Ethan Carr

Tuesday, October 8, 6:00 pm – Franklin Park: Boston’s Imperiled Public Landscape

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The Emerald Necklace Conservancy and the Library of American Landscape History invite you to a film premiere and panel discussion on Tuesday, October 8 at 6 pm at Hibernian Hall, 184 Dudley Street, #200, Boston, Massachusetts. Based on Ethan Carr’s award-winning book Boston’s Franklin Park: Olmsted, Recreation, and the Modern City, the new film from director Ian Forster weaves together interviews with the author, park advocates, and park users, to trace the park’s decline, caused by patterns of institutionalized racism on the part of the City of Boston and the heroic efforts of local residents to save it from ruin. Register and learn more at www.emeraldnecklace.org

Saturday, March 16, 1:00 pm – 3:00 pm – Ethan Carr: Getting it Together at Franklin Park, The Past and Future of a Boston Landmark

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UMASS professor and author Ethan Carr discusses his 2023 nonfiction book, Boston’s Franklin Park. Franklin Park is one of the great urban parks of the world. Generations of Bostonians have loved this landscape and invested it with many diverse memories and meanings. Today the park is at a turning point. Mayor Wu has approved an Action Plan to guide its future, and the City of Boston and its partners have proposed new multi-million dollar construction projects. The time is right to consider the past, as well as the future, of Franklin Park.

Ethan Carr is a professor of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. His latest book is Boston’s Franklin Park (Amherst: Library of American Landscape History, 2023).

This event is co-sponsored by the Grove Hall Branch of the BPL, the Dorchester Historical Society and the JP Historical Society. It is free and open to the public. It will use a hybrid format you can attend in-person or via Zoom. Please register here for the Zoom details: https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_pUtwfzf1RL-U8n5yWxCJdw

In the case of heavy snow, the event will be held virtually.

Wednesday, November 8, 6:00 pm – Boston’s Franklin Park: Olmsted, Recreation, and the Modern City

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Join The Emerald Necklace Conservancy on Wednesday, November 8 at 6:00 pm EST with Dr. Ethan Carr for a talk on his new book, Boston’s Franklin Park: Olmsted, Recreation, and the Modern City (LALH 2023), which details the history of Franklin Park from the time of peak popularity to the current era of park revival.

This talk will be held in person in Rabb Hall at the Central Library in Copley Square. Following the talk, there will be time for audience Q&A, and the program will conclude at 7:00 pm with a book signing.

Dr. Carr’s forthcoming book, Boston’s Franklin Park: Olmsted, Recreation, and the Modern City (LALH 2023), documents the design and history of Frederick Law Olmsted’s most mature expression of urban park design. In this comprehensive study, Carr affirms Franklin Park as one of great works of nineteenth-century American art. Since the 1980s, historians have described Franklin Park as unfinished, obsolete, or a casualty of changing trends in public recreation. Carr disagrees, offering a persuasive argument that the park’s decline was not a consequence of its design but of a lack of stewardship on the part of the city, an example of institutionalized racism.

Ethan Carr, FASLA, is professor of landscape architecture at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. An international authority on America’s public landscapes and the author of many books, he is lead editor of The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted: The Early Boston Years and coauthor of Olmsted and Yosemite: Civil War, Abolition, and the National Park Idea (LALH 2022).

Register at https://www.emeraldnecklace.org/event/ethan-carr-franklin-park/

Monday, April 11, 7:00 pm – Arnold Arboretum Director’s Series: Birth- The Early History and Meaning of the Arnold Arboretum, Live and Online

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Join the Arnold Arboretum’s Director William (Ned) Friedman for the annual Director’s Series! To celebrate the Arboretum’s sesquicentennial, this year’s series will explore the Magic and Meaning of a Garden of Trees. Over the course of four sessions, we will trace the Arnold’s significance in the landscape architecture movement, value for the people of Boston, and leadership in creating global connections between plants and people. This session will include brief presentations and a moderated panel. The program is free and is offered both in person and livestreamed.

Panelists:

  • Dr. Ethan Carr, Director of the Master’s of Landscape Architecture Program, University of Massachusetts
  • Dr. Rosetta Elkin, Academic Director of the Master’s of Landscape Architecture Program, Pratt Institute
  • Lisa Pearson, Head of the Library and Archives, Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University

To sign up for the virtual presentation, click HERE. To sign up for the in-person event at the Weld Hill Research Building, 1300 Centre Street in Boston, click here.

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Saturday, March 12, 2:30 pm – 4:00 pm – Olmsted and Yosemite: Civil War, Abolition, and the National Park Idea, Online

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Out of the 1860s, as the United States engaged in a civil war, abolished slavery, and remade the government, the public park emerged as a product of these dramatic changes. New York’s Central Park and Yosemite in California both embodied the “new birth of freedom” that emphasized the duty of republican government to enhance the lives and well-being of all its new citizens. A central figure directly connected with abolition, the Civil War, and the dawn of urban and national parks is Frederick Law Olmsted, whose pre-war journalism about the South, design work on Central Park, and ground-breaking Yosemite Report created an intellectual framework for the “park idea.” Marking the bicentennial of Olmsted’s birth, a new book by Rolf Diamant, former superintendent of Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site and Ethan Carr, Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, offers a new interpretation of how the American park—urban and national—came to figure so prominently in our cultural identity, and why this more complex and inclusive story deserves to be told.

The Arnold Arboretum will present Rolf Diamant and Ethan Carr on March 12 from 2:30 – 4, and will also be presented in-person at the Arboretum’s Weld Hill Research Building at 1300 Centre Street, Boston, MA 02131. To sign up for the in-person event, click here. Presented in collaboration with Friends of Fairsted, the Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site, and the Library of American Landscape History. Register HERE.

Tuesday, November 5, 1:00 pm – 5:00 pm – Geniuses of Place Symposium

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Massachusetts Horticultural Society is thrilled to offer an afternoon of insight into Lancelot “Capability” Brown, Humphry Repton, and Frederick Law Olmsted, the people who became influencing factors and cultivated the foundation and appreciation of landscape design. Join us for an afternoon lecture series on the design principals of Brown, Repton, and Olmsted followed by a panel discussion. Facilitated by Ethan Carr, John Phibbs and local experts, the audience will have a chance to express their questions. Meet, mingle and enjoy the company of like-minded individuals at the reception following.  The event at The Gardens at Elm Bank will take place November 5 from 1 – 5, and is $85 for members, $100 for nonmembers. Register at www.masshort.org.

Thursday, December 3, 6:00 pm – Our National Parks and the “Fairsted School”: An Enduring Legacy

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The Olmsted firm is famous for the design of hundreds of municipal parks and other landscapes. The achievements of Olmsted and his successors in scenic preservation are less well understood, but park design and scenic preservation were both aspects of the practice of landscape architecture Olmsted developed in the second half of the nineteenth century. This December 3 talk explores the role of the “Fairsted School” of landscape architecture and its influence on scenic preservation and the design of state and national park systems through the twentieth century. The program will begin with a 6 pm reception followed by the lecture at 7, at the Wheelock College Brookline Campus, 43 Hawes Street, corner of Hawes and Monmouth Streets in Brookline. Reservations are required. Call 617-566-1689, x 265, or reserve online at http://friendsoffairsted.org/programs/register/

Ethan Carr, PhD, FASLA, is a landscape historian and preservationist specializing in public landscapes. He has taught at the Harvard GSD, the University of Virginia, and at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he is a professor. He has written two award-winning books, Wilderness by Design (1998) and Mission 66: Modernism and the National Park Dilemma (2007), and is the volume editor of Volume 8 of the Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted, The Early Boston Years, 1882-1890 (2013).

Limited street parking is available. Public parking is not allowed in the Wheelock parking lot. Venue is easily accessible by MBTA Green Line “C” (Hawes Street) or “D” (Longwood) trains.

Saturday, April 27, 9:00 am – 2:00 pm – Climate Change: What Would Olmsted Do?

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Join The Emerald Necklace Conservancy Panel entitled Climate Change: What Would Olmsted Do? beginning at 10 am moderated by Ted Landsmark, President and CEO of the Boston Architectural College with panel speakers: Ethan Carr, Author and Olmsted Scholar, Brian Swett, City of Boston Chief of Energy and Environment and Jhana Senxian, Founder and CEO of the Sustainability Guild International. Coffee and Registration at 9 am. Presented by Olmsted 2022 at Simmons College, 300 The Fenway, Boston. Registration fee $10 (includes coffee and lunch). Reserve online at https://25749.thankyou4caring.org/sslpage.aspx?pid=300

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Thursday, March 15, 6:00 pm reception, 7:00 pm lecture – FL Olmsted 1882 – 1890: Boston, Brookline and Beyond

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The Friends of Fairsted present F L Olmsted 1882 – 1890: Boston, Brookline & Beyond on Thursday, March 15 at Wheelock College, 43 Hawes Street in Brookline.  The evening will begin with a reception at 6, followed by a lecture given by Ethan Carr.  Ethan Carr, Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and editor of Volume 8 of the Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted: The Early Boston Years 1882-1890, provides an insider’s look at the process of preparing the volume including new and revealing details of his work on the Boston Park System. The volume will be published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 2013.  For further information e-mail friendsoffairsted@gmail.com or call 617-566-1689 x265.