99 Warren Street
Brookline, MA 02445
Phone: 617-566-1689
www.nps.gov/frla/
“An artist, he paints with lakes and wooded slopes; with lawns and banks and forest covered hills; with mountain sides and ocean views.”
— DANIEL BURNHAM
Frederick Law Olmsted (1822–1903) was many things: a conservationist, a public administrator, and a social critic. But he is best known as the father of American landscape architecture. His most renowned work is Central Park in Manhattan, but he created a lot more. His favorite park was Prospect Park in Brooklyn, New York. His parks, academic campuses, and other landscape works across the country—as far away as San Francisco—would be too numerous to recount here. But in the Boston area, his major contribution was the design of the Emerald Necklace, a series of open spaces, green areas, and parks linked by waterways and parkways. The Emerald Necklace starts with the Boston Common (1634) and the Boston Public Garden (1837); continues down the mall of Commonwealth Avenue; then on to the Fens (past the Gardner Museum—see page 53), the Riverway, Olmsted Park, Jamaica Pond, the Jamaicaway, the Arborway, and the Arnold Arboretum; and ends at Franklin Park.
Olmsted frequently worked with the great American architect Henry Hobson Richardson (1838–1886). Richardson lived in Brookline and suggested that Olmsted do the same. So in 1883 Olmsted (whose name means “place of the elm”) bought Fairsted, an 1810 Federal farmhouse built for the Clark family. Once there, Olmsted and his son John Charles landscaped the property and renovated the house. In 1903 a wing was added for the landscaping firm. And so this site presents a home, an office, and a garden.
After Olmsted died, his sons Frederick Jr. and John Charles continued in their father’s footsteps. The firm became known as the Olmsted Brothers company. The Olmsted family lived here until 1936, when they rented the house to others while maintaining the company’s office here. The business closed in 1980, and the property was sold to the National Park Service, which now offers tours. The house exterior has been restored, as has the garden. Within, the house’s original wall coverings have been reproduced, and there are displays of photographs of the house interior as it was in Olmsted’s time. The part of the site used by the Olmsted Brothers company has archives and storage space for more than one hundred thousand documents used on about five thousand projects, as well as photos, models, tools, and work space. The work of Olmsted and his sons’ firm is well documented and presented here.