Robert Fishman’s 1987 book, Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbiaaddresses the monumental act of designing and planning for the planting of several thousand trees in the suburb of Riverside, Illinois: 7,000 evergreens, 32,000 deciduous trees, and 47,000 shrubs to be exact.

The brain behind the plan for this monumental planting was Frederick Law Olmsted, who is best known for his design of Central Park in 1858 for which more than 4 million trees, shrubs and plants were imported by 1873 into the middle of New York City from the surrounding area.

Olmsted began his designs for the suburb of Riverside, Illinois in 1868, tens years after Central Park, at the request of the businessman E.E. Childs.Fishman notes that Childs, “had acquired a featureless 1,600 acre tract of Midwest prairie – ‘low, flat, miry, and forlorn,’ Olmsted called it – relieved only by the Des Plaines River and by the tracks of the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy Railroad, which ran to Chicago some nine miles away. As with Central Park, Olmsted had no ready-made picturesque features to work with. Design alone had to create both the landscape and the community.”[Fishman, 129]

Photos highlighting the community of Riverside on the official Riverside website
(more…)