By Vicky Hallett
NEW YORK--The textbook in J. T. Stipanovich's lap sits unread in the Sunday sunshine. The 26-year-old Columbia University graduate student's eyes wander to a wedding party meandering toward the reservoir, a plump man wiping his hands on his thighs mid-picnic on the Great Lawn, and a mother tickling her daughter with blades of grass on a nearby bench. Like thousands of other New Yorkers, Stipanovich finds his haven from the city right in its midst: Central Park. "I needed to get out of my cramped apartment," he says.

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Frederick Law Olmsted foresaw that need long before Manhattan became packed with skyscrapers and choked with cars. With his collaborator Calvert Vaux, Olmsted conceived "Greensward," a verdant refuge that would offer space for solitude or open-air gatherings at the heart of an increasingly crowded city. Central Park, which turns 150 this summer, was the embodiment of this dream and the beginning of landscape architecture. And it launched Olmsted's career of reinventing America's open spaces.

Olmsted first made a name for himself as a writer. He explored the South composing dispatches on slavery for the New York Times, cofounded the Nation, and compiled Walks and Talks of an American Farmer in England from his travels in Europe. On his tour, he fell in love with public recreation grounds, where, he wrote, garden-ing "reached a perfection that I had never before dreamed of."

That democratic America did not have a "people's park" bothered Olmsted. So when the New York Board of Aldermen set aside a parcel of land at the northern edge of the developing city to turn into a park, Olmsted lobbied for the superintendency, and in 1857 he took charge. A year later, his and Vaux's plan won the design competition, and thousands of workers set about shifting earth and foliage to transform the rather ugly, rocky rectangle into a lush escape.

Greensward represented a major shift from the traditional style of landscape gardening. Instead of the manicured lawns and orderly rows of flowers found in European gardens, Olmsted and Vaux insisted that every detail from shrubs to stones appear as if it were untouched from the beginning of creation. While competing plans for Central Park had called for vast exhibition halls, horse-racing tracks, and other prominent structures, Greensward de-emphasized buildings and turned the landscape itself into architecture. Olmsted shaped it into hills, lakes, and woodsy hideaways, with curvy paths tracing the topography. It was all an illusion, requiring much draining, blasting, and filling--some 5 million cubic yards of rock and soil were moved during the construction.

One and all. Olmsted's purposes were social as well as aesthetic. Yale University's Alexander Garvin, an authority on urban parks who says he "worships at the altar of Frederick Law Olmsted," explains, "The difference between him and English landscape designers is he figured out how to use this aesthetic to bring people together of every class and race." Central Park was not merely a place for the wealthy to ride around in their carriages; its promenade invited mingling, and the meadows did not discriminate. Olmsted posted descriptions and directions to the park in tenement houses around the city to encourage visits by the poor and sick. Everyone was welcome in this scenic refuge, and everyone came.

The experiment proved successful, and so did Olmsted. He found himself in high demand, designing 17 major urban parks--including Brooklyn's Prospect Park, Detroit's Belle Isle, and Chicago's Jackson Park--and often extracting exquisite beauty out of swamps, lagoons, and dumps. Olmsted also pioneered the ideas of parkways and suburbs, all in keeping with his goal: "the ruralizing of all our urban population and the urbanizing of our rustic population." He applied his talents to natural wonders--Yosemite and Niagara--the U.S. Capitol grounds, Stanford University, and Boston's "Emerald Necklace" park system.

Given the relaxing qualities of his spaces, some hospitals and mental institutions requested his skills as well. In 1895, when he was diagnosed with senile dementia, Olmsted moved to one of them, the McLean Asylum in Belmont, Mass. But he was disappointed when he reached the grounds. As he wrote in a letter to his family, "They didn't carry out my plan, confound them!" Much of America, however, did.