The Olmsteds in Pittsburgh
When Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903) first visited Pittsburgh in 1863, it reminded him of Birmingham, England, which he had seen a decade earlier at the height of the Industrial Revolution. “All the colors and smells and grease,” he wrote his wife Mary, “Great steep cliffs opposite, up which I clomb, cinders, coalmines. . . a very grand, mysterious, obscure, gloomy sentiment in the view over the town.”
 
By the turn of the century when his stepson and nephew John Charles Olmsted (1852-1920) and son Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. (1870-1957) began to work in Pittsburgh, all that activity was producing great wealth and corresponding ambitions to build a more beautiful and convenient city. The firm’s first clients in the area reflected the breadth of Pittsburgh’s interests and pointed the direction for future projects extending over nearly half a century.
 
In 1895, they designed the new company town of Vandergrift, 40 miles from the city, for the Apollo Iron and Steel Company, makers of galvanized steel. The history of this remarkable project is the subject of Anne E. Mosher’s 2004 book, Capital’s Utopia: Vandergrift, Pennsylvania, 1855-1916. Twenty five years later the firm did extensive planning for the Fort Pitt Malleable Iron Co.
 
Franklin A. Nicola brought them in to landscape his new Schenley Hotel in 1898, the opening salvo in the development of Oakland as Pittsburgh’s cultural center. The hotel survives as the William Pitt Union of the University of Pittsburgh. The firm returned in 1948 to provide detailed plans for Pitt’s Cathedral of Learning and other university properties.
 
The venerable Allegheny Cemetery, founded in 1844 as one of America’s earliest rural cemeteries, asked John Charles Olmsted to upgrade its design in 1901.
 
Lizzie Dohrmann Thaw, the widow of William Thaw Junior, worked with the firm for fifteen years beginning in 1901 on her country estate at Sewickley Heights, about eight miles downstream from the city. This led to at least five other commissions in that fashionable neighborhood, including very large projects in 1920 and 1921 for James H. Park and Charles A. Painter, Jr.
 
William Larimer Mellon, founder of Gulf Oil, asked the firm to landscape his residence in Squirrel Hill in 1901. Subsequently two even more wealthy Mellon uncles also turned to the firm. Richard B. Mellon’s estate at Fifth & Shady is now Mellon Park, while his daughter Sarah Mellon Scaife’s home next door at 1081 Shady, relandscaped by the Olmsteds in 1931, has become the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts. Andrew W. Mellon’s house on Woodland Road is now the centerpiece of Chatham University. The firm returned in the 1940s to work for Chatham, when it was still called Pennsylvania College for Women.
 
Other prominent Pittsburgh clients of the Olmsteds included (among others) both H. J. Heinz and his son Howard Heinz, steel man James B. Oliver, and Francis T. F. Lovejoy, a junior partner of Andrew Carnegie.
 
Perhaps the greatest impact the firm had on Pittsburgh, however, was the plan that FLO Junior produced in 1911 for the Pittsburgh Civic Commission. Its title suggested a rather narrow focus: Pittsburgh Main Thoroughfares and the Down Town District; Improvements Necessary to Meet the City’s Present and Future Needs. But in typical Olmsted fashion, the report’s content was actually both deep and wide. It looked at the highway system throughout the region and recommended a network of parks and parkways, starting with the Boulevard of the Allies along the Monongahela Valley, designed in 1910 and built 1922-1927. Other recommendations that were carried out included the South Hills Bridge and Tunnel complex, the widening of Forbes, Fifth and Sixth Avenues, the elimination of the so-called “hump” at the east end of downtown, and the creation of Schenley Plaza as a formal entry to the park system. More broadly, the report set the agenda for future planning by identifying both the need for decisions in many areas and shortcomings in available data needed to make such decisions.
 
The Olmsteds didn’t create Pittsburgh, but impacted many of the features that we most treasure today and set the city on a course toward greatness.