Three Natures Redux
Taken as a whole, the trio of Woodland, Green Lake, and Ravenna Parks demonstrates
once again the diversity of landscape that was employed in on an individual level to connected
spaces. While all three parks contain some elements of formal, rural, and natural landscapes,
when read in context, each of Hunt’s three natures is highlighted independently in one of the
parks. In Woodland Park, the zoo, rose garden, and adjacent playfields are highly formalized
spaces, while Highway 99’s cleaving of the park into east and west sections effectively produces
166
though perhaps contrary to his true intentions, as he wrote in 1903 “it would not be of sufficient use to justify the
damage that would be done to the local scenery and its interference with the most enjoyable use of grounds by
visitors on foot” +
167
Sherwood, Don. Cowen/Ravenna Park and Ravenna Boulevard. Seattle, WA. Don Sherwood Parks History
Collection. Seattle Municipal Archives, Seattle, WA, 1968.
+Ibid, 98.
168
Ibid.
86

two separate parks—Woodland Park Zoo, and Woodland Park proper. Due to its proximity to the
lake, Lower Woodland Park in particular, naturally flows into the larger Green Lake Park
complex. Grouping these two spaces together makes it easier to understand the Zoo as a first
nature space, and the Woodland-Green Lake composite as a second nature one. Even the wooded
portion of Upper Woodland, though preserving some of the original qualities of the pre-
Olmstedian evergreen forest, has a choreographed nature, with rolling lawns and numerous
picnic shelters, that Ravenna lacks. Like Green Lake, it presents a second nature aesthetic in the
service of a first nature experience. Ravenna Park is a rugged first nature space that has
transformed the least from its original state. Despite the presence of playgrounds and playfields,
the park is left largely to its natural devices, and visitors are not allowed to stray far from the
well-worn dirt footpaths that cut through it. It is a space not intended to bring nature into the city,
but rather to preserve it, and in strolling beneath the cooling canopy of native maples, hemlocks,
and cedars, the visitor is transported, not to mountainous spaces beyond, but rather to the virgin
forests of a Seattle past.
Volunteer Park
By the time that Olmsted made his maiden visit to Seattle, Volunteer Park was already
well-established as Seattle’s foremost park, and through its Olmstedian landscape treatment,
stands as one of the best examples of the romantic style suited for the conditions of the
Northwest that the architect sought to achieve. For the design of Volunteer Park, Olmsted
pictured “at least one notably large unbroken lawn [...] graded with graceful surfaces,” and
curvilinear walks traversing the park “to afford views over the broadest possible lawns, with
foregrounds of trees and shrubbery.” 169
169
Olmsted, John Charles. First Annual Report of the Board of Park Commissioners. 115.
87

Figure 29. Olmsted’s Preliminary Plan for Volunteer Park, 1909
When it came to the existing vegetation and landscaping, Olmsted did not mince words, noting
that there was an overabundance of large trees taking away from the desired picturesque effect
created by the lawns. “Another reason for eliminating most of the fir trees from this park,”
Olmsted noted, “is that they are associated in the mind with wild surroundings, and hence are not
quite appropriate on clipped lawns.” 170 Additionally, the architect was strongly opposed to
mixing landscape elements in the same space. He wrote of the presence of otherwise formal
flower beds “scattered promiscuously in portions of the ground, treated in other respects
informally,” and maintained that “there should be an association of formal flower beds with
170
Ibid, 116.
88

some strong architectural features of formal design,” or rather, the “strictly formal flower
garden” should be “separated from the informal portions of the park by shrubbery
plantations.” 171 From the entrance on 15th avenue, a curving road led to the greenhouse, then
turned onto a wide drive lined on both sides with broad-leafed chestnut trees. This central drive,
which eventually widened into a concourse in passing the reservoir, formal flower gardens, and a
band stand, terminated at the water tower, where visitors could climb its spiraling stairs to take in
a view of the city from on high. The egg-shaped reservoir had been built in 1901, and the brickand-concrete
water tower with an upper gallery for observation was erected—as per Olmsted’s
plan—in 1906. A glass conservatory housing orchids and other exotics was constructed in
1912. 172 The structure was based on London’s Crystal Palace, built in Hyde Park for London’s
1851 Great Exhibition. The aesthetic consideration of placing an ornate greenhouse on the site of
a picturesque garden makes clear the conceptual link between the park and its English
antecedents.
Figure 30. Postcard
featuring an aerial
view of the Olmsted
design. Reservoir is
visible at Left, with
formal flower beds,
concourse, and
bandstand at right.
The Volunteer Park
Conservatory, based
on London’s Crystal
Palace, is visible in the
background.
171
Ibid, 115.
172
Sherwood, Don. Volunteer Park History. Seattle, WA. Don Sherwood Parks History Collection. Seattle
Municipal Archives, Seattle, WA, 1972.
89

In the 1903 Park Commissioner’s report, Olmsted advocated for the creation of a
parkway linking Washington Park and Volunteer Park. Volunteer Hill Parkway, as Olmsted
called it in the report, was to be “one of the most desirable, and probably one of the most
immediately profitable” parkways in the city. 173 In 1908, Olmsted’s dream was realized, with the
construction Interlaken Boulevard. The road was steep and full of switchbacks, and provided a
pleasurable drive via winding roads through a verdant glen. While scenic in nature and providing
an enjoyable route for cyclists, Interlaken does not create the same sense of continuity that
Ravenna Boulevard does. In part, the topographic discrepancy between Washington Park,
located on Lake Washington, and Volunteer Park, located on the crest of Capitol Hill, makes it
difficult to create spatial unity, and as the two parks are large and free-standing, they function
rather independently from each other, and in this way are not in need of a unifying force. They
function best on their own.
In a similar arrangement to Central Park and Prospect Park, Volunteer Park is owned by
the city of Seattle, but efforts to preserve and organize events within the park are carried out by
the Volunteer Park Trust. Though the park receives funding from and is managed by the Seattle
Department of Parks and Recreation, the tradition of community-based stewardship is central to
the park, as its name belies. 174 Neighborhood involvement and financial investment in the park
have made possible the close preservation of the Olmstedian scheme. As a result, the park exists
much as it did when improved by John Olmsted. Its program remains similarly unaffected, and
its sloping lawns remain as suitable as ever for wandering, taking in views, and lounging. The
173 Ibid, 106.
174
The park was actually named in honor of soldiers in the Spanish-American War, but this fact has been somewhat
buried in the annals of Seattle history. +
+Hockaday, 44.
90

presence of the Seattle Asian Art Museum and the Volunteer Park Conservatory provide cultural
program where diversity of landscape and activity is absent. Above all, this pastoral park, and its
direct proximity to the similarly romantic Lake View Cemetery makes the entire scheme a
quintessential Olmstedian landscape, characteristic of the late nineteenth century American park
as an interpretation of the English landscape movement. Volunteer Park has not made the
transition into the present in the way that many early nineteenth century American parks have,
but rather exists as a nostalgic homage to the Olmsted Brothers’ idyllic shaping of the urban
landscape of the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
91

Fig. 30. Left (above): The formal rose garden at Woodland Park. (below): Tree-lined walk in
Green Lake Park, which recalls the elm walk in Central Park. Right (above): Weiss/Manfredi’s
Olympic Sculpture Park. The z-shaped greenspace is adapted around existing infrastructure,
spanning Eliott Avenue and the railroad tracks. (Below):Olympic Sculpture Park is integrated
into the Seattle Waterfront and is a popular spot for tourists, cyclists, and dog walkers.

Conclusion
A study of Seattle public parks would be incomplete without touching briefly on
contemporary parks. Richard Haag’s 1975 Gas Works Park is the best example of adaptive reuse
of obsolete environments. Built around the extant remains of a repurposed coal gasification
plant, Gas Works Park demonstrates the continuing success of Seattle park planning, the role that
historical preservation can extend to outdoor environments, and the manifold possibilities for
programming in the urban public park. The park had a pronounced influence on park planning
and the design leisure spaces in Europe, most notably in Peter Latz’s Landschaftspark Duisburg-
Nord, completed in Duisburg, Germany in 1999. 175 In some ways, Gas Works Park can be seen
as a rejection of the Olmsted tradition, with the afterlife of an industrial site being preserved
rather than the creation of an imagined pastoral one. However, both parks can be seen as highly
fabricated; Green Lake required dredging to increase lakefront real estate, and Gas Works
incorporates the remains of an industrial history of production and destruction.
Figure 32. Gas Works Park as a sight
for leisure, with the man-made Kite
Hill on the right, and the coal
gasification plant visible at left.
175
Lubow, Arthur. "The Anti-Olmsted." New York Times, May 16, 2004.
94

Fig. 33.
Above: Gas Works Park
before reuse, when it was
a coal gasification plant.
Below: Satellite view of
Gas Works Park today.
95

Figure 34. Freeway Park passing over Interstate 5.
Lawrence Halprin’s 1976 Freeway Park poses a radically different vision for the urban
public park. Located adjacent to the Seattle Convention Center, and spanning over Interstate 5 in
the heart of downtown Seattle, the park eschews the traditional (read: Olmstedian) greenscape in
favor of a brutalist concrete scheme. However, nature is not absent from the landscape, but rather
is invoked through the stepped concrete and cascading waterfall that transforms the rectilinear
architecture into a secluded river gorge. The original planting scheme featured trees and
vegetation on and surrounding the built landscape, producing a jungle-like quality of a landscape
intentionally overrun by nature. However, the park’s location in a nonresidential area made it
difficult for the park to take on the community qualities of a public space, and the park
developed a reputation for being unsafe after a string of crimes occurred there in the early
2000s. 176 Efforts to enhance the safety of the park were made by clearing some of the vegetation
and improving sightlines, lighting, and security, but the park’s negative press and lack of
frequent neighborhood users has made it difficult to reclaim the space. Nonetheless, this park
served as an important design precedent for hyper-urban parks worldwide.
176
A New Vision for Freeway Park (PDF), Seattle Parks Department, 2005.
96

This arcing study of Seattle’s public parks and their precedents serves to contextualize
Manfredi/Weiss’s competition-winning design for the Olympic Sculpture Park, the most recent
development in the lineage of public park planning. The park, completed in 2011, was designed
and built under the auspices of the Seattle Art Museum, which acquired the land in partnership
with the Trust for Public Land. It is the public-private partnership between city and museum that
makes such an imaginative design possible, which speaks to the elitism of the space, as it would
not be possible without the resources of a private institution and private donations. Built over a
former brownfield site, the design reimagines public space as a curated experience, in which the
typology of the art museum blends with the urban/natural/postindustrial landscape to create a
new possibility for access to cultural programing and an alternative identity for the classical park
built out of and challenging the Olmsted tradition.
Figure 35. Left: Brownfield site before development of Olympic Sculpture Park.
Right: The park as it exists today.
Changing ideas of the use parks highlights a growing tension between public park use
and the understanding of the park as a truly public space. First, though parks are understood to be
97

Fig. 36. Olympic Sculpture Park. Weiss/Manfredi, 2007.

open to all, there are certain limitations of use and codes of conduct that exist. Parks in Seattle
are generally open to the public between the hours of 4:00 A.M. and 11:30 P.M., thus limiting
overnight use. The notable exception to this rule is Green Lake Park, which is open to the public
24/7; however, Seattle Municipal Code 18.12.250 prevents overnight use of the park. 177 ’ 178 The
rules governing public park usage use are tied to citywide “civility laws”, which prohibit
overnight camping at Seattle Public Parks overnight unless in posted campsites. Yet this rule is
very loosely enforced; in 2017, only seven park users were charged with entering and remaining
in a park beyond posted hours. 179 The lack of enforcement points to a larger city-wide struggle
with homelessness; while homeless camps are banned in Seattle public parks, an estimated
12,112 people are experiencing homelessness in Seattle this year. 180 In 2018, Seattle had the
third-largest homeless population behind New York and Los Angeles. Rising income inequality
in the city, spiking rates of drug addiction fueled by the opioid crisis, and the steady increase of
homelessness leaves law enforcement in a tricky position; while many pressure the Seattle Police
to crack down on illegal encampments, police cannot do so unless they are able to offer
alternative and temporary housing to individuals. In 2017, homeless shelters reached maximum
capacity, leaving law enforcement powerless to regulate illegal encampments. 181 The uneven
177
Seattle Municipal Code 18.12.245 states: “General park operating hours shall be between four (4:00) a.m. and
eleven-thirty (11:30) p.m. Individual parks, unless provided otherwise pursuant to this section, shall not be open to
the public between eleven-thirty (11:30) p.m. and four (4:00) a.m. (Ord. 117645 § 1, 1995.)
178 According to the Seattle Municipal Code 18.12.250, “It is unlawful to camp in any park except at places set aside
and posted for such purposes by the Superintendent.” In Municipal Code 18.12.030 (Enforcement Against
Unauthorized Use of Park Property), The city defines to camp as “to remain overnight, to erect a tent or other
shelter, or to use sleeping equipment, a vehicle, or a trailer camper, for the purpose of or in such a way as will permit
remaining overnight.” (Ord. 106615 § 13, 1977.)
179
Seattle Municipal Court. "Civility Charges." Chart. City of Seattle. 2019.
180
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The 2018 Annual Homeless Assessment Report
(AHAR) to Congress. By Meghan Henry, Anna Mahathey, Tyler Morrill, Anna Robinson, Azim Shivji,
and Rian Watt. Washington, DC, 2018.
181
Greenstone, Scott. "Why don't police enforce laws against camping in Seattle parks and streets?"
Seattle Times (Seattle, WA), September 3, 2018, Local.
Previous Page: Fig. 35. Aerial View of Olympic Sculpture Park, Weiss/Manfredi, 2007.
98

enforcement of of illegal camping laws stands as an example of the fraught nature of public park
use in Seattle, leaving dependent but illegal users of the park at risk of being ticketed, and
without money or ability to appear in court, potentially facing criminal charges.
Fig. 37: A tent pitched under picnic shelter at the Woodland Park Lawn Bowling Club.
The history of parks is by no means complete with this western perspective, nor does
tracing it to the modern day mean that it has reached a final state of evolution. This social and
historical perspective on parks instead serves as a record of the ways in which public space has
transformed in definition and form throughout time. In particular, it is an account of how
greenspaces in particular have developed along such guiding principles as rus in urbe, Hunt’s
three natures, and the right of the commons. However, as demonstrated, the language used to
describe parks and who can claim ownership over them is by no means clear, and can vary even
in the terminology used to describe even a single park. The term park in itself seems pliable, and
when gardens, plazas, and squares are thrown into the mix, the language is at once precise and
insufficiently vague. It is easy to put a finger on what a park is not—at least in the abstract—but
99

much more difficult to determine what it is. A park can take the form of a garden, for
instance, but the term garden is not enough to describe the intangible public and social role that
the park plays. A park can be small or large, formal or naturalistic, available to many or few.
How, then, can we put a finger on the meaning of the most central term to this essay, the park?
As noted before, Frederick Law Olmsted Sr. aligned its meaning with the European hunting
park, a definition that has not withstood the test of time in the way that Olmsted believed it
would. For an interpretation that is more in line with present day needs for parks, we turn to
Olmsted again, but this time it is John Charles instead of Frederick Law who provides the
working definition. In the 1903 Park Commissioner’s report, John Olmsted set out “to define the
purpose of parks, their desirable sizes, locations and natural features.” 182 He divided them into
the following six classes:
1. Small urban parks, whose “main function is to afford a certain spaciousness to the
locality in which they occur,” with a “beauty of a landscape gardening sort.” This
is the traffic circle, the p-patch, the converted lot, the parklet.
2. Ornamental squares or small parks, where visitors are able to “enjoy a fair amount
of landscape beauty amidst the buildings and streets.” These parks are often
centrally located, and may take the form of paved plazas or small squares with
some rather minor landscaping.
3. Playgrounds, in which “landscape beauty is subordinated” to the purpose of play.
4. Playfields, which should contain “a border [...] set aside and improved to secure
some degree of landscape enjoyment of those who are not playing on the field.”
This is the space for competition, for athletic achievement, and for light
recreation.
5. Small parks “in which landscape beauty is the primary consideration.” These
parks combine some of the previous elements, like sports fields and playgrounds,
but can function on their own, as a formal garden or urban refuge.
6. The large landscape park, the source of study of this essay, in which natural views
are framed, beauty enhanced, and “a considerable body of natural landscape is
preserved or more or less created by man with the aid of nature.” 183
182
Olmsted, John Charles. “Supplemental Report on Annexed Territory and General Development.” In Parks,
Playgrounds and Boulevards of Seattle, Washington, 1909. 124.
183
Ibid, 124-125.
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As they stand, Olmsted’s categories provide a strong framework to describe nearly any urban
park. Of notable exception are the urban wildlife refuge, the state park, and the nature preserve,
around which design considerations are made for the flora and fauna rather than man. Of
particular interest are the sites of breakdown, where categories overlap, or fail to do so. These are
spaces of the present, like Richard Haag’s 1975 Gas Works Park, Lawrence Halprin’s 1976
Freeway Park, and, most recently, Weiss/Manfredi’s 2007 Olympic Sculpture Park.
The City of Seattle uses its own metric to define public parks, categorizing them by use rather
than composition:
‘Park’ means all parks and bodies of water contained therein, squares, drives, parkways,
boulevards, trails, golf courses, museums, aquaria, zoos, beaches, playgrounds,
playfields, botanical gardens, greenbelts, parking lots, community centers and other park,
recreation and open space areas and buildings and facilities comprising the parks and
recreation system of the City under the management and control of the Superintendent. 184
The Roman parco, English square and Crown Park, the two Olmsted definitions, and the City of
Seattle’s definition of the park may seem to be at odds with each other; however, they simply
demonstrate the politically and historically fraught nature of the public park. A simple definition
eludes us, as the development of these spaces was neither linear nor socially neutral. What’s
more, to define the term park in such plain terms would be insufficient to describe the incredible
and vast systems that the term encompasses.
The question of what comes next for Seattle is a difficult one. How can park planners
better design parks to make parks more democratic? Though they offer different interpretations
of the meaning of park as public space, both Olmsted and Weiss/Manfredi’s Seattle park designs
demonstrate the ability of the park to bring leisure and access to nature to the public. Ideas of
public health, recreation, culture, and regional identity are tied into Seattle’s diverse park
184
Seattle Municipal Code 18.12.030. (Ord. 106615 § 3, 1977.). Certain drives are not included within this rule,
namely Ravenna Boulevard and Lake Washington Boulevard.
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program to varying degrees of success. The underlying tension, then, is to what degree these
spaces are made available to the public, and who or what was prioritized in their design and
realization. This study has revealed that the ideas of what parks are and who has the rights to use
them have constantly shifted throughout history and into the present. Even though most cities in
the world have public parks, and Seattle in particular boasts a wealth of park resources, as
Seattle’s growing homeless population demonstrates, the legal and true rules of use, as well as
their enforcement, do not always match up. Though there is no clear solution that can be
proposed, this essay reveals that the complexity of the issue has historic precedent reaching back
to ancient Rome. In order to attempt to improve access to parks, rehabilitate struggling
greenspaces, and ensure that the conditions across parks are more equal, urban planners and
landscape architects should first attempt to come to a holistic understanding of the history of
parks and the intention of their designers. More than anything, though, contemporary designers
have transformed the way that we think about parks by questioning what the urban park looks
like. Gas Works Park may shrug at the picturesque landscape of Volunteer Park, but it seems that
John Olmsted may have looked favorably upon the insistently non-Olmstedian landscape after
all. In the 1903 Parks Commissioner’s Report, he writes,
The point of land between the two northerly arms of Lake Union and south of the railroad
should be secured as a playground and waterfront park. The population on a considerable
area north of Lake Union would be distant from Woodland Park, and would be greatly
benefitted by this little park or playground. 185
Though the varying park typologies that have been investigated in this essay are extremely
diverse in form, they are all in the service of the same pursuit: to bring fresh air, open space, and
nature—whether in the form of a sculpture park or a rus in urbe landscape—into the city.
Moreover, it is not their visual trappings, the amount of resources they possess, or the amenities
185
Olmsted, John Charles. First Annual Report of the Board of Park Commissioners. 112.
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they provide, but rather the public function that they serve that makes public parks incalculably
precious to cities. Though the Olmsted parks were established with certain priorities in mind,
Frederick Law Olmsted’s vision rings true today. We return one last time to his 1858 letter to the
New York Park Commissioners, to examine it with new eyes. “It is one great purpose of the
Park” he wrote,
to supply to the hundreds of thousands of tired workers, who have no opportunity to
spend their summers in the country, a specimen of God's handiwork that shall be to them,
inexpensively, what a month or two in the White Mountains or the Adirondacks is, at
great cost, to those in easier circumstances.” 186
This, more than anything, is the meaning of the term “public park,” and the ultimate reason that
communities must continue striving to preserve, improve, and ensure that urban parks are, and
continue to be, available to all.
186
Olmsted, Frederick Law. Letter to Board of the Commissioners of the Central Park, May 31, 1858.
105

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Appendix II: Index of Images
Fig. 1. Gleason, Kathryn L. Plan of the Campus Martius with Porticus Pompeiana. Image. 1994.
Journal of Garden History.
Fig. 2. Lanciani, Rodolfo. Forma Urbis Roma. Milan, 1893.
Fig. 3. "Domus Aurea" of Emperor Nero, planned palace, reconstruction by Johann
Bernhard Fischer von Erlach, after description of Suetonius Tranquillus, copper
engraving. 1760. Alamy.
Fig. 4. Lanciani, Rodolfo. Forma Urbis Roma. Thermae Traiani overlaid with the Domus Aurea,
1893.
Fig. 5. Heinz the Younger. Villa Borghese. Oil on Canvas, 1625
Fig. 6. Pianta del Giardino del Eccellentissimo Signore Principe Borghese fuori di Porta
Pinciana [Villa Borghese] (from Falda, Gardens of Rome), before 1695
Fig. 7. Felice, Simon. View of the Villa Borghese. Illustration. 61.532.26(15). The Elisha
Whittelsey Collection. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Etching, 1677.
Fig. 8. Bird's Eye View of Leicester Square. Map. 1750.
Fig. 9. Nicholls, Sutton. Bird's-eye view of Leicester Square, London Metropolitan
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Fig. 10. Rocque, John. "A plan of the cities of London and Westminster, and borough of
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Fig. 11. John Henning’s Ionic Screen at Hyde Park Corner, 1826, in London’s Royal Parks.
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Fig. 12. Brockett, John. New Haven in 1641. 1641. Image.
Fig. 13. Holme, Thomas. “A Portraiture of the City of Philadelphia in the Province of Pennsylvania
in America,” in William Penn, A Letter from William Penn, proprietary and
governour of Pennsylvania in America, to the committee of the Free society of
traders of that province, residing in London (London: A Sowle, 1683).
Fig. 14. Gordon, Peter. “A View of Savannah as it stood the 29th of March 1734 To the Honorable
The Trustees for establishing the Colony of Georgia in America; This view of the
Town of Savannah is humbly dedicated by their Honours Obliged and Most
Obedient Servant Peter Gordon.” London, 1734.
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Fig. 15. Douglas, David B. Plan of Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn, New York, 1839.
Fig. 16. Olmsted, Frederick Law and Calvert Vaux. Greensward Plan of Central Park, 1872.
Fig. 17. “Spring in Central Park,” Central Park Sheep Meadow, New York, late 19 th century. Public
Domain.
Fig. 18. Sheep Meadow, April 2004. Public Domain.
Fig. 19. Gossett, Carl T. Jr. Antiwar Protestors Holding a Lie-in in Central Park’s Sheep Meadow,
New York Times, Nov. 14, 1969.
Fig. 20. Meyer, Fritz. “Prospect Park—Interior View from Redout Hill.” In First Annual Report of
the Commissioners of Prospect Park, 1861.
Fig. 21. Olmsted & Vaux. “Plan of Prospect Park,” Brooklyn, New York, 1901.
Fig. 22. Blackwell, J. S. Letter to P. R. Jones, March 21, 1902. Job #2690. Friends of Seattle's
Olmsted Parks Collection. Seattle Central Library, Seattle, WA.
Fig. 23. Seattle Board of Park Commissioners. "Parks, Boulevards, and Playgrounds of
Seattle." Map. Seattle Municipal Archives. 1909.
Fig. 24. “Beautiful Seattle in Woodland Park.” Friends of Seattle’s Olmsted Parks, 1900.
Fig. 25 Olmsted, J. C. “Woodland Park Preliminary Plan,” Seattle Park Commission, 1910.
Fig. 26. . ---. “Green Lake Boulevard Preliminary Plan,” Seattle Park Commission, 1910.
Fig. 27. Green Lake Beach, Swimmers. Seattle Municipal Archives, Jun. 25, 1936.
Fig. 28. “Mineral Springs, Ravenna Park, Seattle, Washington,” Seattle Public Library, 1905.
Fig. 29. Olmsted, J. C. “Volunteer Park Preliminary Plan,” 1909.
Fig. 30. Images by author.
Fig. 31. “Birdseye View of Volunteer Park,” Seattle Washington, early 20 th c.
Fig. 32. Gas Works Park, Seattle, 2014. Tighe Photography.
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Fig. 33. “Aerial view of the Seattle Gas Works.” Pacific Coast Architecture Database, City of
Seattle, Parks and Recreation Department, 1965.
Fig. 34. Richard Longstreth. “Freeway Park,” Lawrence Halprin & Associates, The Cultural
Landscape Foundation, 1981.
Fig. 35. Olympic Sculpture Park Before and After Redevelopment. Weiss/Manfredi, 2007.
Fig. 36. Aerial View of Olympic Sculpture Park, Weiss/Manfredi, 2007.
Fig. 37. Image by author.
114