Frederick Law Olmsted

Lidargraph, Deepdene Forest (2024)

animation by Joel Silverman

Before he became America's foremost landscape architect, Frederick Law Olmsted was a traveling newspaper correspondent. In 1856 he made a two year reporting trip on horseback through the South to see the country and report on a region at the brink of a Civil War. Olmsted's dispatches argued that slavery was ruining the South, and predicted that seceding from the Union would be disastrous to the South for “half a century”. He returned home and spent that half a century becoming the foremost designer of American parks. He took his years of wandering through the beauty of nature, and asked himself, how can people in cities be given the chance to wander too? Olmsted championed the concept of parks as essential, egalitarian, and naturalistic urban spaces. And then, at the end of his long life, Olmsted returned to a very changed South, to design the shaggy and rambling park that I have been wandering for weeks while I recover from a difficult eye surgery, scanning with my laser scanning camera that can see so much better than I can at the moment, grateful to have an dark and quiet forest hidden in plain sight in the middle of the city.

I led a wonderful Drift the Map ramble through Deepdene on December 8 with the Olmsted Linear Park preservationists who have been fighting to restore and protect this architectural and ecological gem. The park is so beloved that activists once chained themselves to bulldozers to stop a road from being built through it. Some of them climbed into trees about to be cut down by construction crews and refused to come down until they were dragged down by the police. They learned these civil disobedience techniques from Freedom Rider John Lewis, a political outsider who used the ties he built in this eastside intown neighborhood from opposing Jimmy Carter’s ill-fated Presidential Parkway to boost his campaign for Congress the following year. Decades after being saved from being paved over, the park includes some of intown Atlanta’s most biodiverse urban stream and wildlife habitat and at least one tree that is older than the American Revolution.