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2024-2025 Colloquium Series
“Frederick Law Olmsted’s Urban Parks:
The Touristic Strategy of Bourgeois and Working-Class
Containment”
Nilak Datta, Literary and Cultural Studiest
Birla Institute of Technology & Science,
Friday, May 2, 4PM-6PM PDT
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Abstract
Frederick Law Olmsted’s body of work in the arena of landscape architecture consists of a variety of
commissions that began with the design of New York City’s Central Park 1858 to the landscaping of
Chicago’s Jackson Park for the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893. In a career spanning 35 years, he
instituted the profession of landscape architecture and helped Americans understand the need for open
urban spaces that could offer a variety of touristic uses. Sometimes the large landscapes he designed
offered public space for the free mixing of all social classes (such as Prospect Park, Brooklyn) where
visitors could see and be seen by others. Sometimes they took the shape of exclusive private space for
millionaires (such as Vanderbilt’s Biltmore Estate) where the estate owner could engage in solitary
enjoyment of park and forest land. Sometimes Olmsted’s commissions took the shape of academic
campuses (such as Stanford University) or rest homes for the mentally ill (such as Hartford Retreat,
Connecticut) where aesthetics of landscape architecture could offer deeper replenishment and insights
about self and the world. Sometimes his commissions took the shape of large nature preservation sites
like the Niagara Reservation or the Yosemite Valley which could become a means of tourist revenue
without sacrificing the touristic enjoyment of the sublime (especially in the case of the Niagara
Reservation).
This paper argues that Olmsted’s public parks took the shape they did in response to rapid urbanization,
overcrowding, and significant migration from the rural sector to towns leading to middle- and upper-class
anxieties about an unruly urban poor. In democratizing the reach of parks to all classes (especially the
urban poor), during the 1850s to the 1890s, Olmsted wanted to create a containment strategy by
addressing these class anxieties through a broad-based day tourism for the masses. He argued that rural
scenery and picturesque landscapes offered touristic relief to the urban dweller, an escape from the
pressures of urban life. On the one hand, this design philosophy reflected Olmsted’s class affiliations (if
not, personal friendships) with the Hudson River School artists and their aesthetics and with his own
childhood and youthful associations with late 18 th century notions of the picturesque (John Gilpin) in
painting and in British rural landscaping. On the other hand, commercial park commissions demanded
greater tourist infrastructure in the form of amusement parks to cater to higher volume (Kasson 37-42).
Speaker Bio
Nilak Datta teaches Literary and Cultural Studies at Birla Institute of Technology & Science, Pilani, K K
Birla Goa Campus, India. He has taught in the United States, Qatar and in India. He earned his PhD in
Literary and Cultural Studies from Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh, PA). His current research
interests revolve around the intersections between urban studies, tourism studies, and American frontier
studies. His most recent work delves into the relationship between the 1893 Columbian Exposition and
popular 19 th century fiction.
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