His accomplishments
Frederick Law Olmsted lived from 1822-1903 and was a supremely important figure in the history of the American city. He is remembered as the founder of America's tradition of landscape architecture, which is the science and art of designing attractive, functional outdoor areas. His accomplishments are many, and his influence on urban planning cannot be underestimated.
Olmsted was a champion of the City Beautiful movement, which held that an aesthetically-pleasing, comfortable city would satisfy its citizens and encourage the city's growth and development. The idea of city design still plays a significant role in the profession of planning, although urban design is a much more complex topic today than during Olmsted's era.
His most memorable role in the City Beautiful movement was the promotion of open places in cities. The American city of this period was little regulated, and a laissez-faire government allowed capitalism to design cities as it wished, resulting in extreme crowding and an utter lack of open spaces. American cities were stifling and smelly, and lacked greenery. Olmsted played a prominent role in the allocation of space to public parks: he designed many of the most beautiful parks in the United States. He is most remembered for his design of New York's Central Park in 1857 along with Calvert Vaux. He later went on to design Brooklyn's equally-majestic Prospect Park, along with parks in many other North American cities, including Chicago, Detroit, Montreal, and Boston.
His influence ranged from the intangible to the highly visible. Olmsted's designs were important and prestigious: Stanford University, the U.S. Capitol grounds, much of Atlanta, as well as the fairgrounds of the Columbian Exposition of 1893, which led to the beginning of modern urban planning. His works, however, had impact beyond the cities in which he worked, as his ideas became the model for many other cities and became integral parts of urban thought.
His life
Frederic Law Olmsted led a fascinating life. He was born to an educated, successful middle-class Connecticut family, and was extremely knowledgeable, despite never attending college. During his childhood, he was the beneficiary of his father's fascination with scenery and "the picturesque", and they spent a great deal of time together traveling New England in search of it.
At age fifteen, about to enter Yale college, Olmsted suffered sumac poisoning, which damaged his vision and prevented him from pursuing his studies. Instead, he worked at various other professions. He moved to New York at 18 to be a farmer, and when that effort failed, he went on to a career as a merchant seaman, spending a year on the China trade. After that, he took a walking tool of Europe and wrote his first book, Walks and Talks of an American Farmer in England.
In 1852, he began a career as a reporter for the New York Times. He traveled through the south, and between 1856 and 1860 wrote three books of social analysis of the region. His travels and the experience he developed along the way led to many of the ideas that would influence his later work.
It was through the connections he built in his career as a reporter that Olmsted managed to secure an appointment in 1857 as the superintendant of Central Park, while the design process was still in its infancy. Calvert Vaux was working on the design of the park with another man, who died, and thus the two collaborated on the design, which was eventually selected and implemented.
He didn't immediately devote himself exclusively to landscape architecture, though. After designing Central Park, he went on to work as director of the United States Sanitary Commission, overseeing primarily sanitation and the distribution of medical supplies in Union army camps. He worked at this post from 1861-1863, and after he left, he worked for two years managing the Mariposa Estate, a gold-mining complex in California.
In 1865 Olmsted returned to New York and continued his work on Central Park, and soon after, Prospect Park. For the next thirty years, he continued to work as a landscape architect, with the central idea that his work could have a tangible impact on the quality of life in a city. Concepts such as large urban parks, like Central Park, the parkway, a green, wide highway accomodating multiple types of transport, the city-wide park system, and the aesthetically-attractive, suburban residential neighborhood all originated with Olmsted's work in this period. | 
