speaker: It is almost a miracle that in the very heart of crowded Manhattan Island, an immense tract of land has been reserved for a public park.

Stockard Channing: Central Park is not a miracle, but it is a masterpiece.

It was also the first park that Frederick Law Olmsted ever designed, but far from the last.

There would be Brooklyn, Buffalo, Boston, Louisville, Chicago, Montreal, Detroit, Rochester, the Chicago World's Fair, the US Capitol, Niagara Falls, and more and more.

Charles Birnbaum: What is it about an Olmsted landscape that makes people love them so much?

Thomas Herrera-Mishler: Most folks, when they're walking through the park they go, wow, this is a really pretty landscape.

They have no idea that every nook, every cranny of these landscapes were laid out intentionally.

Adam Gopnick: This isn't a piece of natural landscape that someone has put a fence around.

It's just the opposite.

It's a stage set.

Stockard: If an Olmsted Park is a stage set, its actors play many parts.

They make their entrances and their exits.

For the past 150 years people have loved Olmsted parks, trashed them, fought over them, turned them into ballparks and highways.

These theaters of life were the work of the most successful landscape architect who ever lived.

male: Olmsted has a double legacy.

On the one hand he's a super pragmatist.

He's a problem solver.

At the same time he's a dreamer.

What his parks are all about is finding immensely practical solutions to the problem of building a dream in the middle of a city.

♪♪♪ announcer: "Frederick Law Olmsted: Designing America" has been made possible by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, exploring the human endeavor, and the Margaret L. Wendt Foundation.

With additional funding from HSBC, the Tiffany & Company Foundation, the C.E.

& S. Foundation, and these funders.

Stockard: For 40 years Frederick Law Olmsted designed American places.

He worked in a young, booming country where cities were crowded and dirty, their growth unchecked and unconsidered.

Olmsted devoted himself to making places that were just the opposite.

Betsy Gross: Olmsted had a vision of the role of public open space in cities over time.

That kind of vision for understanding what people were going to need 100 years after he was gone, only a genius could have created a system that over 100 years still works.

Charles B.: When you think about Olmsted, then you think about these handful of images that you always see of him.

There's the dapper hat in Central Park with the cape.

There's the Santa Claus Olmsted.

There is only just a small number of photographs, and so the way we get to know Olmsted is through his landscapes.

Stockard: Frederick Law Olmsted did not invent the public park, but with his partner Calvert Vaux, he invented the parkway, the first integrated park system, and the profession of landscape architecture.

He set in motion one of the earliest experiments in scientific forestry and the first campaign to preserve natural scenery, but his vital legacy is most evident in the city.

After Olmsted it was clear, any city hoping for greatness must have great parks for its people.

Garret Nelson: Parks are something that we now almost take for granted as part of American life.

It's easy to forget about how innovative a part of our civilization they are, and Olmsted is important because he made parks a essential part of American life.

Adam: That seems commonplace to us now, the idea that there would be public green spaces where people can go and find their own kind of joy, but before Olmsted such places did not exist.

Olmsted was a democratic visionary.

There's a slowly evolving vision that goes on in his life from his early years.

When we look back on it, we see an arc of continuity.

Stockard: Frederick Law Olmsted was born in Hartford, Connecticut in 1822.

His father was a well-to do merchant.

His mother died from an accidental overdose of laudanum when he was three.

speaker: Frederick Law Olmsted, "I have but a tradition of memory of her.

While I was small, if I was asked if I remembered her, I could say, 'Yes, I remember playing in the grass and looking up at her while she sat sewing under a tree.'

It has always been a delight to me to see a woman sitting under a tree, sewing, and minding a child."

Stockard: The one constant in Frederick's life was his father, John.

Charles Beveridge: His father loved landscape.

They would go on these tours in search of the picturesque.

Justin Martin: They were silent trips.

Olmsted would often sit in front of his father on the saddle.

That was one of the things that kind of gave him an appreciation of the landscape of his native Connecticut.

♪♪♪ Stockard: His early work life was less than promising.

At 18 he apprenticed as a surveyor.

That didn't work out.

He was a clerk and hated it.

At 20 he sailed to China as a deckhand and nearly died of scurvy.

At 24 his father bought him a farm, and for 6 years he tried a technique called scientific farming.

He never made a profit.

Witold Rybczynski: I think his friends and his family were really worried about him because he just seemed to go off, try something, fail, try something else.

Stockard: But in 1852 the 30 year old Olmsted was handed a job and a new career.

Justin: There was a brand new newspaper at this time called "The New York Times" that was looking for a correspondent to travel across the American South and report on the region almost as if it was a foreign country.

Olmsted was handed this incredible assignment because he indicated that he would be open minded about traveling through the South.

He would be open minded on the all important issue of slavery.

Adam: Olmsted is one of the most important journalists of the Civil War generation.

He's one of the makers of "The New York Times" as the central newspaper of the city.

His reporting from the South is key to shaping the northern mind in the years before the Civil War.

speaker: January 26th, 1854, "Southerners often represent the condition of their slaves to be so happy and desirable, we might wonder that they do not sometimes take measures to be made slaves themselves or at least occasionally offer their children for sale to the highest bidder.

The sale and purchase of men, women, and children is such an insult to the human race that nothing else more demands the shame and the indignant protest of all men."

Stockard: By the end of 1855 Olmsted, no longer open-minded about slavery, was shipping guns and war manuals out to the anti-slavery forces in Kansas.

He was a committed reformer, determined to influence the American public.

He became a magazine editor and borrowed money from his father to become a partner in a publishing house, but the company soon went bankrupt.

Justin: And then Olmsted got just a devastating letter, literally a deathbed letter from his beloved brother John over in France trying to recover from tuberculosis, and in the letter John said, "Don't let Mary suffer while you're alive."

It was really a final request that he made to Olmsted, and shortly afterward his brother died from tuberculosis.

1857 was a tough year for Olmsted.

He'd lost his job in journalism.

He owed money to just about everyone he knew.

He needed a job.

He had to go find something in the midst of this terrible economic panic.

Stockard: What he found would make him famous eventually.

At first it didn't seem like much.

A job supervising the building of a new public works project in New York City.

speaker: August 20th, 1857, "I am going to offer myself for the office of Superintendent of the Central Park."

Bakhyt Mustafayev: So as usual, guys.

Welcome to Central Park.

Usually we start like that.

Some people say, "Welcome to my office," but, you know, because they are working inside the park.

So if you take a look around today you can see the beautiful park with many trees, landscapes, rocks, and grass, but before it wasn't anything over here.

It was just empty space covered by rocks.

Stockard: This empty space stretched from 59th to 106th Street.

The city had purchased a long rectangle of land in 1853 in order to create a large public park.

The cost of this land in 1853, $5 million.

The price of one apartment overlooking this land today could also be $5 million.

Size of the lot in 1853, 778 acres.

Condition of the lot, rough.

speaker: "It was a pestilential spot.

It was filthy, squalid, and disgusting, filled with heaps of rubbish.

The low grounds were steeped in the overflow and mush of pigsties, slaughterhouses, and bone boiling works, and the stench was sickening."

Sara Miller: It had rocks.

It had swamps.

It was treeless.

It couldn't be less suggestive of a beautiful public park.

Stockard: In the fall of 1857, Olmsted began work.

His boss was the chief engineer of the park, Colonel Egbert Viele, a West Point graduate who held fast to his military title and uniform.

Sara: He didn't like Olmsted.

Olmsted was probably an intellectual to him, and he was a practical man.

The two did not get along at all.

Stockard: Chief Engineer Viele had prepared a straightforward and functional design for the park.

The commissioners decided they wanted something better.

They set aside Viele's plan and announced a public competition instead.

Olmsted did not intend to enter, but someone else did, a 33 year old Englishman, an architect named Calvert Vaux.

Justin: Calvert Vaux approached Olmsted to see if Olmsted wanted to partner up.

The reason Vaux wanted to be partners with Olmsted was 'cause Olmsted had been out on this piece of land knocking down shanties and draining swamps, and Vaux rightly perceived that if they became partners in the design competition they'd have a leg up because Olmsted literally knew the lay of the land.

Charles: Vaux has the professional training.

He knows how to make plans.

He was an excellent architect.

Olmsted, on the other hand, is well trained as a farmer.

He knows about drainage.

So he knows the site.

Sara: There were 33 designs altogether in the competition.

Number two was actually a pyramid and nothing else in an envelope.

I have a feeling Egbert Viele actually entered that.

Stockard: Number four was a design of paisley shaped spirals and mazes.

Number 25, a complicated patchwork of backyard gardens.

Number 33 by Olmsted and Vaux was far simpler.

But when the board announced their decision in April of 1858, Olmsted and Vaux had won.

They called the plan Greensward.

Adam: The plan, when you look at it from a classically minded point of view, is beautiful and welcoming, and, by comparison to a Parisian park, chaotic.

It has no obvious inner architecture.

It's a very different way of approaching a park than the way Europeans approach a park.

Stockard: Olmsted and Vaux included very few buildings in the Greensward plan.

Instead there were broad stretches of meadow and a secluded woodland at the heart of the park.

They connected the pieces with a flowing system of roads, bridges, and walkways.

Elizabeth Rogers: Olmsted and Calvert Vaux designed the first example of grade separation in America.

You have the transverse roads carrying the busy east west traffic.

You have the earthwork creating the berms so that you don't see that traffic.

You carry the pedestrians across beautiful cast iron bridges.

You carry them under the carriage drives through stone arches.

It is a triumph of 19th century engineering.

The design is a symphonic sequence of beautiful spaces.

♪♪♪ Stockard: But in 1858 this beautiful design existed only on paper.

Someone would have to build it, but it would not be Colonel Viele.

He was fired as chief designer, and in his place Frederick Law Olmsted, 36 years old, was hired to build Central Park and to run it as well.

speaker: "If a fairy had shaped the job for me, it could not have fitted me better.

It was naturally outgrowing from my previous life history and it occupied my whole heart."

Stockard: The following year Olmsted's life took another turn.

On June 13th, 1859, Frederick married his brother's widow Mary and became father to her three children.

Adam: He marries his brother's widow and he takes on an entire family.

He finds himself responsible for a whole gang of people who he has to provide for.

Stockard: There was no time for a honeymoon.

Olmsted had a job to do, the building of Central Park.

Sara: Central Park was one of the largest public works projects this country had ever seen.

They were draining the land.

They were filling in the land with millions of cartloads of soil.

They had to blast with gunpowder.

Dynamite wasn't invented yet.

It was a huge work, and yet, technologically they didn't have more than pickaxes, gunpowder, and horses with carts.

Rock that was there when Olmsted and Vaux started designing the park are the 450 million year old Manhattan schist rock outcrops that are the bedrock of Manhattan.

They use the rocks as design elements.

Reginald Arcilla: And this place is called the ravine.

There's a nice water effect here.

This is a didgeridoo, and I play it here 'cause of the acoustics.

These water effects, they seem so real.

If you don't know you would think that they were natural, but from what I understand valves control the water here.

So they could shut this stream off with a valve.

It's really cool.

♪♪♪ Douglas: Blonsky: Olmsted and Vaux did something very smart in the very beginning.

They said: let's do something that the public would want to come up and see.

And so by the first winter of 1858, 1859, they actually had the lake done and they had ice skating on it.

Immediately, businesses opened up to sell ice skates.

Women would come to the park in these huge gowns.

They couldn't even bend over to tie their skates.

That became a business to tie the lace on the skates, and it was also one of the first recreational activities that men and women could do together.

Ethan Carr: In Central Park, for example, first with ice skating and later in the century--toward the end of the century with bicycling, these were experiences that offered women unprecedented social freedom because they could escape their chaperones, because they could become literally mobile in the park landscape.

In fact, a good part of the significance of Central Park derives from the fact that it is a great public landscape.

Generations of people have used it and reinvented it in the process of using it.

Stockard: From the beginning, Olmsted had a lofty goal for Central Park, democracy.

speaker: "In Central Park you will find all classes largely represented with a common purpose, each individual adding by his mere presence to the pleasure of all others, all helping to the greater happiness of each.

You often see vast numbers of persons brought closely together, poor and rich, young and old, Jew and Gentile."

♪♪♪ Keith Morgan: Olmsted intensely believed in democracy and in the park as the site for enactment of democracy, but Olmsted personally was determined to use rules and park police to ensure that an upper middle class vision is controlling all classes in the park.

Douglas: Olmsted really did look at the park as a place that needed to be managed.

People had to behave a certain way.

There were rules that you didn't go on the lawns.

Vulgar language was not tolerated.

Dogs had to be on a 6 inch leash all the time.

You were supposed to actually get kind of dressed up when you came to the park.

Stockard: Olmsted made the rules, but his control was not complete.

The board's comptroller, Andrew Haswell Green, was in charge of the park's finances.

Justin: Andrew Green started to point out to Olmsted and Vaux that they were going way over budget.

Green really wanted to prove to Olmsted that--he wanted to kind of school him.

He wanted to prove to him that, yeah, you might have these artistic aspirations, but if we run out of money art's out the window.

Sara: Green bugged them, both of them, over the smallest amounts of money or a couple of shovels, and so it was constant warfare.

speaker: "I send my bill for items of 12.5 cents and then, sir, I cannot be reimbursed until I have undergone a cross-examination for an hour."

Sara: Here's this father figure, the man who controls the purse.

I think because Olmsted's father gave Olmsted whatever he wanted, that when Olmsted came up with an authority figure that he didn't know how to deal with it.

He was used to getting his way with his father.

speaker: "It made me boil with indignation to remember how cruelly and meanly Green managed me.

What a systematic small tyranny he exercised over me.

It was slow murder."

Sara: There's a famous photograph of the men who built Central Park standing on Willowdell Arch.

On the extreme right is Frederick Law Olmsted, smack in the middle is Calvert Vaux, and on the extreme left is Andrew Haswell Green, bigger, taller, beefier than the rest of the men, and you can just see that Olmsted and Green wanted to be separate and far apart from each other.

Stockard: But problems at work were soon overshadowed.

One summer evening in 1860 Olmsted took Mary and their infant son John Theodore for a carriage ride in the park.

The exhausted Olmsted fell asleep at the reins.

Justin: The horse bolted.

Olmsted was thrown clear.

His wife and the child were thrown clear.

Olmsted landed very badly, broke his left leg in several different spots.

They actually thought he might die.

For the rest of his life, his left leg would be about 2 inches shorter.

But then the really shocking thing was a week after the accident his infant child died of an illness.

Now, for Olmsted and his wife Mary, it was impossible to think that this illness could not in some way be associated with the carriage accident that had just happened.

They would forever really put those two events together in their mind.

♪♪♪ Stockard: Within two weeks of the death of his son Olmsted was back at work at Central Park.

Justin: Park employees would carry him from place to place.

Sometimes he'd actually need to take a closer look, so they would set him down on the ground.

He'd drag himself painfully along the ground to take a look at some particularly detail in the park.

Stockard: In the spring of 1861 Olmsted's problems with his bosses came to a head.

Central Park was careening wildly over budget.

The board handed complete control to Andrew Green.

Olmsted felt humiliated and embittered.

He wanted a way out of the park, and history provided one, the Civil War.

Olmsted went off to serve his country, creating and running a gigantic organization called the US Sanitary Commission, the precursor of the Red Cross.

Olmsted raised money, built and supplied field hospitals, recruited and organized volunteer doctors and nurses.

For two years Olmsted worked close to the front lines, and he worked around the clock, but the Sanitary Commission became a repeat of Central Park.

He did brilliant work and quarreled bitterly with his superiors.

One commissioner complained that Olmsted had an appetite for power.

In September 1863 a frustrated and exhausted Olmsted resigned.

He was deeply in debt and in need of a job.

He soon found one managing the Mariposa estate, one of the biggest mining operations in the world, off in the wild Sierra Mountains of California.

Charles: Olmsted is in California when Yosemite Valley is deeded to the state of California.

He becomes the head of the commission in charge of that.

He plays a very important role in that.

Beginning years of Yosemite, he writes a compelling report about why it's important for a republic to set aside these areas of great natural beauty.

speaker: "It is the main duty of government to provide means of protection for all its citizens in the pursuit of happiness.

It is a scientific fact that the occasional contemplation of natural scenes increases the subsequent capacity for happiness and the means for securing that happiness."

Stockard: Olmsted's family joined him at Mariposa in 1864, and it seemed that they would stay in California forever.

"I was never happier in my life," he wrote, but happiness would not last.

In the winter of 1865 his parent company suddenly faced bankruptcy.

The gold mining operation was lost.

Again Olmsted would have to start over, and again Calvert Vaux had a plan.

Tupper Thomas: Calvert Vaux was back in New York, and the parks commissioner of Brooklyn contacts him and says, we're trying to build a park in Brooklyn to compete with Manhattan.

Stockard: Brooklyn, New York, by 1865 the nation's third largest city.

Manhattan has Central Park, drawing millions of visitors a year.

Brooklyn has nothing, and so they commissioned a plan for a park big enough to rival the one in Manhattan.

The problem was the park's designer, Colonel Egbert Viele.

Tupper: So Vaux gave a critique, and he was very unhappy with those plans.

Vaux just said, you know, this is not a good plan.

You've got Flatbush Avenue right through the middle of your park.

Stockard: Vaux proposed that Brooklyn sell off the small piece of land on the far side of Flatbush Avenue and buy more land on the near side.

The park commissioner agreed, and so seven years after Egbert Viele was fired by Central Park, the colonel was fired by Prospect Park.

Vaux got the job, but he needed help.

Tupper: Vaux knew he had to do it with Olmsted, so he starts writing, please come.

They're gonna give us all the money we want.

There'll be no political problems.

Witold: Without Vaux, I don't think Olmsted would have become a landscape architect, 'cause even if he had done Central Park, it was Vaux who convinced him after many, many letters to come back from California and get involved in Prospect Park.

Stockard: In the fall of 1865 a new office opened on Broadway, Olmsted, Vaux, and Company.

Almost by default, Frederick Law Olmsted was about to become a landscape architect.

He would be one for the rest of his life.

Tupper: One of the things that was really different between Central Park and Prospect Park was they weren't held to this completely rectangular shape.

They actually shaped the park in a way that's more, to be exciting, blob like.

It has a lovely edge to it that works very nicely within the community.

Their plan was to have the major elements of landscape in large forms.

They brought in giant rocks.

They brought in fabulous trees.

The water system was all man-made.

Not a drop of water would have been found in the Prospect Park area before that.

So this entire trickling, babbling brooks coming through and then out into a lake that was expansive and beautiful, and so you created a landscape that was completely man-made and totally comfortable to the visitor.

Olmsted and Vaux did beautiful, beautiful work.

How they got along is such a mystery to everyone.

David Scobey: They were partners for decades, they were on again, off again friends, but they battled constantly.

Vaux accused Olmsted of being an autocrat.

He called him Frederick the Great, the prince of the park.

Francis Kowsky: There was friction from time to time between Vaux and Olmsted, but I think Vaux had a great respect for Olmsted, and when he said these things and when he chided him, it was to try and bring out the better man in his friend.

Stockard: By 1867 Olmsted was able to provide for his growing family.

Vaux and he were working on both Prospect Park and Central Park, and they took on dozens of new commissions.

Ethan: Soon after Olmsted and Vaux designed Central Park, and then after the war Prospect Park, there's really not a major American city over a certain size that isn't interested in trying to replicate these successes.

Stockard: In 1868 Buffalo, New York came calling.

It was one of the largest cities in America, with one of the largest inland ports in the world.

Francis: Buffalo is really a booming city.

It was on the rise.

Its industry was flourishing.

Its transportation was flourishing.

It was also the center of a growing agricultural region.

Thomas: This was a place that had a lot of money.

It had great ambitions.

The city was growing fast, and there were not any open spaces easily accessible to the urban dweller.

The city leaders basically said, we want you to pick out a site for a park.

We'd like to have one of those Central Park things here.

They showed him three wonderful sites.

Stockard: For Olmsted, these three unique sites presented an opportunity to design something new.

This would not be Central Park transplanted upstate.

In a way, it was much more ambitious.

Buffalo's three large parks would become America's first park system.

Florence Johnson: I would describe Olmsted's impact as being one of genius.

Each of the parks take on the characteristic of each of the neighborhoods, and yet there's a common thread that brings them together, the parkways.

Stockard: Parkways were not just roads that connected the parks.

They were tree-lined boulevards that essentially created long parks threading their way through the city.

Parkways too were an Olmsted and Vaux invention.

♪♪♪ Thomas: This notion that anyone in the city could step out of their front door and within a block or so be able to be in a park, in a park landscape, it was this notion of a city within a park that was so unique.

Charles B.: Nothing has ever been achieved on the scale that it was achieved in Buffalo.

In terms of thinking of Olmsted as a city planner, as a city shaper, working in concert with Vaux, that Buffalo, New York, end of story, it is the most comprehensive network the two did together.

Keith: Buffalo then becomes a template that is repeated by Olmsted and other firms in cities across the country.

Louisville, Kentucky, Boston, Massachusetts, Seattle, Washington all have this sense of connected, comprehensive park environment.

speaker: "The city of Buffalo is the best planned city as to its streets, public places, and grounds in the United States, if not the world."

Stockard: The Buffalo design with its parkways would be copied all over America, but this influential design was more than just a beginning.

It was an end.

In October 1872 Olmsted and Vaux dissolved their partnership.

Witold: Vaux wants to do architecture.

Olmsted wants to do the parks.

Francis: Vaux had been engaged to design the exhibition in Philadelphia, the American Museum of Natural History, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Gradually over the next decade, these commissions slipped away.

The combination of the change of taste and Vaux's own sort of phlegmatic personality led to his loss of commissions.

Stockard: A financial panic in 1873 meant Olmsted too lost commissions.

Chicago and New York shelved his designs.

A railway company asked him to plan a new city called Tacoma, Washington, but they hated his design.

There wasn't a straight line or a right angle.

The blocks were shaped like melons, pears, and sweet potatoes.

He was fired on the spot.

But 1873 was also the year Olmsted began work in Washington DC, completely changing the exterior and grounds of the US Capitol.

He moved the back entrance to the front, extended marble terraces on three sides of the building, and created the famed Capitol steps.

That same year he oversaw the completion of Central Park and stayed on as chief designer and superintendent, determined to maintain what Vaux and he had created.

Witold: Olmsted very often talked about the long view that the landscape architect had to have.

That the landscape architect had to look far ahead into the future, 'cause it took so long for these projects to come to fruition.

speaker: "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 results to be realized in less than 40 years."

Harrison Hogan: When they built the park, they built it to be portraits, landscape portraits.

It was made to look like something, to soothe or to excite or to exhilarate, and that's Olmsted and Vaux.

That's who they were.

They were constantly trying to figure out what would be the panoramic beauty of something.

Sara: When people take out their cameras today, they think they're making a beautiful composition, but in fact Olmsted and Vaux did that 150 years ago so that we want to take out our cameras.

Central Park is the most important work of art of the 19th century and one of the most important works of art in America today.

Stockard: Olmsted had worked as a supervisor and designer of Central Park on and off for two decades, but in 1877 his long tenure at the park came to an abrupt end at the hands of a new board of commissioners.

Charles: A new group has come in and taken over political control of the city, and they want his job.

He's fired.

All of a sudden, after all that work and all those years, he has no role in Central Park anymore, and that creates a period of very long depression for him.

speaker: "I have not a doubt that I was born with a defect of the brain.

Did you never hear of a case in which a man was oppressed with melancholy and reflected on suicide as he began to face his great work in the world?"

Adam: The thing that most strikes me about Olmsted as a man is that deep, deep vein of melancholy that runs through all of his writing.

He was a serious man, and I think that the seriousness of purpose is what unites his work.

Stockard: Olmsted's purpose was to create spaces that brought people and nature together.

In the 1860s at Yosemite he had advanced the theory that a republic had a responsibility to protect scenic beauty.

In the 1870s he turned theory into practice at Niagara Falls.

Francis: Olmsted had come to Niagara Falls even as a youngster, and when he started to work here in Buffalo in the late 1860s it renewed his interest in the falls.

He was very upset by the fact that much of the land around the falls had been bought up in parcels by private individuals.

Stockard: Local property owners had lined the banks of the Niagara River with a shoddy mix of factories and tourist traps.

Thomas: There is no way that anyone visiting the falls can see this amazing natural wonder without paying something.

Olmsted could look beyond the reality and say, "Get rid of these ugly factories, these horrible mills, and replace it with a naturalistic landscape."

Ethan: Olmsted was involved in a decade-long preservation battle at Niagara.

Olmsted is part of a group of people who are basically orchestrating a public relations campaign and making the case that preservation is something that should be done for its own sake.

Francis: Niagara Falls was really the first big national campaign on behalf of scenic preservation.

Olmsted called it the Free Niagara Movement.

Stockard: The Free Niagara Movement called for New York State to purchase the land around the falls and make it available for all people.

In 1885 Olmsted and his supporters won.

Ethan: The result is unprecedented legislation by the state of New York to create a public park and to acquire the land as necessary.

Thomas: It was a very big change, tearing down the factories, buying up land, and then dedicating it permanently for free access.

It's an amazing accomplishment, and even more so, it planted a seed in the national consciousness for the need to preserve special places for future generations.

Stockard: The new state reservation would be designed, of course, by Frederick Olmsted, and he turned to his old partner Calvert Vaux for help.

Francis: What he wanted people to see there was mostly the beauty of the waterscape, the falls, of course, but he even thought the rapids were more impressive and compelling than the falls, and he wanted people to have easy viewing access.

The gem of the Niagara Falls State Park is Goat Island, and to Olmsted and Vaux that in fact was the most beautiful part.

Areas of it are as they would have known it.

You can walk out onto the island almost the middle of the river and see the rushing rapids coming on.

If the mist is rising at the right angle you don't see the casinos and the towers.

For a brief period you could put yourself back in time.

Stockard: With the preservation of Niagara Falls, Olmsted had masterminded another success, but no worldly success could mask tragedies at home.

In 1881 his stepson Owen, ranching in Montana, fell ill and died.

In 1883 his stepdaughter Charlotte had to be institutionalized.

By now, Olmsted was an experienced stoic.

Mary and he left New York for good.

"Continuing to live in New York," he said, "would be hell to me."

They settled down in the rolling hills of Brookline, Massachusetts.

Ethan: Olmsted buys an old farmhouse, renames it Fairstead, remodels it to be his home and also his office.

It's at Fairstead that really the first modern landscape architectural practice evolves.

It's no longer one man, Frederick Olmsted, working with different consultants and partners to create public park systems in the United States, but it's an entire office that includes his apprentices and eventually his partners engaged in the practice of landscape architecture.

Stockard: Fairstead was not just an office.

It was a family home, for much of the family still lived there, even if Frederick was now 61.

His stepson John Charles was 31 and a partner in the business.

He lived at home.

So did the 21 year old Marian.

The youngest was his 13 year old son.

Witold: His son was named Henry.

When he was seven years old Olmsted renamed him Frederick Law, and he actually tells the son--there's a letter where he says, you know, "I can only give you my name."

He wasn't a rich man, he was never a wealthy man, but he gave him his name, which was enormously important because the firm just keeps going.

Stockard: From the Brookline office, Olmsted and his firm worked on their most ambitious project yet, Boston.

speaker: There was a real movement to have public parks for the growing city of Boston.

Olmsted was brought in in the late 1800s, first with the Back Bay Fens.

Stockard: The Back Bay Fens was a 100 acre plot just a mile west of Boston Common.

The city had purchased the Fens with the idea of creating a large public park out of land that was nothing like a park.

Margaret Dyson: It was a salt marsh.

It was a tidal marsh.

Water came in from the harbor, came up through these marshes, and they were sewers.

They were the public sewers for the growing city of Boston.

So the question became what can you do with this land?

He recreated a salt marsh in the middle of a growing city, and his goal was to make it seem like and feel like the city had happened to grow around this beautiful natural resource.

It was a park unlike any other.

Stockard: Boston was clearly impressed.

The city asked him to design an entire park system.

It would be called the Emerald Necklace.

Betsy: The Emerald Necklace is a linear park system that stretches almost 7 miles.

Each segment of it is different and is used differently.

It's one of the best examples in the country of Olmsted's design genius.

Charles B.: The idea of working within the geology and the natural systems of a place and creating this emerald necklace that knit and bound a community together, we had never seen anything like this, and I--when I say we I don't mean Americans.

I mean the world.

Stockard: Olmsted did work within natural systems, but his parks were not natural.

Adam: He's a deep believer in artifice.

Central Park, and people still don't credit this when you tell them about it, is an artificial design.

It's every bit as artificial as Disney World is.

Faye Harwell: Some people really bridle when you try to compare Olmsted to Disney, but Disney was a master at hiding engineering and hiding the nasty parts, the waste management, the traffic management, and Olmsted really did have that same kind of sense.

speaker: Here come the brides, a whole platoon of them, ready for the first mass wedding at Brooklyn's Prospect Park.

Faye: He was very good at creating stage sets for human life.

speaker: Taking of marriage vows.

Now maybe they'll have to change the song to: Get me to the park on time.

♪♪♪ Stockard: The public park was the landscape that made Olmsted's name, but by age 70 he had designed virtually every kind of space, suburbs, cemeteries, gardens, schools, hospitals, armories, even a world's fair.

He landscaped the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

The result was the White City, a parade of gleaming white neoclassical palaces stretched out along the shore of Lake Michigan.

At the same time he was working on his largest commission, Biltmore, George W. Vanderbilt's vast mountain estate in Asheville, North Carolina.

♪♪♪ Justin: Vanderbilt had an idea that maybe he would create his own private Central Park.

Olmsted suggested turning it into an experiment in managed forestry.

The very first forestry school in the United States was on the grounds of the Vanderbilt estate.

The Vanderbilt estate is often called the cradle of US forestry.

Stockard: Olmsted was far and away the most prominent landscape architect America had ever seen.

Even so, virtually all of his parks would come under threat again and again.

Margaret: Olmsted talks about the need to guard against the impulse to fill up space with things.

The openness of the space looks like there's nothing there, and when there's nothing there people who are pressed on all sides by the city start looking at it and say, "Ah, we could put this there.

We could put that there."

We have done a little bit of that in Boston in the last century.

We had the zoo.

We built a big stadium.

Shattuck Hospital, a public health hospital was built in part of Franklin Park.

speaker: "Suppose that you had been commissioned to build a really grand opera house, that after construction had been nearly completed you should be instructed that the building was to be used on Sundays as a Baptist tabernacle and that a suitable place must be found for a huge organ, a pulpit, and a dipping pool, then it must be so refitted that parts of it could be used for a courtroom, a jail, a concert hall, hotel, skating rink, for surgical clinics, for a circus, dog show, ballroom, and railway station.

This is what is nearly always going on with public parks.

It is a matter of chronic anger with me."

Margaret: I think Olmsted struggled with some of the reality of how people wanted to change his designs.

Frustrated by constraints of money and time and resources, he made the best spaces that he could make.

He did a fabulous job of making spaces that have met a lot of needs for a lot of people for a lot of time.

May not be exactly how he designed them, but the bones are good enough that you can do a lot in those spaces.

Garret: I think by the end of his career, looking back on the thing that he had done, which was essentially make parks an essential part of the American landscape, I think he was happy with that.

He felt that it was enormously serendipitous that he had stumbled upon this career, but I think he ultimately was satisfied with what he did.

♪♪♪ speaker: "I have pretty well surrendered to fate.

I must flounder along my way to the end, but I enjoy my children.

In spite of my infirmities, which do drag me cruelly, I am not to be thought of as an unhappy old man."

Stockard: As the old man kept working in Boston, Chicago, and at Biltmore, the firm took on another partner.

The 24 year old Frederick Junior, known as Rick, began working with his father at Biltmore in 1894.

Even as the son became more involved, the father began to fade.

When George Vanderbilt hired the noted artist John Singer Sargent to paint Olmsted's portrait, Rick had to take his father's place, literally.

Witold: Olmsted wasn't actually able to pose for Sargent for the full required length of time.

His son Rick is actually--puts on his clothes and sort of as a stand-in while the portrait is being painted, and of course, it's poignant because Rick in effect becomes Olmsted.

His memory started to go.

In his typical sort of hardheaded way he kind of analyzed himself.

He sees that it's time to get out.

He basically tells his sons, you know, I can't do this anymore.

You can't trust me.

I tell clients things that aren't true or I make wrong decisions, and he kind of pulls himself out of the practice.

Stockard: In 1895 another part of his past slipped away.

One foggy November evening, the 70 year old Calvert Vaux went for a walk in Brooklyn by the sea.

Francis: Calvert Vaux liked to walk out on a pier that was there every evening and watch the sun go down, and one day he did not return.

Speculation is that he probably fainted or maybe had a heart attack and fell off the pier.

There is an air of mystery about his death.

Stockard: When Mary Olmsted received the news that Calvert Vaux had drowned, she burnt the letter.

At first she could not bear to tell Frederick.

When she finally broke the news he planned to write a tribute for his old partner, but in the end he simply forgot.

For three years as his dementia grew worse, Mary cared for Frederick.

Finally, in 1898 she placed him in the McLean Asylum near Boston.

Olmsted had once proposed a design for the McLean grounds.

According to legend, his memory did not fail him completely.

He recognized the place.

"They didn't carry out my plans," he said.

"Confound them."

Frederick Law Olmsted died at McLean in 1903 at the age of 81.

The Olmsted firm survived for decades, the preeminent company in American landscape architecture.

Charles: The legacy of the Olmsted firm is remarkable.

He and his successor firm, run particularly by his stepson John C. Olmsted and his son and namesake, Frederick Law Olmsted Jr, the firm lasted and worked for 100 years and created 700 parks and public spaces.

So they are all over the country.

They are everywhere.

♪♪♪ speaker: The men who planned for New York's growth had great vision.

Long ago they foresaw the need for Central Park, Manhattan's great outdoor playground.

Faye: Sometimes we don't even know that we've been experiencing an Olmsted Park.

When I grew up in New York as a little girl, I went to Central Park with my parents very often.

I had no clue that I was in an Olmsted Park.

I just knew that I was in a place that I really loved.

If you think of those tiny little experiences multiplied over all of those thousands of parks, this is really a huge, huge impact on human experience in America.

Betsy: So many years after his death these parks mean to people what he meant for them to mean, and that they're being used by the widest variety of people you can possibly imagine.

They're there and they're using the spaces he created with absolute abandon and reverence and joy.

speaker: "The beauty of the park should be the beauty of the fields, the meadow, the prairie, of the green pastures and the still waters.

What we want to gain is tranquility and rest to the mind.

Is it doubtful that it does men good to come together in this way, in pure air and under the light of heaven," Frederick Law Olmsted.

announcer: "Frederick Law Olmsted: Designing America" has been made possible by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, exploring the human endeavor, and the Margaret L. Wendt Foundation.

With additional funding from HSBC, the Tiffany & Company Foundation, the C.E & S. Foundation, and these funders.

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