Olmstead in Seattle: Creating a Park System for a Growing City

$29.95 at Seattle Art Museum.

Many Seattle neighborhoods are distinguished by their parks and linked together by park boulevards.  This defining quality is the result of the city’s Board of Park Commissioners hiring John Olmsted in 1903 to create a park system that would make Seattle a world-class city.  Olmsted in Seattle traces the story of the park system’s expansion from the handful of parks Olmsted found upon his arrival, through the development of three citywide plans and dozens of landscape designs for parks and parkways.  This…