How would the American landscape be different today without Olmsteds legacy?
You can’t imagine New York without Central Park, or Boston without its Emerald Necklace, or Montreal without Mont Royal park. There are at least half a dozen cities in North America that would be very, very different if he had not been alive and done his work. Would those parks have been designed by somebody else if Olmsted hadn’t been around? Central Park would certainly have been designed by somebody else. But I think that without Olmsted and Vaux, Central Park might have been much more like a very large garden. Or it might have been more like a sort of World Fair site, with lots of pavilions and exhibition buildings. Or it might have been a very formal, manicured landscape. In some cases the parks might have been carefully designed, but not the way Olmsted did, as very natural, almost wilderness landscapes, or pastoral ones. Without Olmsted we would think of landscape in a different way. His picturesque landscape became the absolutely dominant ideal for most Americans — to the poin
