The Ghost of Olmsted: Nature, History & Urban Park Restoration in Boston's Emerald Necklace

This dissertation examines the nineteenth-century production, the twentieth-century deterioration, and the twenty-first century restoration of Boston’s Emerald Necklace, a 1,100-acre series of parks and parkways designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, Sr. (1822-1903). Originally built to meet a particular set of aesthetic landscape tastes, over time this park system changed to meet the recreational needs of visitors. Throughout, the Emerald Necklace has served the interests of Boston’s urban elite. It is, therefore, an appropriate case for examining the historical relationship between power and landscape. The parks of the Emerald Necklace did more than provide pretty views and space for play; they advanced the upper-class economic and cultural agendas of boosterism, real-estate speculation, and cultural assimilation. When we look at the nineteenth-century political economic context in which Olmsted worked and compare it to the late-twentieth/early-twenty-first century political economic context associated with park restoration, an intriguing historical-geographical parallelism becomes apparent. In both moments, the Emerald Necklace operated as part a specific “spatial fix ” to a variety of environmental, economic, and social problems associated with major crises of production withi