Hello, welcome to Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site. My name is Alan Banks, and I'm going to be taking
you through the design studios of the Olmsted firm. A little bit before we start,
this site in Brookline was where Frederick Law Olmsted moved to from New York City--kind of
in mid-career. He had already designed Central Park and Prospect Park in Brooklyn and
had expanded his portfolio to include
other types of designs like Riverside near Chicago (a very early
planned suburban community), the Capitol grounds in Washington DC. And he moves up here
to Brookline really because he's starting to get much more involved with the Boston Park System, which many people
call the Emerald Necklace. But the firm that he brings up here actually remains
in operation here for ninety seven years, being guided not only by him, but also
his two sons John Charles and Frederick Law Olmsted Junior (Charlie and
Rick). And the firm remains here in some form all
the way up until 1980 when this becomes part of the National Park Service. So what we're going to be
touring is actually the studios that the Olmsteds and their associates built over a series
of about forty years to serve as a space where things were created
that represented their ideas--whether it was a plan, whether it was a
photograph, whether it was a model. What we're really going to be seeing as
we go through the office wing is that conduit between the intangible idea
of a designer and the tangible landscape that sometimes was three thousand miles away being
built. So why don't we go take a walk.
Okay, where we're standing now is in the North Parlor of the 1810 home that
Olmsted had purchased when he moved up here from New York. He merely converted this room into
his design studio, and in fact, behind me is the way this room would have looked around 1886-1887.
We estimate that by the time the Olmsteds kind of the
firm itself had wrapped itself up, they had been involved with about 6,000 landscape commissions in
forty-six of the fifty states. We get a lot of people from New York here though who only think Olmsted
as the designer of Central Park. We get other people in the local area in Boston who only think
of him as the designer of the Emerald Necklace. But by the time the Olmsted firm again
had wrapped up, they had work on thousands of projects all across the country and
some in Canada too, and a few international projects. But whatever the project was,
it always started with the same thing and that was an idea. And this was a room where these
ideas were generated because a very important thing to note about Olmsted is he once said,
"Service must precede art. There can be no beauty without utility." Or maybe
his partner Calvert Vaux described it more succinctly by talking about the "noble
motive." But the point was before you even put pencil to paper the first thing you
needed to know is what was this design to do. A public park was designed,
for example, to be a respite for people living in the city to create nature that people could, you know,
pass through and hopefully mitigate some of the effects of living in urban areas. But a
college campus design was not going to be like that. It was going to be designed primarily to
facilitate education. In fact, a funny story and maybe apocryphal was that somebody once
asked Olmsted why the lines on his campus designs were so straight when the ones in his
parks were so curvy. He said because college students find time to meander
enough without my help. So again, important thing to note as we talk about Olmsted design was
the fact that it was never based primarily on aesthetics, but again it was
primarily based on purpose. And when we go into the design studios,
we're really going to be seeing where that intangible idea that may have been generated in this
room--maybe by Olmsted or Charles Eliot
or Harry Codman--was then able to be put into a tangible form.
And once that tangible form was created, you could then take that material, bring
it three thousand miles away, and put into three-dimensions. So why don't we go take a walk on the office
wing, and we're going to talk a little bit about design process.
We'll start off in the photo archives and work our way through. We'll talk about blueprinting and drafting
and all the things that went into creating these landscapes. So, again, follow me.
Although Frederick Law Olmsted is the most famous of the Olmsteds, it would actually be his two
sons John Charles and Fred Junior who would be most prolific. And due to the fact that the firm
was expanding tremendously, especially early in the twentieth century, the need for office space was
acute. So over the series of about forty years, they added on the space
we're about to go into. We're actually kind of standing in
what links the original farmhouse to that office space. And what this office space
represents really is something that's I think important to note that when we talk about Olmsted landscapes,
we're really talking not so much about a man but a firm.
Olmsted you really can kind of think of as a conductor of an orchestra. He brought people, and his
sons brought in people who had the talents to carry out the ideas that
they been generating in the North Parlor. So as we're going to see it was a very
laborious process to get a landscape created, and it called
for various skills from various people who are again able to take those intangible
ideas and create the tangible material that then can be used to build
the landscapes. So I'm going to take a walk up the stairs and actually go up to the photographic record room.
Okay, as we were discussing earlier when we were in the North Parlor when we
talked about ideas, we talk about the fact that these ideas had to be put into some type
of tangible form. And being that landscape architecture is such
a visual profession, photography very early on was an important thing that the Olmsteds
learned to exploit. These drawers that you see around me were filled with about
sixty-six thousand photographs, and most of the photographs in these drawers
were stored in
these little black photo albums. And inside these albums you
would find the mounted--usually with a description of what they were--
pictures of the locations. And these albums really serve multiple
purposes. I mean, for one thing, it documented the work that they were doing. Another important thing is it made the
work transferable. In that sense, I mean that people could see these landscapes without
without actually having to travel to them. Another thing they also created was a portfolio
of sorts. So when, for example, the Olmsteds would work on a project like Rock Creek Park
down in Washington DC, they could pull out those photos when they were talking to the people
of Boulder, Colorado who also asked the firm to design a park along a creek. So they
really were a tool, a design tool, for them to use. And just to
prove how important photography was of the Olmsteds,
back then it wasn't whipping out the Instamatic or the iphone. It was sometimes a big deal to
take photographs but they felt was important enough that they needed to do it.
And obviously, the fact that sixty six thousand photographs were stored in these drawers kind of
proves how important photography was. So again, just one design tool that
they used. As we travel through, we'll be talking bit more about the way these places got built.
want you follow me now. We're actually going to be going into the Engineer's office and talk a
little bit about the creation of the "hardscape." So follow me.
So, we're now standing the architectural department. At this desk would have sat Charles Waite. They used
to call him "Chick," and his specialty was developing features within the landscape
that oftentimes is described as the "hardscape"--things like gazebos, balustrades,
again, the non-organic things that you might find in a landscape. It was a very technical
field--one that I would never get involved with because there was a lot of math involved with it, but,
it was an essential component to landscape design. Now a lot of the features that they would
design for these landscapes, they could be very, very formal, especially during the early twentieth century. And when they
would design these very elaborate private estates all across the country, they were
designing places that would have, again, iron work and different types of things that
one we consider to be very formal. If you look a lot though at the Olmsted Senior era
park designs, you see a lot of the structures being extremely rustic.
And a really good example of that is a bridge in the Back Bay Fens,
which was described by one of the firm members as looking like the work of
an unskilled mason and a partially standing ruin.
They were paying it a compliment because in the case of that particular architectural feature,
they're really looking to create this idea of being in the middle
of the countryside somewhere. So again, this was part of that overall orchestra.
Where we're going to be going next is into the drafting space where
the architect in here would have been directing a cadre of draftsmen to carry
out his ideas and put those ideas onto paper. So we're going to go right next door.
So, we're now in the Upper Drafting Room. This is one of the two main drafting rooms here
at Fairsted, and drafting was really the major way that the designers got their ideas print
to form that could then be transferable to the landscape projects all across the country.
So, in this room you would have had probably about a
dozen guys, five-and-a-half days a week, listening to instructions by maybe one of the
Olmsteds or maybe it's by Chick Waite next door who was one of the architects who worked here
and developed those architectural features. And they would, again, put onto paper
a very circumscribed thing. In other words, they were not making decisions on what they were putting
onto paper. They were being instructed by the designers. They were
actually very circumscribed in terms of how they would draft plans. There was a standardization put in
here very, very early, so they were given instructions in terms of how they should be drawing an electrical
line, how they should be drawing a tree,
what the abbreviation should be for that.
So again, everything became very much more
standardized, especially early in the twentieth century. So you could have a guy spending five days
struggling to create a plan that the
designers finally agree is the one they want to send out to the client.
Now, you're not going to trust the United States mail with a plan that
you spent five days creating. What you're going to need to do is make a copy. So where we're going to be
going now is actually into their copy room--what they call the blueprinting department--where the plans
drafted in here could then be replicated and then shipped out all across the country.
To a large extent, I think you can think of the office wing as one big
image factory. Again, these images representing the ideas of the landscape architects who
worked here. And once you had a draftsman create a plan that everybody agreed could be sent to thee
job site, it was essential to be able to make copies of it. For many reasons you didn't want to
have to get lost in the mail, you wanted to
have record for yourself, you might be working with an architect who needed to see the plans that
you were creating. So once that plan was drafted, it would then be brought in here.
And how they used to make blueprints back in the nineteenth-century one of the methods they used was
known as sun-printing. And how sun-printing worked was kind of pretty simple.
You would first need to have your original.
An original could be drafted onto something like vellum, which was
translucent. In other words, light will pass through it. Once you had that original drawing on
vellum, you'd bring it in here.
And, beneath that piece of paper, you would put light sensitive
paper--paper similar to photographic film in that it reacts ultra-violet light.
You then take those same two pieces of paper, put them into a glass-top box, which would have been in
this area here. And you would've rolled these boxes outside.
There were platforms outside the window here, where you'd hold these boxes out
in the sunlight. The basic premise is by exposing that light-sensitive
paper to sunlight through the image on the translucent paper,
a chemical reaction would occur, causing the paper to turn color, mostly
blue. In fact, sometimes you hear these called cyanotypes, and I should mention "cyan"
was short for cyanide because a type of cyanide was use on this paper. And
I should also mention if you're going to be working for the Olmsteds, again, this would be a room that would probably the
least desirable because not only did they use chemicals like potassium cyanide, one of the
advancements in blueprint is when they started using ammonia fumes to develop blueprints.
And that was seen as a positive thing. So again, on a hot August day this must have been not
a fun place to work. Sun-printing was a great process. It didn't take too long,
maybe a couple of minutes outside with good sunlight. But that was the problem--
sunlight. And in New England, sunlight was at a premium, and it also got dark out.
So, technology eventually came to the answer, and that's what this big tube is behind me. This is an
electric blueprint machine. After 1904 it was state of the art. Really
the same idea with one major exception. But again, that drawing on
translucent paper, light-sensitive paper behind it, wrap it around the
outside the glass tube, wrap these covers around it, this rolls,
this canvas rolls right around the tube. And you have a pulley up there. And
from that pulley you would lower a carbon arc light, which would descend through the center of the
tube, again causing the same reaction.  But now you have something that could be pretty much
used twenty-four seven. You didn't have to worry about the weather outside. So again,
as technology became available, they immediately purchased it. And I guess there's a little bit
of irony there, in that the Olmsteds were creating these very
verdant, romantic landscapes by using the most up-to-date methods. So once this
was exposed either to sunlight or on the blueprint machine you then, like film,
had to develop it or fix it. And when we go next door where there was a fixing bath, we would
actually take that, give it a bath, and that would create your final image.
So, where we are now is actually kind of the last part of the blue printing process.
On my right is what you might describe kind of as a developing room, but really was more of a fixing
bath because when you put those prints outside, for example,
into the sunlight, the reason the paper turned blue was the chemical on it. Well, even though you
had blocked out those chemicals from developing with lines on
the paper itself, if you were to leave that paper out, that chemical was still on there. So more or less,
what you did in this room was rinse off that part of the blueprint that didn't
develop because it was blocked out by the lines on the paper. Now that's great, but now you have a
soaking wet plan. To dry it--very high-tech--you'd put it on
a frame. And the frame was on tracks that allowed you to roll it inside the closet, where there was a
gas heater, which would warm the closet up and
then dry out your plan. And then you'd take it back out, you'd roll it up and you'd put it
into a mailing tube and that mailing tube would then be sent maybe three thousand miles away to the client,
who would open up the plan with his contractor. The Olmsteds did not do construction;
they did design. Somebody else had to take their design and then build it.
Okay, we are now is in part of the planting department, and earlier on we were
talking about architectural features in the
landscape and described it as what oftentimes is the hardscape of things.
Well, up here was the planting department, and you may guess they used
to call this the "softscape" of the landscape. You would think that planting was not
as technical as architectural features but it could be. You had to know
a lot of different things. You had to know,
for example, what type of plants would grow in what type of soil. You had to know what the
environment was you were working in. The climate especially was essential to know what would be able to be
sustained over long periods of time. You also had to take and consider the use
of the landscape. What type of material would be able to be planted in a place that was used very heavily,
or maybe planted in the place that wasn't used as heavily. But a lot of
what planting was about was to create a feeling. It was the idea
of effect. This is especially true in Olmsted Senior's day when he was
designing public parks. He once said, "Less wildness I object to," because
he felt that people living in cities were always surrounded by artificial things. It was a very sterile
environment, so his planting plans tended to be extremely lush,
almost to the point of looking like the plants were going to take over. Sometimes
they would create very detailed planting plans. For example, when they were designing
private estates--maybe down on Long Island--and they had flower beds and things
to layout, they might have very specific areas where things should be planted. But in the case,
for example, of the Muddy River here in Boston, he had a guy working for him
named Bill Fischer and he felt Bill had the skills enough that if you just gave
him a general idea of that, again, that feeling you were looking for, he could take it
from there. And when Olmsted was working on that he told them to over
plant. There's an old maxim of English landscape gardening called "plant
thick, thin quick." So in Olmsted's mind, over plant. If half
the things die out, you still have a good effect, and if all of it lives, you
should obviously cut back on that. Unfortunately, a lot of people
didn't listen to Olmsted's advice, and sometimes they would just leave everything in there to grow and they would all
choke each other out. But again, that's again, part of planting. It's taking
all these things into consideration. So what we're going to be doing now, is we're going-to
be heading down towards the vault, where all the drawings--we've been talking a lot about drafting--
while these things, these plans, were extremely important, this was the product that they were
producing here. And to protect this product, they actually built the three-story vault, where they
could be stored, especially away from any type of fire that might break out here.
As we've been talking about throughout the office wing, plans were the thing.
They were the way that these places got created, they represented the ideas of the designers
So for the Olmsteds, protecting these plans was going to be extremely
important, and what they did early in the twentieth century was build a three-story brick vault, which
would protect them from fire, which was, of course, with all this paper and a
wooden office wing, going to be something that they would have to deal with. And, again, we're going to be
going here and second. Another level of protection they had was actually the person who sat at
this desk. His name was Harry Perkins. He worked for the firm for about fifty years, and Harry
really was the only person allowed inside the vault. So if you were draftsman, you had to
line up here every morning, along with the other draftsman, so that
Harry could go in there and get the plans out for you. And then, at the end of the day, you have to reverse the process.
So you'd lined up, Harry would take the plans and put them back in the vault for you. So again,
they were always very careful to make sure that everything was very
well-controlled here with the volume of work that they were doing.
The thing is, Harry's not around right now, so I think I'm going to try to go in
there and take a look inside this vault.
We're now standing inside the middle vault. When this became a National Park Service site, what we
acquired with the contents of this vault, which were about one hundred forty thousand plans and drawings that the
Olmsteds created. The Olmsteds stored
their drawings more or less wrapped around wooden sticks and shoved into cubby holes, each cubby
hole being numbered. It was a system that worked well for them. There were some
issues with it, especially in terms of tracking plans. That's one of the reasons why Harry Perkins was the only one allowed
inside the vault. It wasn't so much that if a draftsman went in here and took
out a plan--that wasn't really the problem. The real problem was when that draftsmen came
back and put the plans back into the cubby hole. If he missed it by one or two, those
plans could never be seen again. So that's why, again, Harry was the only one allowed inside the vault. He was the one
who kept track of everything. And when we arrived here, what we had to deal
with was three stories of basically
hundred, over hundred-year-old plans that were more or less rotting in place.
And as a conservation agency, the National Park Service had to develop a way of both
conserving them and also preserving them for as long as possible. Now, I think when a lot of people think of
the National Park Service, they think of us as being America's principle conservation agency.
I also think though, when most people think of us doing conservation, they think of the
geysers of Yellowstone, the Sequoias out in California,
and they're not aware that we also conserve our cultural heritage. And really this
collection of documents is a huge part of our cultural heritage. It's really the landscape record of the United
States here. So during the 1980s, the whole vault was gutted, new shelving was
put in, a climate control system--right now the temperature in here is about sixty five degrees, the
humidity is about forty five percent, nice place to come in the summer--and
the shelving you're seeing here really is shelving that was built because we really want to store as
many plans flat as possible because paper long-term storage wise
is more likely to last a longer time if the paper fibers all run in one direction
instead of being rolled around. But that's not my expertise. It's actually the expertise of our archivist
staff, and one of the archivists Anthony Reed is here with us today to kind of show us what we would find if you
were to open up one of these drawers. How you doing, Anthony? Hey, Alan. I'll pick one
at random. This is how we store them now--all flat as much as we can in
couple different sizes. First one on top randomly is
the Woodrow Wilson Park in Birmingham, Alabama.
It looks like a small, city park across the street from a courthouse, proposed library
site. It's a 1924 drawing. Whether this was ever implemented or not, we could
go to the site now and see what was built or if it wasn't built. We get researchers here who
are either restoring historic landscapes or conserving ones that might be in danger sometimes
for adverse purposes. We have people coming in wanting to do the homework to be able to propose a historic, an Olmstedian
landscape for a space. Or, on the off chance that it was never implemented, if the city managers
said seen this plan, thought it was either too expensive or not right for them, it might not ever have been built.
And this might be an opportunity to actually implement an Olmsted landscape that had never been done.
So, are these all the same project, this is all Woodrow Wilson Park? No, it's funny, you know,
for the basis of the storage, the needs of the storage, we store them by the size of the plan. So this has a mix
of numerous project in it. And in fact, we separate it out by the
media type. So this is an ink on a linen drawing. In the same folder we have some
blueprints, some photographic materials, other graphic materials.
So it all needs to be separated out. So you were talking about conservation work. These have all been cleaned and
catalogued individually, and then separated out, buffered by my mylars
and tissue papers to keep the chemicals away from each other and to maintain
the acidity of the papers from one another. So, you know, kind of exactly what we have in the collection.
I don't know exactly. We do have a database available. As I said, they were all individually catalogued
individually catalogued and available on a database on a website called ORGO--the Olmsted Research
Guide Online-- and that is available at
www.rediscov.com/olmsted
Yeah, we'll have to put up something maybe here so people can see that.
And it was amazing. I was researching my own town, and I thought, "There's no way my
town of Randolph--a little sleepy bedroom community just south of Boston--would have any Olmsted projects,
and there are actually three. So I was pretty surprised, and that's why, you know, when
people come here, often times they've never heard of Frederick Law Olmsted. And we introduce them to him and
then they say, "There's no way he did anything in my town." There's always some sort of connection, whether it was the college campus
they attended, maybe the church they got married had the grounds done by them. Because the
Olmsteds were really a cradle-to-grave operation. They designed everything from literally hospitals
where babies were born to cemeteries where they ultimately, all of us I guess or some of us,
just might end up. But anyways, Anthony, thank you so much
for showing us what's in here. And what we're going to do is probably start heading back. I know
take a lot of your time up today, and I know you're busy. We're going to go back actually
out through the office wing. So again, I thank you very much.
Okay, so, we've traveled through most of the office wing, and in fact, we're at one of the oldest
parts of the office wing. It's the one that adjoins the house that Olmsted purchased. And again, initially using the North
Parlor as his office. You know, lots of important things went on out here. You know, if it wasn't
for the draftsman doing their drawings and the designers coming with their ideas,
none of these places would have got built. But what went on in this particular wing was also probably just as important because
this is the clerical wing. And the women who worked here made sure that the Olmsteds got paid
for all the work they were doing. They were altruistic, but not that altruistic. So again,
women worked here. People like Helen Bullard, who was the
de facto office manager and also John Charles' secretary had a career here.
Stella Obst, who actually started in the clerical wing and ended up being Frederick Law Olmsted Junior's personal secretary had
a career here. It was really, again, this group of people, again,
the idea of the Olmsteds conducting an orchestra of people to get these places built.
So, again, really cool spaces. But where we're going to end this tour is actually
in one of my favorite spaces. And it's not an addition they put onto the office;
its an addition that Olmsted put onto his own home.
Well, I hope you enjoyed our journey through the historic design studios
of the Olmsted firm and learned a little bit about the process of design that
went on here. As I mentioned earlier, when we talk about an Olmsted project, we're talking about
a firm. But also when we talk about Olmsteds here, we're talking about a family,
which included not only Frederick Law Olmsted, but his two sons John Charles and
Frederick Law Olmsted Junior (Charlie and Rick), his daughter Marion, who actually also
got involved with the firm, mainly through photography that she did for them, and his wife Mary,
who I guess didn't exactly like living next to a huge business here, but I think she enjoyed
the neighborhood. This room I'm sitting in right now is actually an addition that Olmsted
himself put on right after he moved here from New York. He added on to that 1810 house
he had purchased, and this probably was one of his favorite rooms because when
Olmsted was inside, he always wanted to be outside. And as you can see behind me, this room kind of projects you
right out into the South Lawn area here. So we hope you have a chance to come and visit
us. I'll mention that besides this room here in front of me is
a whole series of rooms that have all exhibits that relate the Olmsted firm's work.
And, we're seasonal operation, but if you check out our
website, which I gave earlier, which is
www.nps.gov/frla
that's www.nps.gov/frla
You can find out about all the programs going on
here and also the programs we do off-site in some of
the local Olmsted landscapes. So again, thanks for coming, and I hope to see you around.
Go ahead. [awkward noise, screeching, laughing]
Okay, hold on. Kind of a little bit of an untold story here about what went on in this particular part...[employee attempts to enter]
[employee sticks head out] When I was inside here? You said, you said that it wasn't...
It's a box. [mimics a mime trapped in a box] ... I hate mimes...
But, again, you're curious. What are in these drawers? This one's empty. This one...(laughing)
