Olmsted Quotes

To produce the kind of landscape effects Olmsted strived to create required not months but years, even decades. "I have all my life been considering distant effects and always sacrificing immediate success and applause to that of the future," he wrote. "In laying out Central Park we determined to think of no result to be realized in less than forty years.

The possession of arbitrary power has always, the world over, tended irresistibly to destroy humane sensibility, magnanimity, and truth.

we are always personally under an agitating pressure and cloud of anxiety.” And Olmsted himself had grown increasingly susceptible to illness. He was sixty-eight years old and partly lame from a decades-old carriage accident that had left one leg an inch shorter than the other. He was prone to lengthy bouts of depression. His teeth hurt. He had chronic insomnia and facial neuralgia. A mysterious roaring in his ears at times made it difficult for him to attend to conversation. He was still full of creative steam, still constantly on the move, but overnight train journeys invariably laid him low. Even in his own bed his nights often became sleepless horrors laced with toothache.

designed and built the world’s first municipal park. This park so captivated the American landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted that he modeled Central Park in New York on it.

at Birkenhead, near Liverpool, designed and built the world’s first municipal park. This park so captivated the American landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted that he modeled Central Park in New York on it.

Olmsted’s greatest concern, however, was that the main, Jackson Park portion of the exposition simply was not fun. “There is too much appearance of an impatient and tired doing of sight-seeing duty. A stint to be got through before it is time to go home. The crowd has a melancholy air in this respect, and strenuous measures should be taken to overcome it.” Just as Olmsted sought to conjure an aura of mystery in his landscape, so here he urged the engineering of seemingly accidental moments of charm. The concerts and parades were helpful but were of too “stated or programmed” a nature. What Olmsted wanted were “minor incidents … of a less evidently prepared character; less formal, more apparently spontaneous and incidental.” He envisioned French horn players on the Wooded Island, their music drifting across the waters. He wanted Chinese lanterns strung from boats and bridges alike. “Why not skipping and dancing masqueraders with tambourines, such as one sees in Italy? Even lemonade peddlers would help if moving about in picturesque dresses; or cake-sellers, appearing as cooks, with flat cap, and in spotless white from top to toe?” On nights when big events in Jackson Park drew visitors away from the Midway, “could not several of the many varieties of ‘heathen,’ black, white and yellow, be cheaply hired to mingle, unobtrusively, but in full native costume, with the crowd on the Main Court?

The 1856 standard textbook, Olmsted’s School Astronomy, informed students that, according to no less an authority than William Herschel, discoverer of the planet Uranus, the Sun was inhabited by humanlike creatures who lived on its surface.

In the nineteenth century, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux proposed a series of roadways through New York City, to which they gave a name of their own devising, “parkways.” Two of their projects, the Eastern and Ocean parkways, survive today.

Fred Olmsted sat at the edge of the stagecoach seat, chattering to his father about their trip. How exciting to see the towns and forests of western New York! Suddenly, Fred stopped talking. That roar in the distance could only be one thing. Niagara Falls!

Knowledge is the light that guides the path~

the single most common substitute for the tuna is escolar, one of most dangerous seafood products you can buy.

Not all Fake Foods are harmless, and many are disgusting. If

and slaves thus get a fictitious value like stocks “in a corner.

the seafood industry is rife with fraud, substitution, and adulteration. Imagine if half the time you pulled into a gas station you were filling your tank with dirty water instead of gasoline. That’s the story with seafood.

More than 80 percent of the antibiotics manufactured in this country—and 95 percent of the class considered “medically important” for treating humans—are not used to treat us, our pets, or to treat anything at all. They are food, fed directly to cattle, pigs, and poultry. In

A study of New York City seafood done by scientists at nonprofit marine conservation group Oceana found fraud in 58 percent of retail outlets and 39 percent of restaurants. The one especially scary finding that would have my father turning over in his grave was that every sushi restaurant from which samples were collected—100 percent of them—served fake fish. Obviously,

Dripping charnel  grounds of light - I examine hope &  fear - blue-black body  monster of enlightenment - call me Youthful Lightning Bolt -  tired I slump - desire's already  here - I don't care - my wrathful rosary coiled      snake   on my cushion -  I close my tired   eyes -  sleep has been  troubled but   my mother's  cancer hasn't  spread -      still I  am the Cemetary King

William Stead recognized the power of the fair immediately. The vision of the White City and its profound contrast to the Black City drove him to write If Christ Came to Chicago, a book often credited with launching the City Beautiful movement, which sought to elevate American cities to the level of the great cities of Europe. Like Stead, civic authorities throughout the world saw the fair as a model of what to strive for. They asked Burnham to apply the same citywide thinking that had gone into the White City to their own cities. He became a pioneer in modern urban planning. He created citywide plans for Cleveland, San Francisco, and Manila and led the turn-of-the-century effort to resuscitate and expand L’Enfant’s vision of Washington, D.C. In each case he worked without a fee. While helping design the new Washington plan, Burnham persuaded the head of the Pennsylvania Railroad, Alexander Cassatt, to remove his freight tracks and depot from the center of the federal mall, thus creating the unobstructed green that extends today from the Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial. Other cities came to Daniel Burnham for citywide plans, among them Fort Worth, Atlantic City, and St. Louis, but he turned them down to concentrate on his last plan, for the city of Chicago. Over the years many aspects of his Chicago plan were adopted, among them the creation of the city’s lovely ribbon of lakefront parks and Michigan Avenue’s “Miracle Mile.” One portion of the lakefront, named Burnham Park in his honor, contains Soldier Field and the Field Museum, which he designed. The park runs south in a narrow green border along the lakeshore all the way to Jackson Park, where the fair’s Palace of Fine Arts, transformed into a permanent structure, now houses the Museum of Science and Industry. It looks out over the lagoons and the Wooded Island, now a wild and tangled place that perhaps would make Olmsted smile—though no doubt he would find features to criticize.

There is no doubt that the widespread consumption of antibiotic-laden meat is bad for us. Ample evidence fingers this massive drug use in our meat industries as a key contributor to one of the biggest health concerns of the modern era, the rise of drug-resistant bacteria, aka superbugs. This is not some future science fiction. It is killing people right now—lots of people. The CDC called antibiotic resistance one of the five greatest health threats facing the nation, and new drug-resistant

Olmsted did think about it and began to see the exposition as an opportunity to achieve something for which he had fought long and hard but almost always with disappointing results. Throughout his career he had struggled, with little success, to dispel the perception that landscape architecture was simply an ambitious sort of gardening and to have his field recognized instead as a distinct branch of the fine arts, full sister to painting, sculpture, and brick-and-mortar architecture. Olmsted valued plants, trees, and flowers not for their individual attributes but rather as colors and shapes on a palette. Formal beds offended him. Roses were not roses but “flecks of white or red modifying masses of green.” It irked him that few people seemed to understand the effects he worked so long and hard to create. “I design with a view to a passage of quietly composed, soft, subdued pensive character, shape the ground, screen out discordant elements and get suitable vegetation growing.

The same thing happened with large civic clients. He and Calvert Vaux had built and refined Central Park from 1858 through 1876, but forever afterward Olmsted found himself defending the park against attempts to tinker with its grounds in ways he considered tantamount to vandalism. It wasn’t just Central Park, however. Every park seemed subject to such abuse. “Suppose,” he wrote to architect Henry Van Brunt, “that you had been commissioned to build a really grand opera house; that after the construction work had been nearly completed and your scheme of decoration fully designed you should be instructed that the building was to be used on Sundays as a Baptist Tabernacle, and that suitable place must be made for a huge organ, a pulpit and a dipping pool. Then at intervals afterwards, you should be advised that it must be so refitted and furnished that parts of it could be used for a court room, a jail, a concert hall, hotel, skating rink, for surgical cliniques, for a circus, dog show, drill room, ball room, railway station and shot tower?” That, he wrote, “is what is nearly always going on with public parks. Pardon me if I overwhelm you; it is a matter of chronic anger with me.

Congress displayed contempt for the city's residents, yet it retained a fondness for buildings and parks. In 1900, the centennial of the federal government's move to Washington, many congressmen expressed frustration that the proud nation did not have a capital to rival London, Paris, and Berlin. The following year, Senator James McMillan of Michigan, chairman of the Senate District Committee, recruited architects Daniel Burnham and Charles McKim, landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., and sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens to propose a park system. The team, thereafter known as the McMillan Commission, emerged with a bold proposal in the City Beautiful tradition, based on the White City of Chicago's 1893 Columbian Exposition. Their plan reaffirmed L'Enfant's avenues as the best guide for the city's growth and emphasized the majesty of government by calling for symmetrical compositions of horizontal, neoclassical buildings of marble and white granite sitting amid wide lawns and reflecting pools. Eventually, the plan resulted in the remaking of the Mall as an open lawn, the construction of the Lincoln Memorial and Memorial Bridge across the Potomac, and the building of Burnham's Union Station. Commissioned in 1903, when the state of the art in automobiles and airplanes was represented by the curved-dash Olds and the Wright Flyer, the station served as a vast and gorgeous granite monument to rail transportation.

THE THING THAT ENTRANCED ME about Chicago in the Gilded Age was the city’s willingness to take on the impossible in the name of civic honor, a concept so removed from the modern psyche that two wise readers of early drafts of this book wondered why Chicago was so avid to win the world’s fair in the first place. The juxtaposition of pride and unfathomed evil struck me as offering powerful insights into the nature of men and their ambitions. The more I read about the fair, the more entranced I became. That George Ferris would attempt to build something so big and novel—and that he would succeed on his first try—seems, in this day of liability lawsuits, almost beyond comprehension. A rich seam of information exists about the fair and about Daniel Burnham in the beautifully run archives of the Chicago Historical Society and the Ryerson and Burnham libraries of the Art Institute of Chicago. I acquired a nice base of information from the University of Washington’s Suzallo Library, one of the finest and most efficient libraries I have encountered. I also visited the Library of Congress in Washington, where I spent a good many happy hours immersed in the papers of Frederick Law Olmsted, though my happiness was at times strained by trying to decipher Olmsted’s execrable handwriting. I read—and mined—dozens of books about Burnham, Chicago, the exposition, and the late Victorian era. Several proved consistently valuable: Thomas Hines’s Burnham of Chicago (1974); Laura Wood Roper’s FLO: A Biography of Frederick Law Olmsted (1973); and Witold Rybczynski’s A Clearing in the Distance (1999). One book in particular, City of the Century by Donald L. Miller (1996), became an invaluable companion in my journey through old Chicago. I found four guidebooks to be especially useful: Alice Sinkevitch’s AIA Guide to Chicago (1993); Matt Hucke and Ursula Bielski’s Graveyards of Chicago (1999); John Flinn’s Official Guide to the World’s Columbian Exposition (1893); and Rand, McNally & Co.’ s Handbook to the World’s Columbian Exposition (1893). Hucke and Bielski’s guide led me to pay a visit to Graceland Cemetery, an utterly charming haven where, paradoxically, history comes alive.

In 1853, Haussmann began the incredible transformation of Paris, reconfiguring the city into 20 manageable arrondissements, all linked with grand, gas-lit boulevards and new arteries of running water to feed large public parks and beautiful gardens influenced greatly by London’s Kew Gardens. In every quarter, the indefatigable prefect, in concert with engineer Jean-Charles Alphand, refurbished neglected estates such as Parc Monceau and the Jardin du Luxembourg, and transformed royal hunting enclaves into new parks such as enormous Bois de Boulogne and Bois de Vincennes. They added romantic Parc des Buttes Chaumont and Parc Montsouris in areas that were formerly inhospitable quarries, as well as dozens of smaller neighborhood gardens that Alphand described as "green and flowering salons." Thanks to hothouses that sprang up in Paris, inspired by England’s prefabricated cast iron and glass factory buildings and huge exhibition halls such as the Crystal Palace, exotic blooms became readily available for small Parisian gardens. For example, nineteenth-century metal and glass conservatories added by Charles Rohault de Fleury to the Jardin des Plantes, Louis XIII’s 1626 royal botanical garden for medicinal plants, provided ideal conditions for orchids, tulips, and other plant species from around the globe. Other steel structures, such as Victor Baltard’s 12 metal and glass market stalls at Les Halles in the 1850s, also heralded the coming of Paris’s most enduring symbol, Gustave Eiffel’s 1889 Universal Exposition tower, and the installation of steel viaducts for trains to all parts of France. Word of this new Paris brought about emulative City Beautiful movements in most European capitals, and in the United States, Bois de Boulogne and Parc des Buttes Chaumont became models for Frederick Law Olmsted’s Central Park in New York. Meanwhile, for Parisians fascinated by the lakes, cascades, grottoes, lawns, flowerbeds, and trees that transformed their city from just another ancient capital into a lyrical, magical garden city, the new Paris became a textbook for cross-pollinating garden ideas at any scale. Royal gardens and exotic public pleasure grounds of the Second Empire became springboards for gardens such as Bernard Tschumi’s vast, conceptual Parc de La Villette, with its modern follies, and “wild” jardins en mouvement at the Fondation Cartier and the Musée du Quai Branly. In turn, allées of trees in some classic formal gardens were allowed to grow freely or were interleaved with wildflower meadows and wild grasses for their unsung beauty. Private gardens hidden behind hôtel particulier walls, gardens in spacious suburbs, city courtyards, and minuscule rooftop terraces, became expressions of old and very new gardens that synthesized nature, art, and outdoors living.

George had a growing notion to create a working farm, with a village to support the estate where workers, employees, and others might live. He was also coming around to the idea, planted by Olmsted, of making a commitment to scientific and sustainable forestry, a concept foreign to Americans at the time.

Elias Blackwell: Deceased Occupation: Lawyer Aliases: Elias Wollman, Elias Belvedere, Elias Olmsted Most Recent Home: Central Park Role within the 13: Legal Last Sighting: Fifth Avenue Most important, though,

Werlin

the average imported fish travels 5,475 miles before reaching a diner—

Until authorities take action, which may be never, seafood remains the single most confusing food to buy,

I like buying drugs from you because your bathroom's always clean.

The first Board of Commissioners were F. Law Olmsted, J. D. Whitney, William Ashburner, I. W. Raymond, E. S. Holden, Alexander Deering, George W. Coulter, and Galen Clark.

The only person of color in any of the photographs was a black waiter. Blacks were otherwise barred from the dance hall, as were locals of Mexican descent. In the Texas of that day, laws and customs known as Juan Crow subjected Hispanics to discrimination and segregation similar to that inflicted on African Americans.

I wandered over to the adobe birthplace of Ignacio Seguin Zaragoza, whose father was posted at the garrison in the early 1800s. Zaragoza went on to become a national hero in Mexico, leading a reformist revolt against Santa Anna and defeat- ing an invading French force on May 5, 1862, the date celebrated as Cinco de Mayo. While exploring the birthplace, I met Alberto Perez, a history and so- cial studies teacher in the Dallas area who was visiting with his family. When I confessed my ignorance of Zaragoza, he smiled and said, "You're not alone. A lot of Texans don't know him, either, or even that Mexico had its own fight for independence." The son of Mexican immigrants, Perez had taught at a predominantly Hispanic school in Dallas named for Zaragoza. Even there, he'd found it hard to bring nuance to students' understanding of Mexico and Texas in the nineteenth century. "The word 'revolution' slants it from the start," he said. "It makes kids think of the American Revolution and throwing off oppression." Perez tried to balance this with a broader, Mexican perspective. Anglos had been invited to settle Texas and were granted rights, citizenship, and considerable latitude in their adherence to distant authority. Mexico's aboli- tion of slavery, for instance, had little force on its northeastern frontier, where Southerners needed only to produce a "contract" that technically la- beled their human chattel as indentured servants. "Then the Anglos basically decided, 'We don't like your rules,"" Perez said. "This is our country now.

co-architect Frederick Law Olmsted, who often promoted himself at the expense of his partner, Calvert Vaux; and landscape architect Andrew Jackson Downing, who would have designed the park if he hadn’t died in an accident just as the park was getting off the ground.

late 1857, Frederick Law Olmsted, short on cash and desperate for a job, had campaigned to be appointed park superintendent, a position that reported to Viele. Calvert Vaux, remembering Olmsted’s Walks and Talks of an American Farmer and his keen interest in the principles of park design, approached him to form a partnership. Vaux, the trained architect, brought to the table his drafting skills, his knowledge of construction, and a sense of how to sell a project.

The commissioners received thirty-three proposals; Vaux and Olmsted’s—entry no. 33—arrived on March 31, 1858, one day before the deadline. That deadline had already been pushed back a month, ostensibly to accommodate new specifications that had been added to the contest, but perhaps because Vaux and Olmsted weren’t ready. There’s no evidence the contest was rigged, but the second-, third-, and fourth-place winners also already

The other traffic issue concerned the park’s users. Vaux and Olmsted came up with three categories of roadway that they simply called the “Walk” (for pedestrians), the “Ride” (for horseback riding), and the “Drive” (for carriages). All together, there are today about seventy miles of Walk, Ride, and Drive wending through the park. In the master plan, none of these paths ever touched. If the Drive crossed the Walk, a bridge was constructed to pass pedestrian traffic below the carriages. Similarly, the Ride was kept separate from the other paths so that horseback riders would never have to rear up suddenly when confronted with an obstacle.

Riotte fought to keep the Zeitung and free-state effort alive, but like Douai he was worn down by foes who "vomit fire and poison against me." Rather than "act the part of Sisiphus," he planned to found a new German colony in northern Mexico to "build up a more solid wall against slavery" than was possible in the US, In his letters to Olmsted, Riotte also delineated, with keen transatlantic insight, a divide that he felt had doomed their efforts from the start. "We are judged from the standpoint of an American-indeed a very strange people!" he wrote. Riotte and his ilk viewed society "as a congregation of men, whose aim it is to elevate the wellbeing of the aggregate by the combined exertion." Americans, by contrast, "look first upon themselves as private individuals, entitled to ask for all the rights and benefits of an organized community even to the detriment of the whole.... We idealize the community-you the individual! How is it possible, that we ever should amalgamate?" Riotte closed by praising Olmsted's writing on the South but expressed doubt that it would diminish the Slave Power. "I don't know of any historical record of an Aristocracy giving up their privileges, except in the case of revolutionary pressure.

Bowlin was previously divorced and had learned a thing or two. "Set of titties or a college education-buy either of those for your old lady and she's done," he said, "She doesn't need you anymore.

The mudders we'd met couldn't have been more open and hospitable. They'd generously shared their beverages, hobby, and attitudes-which together comprised a garish stereotype of the rural white South. Unlike Olmsted, I wasn't undercover. But I still felt like an infiltrator.

As for Judy, the terrier, the wet country had proved for her a great relief. Her ulcerated paws had been carefully covered with moccasins, and, from the beginning of the marshy country, daily improved, until she was able to accomplish the rare canine feat of over two thousand miles of steady travel. A day's pause was now to the tired creature a priceless boon, spent in a rest that was no less than intense. Selecting the quietest nook, she would coil herself with great deliberation, and for hour after hour not so much as move a muscle; immersed in a terrier's sleep, the tip of an eyelid never unlifted. I shall not soon forget her appearance in the Neches bottom. She was very averse-being anything but a water-dog-to enter at all; but seeing herself abandoned, as we waded away, jumped, with a yelp, into the water, and swam for the nearest stump; and so followed, alternately submerged in silence and mounted, with a series of dripping howls, upon these rotten pedestals.

UPON LEAVING MEXICO, THE OLMSTEDS RODE STRAIGHT TO SAN Antonio and "prepared for more rapid travel," shedding "useless weight" for their journey out of Texas. Having spent more than four months traversing the state, they exited it in three weeks, via Houston and Beaumont. By the time they neared Louisiana, "the hot, soggy breath of the approaching summer was extremely depressing." This was particularly so for John, who'd set off for Texas with "the hope of invigorating weakened lungs." Instead, the "abominable diet, and the fatigue" had "served to null the fresh benefits of pure air and stimulating travel." While slogging through a swampy plan near Beaumont, John fell from the saddle "in faint exhaustion," lying facedown on the ground for half an hour, "hardly breathing, and unable to speak.

The horses, reluctant and excited from the first, become furious and wild. At the next shoal-personal nastiness being past consideration-we dismount, at knee-deep, to give them a moment's rest, shifting the mule's saddle to the trembling long-legged mare, and turning Mr. Brown loose, to follow as he could. After a breathing-spell we resume our splashed seats and the line of wade. Experience has taught us something, and we are more shrewd in choice of footing, the slopes around large trees being attractively high ground, until, by a stumble on a covered root, a knee is nearly crushed against a cypress trunk. Gullies now commence, cut by the rapid course of waters flowing off before north winds, in which it is good luck to escape instant drowning. Then quag again; the pony bogs; the mare, quivering and unmanageable, jumps sidelong among loose corduroy; and here are two riders standing waist-deep in mud and water between two frantic, plunging-horses, fortunately not beneath them. Nack soon extricates himself, and joins the mule, looking on terrified from behind. Fanny, delirious, believes all her legs broken and strewn about her, and falls, with a whining snort, upon her side. With incessant struggles she makes herself a mud bath, in which, with blood-shot eyes, she furiously rotates, striking, now and then, some stump, against which she rises only to fall upon the other side, or upon her back, until her powers are exhausted, and her head sinks beneath the surface. Mingled with our uppermost sympathy are thoughts of the soaked note-books, and other contents of the saddle-bags, and of the.hundred dollars that drown with her. What of dense soil there was beneath her is now stirred to porridge, and it is a dangerous exploit to approach. But, with joint hands, we length succeed in grappling her bridle, and then in hauling her nostrils above water. She revives only for a new tumult of dizzy pawing, before which we hastily retreat. At a second pause her lariat is secured, and the saddle cut adrift. For a half-hour the alternate resuscitation continues, until we are able to drag the head of the poor beast, half strangled by the rope, as well as the mud and water, toward firmer ground, where she recovers slowly her senses and her footing. Any further attempts at crossing the somewhat "wet" Neches bottoms are, of course, abandoned, and even the return to the ferry is a serious sort of joke. However, we congratulate ourselves that we are leaving, not entering the State.

The hot, soggy breath of the approaching summer was extremely depressing

The forest was dense, and filled with all manner of vines and rank undergrowth; the road was a vague opening, where obstructing trees had been felled, the stumps and rotten trunks remaining. Across actual quags a track of logs and saplings had been laid, but long ago, now rotten and in broken patches. As far as the eye could reach, muddy water, sent back by a south wind from the gulf, extended over the vast flat before us, to a depth of from two to six feet, as per immediate personal measurement. We spurred in. One foot: Two feet, with hard bottom: Belly-deep, hard bottom: Shoulder-deep, soft bottom: Shoulder-deep, with a sucking mire: The same, with a network of roots, in which a part of the legs are entangled, while the rest are plunging. The same, with a middle ground of loose poles; a rotten log, on which we rise dripping, to slip forward next moment, head under, haunches in air. It is evident we have reached one of the spots it would have been better to avoid.

In his letters to Olmsted, Riotte also delineated, with keen transatlantic insight, a divide that he felt had doomed their efforts from the start. "We are judged from the standpoint of an American-indeed a very strange people!" he wrote. Riotte and his ilk viewed society "as a congregation of men; whose aim it is to elevate the wellbeing of the aggregate by the combined exertion." Americans, by contrast, "look first upon themselves as private individuals, entitled to ask for all the rights and benefits of an organized community even to the detriment of the whole.... We idealize the community-you the individual! How is it possible, that we ever should amalgamate?" Riotte closed by praising Olmsted's writing on the South but expressed doubt that it would diminish the Slave Power. "I don't know of any histori- cal record of an Aristocracy giving up their privileges, except in the case of revolutionary pressure.

Western Texas was just such a project: a grandiose scheme, germinated in secret, and unlikely to bear fruit for years. As laid out in private correspondence with Adolf Douai and other co-conspirators in Texas, the plan called for the "immigration of one or two thousand staunch and steadfast northern men, supporters of Freedom." These infiltrators should come quietly and in small groups at first, forming a "nucleus" in alliance with free- state Germans. Thereafter, migrants from the North and Europe would "pour in," aided by new railroad lines. Olmsted kept refining and expanding on this plan, long after his return from Texas. It became, in effect, a dry run for his career as a landscape architect, including blueprints for a string of planned communities across the frontier of the Cotton Kingdom. "I have a private grand political hobby which I must display to you," he disclosed to a Northern ally, in a letter filled with geometric shapes, lines, and arrows. The sketch was nothing less than a sweeping design for winning what Olmsted called the "war between the power of Slavery and of Freedom on this continent.

sartorial

they have no care for the future this side of heaven, to gain which they must think it was especially provided for them that no works should be necessary.

to withdraw from the labor of the free poor, the most available land of the country.

Landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted’s magnificent Central Park alone gives citizens a breath of fresh air and SVU writers acres of ideal locations. Their imaginations also swim in the Hudson and East rivers. In all five boroughs, neighborhoods can either glitter enticingly or represent urban decay. Everything needed is within reach, often a few subway stops away.

Do you believe in God, Mr. Olmsted?” asked Charlotte. He looked up, confused. “Are we changing the subject here?” “I believe He is sovereign, even in war. If he means us to be safe, we will be safe here, on the peninsula, or in our homes. If our days are to end, then they will end, no matter where we happen to be. He is ultimately in control of our well-being. Not the government, not the Sanitary Commission, not you. So please. Let us come, and leave our safekeeping in God’s hands. We have work to do.

Tests by Bloomberg showed that Kraft Parmesan contained almost 4 percent cellulose, a plant-derived polymer mainly used to make paper and paperboard. Other brands had cellulose content as high as 7.8 percent.

almost all red snapper sold in this country is fake, it

In 2013, Great Britain created a new criminal investigative division, the Food Crimes Unit—a real-life CSI devoted solely to this issue. Italy

Consumers ordering white tuna get a completely different animal, no kind of tuna at all, 94 percent of the time. Your odds of getting served real white tuna in a restaurant are about the same as hitting zero/double zero on a Vegas roulette wheel, which is to say, not good. Not

Take Red Baron’s classic crust pepperoni version. Not only does this frozen pie have at least fifty-two separate ingredients, but these include lots of things I don’t want to eat, like butylated hydroxytoluene, which is banned in England and the FDA has said (for years) “should” be investigated owing to the possibility of turning other ingredients toxic or cancer causing. It also has butylated hydroxyanisole, a petroleum derived additive that has been “pending” FDA review of a citizen petition for a quarter century. I

Almost no truffle oil is real. The fakeness runs so deep that truffle oil sets itself apart even in the crowded world of ersatz edibles by virtue of not really being counterfeit—there is so little actual truffle oil that the fake stuff is more a made up artificial food than a copy of something real.

All of the Kobe beef sold in this country, by chefs famous and anonymous, in ten-dollar sliders or three-hundred-dollar steaks, was fake, all of it, end of story. Every single restaurant and store purporting to sell Kobe beef—or any Japanese beef—was lying, including some of the country’s best-known chefs.

Proximity to the sea is a classic ingredient of a particular terroir, especially evident in briny, peaty, single-malt Scotch whiskies.

While researching Champagne I became so fascinated with the repeated suggestion that I finally broke down, and ran out one night to bring back the merely average fried chicken from my local gas station, which I ate with a bottle of Nicholas Feuillatte brut. It was everything promised, the Champagne taming the grease while amplifying the salty, rich flavor, and it made even this run of the mill fried chicken much better. It was so good I don’t know how I’ll ever go back to beer. I can’t endorse KFC, but if you have a Popeye’s near you, I suggest putting down this book, taking a break, making a fried chicken-and-Champagne run, and then picking up where you left off, decadently satisfied. Just don’t buy Korbel or Cook’s.

All real Champagne is labeled “Product of France,” without exception.

In Spain, they are called paradores and in Portugal pousadas, but the concept is essentially identical. Across the length and breadth of both countries, historically important buildings, including palaces, convents, monasteries, castles, mansions, and forts have been converted to small hotels or large inns, all owned by the government. The programs serve two important purposes, protecting and in many cases rescuing these centuries-old structures that otherwise could not afford maintenance and upkeep and offering tourists a distinctly immersive (and affordable) way to explore the countries.

if you are drinking a cup of herb tea as you read this, you might want to put it down for another hundred pages or so. Pour yourself a Scotch whisky instead, one of the few reliably Real Foods.

When people get sick after eating sushi or sashimi, they often blame the rawness for their stomach distress, saying something like, “I must have had bad tuna.” It’s more likely their problems were caused by the fact that they never had tuna at all. While

From a health and environmental perspective, faking the country of origin may be a worse problem than species substitution. Much

scalloping runs from just December through March—there is no such thing as fresh Maine scallops most of the year.

Ninety-one percent of the seafood consumed in the United States is imported, and about half of this is farmed. Yet only one-thousandth of 1 percent of imports are inspected for seafood fraud. In addition,

Ecosystems are amazingly complex, from climate, geography, and geology down to the insect and microbial level. This makes particular places better or worse than others at growing particular things. There

Paolo Rainieri*—is awakened by his alarm clock. It is 5:00 a.m., and to say he is used to this early hour is an understatement: Rainieri has been rising at this same time to make cheese seven days a week for the past thirty-five years. The last time he had a day off was when a scooter accident sent him to the emergency room,

As demand for cotton grew, slavery was considered indispensable as a means of maximizing profit for this labor-intensive staple crop. Equally important, as we shall see, slaves could be financed—that is, purchased on credit. In financial parlance this is called leverage. Planters had one objective: increased cotton production. Arguments about the optimum size of a cotton farm are irrelevant because of slavery’s financing characteristic. Simply put, the goal was more cotton, which called for financing the purchase of more land and more slaves. Because a mechanical means of solving cotton’s production needs did not exist until the mid-twentieth century, cotton demanded an endless supply of black bodies as long as the price of cotton permitted financing. The Northerner Frederick Law Olmsted,

As demand for cotton grew, slavery was considered indispensable as a means of maximizing profit for this labor-intensive staple crop. Equally important, as we shall see, slaves could be financed—that is, purchased on credit. In financial parlance this is called leverage. Planters had one objective: increased cotton production. Arguments about the optimum size of a cotton farm are irrelevant because of slavery’s financing characteristic. Simply put, the goal was more cotton, which called for financing the purchase of more land and more slaves. Because a mechanical means of solving cotton’s production needs did not exist until the mid-twentieth century, cotton demanded an endless supply of black bodies as long as the price of cotton permitted financing. The Northerner Frederick Law Olmsted, author of The Cotton Kingdom (1861), attributed slavery’s growth to cotton production that had

Old World Bourdeaux, the noblest and most lauded of the many noble and lauded French wines. Like Champagne or Burgundy, Bourdeaux is both a region and a regulated wine style, but it is the most collected and coveted style. Strict quality rules rank just five Bourdeaux vineyards out of hundreds as "first growth," or premiers cru, and all five have become household names among wine lovers, synonymous with luxury and quality: Chateau Lafite-Rothschild; Chateau Margaux; Chateau Latour; Chateau Haut-Brion; and Chateau Mouton Rothschild. These have long been considered among the greatest wines ever made

The stainless-steel mold gives the cheese its disc shape, about ten inches thick and two feet in diameter. But the mold serves another increasingly important function, as an anticounterfeiting measure. The molds are specially produced by the Consorzio Parmigiano-Reggiano, an independent and self-regulating industry group funded by fees levied on cheese producers. Carefully tracked and numbered, molds are supplied only to licensed and inspected dairies, and each is lined with Braille-like needles that crate a pinpoint pattern instantly recognizable to foodies, spelling out the name of the cheese over and over again in a pattern forever imprinted on its rind. A similar raised-pin mold made of plastic is slipped between the steel and the cheese to permanently number the rind of every lot so that any wheel can be traced back to a particular dairy and day of origin. Like a tattoo, these numbers and the words Parmigiano-Reggiano become part of the skin. Later in its life, because counterfeiting the King of Cheeses has become a global pastime, this will be augmented with security holograms... One night, friends came to town and invited Alice out to dinner at celebrity chef Mario Batali's vaunted flagship Italian eatery, Babbo. As Alice told me this story, at one point during their meal, the waiter displayed a grater and a large wedge of cheese with great flourish, asking her if she wanted Parmigiano-Reggiano on her pasta. She did not say yes. She did not say no. Instead Alice looked at the cheese and asked, "Are you sure that's Parmigiano-Reggiano?" Her replied with certainty, "Yes." "You're sure?" "Yes." She then asked to see the cheese. The waiter panicked, mumbled some excuse, and fled into the kitchen. He returned a few minutes later with a different and much smaller chunk of cheese, which he handed over for examination. The new speck was old, dry, and long past its useful shelf-life, but it was real Parmigiano-Reggiano, evidenced by the pin-dot pattern. "The first one was Grana Padano," she explained. "I could clearly read the rind. They must have gone searching through all the drawers in the kitchen in a panic until they found this forgotten crumb of Parmigiano-Reggiano." Alice Fixx was the wrong person to try this kind of bait and switch on, but she is the exception, and I wonder how many other expense-account diners swallowed a cheaper substitute. This occurred at one of the most famous and expensive Italian eateries in the country. What do you think happens at other restaurants?

Fake seafood is not a Florida problem or a Massachusetts problem or a New York City problem - it is an everywhere problem. Oceana took its study national in 2013 and found that mislabeling in violation of FDA regulations was often much worse in the biggest cities. A summary released with the report noted that "Oceana found seafood fraud everywhere it tested, including mislabeling rates of 52 percent in Southern California, 49 percent in Austin and Houston, 48 percent in Boston, 39 percent in New York City, 38 percent in Northern California and South Florida, 32 percent in Chicago, 26 percent in Washington, DC, and 18 percent in Seattle."... Dr. Warner's most recent project for Oceana was a global "study of studies," in which she and her colleagues did a comprehensive analysis of fake fish studies conducted by many different entities in different countries, including sixty-seven peer-reviewed studies, seven government reports, and twenty-three news articles. The results are pages and pages of more disturbing fraud information, but she was able to sum up the results for me in two sentences: "All studies that have investigated seafood fraud have found it. The take-home message is that anytime someone looks for mislabeling and species substitution in the marketplace, anywhere, they find it.

the only three places in the United States I consider reliable [for Kobe Beef] are the restaurants in the Wynn Las Vegas casino resort, 212 Steakhouse in New York City and Hawaii's Teppanyaki Ginza Sumikawa, the sole spots in this country certified by the Kobe Beef Association.

While Gstaad is one of the wealthiest places you can set foot in, unlike many similarly upscale spots, farming is not only tolerated here but considered culturally indispensable and a most honorable profession. That’s the reason for the zoning and why cows always have the right of way. The main street through the center of downtown is rightly known as the Promenade, and it is where many newly minted locals go show off their Ferraris and Bentleys and fur coats, while shopping for jewelry, watches, and more fur coats in the boutiques. Cheese making in the Alps is largely seasonal, and like many other mountain towns in Switzerland, the cows have to pass through town when they come down from the mountains in the fall and return in the spring. Usually there is a designated day each season when the streets close to traffic for this migration, but not in Gstaad, where each farmer chooses when to move his herd, and in the fall, cows might block traffic on the Promenade for ten straight days. Each time they come through, the government sends a special cleaning crew to follow, because cheese making is that important here, not so much economically as culturally. That is why some fifty-two mountain peaks around Gstaad are privately owned, not by Russian billionaires, or ski resort operators, but rather by multigenerational farming families like the Bachs.

In the case of Gruyère, Switzerland’s rarest grade, Le Gruyère Premier Cru, is one of the most critically acclaimed cheeses on earth: it is the only one ever to win Best Cheese at the prestigious World Cheese Awards in London four different times.

The country is justifiably famous for its tomatoes, especially the legendary San Marzano, grown in rich volcanic soil and so special it has been awarded a PDO

Italy’s two greatest food towns are Parma and Bologna,

Japan has a lot of really great beef, like Matsuzaka, but outside of Japan only Kobe is known,” said Troy Lee, an Australian who is the head chef at the Oak Door steakhouse at the Grand Hyatt Tokyo.

KOBE BEEF OUTSIDE JAPAN This is much trickier, and the only three places in the United States I consider reliable are the restaurants in the Wynn Las Vegas casino resort, 212 Steakhouse in New York City, and Hawaii’s Teppanyaki Ginza Sumikawa, the sole spots in this country certified by the Kobe Beef Association.

The most reliable pork and chicken label is “USDA Organic” (used mainly for meat and much different from the FDA’s version of organic), which requires a 100 percent organic diet, no antibiotics (ever), and bans feed made with synthetic pesticides. For poultry shoppers, Smart Chicken is a national brand owned by Tecumseh Poultry, founded in 1998 to fill the void in the quality chicken market. It comes in organic and regular versions, both of which are completely antibiotic and animal by-product free, using a 100 percent vegetarian or 100 percent organic vegetarian diet. I buy Smart Chicken regularly. For pork, the Niman Ranch brand is antibiotic free with a 100 percent vegetarian diet.

My personal favorite of all these alpine specialties is raclette, which is sort of reverse fondue—instead of dipping food in melted cheese, you spread melted cheese on top of food.

Consumers ordering white tuna get a completely different animal, no kind of tuna at all, 94 percent of the time. Your odds of getting served real white tuna in a restaurant are about the same as hitting zero/double zero on a Vegas roulette wheel, which is to say, not good.

Too bad the guards are looking for irony. It's everywhere in here.

She's the kind of person who can lick everything but a stamp.

Kathryn S. Olmsted asserts that a conspiracy theory is nothing more than a theory about collusion “that may or may not be true; it has not yet been proven.” As Olmsted points out, conspiracies do happen, and fears about wrongdoings and cover-ups are not without precedent. The government propagates their own “conspiracy theories” too. Olmsted points to Watergate and the pretexts for the Iraq War, for example. The problem isn’t the theories, writes Olmsted; it’s the people who come to “believe in their theories the way zealots believe in their religion: nothing can change their mind.

The Constitution of the State has been democratized lately, so that poor people may vote, but no sufficient system of instruction has been instituted; and, though great promises are now made, it is probable, as I have shown, that, while Slavery lasts, there never can be. The majority of the people will, therefore, continue to be amused and used by greedy and ambitious speculators in politics; and, unless the West is more intelligent than it has thus far shown itself to be, the State will yet, for an indefinite time, be wholly ruled by the slave-holders, and everything else will continue, as heretofore, to be sacrificed to what they suppose to be their interests.

Cord’s generosity with gratitude and reluctance at the same time. Cord considered the Olmsteds to be good friends of the Bennetts, and one of these days, Glory might be more than that, although he

Olmsted inquired of the man if he found it “disagreeable” to whip the slaves. “I think nothing of it,” he drawled in response. “Why, sir, I wouldn’t mind killing a nigger more than I would a dog.”5

To move in and take over cities, squirrels needed an ally to reshape their landscapes. They found that ally in Frederick Law Olmsted. Olmsted introduced the idea that cities should contain large tracts of idealized wilderness (his most famous design was New York’s Central Park). It was ideal for reading poetry in the shade or wandering with a friend, but mostly, it was ideal for being a squirrel.

Scotch Whisky Single Malt: This Scotch can only contain malted barley and water, must be the product of one distillery and aged in wood for at least three years. However, single malts can contain a mix of different distillations, casks, and years. This allows brands like a twelve-year-old Glenlivet to maintain consistency and always taste the same, no matter when it’s bottled. Single Grain: Like single malt, this Scotch is a product of one distillery but can be made from other grains and/or unmalted barley. It is used mainly for blending and rarely sold on its own, though it is becoming more popular as whisky connoisseurship increases. Blended Malt: This style, consisting of a mix of single malts from different distilleries, is not common. Blended Grain: This style uses a mix of single grains from different distilleries and is also not common. Blended Scotch: The most popular style in the world, including nondistillery names such as Johnnie Walker (red, black, and blue), Chivas Regal, Dewar’s, Ballantine’s, Cutty Sark, and so on. These are blends of single malts and grain whiskies from different distilleries, sometimes dozens. Vintage Year: While there are really no “vintages” in the sense of better or worse harvests, as with wine, bottles with a year on the label can only contain whiskies made in that year. This will usually taste different from the same distillery’s standard single malt—different but not necessarily better or as good.

GEOGRAPHICALLY INDICATED CHEESES There are more than 150 cheeses protected with GIs in the European, but the highest profile ones are Asiago, fontina, Gorgonzola, Grana Padano, Mozzarella di Bufala Campana, Parmigiano-Reggiano and Pecorino Romano (all from Italy); Comté, Roquefort, Munster, and Reblochon (France); feta (Greece); Gruyère (Switzerland); Stilton (United Kingdom); and manchego (Spain). Try to remember this short list and if you are buying any one of these cheeses, the real thing will only come from the respective nation. Feta, Muenster, and Gruyère are especially frequently copied elsewhere.

SHOPPING TIPS Most of the fakery surrounding the King of Cheese has to do with the misleading use of “Parmesan,” not Parmigiano-Reggiano, so when you see the full Italian name and it says “Made in Italy” and has the PDO seal, it is usually the real deal. The same is true of Prosciutto di Parma. However, the cheese is made in very large wheels that begin to deteriorate once cut, so it is important to buy from retailers with a lot of volume turnover who are constantly opening new wheels and storing it right. More than many other cheeses, it’s usually better to buy from a specialty cheese shop like Murray’s in New York—most cities have these. If you go mail order/online, you cannot beat Zingerman’s in Ann Arbor, Michigan, which buys whole wheels directly from

in Parma and handles them very well. This is the choice of the Consorzio itself when it needs to ship the cheese within the United States for events. For high-quality balsamic, look for the full name Aceto Balsamico Tradizionale di Modena or Aceto Balsamico Tradizionale di Reggio Emilia. Italian law precludes the years of aging on the labels, but better retailers list it, and eight years is the minimum for the good stuff, though truly exceptional balsamic, the kind to be applied with an eyedropper to cheese and ice cream, should be at least twenty-five to fifty years and will always cost you more than a hundred dollars, sometimes much more, for a small bottle. The best are labeled by color, with silver and gold denoting the oldest. Again, Zingerman’s is an excellent resource for authentic standout balsamic vinegars. *“Paolo Rainieri” is an amalgam of Parma cheese makers I met, almost all male and almost all second, third, or fifth generation in their jobs. One had worked every day, save his two-day honeymoon, for thirty-five years.

Rosa di Parma, the Rose of Parma, is reserved for special occasions like Christmas or important guests, but it is so easy that you might make it more often. Mama Rosa’s version serves 8 to 10. 2 garlic cloves, finely minced ½ cup extra-virgin olive oil 1 beef tenderloin (3 to 4 pounds), well trimmed 1 pound Prosciutto di Parma, thinly sliced 8 ounces Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese, shaved into thin slices with a vegetable peeler 2 tablespoons butter, preferably from Parma 1 tablespoon coarse sea salt 1 teaspoon chopped fresh rosemary 6 sprigs fresh rosemary ½ cup brandy ¼ to ½ cup beef broth Directions – In a small bowl, whisk together the garlic and oil. – With a sharp knife, butterfly the tenderloin by cutting lengthwise almost all the way through, leaving just ¼ to ½ inch of meat before unfolding like a book. Cover with parchment paper and pound with a heavy frying pan until the beef is about ½ inch thick. Brush the beef with the garlic oil. – Cover entire surface of the beef with half the prosciutto, slightly overlapping the slices. Top the prosciutto with the shaved Parmigiano-Reggiano. Top with the remaining prosciutto, again overlapping slices slightly. – Starting at one edge, carefully roll the meat up into a log shape. Mama Rosa sews the edge of the seam closed with a needle and sewing thread. Alternatively, you can tie the roll at close intervals with kitchen twine, but you will not get as good a seal. – Place 1 tablespoon of the butter in a large saucepan over high heat. In a small bowl, mix the salt and chopped rosemary, then rub the herbed salt over the meat log. Add the beef to the pan and sauté, turning occasionally, until all sides are browned, about 10 minutes. – Dot the meat log with the remaining 1 tablespoon butter and scatter the rosemary sprigs in the pan. Pour the brandy over the top. Reduce the heat to low and cook for 30 minutes, adding broth as needed to keep the pan from drying out, until the beef is medium rare and reaches an internal temperature between 130°F and 135°F. – Remove the beef to a cutting board and let rest for 5 to 10 minutes. Slice into spirals and serve. Mangia!

The problem isn’t the theories, writes Olmsted; it’s the people who come to “believe in their theories the way zealots believe in their religion: nothing can change their mind.

Brooklyn-born Grimaldi’s is one of New York’s most popular and iconic pizzerias, and there is usually a long line out the door at the flagship. It is famous for using coal-fired ovens, not typical for New York – style pizza, giving it a distinctive taste. Grimaldi’s has parlayed its successful original into a brand name known for both a particular style of pizza and excellence making it, and it has grown into a national chain, with nearly fifty restaurants in a dozen states. It’s not quite a McDonald’s or Chipotle in scope, but it is a significant food undertaking,

But they can hardly have missed the part of Olmsted’s document that teaches a stirring civics lesson: “It is the main duty of government, if it is not the sole duty of government, to provide means of protection for all its citizens in the pursuit of happiness against the obstacles, otherwise insurmountable, which the selfishness of individuals or combinations of individuals is liable to interpose to that pursuit.”1 As Olmsted sees it, Yosemite has the potential to close out the era in which the prize manifestations of nature’s beauty have been reserved for the wealthy.