"Greenscapes:" the stamp of John Charles Olmsted on the Pacific Northwest

We live in an Olmsted city.

It's the work not of Frederick Law Olmsted — famed creator of New York's Central Park — but his nephew/stepson John Charles Olmsted (1852-1920), who between 1903 and 1911 inspired so many design features of Seattle's urban landscape that it boggles the mind to take them all in.

Lake Washington Boulevard, Woodland Park, the University of Washington campus — these are just a few of the dozens of public projects the younger Olmsted worked on in less than a decade. Most are still very much in place as he envisaged them, as are some of his private commissions, including The Highlands.

Seattle author Joan Hockaday's "Greenscapes: Olmsted's Pacific Northwest" (Washington State University Press, 162 pp., $29.95) covers Olmsted's activities in Portland, Spokane and other cities, too, identifying the obstacles he faced as he navigated local political power struggles — or found himself appreciating the natural assets of the region in ways local residents didn't.

One droll example of the latter: A certain Mr. Peter Kerr of Portland, consulting Olmsted on the siting of his new mansion, made clear he was now so blasé about Mount Hood that "he did not feel the need of facing the windows directly toward it."

Olmsted faced similar perplexities when he tried to push for the preservation of native plant species in public parks and private grounds.

"It seems especially queer," he remarked, "that they cannot appreciate the beautiful evergreen undergrowth they have here — the Oregon grape, the Sallal [sic] and the evergreen huckleberry."

The one exception: Everyone liked madronas.

The sources for the book are 5,000 letters Olmsted wrote home to his wife, Sophia, while on his business travels, along with the meticulous reports he sent to the Olmsted Brothers' home office in Massachusetts. These allow Hockaday to offer good detail on his working methods as he tramped through mud and undergrowth and took copious field notes.

Olmsted's observations naturally provide vivid snapshots of the region in the early 20th century, from vacation tents for rent at Alki to the "poor factories, stables & cheap untidy little houses" behind Victoria's Empress Hotel. His writings also shed light on the man himself. He could sometimes be a snob ("cheap untidy little houses" wasn't an isolated comment), and he was a meticulous timekeeper. "We broke up at 2," he said of one Highlands meeting, "and started back at 2:17."

By 1909 he had realized the automobile soon would be taking over from horse-drawn transportation. That same year he complained to Seattle Park Board President Edward C. Cheasty about the lack of pedestrian walkways along newly constructed Lake Washington Boulevard.

One of his frustrations was that while he was revered as an idea man, he had little control over how his ideas were put into effect. The actual building of boulevards and parks was in the hands of city administrators and contractors.

Given these obstacles and also how much time he had to spend far from home to work in this region, it's fair to ask what drew him here, especially when he and his firm sometimes neglected East Coast projects because of commitments here.

Part of it was the clean slate this region offered him, in contrast to already decaying East Coast cities. The dramatic topography and unfamiliar flora were just as much a lure, and Victoria, B.C., seems especially to have seduced him.

"I wish we could live in such a beautiful location," he wrote to his wife on a mild January day while working on the Uplands residential district there. "It is strange to see so much green herbage in midwinter. ... Here a man was running a lawnmower on the hotel lawn today. To be sure it did not look very much in need of mowing."

"Greenscapes" gives readers a thorough overview of John Charles Olmsted's accomplishments here, along with lively insight into his sense of the place.

Michael Upchurch is The Seattle Times arts writer: mupchurch@seattletimes.com