Donato Pesce presented his research on the Olmsted influence on Waterbury’s public parks recently at the 19th Annual Frontiers in Undergraduate Research at Storrs. His presentation was based on the research he conducted after receiving his SHARE award last spring. The title of his poster was “A Visual History of Parks and Green Spaces in Waterbury and Boston”.

Below is a synopsis of Donato’s research:

Frederick Law Olmsted Sr., a Connecticut native, is America’s preeminent park maker. His name is synonymous with big city landscape initiatives like New York’s Central Park, Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, and Boston’s Emerald Necklace park system. However, the Olmsted design firm expanded its influence well beyond these famous parks. After Olmsted’s retirement in 1895, his design firm, led by his two sons, took on five major park projects in Waterbury, Connecticut: Chase Park, Hayden Homestead Park; Hamilton Park, Fulton Park, and Library Park.

The goal of this project was to examine the influence of the Olmsted firm on the City of Waterbury. By examining the visual history of park spaces in Waterbury, and comparing it to the firm’s designs in Boston, the consistency in the Olmsted design becomes apparent.

Methods: Focus on the ways the design elements (pathways, water features and architectural features) in Waterbury parks are similar to other Olmsted parks in Boston by:

• Identifying, locating, and evaluating the primary documents related to the creation of public parks and green spaces in Waterbury.
• Investigating scrapbooks, historic photos, maps, newspapers, postcard collections and ephemera in the archives of the city’s Parks Department, the Silas Bronson Library, the Mattatuck Museum and the Republican-American, the local newspaper to evaluate.
• Examining the digital archives and records owned by the National Park Service.
• Examining the historic photo digital archives of the Boston Public Library.

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