By David Hugh Smith
On September 22, the Museum of Fine Arts will show The Olmsted Legacy: America’s Urban Parks, a new documentary on Frederick Law Olmsted, whose visionary design of the Back Bay Fens did so much to shape the neighborhood around it. The film features award-winning actor Kevin Kline as the voice of Olmsted and stage and film actress Kerry Washington as narrator.

Following the film, there will be a Q&A session with director Rebecca Messner and several Olmsted experts featured in the documentary: Alan Banks of the Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site; Margaret Dyson, director of historic parks at the Boston Parks Department; and Betsy Shure Gross, board member of the City Parks Alliance.
Olmsted and his landscape design practice created nearly 100 public parks across the United States, among more than 500 landscape commissions. Most famously, beginning in the late 1850s, he and architect Calvert Vaux designed and supervised creation of New York’s Central Park.
In Boston, Olmsted is best known for creating the Emerald Necklace of parks that includes the Fens, the Riverway, Olmsted Park, Jamaica Pond, Arnold Arboretum and Franklin Park. He designed them to extend the corridor established by the Boston Common, Public Garden and Commonwealth Avenue Mall. “Frankly, he gave the city of Boston its aesthetic shape,” says Olmsted historian Arleyn Levee, who appears in the film.
The documentary shows that the road to becoming America’s premier landscape architect was not smooth. Olmsted and Vaux battled rigidity and corruption as they shaped Central Park. For a time, a discouraged Olmsted did other things, like manage a California gold mine. But Vaux encouraged him to return to New York to help design Brooklyn’s monumental Prospect Park, after which Olmsted settled into the role he would be known for—carving out parks in growing American cities.
Director Messner sees Olmsted as “someone who [ultimately] devoted his life to creating these green spaces of refuge for the city dweller. He thought that every citizen, no matter of what background [deserved to enjoy these parks].”
Alan Banks, supervisory park ranger for the Olmsted National Historic Site in Brookline, says that what is remarkable about Olmsted is that 130 years ago, when circumstances were far different, he recognized that “people needed to have nature in their lives, they needed to have an escape from city living, a space where they could gather as a community.”
Olmsted began in Boston with the task of cleaning up filthy waterways. In the documentary, the Parks Department’s Margaret Dyson notes that his first assignments, the Fens and the Riverway, were “engineering projects as well as parkland.”
In 1883, while working on the Emerald Necklace, Olmsted himself moved to the Boston area to a home he called Fairsted, in Brookline.
The program, co-hosted by the Emerald Necklace Conservancy and the MFA, will begin at 7 p.m. Tickets are $10 ($8 for seniors, students, and MFA members). Tickets may be purchased by phone at 1-800-440-6975 or online at www.mfa.org/tickets, or at MFA ticket desks. The film was funded by The Speedwell Foundation, which is supporting its presentation in Boston.
David Hugh Smith is a volunteer for the Emerald Necklace Conservancy.  Image from Wikimedia Commons.