Tag Archives: Frederick Law Olmsted

Olmsted Central

I have felt vulnerable all summer long, while working on my contributions for our Salem book: my chapters relate to academic fields for which I have no professional preparation, including African-American history (John Remond), art history (the Colonial Revival) and urban planning (Salem’s 20th-century development). I read widely and had support from my colleagues, and all the chapters will be peer-reviewed, so I don’t think I’ll embarass myself in the end, but I’m still a bit anxious. I’m co-writing the last referenced chapter, on Salem’s development from the Great Salem Fire of 1914 to the present, with my co-editor for the entire book, and after I plowed through rebuilding and urban renewal I simply dumped it on him, just done with it! It wasn’t fun to write and I needed some distance to reflect. So that’s what I have been doing for the last two weeks or so, trying to read histories of urban planning for pleasure. This is a field that intersects with the history of landscape design and garden history—and as the latter is more familiar to me I found a comfort zone. So I got some grounding and feel ready to go back into this chapter with some different perspectives and questions. I also realized I needed to cap off my weeks of reading with a visit to what must be the Mecca of landscape history: the Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site in Brookline, Massachusetts.

So Chestnut Hill, a beautiful section of Brookline which extends over into Newton, was my weekend destination. This is where Boston Brahmins established their country seats in the later nineteenth century, and because of these considerable investments in land the area still retains its pastoral feel despite its proximity to Boston. At the height of his pathfinding career in 1883, Frederick Law Olmsted purchased an early 19th century farmhouse and several acres of land from two elderly spinster sisters who were reluctant to move: he built them a house next door. Another neighbor was Isabella Stewart Gardner, whose “Green Hill” summer house was built by Salem ship captain Nathaniel Ingersoll earlier in the century. Olmsted did not intend for his new house, named Fairsted, to be a seasonal showplace: it became the center of his business and his practice, as well as a center for the emerging new discipline of landscape architecture. This is the focus of the site’s interpretation: on the practice rather than the personal. The farmhouse was expanded in all directions, most conpicuously in the office addition which served as the headquarters of the Olmstead Brothers after the Frederick Law’s retirement in 1895. The firm endured (as the Olmsted Associates) until 1980, the same year that the National Park Service acquired Fairsted. As you can see from the photographs above, the orginal farmhouse its garden addition are not in the best shape: a planned and funded restoration has stalled due to the quality of the workmanship, and is delayed until the next funding process (but private donations can be made here). The interior of the farmhouse is pristine, and (again) dedicated to telling the story of the Olmsted practice. The office addition is like a time capsule of a 1920s-1930s architecture firm: with a drafting room, a photography room, a blueprint-printing room, a shipping room, and a vault, where all the Olmsted plans are archived.

In the main house: very few personal items, it’s all about the firm. I was primarily interested in the urban planning inititatives of the Olmstead firm as my chapter on Salem’s 20th century development begins with Harlan Kelsey’s 1912 City Plans Commission report. Because the Olmsted projects are so extensive, both in sheer number and geographically, the firm’s archives are always in demand and consequently the NPS has completed a major digitization project and also furnished researchers with an invaluable research guide to the collections. I found five Salem projects, the most important of which is the subdivision of the famous Pickman/Loring farm c. 1900: this was Salem’s first planned neighborhood, and I didn’t include it in my draft chapter (but I’m certainly going to do so now)!

The Olmsted site offers two tours, both of which were given by enthusiastic and articulate interns: one on the cultural landscape, the other on the office and practice. In the first, we learned all about Olmsted’s design philosophy (naturalistic and anti-Victorian, not particulaly interested in PLANTS, “borrowed view”) and the second focused primarily on how the firm was run during the era of the Olmsted sons/brothers. I just loved the office tour: forget AI and digital “reality”: this was immersion!

The Olmsted office wing: photography library with project #s (all materials are preserved in the vault now), drafting room, planting specifications, blueprint-printing room (and a very strange blueprint drying machine), shipping room, little cubbyhole office outside the vault.


Stonehurst

Waltham, Massachusetts is a bustling little city just west of Boston that manages to be urban, suburban, and rural all at the same time, depending on what sector you find yourself in. There’s a lot there: an impressive industrial heritage, two universities, Bentley and Brandeis (where I got my Ph.D.), a pretty vibrant downtown, lots of corporations along the Route 128 beltway, and three historic “country” estates preserved as house museums: the Lyman Estate (also known as “The Vale”, built in 1793 and owned and operated by Historic New England), Gore Place (built in 1806 and saved in the 1930s by the Gore Place Society), and Stonehurst (completed by 1886 and owned and operated by the City of Waltham since 1974). Because of my predilection for early American architecture, I have visited the older houses many times: Samuel McIntire designed the foundation structure of The Vale and Gore Place is just about the most elegant Federal house anywhere (outside of Salem, of course). But despite the fact that it is the product of a collaboration between two giants of late nineteeth-century design, architect Henry Hobson Richardson (1838-1886) and landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903), I have to admit I have dissed Stonehurst: I saw it long ago and never returned. The other day I was driving home along Route 128 at just the wrong time on a beautiful day: it was rush hour(s) and the northern lanes were jam-packed. I just had to get out of the car, and as I happened to be in Waltham, I thought I’d go look at the Lyman Estate for a bit and wait out the traffic. After I turned off the highway, however, I saw the sign for Stonehurst and remembered that it is situated on far more land: 109 acres of Olmsted-designed walking trails, to be precise–and I needed some exercise. So there I went, but got slightly distracted by the house, which is a bit……………intimidating? perplexing? provocative?

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Stonehurst is really a combination of two houses built for Robert Treat Paine, a Boston lawyer, philanthropist, and advocate for workers’ housing (scion of a real Brahmin family: his namesake grandfather was a signer of the Declaration of Independence and Massachusetts’ first Attorney General) and his wife Lydia Lyman Paine: her father had financed the Second Empire house that constitutes the western end of the structure, which was later deemed too small for their large family. So Paine (who served on the building committee which oversaw Richardson’s masterpiece, Trinity Church in Boston) commissioned the architect to relocate the house and integrate it with a structure of his own design. The exterior (again, to my untrained eye!) is therefore quite an amalgamation: of the pre-existing Second Empire house, combined with Richardson’s more organic “Richardsonian Romanesque” and Shingle styles. I found the interior far more integrated, with large rooms that related to one another (and the outdoors) in a very pleasing way, and lots of crafted built-in features: window seats, benches, bookcases, mantles, staircases, mouldings: a warm and inviting Arts and Crafts house encased in a somewhat more imposing envelope.

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Interior of Stonehurst and a trail not taken; the line inscribed on the second-floor landing mantle, “Build Thee More Stately Mansions, O My Soul” is from the Oliver Wendell Holmes poem, The Chambered Nautilus.


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