GREEN PASTURES & STILL WATERS

All painting has eye appeal, and most of it can be lived with.

The art of architects and of landscape architects is more fundamental: it is meant to be lived in. One of the top artists America has produced, Frederick Law Olmsted, worked entirely with hills and hollows, trees and grass. He designed fine parks for Boston, Detroit, San Francisco and Chicago, made Manhattan's Central Park his masterpiece.

Plans for Central Park were laid just a century ago. Olmsted spent most of the rest of his life making the dream come true. His aim was "to complement. . . the beauty of the town [with] the beauty of the fields, the meadow, the prairie, of the green pastures and still waters." It was not easy. The region chosen for the park was an unsightly swamp laced with bald rock ridges and pimpled with squatters' shacks. To see it whole and make it new required optimism and an unwavering mind's eye.

Trained in the British tradition of landscape architecture, Olmsted designed Central Park for scenic richness and relaxation. He used its rocks as a kind of underpainting for his composition, and green verdure as a final glaze. He divided it with lakes and streams, wove it together with curving paths and driveways, pointed up its natural loveliness with small, well-placed buildings designed by Calvert Vaux, an English architect.

Olmsted foresaw that the "town" would soon surround his creation, installed four cross-park driveways. A touch of inspiration led him to sink the driveways below ground-level and thus preserve the park's visual harmony. Fighting off the people who wanted to embellish the park with opera houses, race tracks, cathedrals and fire stations was more difficult but almost as successful. Today, the one notable encroacher on the park's priceless real estate is the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Central Park is used and enjoyed each year by some 30 million people--dowagers walking their dogs, prizefighters doing their morning road work, oldsters drowsing in the sun, people of all ages making love in the shade, kids playing cowboys and Indians, nursemaids plying the baby-carriage trade. It is a huge, beautiful-backyard for Manhattan's harried hive-dwellers.

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