In 1857, the Board of Commissioners appointed Frederick Law Olmsted superintendent of Central Park in New York City. His initial responsibilities were practical and demanding: overseeing work on the park’s rugged terrain of rocky outcrops, dense undergrowth, and low-lying wetlands. Within months, however, Olmsted joined the English-born architect Calvert Vaux to submit the Greensward Plan. Chosen by the Central Park commissioners on April 28, 1858, the plan permanently altered the course of American park design and urban planning.
Drawing on English pastoral and picturesque landscape traditions while departing from rigidly formal garden design, Olmsted and Vaux proposed an artfully constructed naturalistic landscape of open meadows, woodlands, winding paths, and water. Their goal was not wilderness but a carefully composed setting that could offer city residents relief from the noise, crowding, and pressures of an industrializing metropolis. The plan also incorporated formal features, including the Mall and Bethesda Terrace, within its larger pastoral vision.
A defining innovation was the system of sunken transverse roads. By routing cross-town traffic below the level of the park and concealing it with grading, vegetation, and bridges, Olmsted and Vaux preserved the sense of a continuous interior landscape for pedestrians and other park users.
Olmsted’s management of the project and his partnership with Vaux helped establish principles that would shape modern landscape architecture in North America. Central Park showed how an ambitious public landscape could support recreation, public health, and democratic civic life. In transforming a difficult and uneven site into an enduring urban refuge, Olmsted and Vaux set a far-reaching precedent for weaving green space into the fabric of American cities.
