Frederick Law Olmsted | A Passion for Parks, National Geographic: Watching The Boys Play Ball

A young girl holds a baseball while watching older boys play in a ball field in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park.

In the original plan of the park, Frederick Law Olmsted, who designed with Calvert Vaux, appreciated pastoral scenery and long meadows broken only by clumps of deciduous trees. Those open views have been difficult to preserve in present day times as a demand for active recreational facilities has mounted in urban areas. The ball fields in Prospect Park were moved to the ends of the meadow, pushing the backstops to the edges to conform to Olmsted’s original plan.

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