To celebrate National Arbor Day on Friday, April 27, Palisades Beautiful will host a program about Frederick Law Olmsted, one of the great landscape architects of the late nineteenth century. Don Marquardt, who plays the lead in a current documentary on the life of Olmsted (commissioned by the American Society of Landscape Architects), will talk about his subject at 4 p.m. in the Palisades Branch Library community room, 861 Alma Real. The public is invited and refreshments will be served. Olmsted is best known as the co-creator of Central Park in New York City, where he transformed a waste dump into a haven that brought the beauty and respite of the countryside to crowded city workers during the Industrial Revolution. He also designed George Vanderbilt’s Biltmore Estate in the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina and the original layout of the campus grounds at Stanford University. Readers of ‘The Devil in White City’ by Erik Larson will remember Olmsted’s impressive contributions to the 1893 Chicago Exposition. ‘A Clearing in the Distance’ by Witold Rybczynski is a recent prize-winning biography of Olmsted Marquardt, who recently retired as parks maintenance director for Culver City, previously worked for the City of Ventura. He has taught for decades in UCLA Extension’s landscape architecture program and currently teaches History of Landscape Architecture.
This page is available to subscribers. Click here to sign in or get access.
