PART III 

 AMERICAN LANDSCAPE GARDENING IN 1857 



In September, 1857, when Frederick Law Olmsted was 

 appointed Superintendent of the Central Park in New York, 

 there was no well-established profession of landscape garden- 

 ing in the United States and the term landscape architect ' 

 was unknown. The untimely death of Andrew Jackson 

 Downing had come five years earlier. It was not until the 

 very end of 1857 that Downing's architectural associate and 

 successor, Calvert Vaux, invited the new Superintendent of 

 the Central Park to participate with him in the competition 

 for the design, thus beginning a partnership which brought 

 about public recognition of a new professional field. It is 

 worth mentioning that the New York newspapers of the day 

 regarded only a few of the thirty-three^ plans submitted 

 in the competition as worth attention, and characterized 

 many as puerile and entirely unsuitable. Of the four pre- 

 miated plans, the second was submitted by Mr. Samuel I. 

 Gustin, the superintendent of planting at the Park, the third 

 by Messrs. Miller and Mcintosh, two employees in the office 

 of the Superintendent (Mr. Olmsted), and the fourth by an 

 architect, Mr. Howard Daniels, — none of these gentlemen 

 apparently enjoying any distinction in the pubHc eye. The 



' The term "Landscape Architecture" in a restricted sense (of Architec- 

 ture in Landscape) was used in England by Laing Meason in 1828 as the title 

 of a work which contained a discussion of Italian villas: The Landscape Archi- 

 tecture oj the Great Painters of Italy. This work was referred to in a Review of 

 Downing's Cottage Residences and two other books on landscape gardening, 

 which appeared in the North American Review, Oct., 1844, p. 308. 



' Two more designs were submitted, but not in competition. The editors 

 discovered in the New York Public Library a printed copy of "Catalogue of 

 Plans for the Improvement of the Central Park ' ' annotated by one of the Park 

 Commissioners with the names of the supposed authors of the thirty-five sets 

 of drawings. 



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