Central Park, NYC, 1866
In 1857, Calvert Vaux, a rising young architect from London, asked Frederick Law Olmsted to join him in preparing an entry for the Central Park competition. While the park was being constructed according to their winning "Greensward" plan, Olmsted left New York, first for Washington and then for California. It took several years for Vaux to convince his friend to return East and join him in leading the nascent urban park movement that Central Park had spawned. In 1865, the reunited partners took up the design of Prospect Park in Brooklyn, their most fully evolved example of pastoral landscape as urban park. Five years later, they prepared the initial proposal for parks and parkways in Buffalo. It was the first plan for an interconnected park system to be implemented by an American city. Other places that sought the partners' advice during the post-Civil War years were Albany, NY, Newark, NJ, and Chicago and Riverside, IL. The latter is regarded as the country's first major suburban residential community.
Along with landscape projects he undertook with Olmsted, Vaux had a parallel career as an architect. He designed many country and suburban houses that displayed sensitive rapport with nature. Most of his early works of this type appeared in his book Villas and Cottages, which came out in 1857. Especially notable were his designs for bridges and other structures that embellished the parks that he and Olmsted laid out. The Bow Bridge and Bethesda Terrace in Central Park are most well known. He was also responsible for imaginative architectural features in Prospect Park and the Buffalo parks....
November 4, 2019
By Louis Sahagun
At the urging of a controversial team of advisors, (click here) the Trump administration is mulling proposals to privatize national park campgrounds and further commercialize the parks with expanded Wi-Fi service, food trucks and even Amazon deliveries at tourist camp sites.
Leaders of the Interior Department’s “Made in America” Outdoor Recreation Advisory Committee say these changes could make America’s national parks more attractive to a digitally minded younger generation and improve the quality of National Park Service facilities amid a huge maintenance backlog. As part of its plan, the committee calls for blacking out senior discounts at park campgrounds during peak holiday seasons.
“Our recommendations would allow people to opt for additional costs if they want, for example, Amazon deliveries at a particular campsite,” said Derrick Crandall, vice chairman of the committee and a counselor with the nonprofit National Park Hospitality Assn. “We want to let Americans make their own decisions in the marketplace.”
But the group’s proposals face angry opposition from conservation organizations and senior citizen advocates, who call them a transfer of public assets to private industry, including businesses led by executives appointed to the Outdoor Advisory Committee....
