In regard to freedom of movement, I think Olmsted would be puzzled by the restrictive character of many contemporary public landscapes. Constructed wetlands, which capture and filter stormwater, reduce nutrient loads, and create diverse wildlife habitat, are intended to contain water either on the surface or just below the soil surface and to minimize damage to grasses, vegetation, and soils, and are generally off-limits to the public. In addition, many new landscapes, such as New York City’s High Line, restrict movement by means of defined pathways or boardwalks. I don’t think Olmsted would approve.
One reason for his opposition to flower beds in parks was that they tended to turn parkgoers into spectators rather than participants, and he wanted people to be able to go anywhere and everywhere, which was not possible with planting beds—or with today’s wetlands. It is important to remember that Olmsted was not an environmentalist in the modern sense; he was a humanist. He advocated preserving selected wilderness areas not for their own sake but because of their effect on people. “The enjoyment of scenery employs the mind without fatigue and yet exercises it, tranquilizes it and yet enlivens it,” he wrote, “and thus, through the influence of the mind over the body, gives the effect of refreshing rest and reinvigoration of the whole system.”
City parks are urban infrastructure, although Olmsted never used such a technocratic term. His talent was to turn engineering infrastructure into something richer and more rewarding, as he did in Boston, where the Emerald Necklace started life as a municipal drainage system to control tidal flooding, but which he transformed into a chain of parks and waterways linking Boston Common to Franklin Park. The parkways of Buffalo and Brooklyn were not simply traffic arteries but linear parks. Ocean Parkway and Eastern Parkway are the antecedents of the scenic restricted-access highways such as the Merritt Parkway, the Bronx River Parkway, and the Taconic State Parkway that later appeared in the greater New York City area, and of New Deal projects such as the Blue Ridge Parkway in the Appalachian Mountains and Skyline Drive in the Shenandoah Valley. The concept of combining functions—transportation and recreation, engineering and beautification—can be traced to Olmsted and remains an important lesson for today, whether we are building flood control measures, solar farms, interstate highways, or airports. By background and temperament, he was a generalist, and he always resisted the specialist’s narrow attitude toward design. If we are to really build back better, we need to take a similar approach.
Olmsted had the rare ability to take the long view. “I have all my life been considering distant effects and always sacrificing immediate success and applause to that of the future. In laying out Central Park we determined to think of no result to be realized in less than forty years,” he wrote his son, Rick. Forty years is a long time, and it meant that Olmsted could never witness the full realization of many of the landscapes he planned. That is perhaps his most important lesson of all: patience.