Frederick Law Olmsted

Co-designer (with Calvert Vaux) of New York's Central Park (1858) and Brooklyn's Prospect Park, founder of the modern profession of landscape architecture in the United States. His firm laid out Boston's Emerald Necklace, Chicago's South Park system, and the U.S. Capitol grounds.

Olmsted's belief that urban parks were not luxuries but democratic necessities — places where every class could meet "on terms of perfect equality" — set the moral charter of American public-space design for a century.