ABSTRACT
The coincidence in 1972 of Frederick Law Olmsted’s one hundred and fiftieth birthday with a revival of environmentalist concern over the plight of the city won for America’s greatest landscape architect a splash of deserved national attention. But some of his celebrants had trouble locating Olmsted as a participant in the history he lived through. Journalists linked him vaguely with Jeffersonian agrarianism, with the New England village green, and in one instance with Edgar Allan Poe. 1 A serious effort was made to tie the young Olmsted of the 1850s to Fourierite utopian socialism and the aging Olmsted of the 1890s to Edward Bellamy’s utopian nationalism. 2 One result of all this was a certain historical deracination of the man. His reputation “took off.” Lauded for his long vision, Olmsted became a visionary for the 1970s—a planner who shaped the future by transcending his own environment, casting aside its blinders and inhibitions to bring hope and wisdom to the present. “It is against this American,” one breathless sesquicentennial enthusiast concluded, “that we must measure the captains who must now guide spaceship Earth.” 3
