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Olmsted moved with his family to Boston from
Manhattan in 1883 specifically to design and manage the building
of this massive civic project. To do this he established the
world's first professional landscape architecture firm at Fairsted
in the leafy Brookline hills.
Boston without the Emerald Necklace would
be as unimaginable as New York City without Central Park - and
amazingly Olmsted designed and built both of them. Central Park,
his first commission, launched his career as a landscape architect
in 1857 and the Emerald Necklace concluded it upon its completion
in 1896, after almost 20 years of tireless work. In between he
also designed and built many other parks, park systems, parkways,
landscapes and planned communities around the country and in
Canada.
We take as a given the parks and park systems
within the cities of this country, but it wasn't always so. Boston
Common, for example, was established in 1634 by the Puritans,
primarily to graze cattle and hang criminals and Quakers. For
200 years the Common was the only public park within the booming
city of Boston, until the creation of the Public Garden in 1837.
Public parks are an invention of the modern mind, and most especially
of Olmsted's.
As we see daily, Boston is a city always under
construction, a work in progress, constantly reinventing, tearing
down and rebuilding itself. One fairly changeless constant over
the past century, however, has been the Emerald Necklace. It
looks somewhat different from Olmsted's original designs, but
it's still intact and if he returned today for a visit he would
find its main features quite recognizable. In short, it has stood
the test of time, when time has swept away so much of the American
urban landscape.
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