Frederick Law Olmsted’s Vision for Milwaukee

Expand

Illustration by David Lee Csicsko via olmsted200.org

Frederick Law Olmsted caricature

Frederick Law Olmsted caricature

There are few individuals more important to the history of America’s environment than Frederick Law Olmsted. Throughout his life (1822-1903), Olmsted served as a pioneer in such fields as journalism, landscape architecture, natural conservation, and historic preservation. Yet outside of his work in New York’s Central Park, many are unaware of just how much Olmsted shaped the way Americans engage with public space, particularly in cities across the country.

“In the Park with Olmsted: A Vision for Milwaukee,” an exhibition on display at the Villa Terrace Decorative Arts Museum through Sept. 25, seeks to change this oversight. Through groundbreaking documentation of Olmsted’s work in Milwaukee, exhibition co-curators Martha Chaiklin and Annemarie Sawkins highlight not only the historical significance of Olmsted, but why his ideas on public spaces remain relevant in the 21st century.

As one might expect, “In the Park with Olmsted” pays attention to Olmsted’s presence in Central Park, along with his work in such other high-profile spaces as the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair and California’s Yosemite Valley. Yet the bulk of the exhibition focuses on Riverside Park, Washington (originally West) Park, and Lake Park—the three parks that Olmsted designed for Milwaukee during the last decade of the 19th century. A variety of materials, from maps to photographs to postcards, lay out Olmsted’s vision for how these spaces were meant to look. Yet equally important are the ways that the exhibition, along with its beautiful catalogue, documents the beliefs that informed Olmsted’s designs in Milwaukee. For Olmsted, parks had to be accessible to all city dwellers. This idea of “parks for all people” challenged the private parks and beer gardens that marked Milwaukee’s built environment throughout the nineteenth century. As the 20th century began, the democratic potential of public spaces—a concept that Olmsted placed at the heart of his park designs—informed the way Milwaukeeans of all stripes came to engage with their rapidly evolving city.

“In the Park with Olmsted” does a masterful job of visually representing these local histories. Yet the exhibition is not solely rooted in the past; it also strives to document the contemporary relevance of these parks. The work of painters (Ariana Huggett), photographers (Stanley Greenberg and Eddee Daniel), and filmmakers (Cecelia Condit) illustrate the continuing beauty of Olmsted’s Milwaukee parks well into the 21st century. Of course, things have changed—as evident in images of Riverside Park captured by photographer Larry Chatman. In Chatman’s photographs, the (visual) noise of Oakland Avenue interrupts the planned serenity of the space, as a children’s playground and a Little Caesar’s pizza restaurant vie for the attention of the park visitor.

Importantly, though, people still visit Olmsted’s parks to get away from such hustle and bustle. They also go to these spaces to have a picnic, fish, play frisbee, jog, or to engage in a host of other activities. They go to these parks because they can—and because Olmsted did not over-design them. Olmsted himself noted that he sought to keep his parks “simple and natural,” utilizing design strategies that “touch us so quietly that we are hardly conscious of them.” Olmsted understood that his parks would be used by a multitude of people for a myriad of purposes. Olmsted, in other words, sought to be as inclusive as possible as he thought through how such spaces should be both planned and lived.

“In the Park with Olmsted” excels at showing how this reality informed the work of Olmsted in Milwaukee. Yet one hopes that any visitor to the exhibition also sees why such ideas remain pertinent to current discussions on the state of Milwaukee parks. Faced with what seems to be a perpetual fiscal crisis, those who oversee the parks system have begun to effectively privatize portions of public parks. These strategies will undoubtedly inform who can and cannot access such places. Olmsted’s greatest legacy here in Milwaukee is the way he democratized urban space. It is now time to revisit—and renew—our collective belief in this valuable tenet.