Archive for 2014

Mount Auburn

Wednesday, December 10, 2014 | Posted by lalh

Mount Auburn Cemetery Boston, Massachusetts 1831 On a hilly seventy-acre site four miles west of Boston, a new cemetery, unlike any in America, was consecrated in 1831. Derived from the picturesque English landscape garden, Mount Auburn also reflected the influence of Père Lachaise Cemetery, whose melancholic, romantic atmosphere was already attracting crowds in Paris. The […]

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Buffalo Parks

Wednesday, December 10, 2014 | Posted by lalh

Buffalo Parks Buffalo, New York 1868 In spring 1858, Frederick Law Olmsted met Calvert Vaux at his Manhattan office to divide the $2,000 fee they had earned after winning the Central Park design competition. At the time, Vaux told his friend that after the park was done they could “carry on the business that it […]

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Tower Grove

Wednesday, December 10, 2014 | Posted by lalh

Tower Grove Park St. Louis, Missouri 1868 Tower Grove Park was created on a long narrow stretch of three hundred acres of land—”half prairie, half shrubbery”—adjacent to one of the nation’s first botanical gardens. Planted with over 17,000 trees, shrubs, and vines and enlivened with colorful and ornate summerhouses, such as the Turkish Pavilion with […]

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Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller

Wednesday, December 10, 2014 | Posted by lalh

Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historic Park Woodstock, Vermont 1869 By the turn of the eighteenth century, Vermont retained little of the forestland that once covered the state. Sheep farming had led to clear-cutting that produced soil depleted slopes and silt-choked streams. One of the keenest observers of man’s misuse of this landscape was George Perkins Marsh, born […]

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Reynolda

Wednesday, December 10, 2014 | Posted by lalh

Reynolda Winston-Salem, North Carolina 1908 Like many other American country places, Reynolda was laid out according to principles whose origins were in the British picturesque, set into open farmland and woods with expansive lawns and a daffodil-bordered lake. However, the estate’s creator and owner, Katharine Smith Reynolds (1880–1924), had loftier purposes than the typical wealthy […]

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Forest Hills Gardens

Wednesday, December 10, 2014 | Posted by lalh

Forest Hills Gardens Queens, New York 1909 Just fifteen minutes by train from the sensory overload of Times Square and two blocks from the commercial sprawl of main street, Queens lies the historic commuter suburb, Forest Hills Gardens. Conceived in 1909, this 142-acre enclave was the collaborative creation of the landscape architect and planner Frederick […]

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Finger Lakes

Wednesday, December 10, 2014 | Posted by lalh

Finger Lakes Region State Parks Ithaca, New York 1914 The environmental planner and landscape architect Warren H. Manning (1860–1938) designed suburbs, parks, campuses, and country estates throughout the nation, but nowhere is his legacy more apparent than the Finger Lakes region around Ithaca, New York. Manning first came to Ithaca in 1900 to design an […]

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Oldfields

Tuesday, December 9, 2014 | Posted by lalh

Oldfields Indianapolis, Indiana 1920 During the first decade of the twentieth century, Hugh Landon and Linnaes Boyd, executives of the Indianapolis Water Company, scouted locations for a reservoir along a branch of a defunct canal system northwest of the city. Although the reservoir was never built, the men purchased 52 acres along the bluffs of […]

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Ford House

Tuesday, December 9, 2014 | Posted by lalh

Edsel and Eleanor Ford House Grosse Pointe Shores, Michigan 1929 The Danish landscape architect Jens Jensen (1860–1951) came to know Edsel Ford through work Jensen had done for his parents, Clara and Henry Ford, at Fair Lane, their Dearborn, Michigan, estate. There Jensen had created rockwork along the Rouge River and expansive tree and flower-bordered […]

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Camden Amphitheatre

Tuesday, December 9, 2014 | Posted by lalh

Camden Public Library Amphitheatre Camden, Maine 1929 One of the most stylistically adventurous landscape architects of the twentieth century—Fletcher Steele—designed the grounds for a new public library in Camden, Maine, beginning in 1928. The project was underwritten by Mary Louise Curtis Bok, who presented the Camden selectmen with an acre and a half of land […]

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