“Roosevelt vs. Olmsted: Parks, People & the Nature of America”

Thursday, February 13th, 2020

Follow this link to watch Lauren Becker's presentation on YouTube.

The 2020 Speaker Nite series started  off with a wonderful turnout and a fantastic speaker! We had the pleasure of welcoming  independent researcher, exhibit designer, nature enthusiast, and friend-of-the-Site Lauren Becker; her topic was, “Roosevelt vs. Olmsted: Parks, People, and the Nature of America”. She focused on the similarities and differences between two giants of natural history; Theodore Roosevelt and Frederick Law Omsted. Both gentlemen radically influenced how Americans--then and now--viewed and interacted with the natural environment from our urban centers to wild spaces.

The achievements of Theodore Roosevelt are numerous and well- documented; many are familiar with his achievements as President of the United States and as a conservationist.  But, the life and achievement of Frederick Law Olmsted are far less known by an average American, but are arguably as widely seen as Roosevelt’s. Olmsted lived a colorful life that could easily be compared to that found in fiction. From a young age, he was exposed to the wonders of nature and found peace and tranquility outdoors. Spending hours with his father horseback riding and hiking, but most of all learning about the natural world. Olmsted's schooling was intermittent and uninspiring. His father, an accomplished Connecticut merchant, sent young Olmsted to small boarding schools run by clergymen, but they were disciplinarians more than teachers, and Olmsted learned much more from reading his father's library and visiting relatives and family friends. After a terrible run-in with sumac that temporarily blinded him at 14, he was advised to avoid serious study and gave up his plans to go to Yale. He spent his early life traveling and bouncing from job to job, accumulating an impressive resume. His endeavors included time as an engineer, surveyor, clerk, farmer, sailor and even a writer for the New York Times. Though Olmsted never stayed in one position long, over the course of years he acquired a vast set of skills that would be invaluable when he finally found his calling in 1857; that was when he was appointed to arguably his most famous position as Superintendent of Central Park. 

Olmsted's appointment as Superintendent of Central Park launched him into his future career as a landscape architect. Alongside Calvet Vaux, a longtime partner and architect, Olmsted designed all of Central Park from the ground up, creating a man-made landscape in the heart of New York City. Central Park is Olmsted's most famous work, but it was far from his last. Following the Civil War, where he served as the CEO of the Sanitary Commision, Olmsted began filling our nation's major cities with parks. Today, you can find Olmsted-designed parks in dozens of U.S. cities, including: Boston, Oakland, Atlanta, Washington D.C. and right here in Western New York. The Buffalo Parks System owes much to Olmsted, who designed (with Vaux) the city's first three parks; those were later expanded to include a total of 6 full parks, 3 ‘pocket’ parks, 8 circles and 7 parkways (much of the later work was actually done by Olmsted's son). In addition, he designed the Niagara Reservation which today is Niagara Falls State Park, a project that Theodore Roosevelt worked on as well.  

In the decades since their completion, tens of millions of people have traversed the grounds of Olmsted's parks and enjoyed a small piece of the outdoors in the heart of our urban centers. For Olmsted, parks were a piece of art designed with the intention to instill in its guests a sense of safety that soothed anxieties and provided a place for pleasant interactions between people that brought out our better nature in an ever hardening urban world. This sentiment of bringing out our better nature through the natural world was shared by Theodore Roosevelt. TR actively saved our natural wonders and went on to protect some two hundred thirty million acres of wilderness. Roosevelt believed that in these scenic and sublime natural places we could find a place that rejuvenated and invigorated us so we could challenge ourselves to grow and see the bigger picture. This picture that Roosevelt sought after and the feeling that Olmsted wished to instill in his parks was one in the same. It was an idea that we needed to create parks and preserve nature for not just their own sake, but especially for our own.

 --Travis Ratka, Programming Assistant | Interpreter 

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Speaker Nite is part of the TR Site’s regular Tuesday evening programming, which is made possible with generous support from M&T Bank, as well as the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA), with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

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