san diego. 700 i.t. companies. they have all of these other things, but they've got craig venter's foundation and other foundations. testing in all of them worked together on a common plan. that actually works in the modern world. cooperation works in real life. conflict works in politics and news coverage. it does. i am not being cutesy here. it does. don not ..

>> so if states were the laboratories of democracy in the 18th century, ngo's are the laboratories of innovation? >> cities are now too. that's the only difference. the cities are just as much laboratories and democracies as the states are. mike bloomberg put up $100 million to build a new laboratory center to develop high-tech jobs. i don't know who gets the contract -- >> as a stanford alumni, i have to -- >> they are in competition for the mu, but the other point is it's a heck of idea and the way the world should work.

i think it's wonderful. los angeles just announced its vast new consortium to have major buildings to have greater energy efficiencies and putting up solar power and how they were going to finance it, and it's the biggest commercial project the country has yet undertaken. they figured out how to do it. full disclosure. my foundation's climate change initiative worked with them, but we just provided, you know, technical help and support. they figured out how to finance it, so the city's can do a lot of these things, but the congress, at least, should not make decisions 245 makes those things more difficult. they should be empowering that and rewarding it and insent vising it. >> and it's an election day today, not in new york city, but certainly in many cities across the country, mayors are being elected or reelected in san fransisco, baltimore, philadelphia, houston, phoenix,

and yet i don't think questions like this have been very central to the coverage in advance of even those local elections, so all be what you said earlier is credible, having been a governor certainly, that people expect governors and mayors to hustle business. that seems to not be central to the discourse around even local elections. how do we make that more fundamental? i know you're racing around the country to do that, and you're not a scalable resource, and almost an exhaustible one -- [laughter] how do we think about that dynamic? >> first i said i was wrong, and now i get to say i don't know. [laughter] i have ideas about it. when i was a governor, i really

worked hard in the national governor's association and all these regional associations and education associations, and there were a lot of things we did when i was governor where arkansas was the first state doing it, first state to require counselors for kids in elementary schools. i was proud of that. i was always more proud when we were the second state to do something because it showed we were not too proud to learn. we were out there on the edge of learning, and one of the real problems is in education and in health care, i'll just use it up because they bear on the economy, is that a lot of the challenges america faces, for example, in providing health care at lower costs and higher qualities so we can afford to be competitive in other areas, a lot of the challenges are met by somebody somewhere, but the ideas don't travel.

almost every challenge in american education is met by somebody somewhere, but the ideas don't travel. part of that is the complication when you have, in the public sector, a monopoly on revenues and customers and in the private sector where the status quo has more power, more resources, and more lobbyists than the future does, but one of the big challenges in the book without having an answer to just to do that. how do you make ideas travel? for example, ask yourself how many of you knew this -- what city in america has the highest energy efficiency standards for new buildings? answer -- the oil capital of america, houston, texas. why? >> which is why it's important who is elected mayor there

today. >> yeah. because the then mayor who did it, bill white, was the deputy secretary of energy when i was president. he had been my friend a very long time, and i knew he knew a ton about oil and gas, but he also wanted to build a modern energy economy. he gets elected mayor of houston. the first thing he did was retrofit every home of the 20% of houstons who were homeowners who were at the lowest income, and then he had the highest new building standards in terms of energy efficiency of any city in north america other than vancouver, canada, the highest in the united states. he was reelected with over 80 president of the vote, and yet the idea still didn't really travel so well, although, they do travel better than you would think among cities, but we have to think about that in the united states because a lot of this stuff bubbles up from the bottom up. if you look at this book a wrote

about in my book, i mentioned the next american economy by william talking about prosperity centers, we have to figure out how to have more of that, and then how people learn from each other on the basis of that. >> one thing i want to ask you about is not in your book, but came out yesterday. the census bureau announced a new draft methodology for how we calculate and assess poverty in the united states, and its early hypothesis from that new paradigm are that we have 49 million americans living in poverty, our highest absolute number ever, and more elderly-americans living in poverty than previously assessed largely because of higher out of pocket health care expenses because although the vast majority of older americans are covered under medicare, medicare

only covers 80% of in-hospital expenses. the -- extensively, although still somewhat challenging given the absolute numbers of children living in poverty were lower than had been previously determined, largely because of chip and supplemental nutrition programs, chiefly free school lunches and breakfast. as you think about that new emerging data, how does that impact both what you diagnosed as challenges in the book, chiefly around social security, stainability, and medicare stainability, and also your kind of recommended prescriptions. >> well, first, the childhood poverty numbers are still appalling, but they are smaller. the chirp's health insurance

program was -- that's what chip is, was started when i was president, and then expanded beginning, i think, in 2007. we had 5 million kids, i think there's now 10 million kids who can get health insurance under it. they will be main taped, and that number will be expanded assuming the health care reform bill is implemented, and that plus nutritional supplements like the school lunch program does lower the percentage of people who are in poverty in fact. what's happened to the seniors is that even though the social security checks go up more than the real cost of living exclusive of health care goes up for seniors. the cost of health care has gone up so much that it's really affecting older people who are on medicare, but as chelsea

pointed out, 20% of their costs are not covered. if you're really poor and old, you get medicaid too, so what happens is especially since the states are busted now and are lobbying against raising the eligibility level for medicaid, what's happening is that this money is going up, the amount of money you have to pay out of pocket, is going up, and the number of older people who qualify for both medicare and medicaid is not going up to make the difference up. what i -- >> the states are not changing their medicaid -- >> yes. >> parameters. >> yes, and because of their budget problems they've got. for example, in 2007, 2009, at the recession, gdp is down 7.5%. people worry about going broke. health insurance profits went up 50%.

five million americans lost their health insurance. #.5 million of them went on medicaid, so ironically, the private sector drove 3.5 million people to the public sector all the time bashing the public sector. the states didn't have the money to pay their medicaid mix, and the federal government increased, so what do i draw from that? i draw from that the conclusion that one of the best things about the so-called simpson-bowles commission, the bipartisan budget commission, is it represents not only savings in the social security program, but modest, $200 billion in a decade. that's a lot of money to you and me, but to the government budget, it's not, but they recommended to redesign in a way that channels more income to lower income seniors so that if we don't fix the health care gap problem, at least those people will have enough money to be lifted out of poverty again, and

it can be done and still save money. >> one of the things that you say you believe in the book that doesn't go into detail is that the united states could actually move from spending 17.8% of gdp on health care to spending 11.8% of gdp on health care which is what france and switzerland approximately spend on health care. that saves us $187 billion a year. how would we do that? >> it would save the federal budget -- >> federal budget. >> it would save you $850 billion a year. that is, if we -- for every year the pugh charitable trust does a survey of countries, and they generally conclude america is

0th in the over-- 30th in the overall quality of health care. that's not fair. it's too low. what's true is germany and france are ranked at the very top, and it is true they get better health outcomes for spending less money. it's also true that even if you had a -- if you gave us more credit for being, for example, for having the longest breast cancer survivor rates in the world and being great at heart surgery, otherwise somebody else would be giving this talk tonight. >> thank you. [laughter] >> you still have to face the fact that we're not getting what we pay for, and it's being driven primarily by the way we finance health care and fee-for-service. chelsea used to work for mckenzie, so you can discount this, but both three years ago -- >> i didn't get the credit, so i'll take the mckenzie

create. >> they issued a three volume study trying to analyze the differences between what we spend for health care in america and what are other rich countries spend, and they essentially concluded that the biggest deal was fee-for-service for medicine rather than an overall service program. dartmouth said that led to 40% of the american people getting health care that's largely more expensive than they should get and not the optimum care. second is the way we finance it with private insurance companies adding to the costs of of not just the insurer, the company, but also the insured, and if you have insurance on the job, then it's more paperwork for the medical providers, for the

employers, and for the insurance companies themselves because that adds $200 billion that we wouldn't pay if we had the administrative costs of any other country, and the third thing was we pay more for medicine than anybody else, but if we bargain more, we could do that. that's about 75%-80% of the difference, and then there's the biggest chunk left, about $150 billion is because we have higher rates of diabetes than any other country in the world where there's consequences which is why childhood obesity is the number one health concern in the country in my opinion, and then there's hundreds of other little things that make up about 5%. >> given we're almost out of time, if you wanted to ensure people left here with one

clearing call to action or sort of one fact that would help lead to more fact debates as we move tomorrow from the election day towards the next election day and november, what would it be? >> if i can only say one thing, everyone should be involved where they live and try to support that does bring government and ngos together to do what we did at the cgi america meeting. start with where you are. this is still the biggest economy on earth. as much as i worry about the retirement of the baby boomers, and i'm the oldest one of them, i worry about this. feel good about this -- ten years ago when i was about to leave the presidency, my then

hometown of little rock, arkansas, had a terrible tornado that ripped up a little community, and an all african-american community was virtually leveled where i worked for 20 years to help. at the end, i have a dinner with 20 people, a barbecue, back when i could do that -- i barbecue with 20 people i went to high school with. besides me, only two others who finished college, besides me, only two made more than $50,000 a year, but their number one goal was their retirement was going to imperil their children's ability to raise their grandchildren. whenever you give up on america, remember that. it's still a good country. people make decisions based on what they know. now, in spite of all of that, our average work force age is still younger than europe and

japan. the other long standing wealthy places. canada may be a little younger than us, but not much. it's easy to start a small business here than any other place. we have laboratory supports for research and development that most countries don't have. we have a lot of indigenous strengths here. we have better, sophisticated venture capital networks and other things, so -- and we know what we need to do, and there's plenty of money out there to bring the economy back. we can figure out how to unleash the money in corporate treasuries and in banks, so i'm not pessimistic, but they're doing this dance in washington now over the same old thing we've been debating since we were told in 1981 that government is the problem. it suspect. i mean, it may be, but it's not the only problem, and it's got to be part of the solution, so

my view is what -- if i could tell you to do one thing, it would be, you know, bloom where you're planted. start and come up with something to support in your community and the state, and use that as evidence to try to change, to break the log jam in washington because there's not a single -- one of the most important points in this book is i go through all of these other countries that are now the -- are now ahead of us in certain agencies, faster broadband download speeds, more modern infrastructure, higher percentage of young people with college degree, less income inequality, faster job growth, lower unemployment -- there is not a single example on planet earth of a successful country that got there on an anti-government strategy which said the most important thing you can ever do is never tax

somebody of bill clinton's income group never, ever again. not one. of the 33 countries, we rank 31st in the percentage of national income going to taxes. mexico and chile are lower than we are. we are ranked 25th in national income going to spending because of all the money we had to come up with to avoid the financial collapse, so i want you to change national policy, but we have to find a way to break the psychology, and i find i'm happier if i have something to look forward to in the morning so i just don't gripe all the time, and so if you asked me one thing you can do, make something good happen. go hire somebody. i have a friend in a company called axium, the largest mass

mailing company in the country. if you get sports illustrated every month, you got it from them and most other magazines. on november 1st, they challenged every company in the united states with 50 or more employees to hire one more person. they said if everybody, even wal-mart just hired one more person, everybody with 50 or more people who could afford to do it, there would be another million people working within a month, and it would change the psychology of america. just do something. you will be able to tell the members of congress what you did and ask them to follow suit. >> well, thank you, all, very much. i hope you'll do that, and buy the book, thank you. >> thank you. [applause]

[applause] >> for more information on president clinton's book, "back to work" go to knopfdoubleday.com. >> now for the 11th annual national book festival on the national mall here in washington, biographer, justin martin presents his book, "genius of price: the life of frederick olmstead."

>> i'm the editor of the "washington post," and we're proud charter sponsors of this festival since the beginning 11 years ago. i'd like to say on behalf of the library of congress, welcome to the festival, and we hope that everyone's having a wonderful day celebrating the joy of reading here in the national mall. before we begin, i want to say that pavilion's presentations are filmed by c-span for airing on booktv, so be mindful of this as you enjoy the presentation. in addition, please do not sit on the camera risers on the back of the pavilion, and please silence your cell phones. thank you. the author with us today is fabulous. his name is justin martin, author of the widely heralded

biographies, alan greenspan and ralph nader, both of whom i think would be interesting dinner guests -- [laughter] at the same dinner. [laughter] i couldn't think of better figures, and he said after he wrote the greenspan book, he didn't want to do anymore economists, and his agent said you can carve a career with economists, so he went with raffle nader. he was chosen by the new york times book review is one of the notable books of 2000. nader, icon published in 2002, is the definitive biography of the consumer advocate and paren yell presidential -- perennial presidential candidate

who sometimes leaves messages on my voice mail asking the post to cover one thing or the other, and he also played a controversial role in the disputed election of 2000. justin became one of the go-to experts to explain nader appearing on c nan and other -- cnn and other television shows, and also in the 2006 documentary, "an unreasonable man." his latest biography is about a less controversial figure. "yen -- "genius a place" is about an architect who designed central park and 50 other green spaces around the country. he was a sailor, scientific farmer, journalist, abolitionist, and civil war hero, a life worthy of the careful illuminating justin

martin treatment. justin is a former staff writer at fortune magazine and wrote widely for such publations like "newsweek" and "money," and he seems so have been destined to write the current book on olmstead like he was the architect, which was olmstead's greatest achievement. with that, i say, please welcome justin martin to the stage. he will be signing books from 4-5 p.m. as well. [applause] >> thank you for the nice

introduction. it is nice to here at the national book festival. i'm here as well as being an author, but here as a fan. i had a really great day seeing different speeches. it's been really fun. my book is called "genius of place: the life of frederick law olmsted." first, i'll describe the path he took in becoming a landscape architect, and then i'll describe his greatest designs in the context of how all the various aide dis he traveled down and the career experience, how this informed his most masterful design, and then there's time for questions. he was born in connecticut in 1822, a pretty prosperous family. his father was a dry goods merchant, and as was the hat in

that era, olmsted was sent away for schooling. he entered into a series of arrangements with poor country parsons. they were besieged and beset. they had their par soggage duty, many of them running small farms on the side to make extra income leaving little time for their third role as educators. olmsted was mischeefl -- mischievous as a boy. he wandered around setting traps for quail, wandered around in the woods, got very little schooling, but got an perks for landscape, particularly the landscape of connecticut. when olmsted was 14 years old, he got a terrible case of poisen sumac that preed into his eyes. into this point, he contrived to get a letter from the doctor that indicated he no longer needed to go to school.

he was delighted, but this meant at a very young age, he needed to find a profession. now, the first thing he lit upon, it kind of made sense, and it was ill ledge call. he wanted to be a surveyor. that's a profession available in this era at least to someone with limited formal schooling, but surveying requires eagle sharp vision, and he is the bout of sumac, but he pressed ahead, arranged an apprenticeship under a surveyor, and he proceeded into completely abuse to situation. well pretending to learn the useful trade of surveying, olmsted wandered around hiking, fishing, paddling in the canoe, learning very, very little about surveying. he deepened his appreciation for land scape, particularly the land scape of connecticut. at this point, his father

decided it was time for olmsted to buckle down and be serious. his father arranged for him to move to brooklyn, got him apartment, and got him a job in manhattan where he would be working for an importing firm. now, olmsted was deeply lonely in brooklyn, and he also, he hated the job working for the importing firm. he hated the fact it was a desk job, the long hours, the renne -- regimennation, and all he liked is going aboard shift and doing inventory. while doing this, he got an idea of something he might like to do with his life. he decided he wanted to become a sailorment once again, this made sense. sailing was thee profession available to people in that era who didn't have formal schooling.

olmsted desired honestly a whole long line of olmsteds back from generation to generation had gone to sea. in april of 1843, olmsted set out on board a ship called the ronaldson heading to china. on july 4 as they rounded the cape of good hope in southern africa, they hit a ferocious snowstorm. they were traveling to the southern hemisphere, and there it's possible for weather conditions to be reversed, so on july 4, there's wicked winter weather, and in this case, this was an incredible storm. olmsted looked around at his fellow say yours who were seasoned. he saw panic in their eyes. he realized the ship might sink. captain fox, the captain gave the order to full sail. this meant that the ronaldson was completely uncontrollable. the wild winds whipped this way

and that, the sails were a detriment so they rolled up the sails, and olmsted and the fellow crewman went blow deck for for three days and nights it pitched on the sea completely unmanned and uncontrolled. olmsted thought at any moment they would crack open, pushed into the ocean, and have a certain death. fortunately, that did not happen. olmsted continued on to china. his -- the ronaldson delivered its american goods. it picked up a load of chinese tea, and headed back to the united states. along the way, olmsted experienceed everything. he didn't get enough food. he didn't get enough water. he didn't get enough sleep. his sailors were whipped for the minorrist of infractions. when the ship docked in april of 1844 and when olmsted disembarked on the dry land, he swore to never, ever go to sea again.

[laughter] this only met he needed to find a new profession. now olmsted hit on the idea of becoming a farmerment one against, this made sense. farming was a profession in this era available to someone with pretty limited formal schooling. before, farming was thee profession in the united states practiced by 70% of the population. olmsted identified a man who received a accommodation for running a model scientific farm, and olmsted arranged to work with this man as an apprenticeship. at this point, he was having the very first pang of wanting to be a social reformer. he liked the idea of being a scientific farmer to accomplish that. the reason why is while olmsted didn't have much formal schooling, he was very, very well read. he thought he could read the latest agricultural journals, learn the best practices in farming, and decimate this

information to fellow i literal farmers and be a social reformer. he completed the apprenticeship and started off on his own for life as a farm e and true his word, olmsted really was very talented as a farmer. he was very good at growing crops. tiew to his word, and also was a social reformer. he read the latest agricultural journals. he gleaned the best practices, the latest practices in farming, decimated the information to his fellow farmers. then olmsted learned that his younger brother, john, was planning to take a walking tour across england, and olmsted was pathologically jealous. he could not believe that his little brother was getting ready to take a great adventure while he was stuck on the farm. olmsted wrote a series of letters to his father pleading to be allowed to leave the farm and join his brother on this trip.

the only wonder, why would a man now in his mid-20s need to beg his father's permission 1234 the father held the mortgage to the farm. his father was also a very kind, very generous man, particularly by 19th century fatherly standards, and so he agreed to let olmsted go, and furthermore, he give olmsted some money for the tour for england. when olmsted returned, he was the beneficiary of a really fortunate coincidence. one of olmsted's neighbors on stanten island where he was farming was a man named george putnam who was a weakened hobby farmer. stanten island was just an island off the tip of manhattan, and george is a name that might have resonance for the people here in the audience today because putnam was a publishing magnet, and the company he founded is still in existence

today,putnams. he was working on paperbacks, brand new to the world of this time, and he was publishing philosophy, collections of poetry, collections of short fiction, and selling them for 25 crepts a pop. he approached olmsted, his neighboring farmer, and asked olmsted if he would be interesting in producing an act to be published in paper bark of his recent walking tour across england. olmsted readily agreed, and he produced a book called "walks and talks of an american farmer in england." sales were very, very slow. reviews were incredibly tepid, but only made a transition of

being a surveyor, a clerk, sailor, a farmer, and now a writer. there's a brand new newspaper, this was the early 1850s, a brand new paper called "the new york daily times". they later drop the daily and become just "the new york times." this is the era when most big cities had a dozen dailies, and so henry raymonday, the editor of the paper tried to figure out how to separate from a large field of competition. he came to the conclusion the best way to do this was by focusing on veer rasety. now, this was the era of yellow journalism so a dozen or so competitors were in the habit of just trusting the truth mightily or making things up, so raymond perceived if he devoted if to objective reporting in so far as

that's possible, he could distinguish it from the competitors. raymond was interested in covering the big topics of the day, and the biggest, again, at this point in the early 1850s, once again, there was rising tensionings between the northern and southern regions of the united states on the issue of slavery, tensions that existed from the very inception of the nation, but now they appeared to be reaching one of their periodic flash points. people thought there might be violence soon or maybe even civil war. so olmsted applied for the job. he had a five minute interview, and he was handed this absolutely plum assignment. you might think how did he get this? he was pretty underqualified, but he had a book to his credit, "walks and talks of an american farmer in england," and more importantly, he was a farmer, and the south in this era was nothing but the society.

from the autumn of 1852 after the hairest is over because olmsted was still a farmer by trade, he set out for the south, and the only way to describe it is nothing could have prepared henry raymond, the editor of the times, nothing could have prepared anyone for what an able reporter olmsted proved to be. he went everyone talking to everyone. he talked to plantation owners. he talked to slaves. he talked to poor white farmers. he produced a series of spectacular dispatches that literally put the brand new "new york times" on the map. in 1861, these were compiled into a book called "the cotton kingdom. " here it is, 150 years later, 1861, and "the cotton kingdom" is still in print. if you want a window into the south on the eve of the civil war, watch "gone with the wind" which is fictional, but has

great observations about the south and the period, or read olmsted's absolutely stellar reporting as it's collected in this "the cotton kingdom," and now he's a member of the literary republic, and next he becomes editor of a magazine called "putnams" editor of harper's, and they had an amazing state of writers publishing emerson, thereau, and longfellow. they copied stories from herman melville, and he also decided he wanted to become much more deeply involved in abolitionism begin the fact he traveled through the south on assignment for the "new york times," this was a cause he certainly wanted to become involved in, and so in 1855, a man named james abbot

traveled east from kansas, and james abbot was the head of a militia which was devoted to making sure if they entered the union as a state, it would be a free state rather than a slave state, and he was headed east to get money to raise money to purchase weapons for the militia. first he went to connecticut and rhode island raising enough money to buy 100 beacher's bibles, they were sharp rifles. they went to new york, and the person he wanted to connect with was olmsted who was involved with ab -- abolitionism. he agreed and he reached out to various people he knew in new york city. one of the people he reached out to was agreely, the editor of the new york tribune and the very person who coined the term "bleeding kansas." olmsted managed to read $300

through various contacts in the literary community and elsewhere, and he was described as a prompt and energized friend of kansas. he was kept apprised of activities, and he used the $300 to purchase this and they were kept apprised the activity by writing letters that employed a ridiculously crackable code referring it to an h. it was not a code that was very difficult for anybody to figure out. at the same time, it reflects olmsted was so very aware they were involved in a very dangerous endeavor here to avoid detection with the letters. he arranged to break this up into several pieces and send it to kansas broken up into component parts. when the cannon arrived in kansas,-once again assembled, reassembled, placed in front of the hotel in lawrence, and it

comported itself admirably, the cannon did throughout the bloody kansas struggles. now comes an absolutely cataclysmic event in u.s. economic history. it's come to be known as the panic of 1857, and it was an incredibly rapid downward spiral in the economic conditions. the magazine olmsted was working for went belly up. olmsted lost his job. olmsted was short on coal. he owed money to everybody he knew. he had a hole in his shoe, didn't have a proper hat. he decided to take a job that was an incredible come down for someone who had been traveling in such lofty circles, rubbing shoulders is emerson. he took a job in which he started clearing a really scruffy unattractive piece of land knocking down shanties and

clearing swamps on an ugly piece of land that was named for its position in the middle of new york city called central park. olmsted was clearing this land for someone else's design. enter call vox. he was an english trained architect. he took a look at the plans, and he was disgusted. he couldn't believe the amateur design. vox had friends in high places. he designed the 5th avenue mansion of a board members of the future central park. he approached the board in saying, first of all, this is a terrible design for the park. i suggest that you get rid of it. second, vox said, in england where i'm from, if you want the best design, you hold a public competition. the board listened to vox. they tabled the existing design for central park, and then they announced there was a public competition for a new design. at this point, vox sought out

olmsted to see if olmsted wanted to be partners. now, for these purposes, vox could not have cared a whit about olmsted's high profile, the fact he was part of the literary republic, an abolitionist, rubbing shoulder with luminaries. that meant nothing. the reason he wanted to partner with olmsted because olmsted was out on the scruffy land clearing the land. if they partnered up, they would have a leg up in the competition because olmsted lit ramly -- literally knew the lay of the land. they partnered up for the competition, and the only way to describe it is parallel to the southern reporting. in this case, nothing could have prepared vox, nothing could have prepared anyone for what great ideas olmsted brought to the design. when they turned into the design, it was the clear winner. there were 33 different people who entered the design

competition. 32 of them produced something -- produced designs that rated somewhere between a b-minus and a flat f. they produced an a-plus. it was immediately seen as thee skin for central park, and they were begin permission to proceed with it. one of the design elements that set their plan so far very far apart from the other designs that were turned in by the other contestants. the board of the park spelled out all the contest at that particular times had to meet certain elements, and one element was four roads had to cross the park. it's a perfect rack tangle, and very narrow. the other 32 contestants complied with the requirement. they produced park plans that were crossed in four places with roads that resulted in really cribbed, cramped plans. it was not possible to have an expansive meadow or any kind of

long view or vista. olmsted and vox came up with this brilliant innovation. they agreed to do the mandatory almosts, the four roads crossing the park, but they had an idea called sunking transverses. these were subterrainian channels that traveled across the park at four points. in certain places, there were land bridges that crossed the channels. this opened up the park plan. it made it possible to have an expansive meadow and have a long view or a vista. what's more it meant traffic was not traveling at eye level going through the park. as olmsted put it, your view was not interrupted by clattering dung carts. well, their design inmoo vaition continues to -- innovations continues to pay dividends today. you had the experience of walking through the park, and there's traffic traveling nearby, but you don't see it or

really hear it either, not that badly at least because it sounds muffled because the traffic is traveling beneath ground. olmsted and vox proceeded with their plan for central park and did most of what they wanted to do and what they had not done, they had in preparation, ready to go when an 1861, the civil war broke out. now, olmsted, he most certainly wanted to be involved in the union cause, and so what he did was at this point, he came down here to washington, and he headed up an outfit called the united states sanitary commission. this was a battlefield relief outfit providing immeasurable relief to battlefield wounded during the civil war. after the civil war, there were a whole series of cons and it mori muched into the american red cross, but come the battle of gettysberg, olmsted went

restless again. that was a turning point in the civil war. it was clear after that battle that the north was going to emerge victorious, the south was defeated. it was just a matter of time and terms. from olmsted's stand appointment, it was clear it was only a matter of time before his assignment with the united states sanitary commission ended, and he would need a new job. the fungny thing is olmsted looked around, he didn't consider landscape architecture, the very profession they pioneered. olmsted is a masterpiece to his credit with central park, but he just didn't think there was that many cities that wanted parks designed. instead, olmsted headed out to california, and he became the supervisor of a gold mine. well, while he was there, he started visiting a place that was about 30 # miles away from the gold mine, and it was yosemite valley. he was enchanted.

by some accounts, he's one of the first 500 non-native americans to even enter yosemite. that gives you an idea of how remote that valley was in this era and how far away and distant it was from civilization. olmsted loved walking around in yosemite, and pretty soon, he started to make a kind of human cry to preserve the place. he recognized that america's population was going to expand, and at some point, yosemite would be in danger of being diminished by having so many people visit it, so olmsted started suggesting that certainly no kind of private interest should be looked to to preserve this natural wonder. he suggested a far-seeing government should step in and take care of this beautiful place. this was unbelievably pressing. this was decades before the national park system, but the

civil war ended, and all the sundayen in the north, at least, there was an economic boom, and all the sudden cities were wanting parks designed. they partnered up again, teamed up again, did a bunch of different designs. then olmsted and vox, they never got along well, always at each other's throats, and so they broke apart. olmsted continued on solo doing a whole series of designs, and these designs, part of the reason people respond to them, the way they do today, part of what makes them so magnificent, so set apart, so singular is very much because of how he drew on all the various dead ends he traveled down and career eddies he traveled over before finding his way to landscape architecture. he brought those experiences, those varied experiences into play. what i'm going to do now is describe just three of olmsted's

greatest works in the context of how his earlier experiences came into play. first of these designs is right up that way, the grounds of the u.s. capitol. olmsted was called upon to design the grounds in 1874, and the very first thing he did was he became extremely fix sated on finding a way, a circulation system, a logical way for people to travel over the capitol grounds. 234 this era, there's 41 different points where a person could enter the grounds, and people were in the habit of entering the capitol grounds at in one of the 41 points and making a beeline for the interest of the capitol producing a harry grid work with people criss crossing one another. olmsted sat down, and he came up with this idea of having -- the best way to describe it is tributaries feeding to larger tributaries feeding into a river. olmsted decided that what made

sense was to have -- it didn't matter what one of the 41 points someone entered into, they were fed into a tributary to be fed into a larger tributary path feeding them into just a couple of very broad curving paths that would deliver the person right to the entrance of the capitol. now, congress, which is the client on this project, was completely puzzled. they'd hired olmsted to create a striking design for the capitol grounds, and here he was fixuated over a circulation system, but this is everything to do, completely rooted in olmsted's earlier career as a farmer. when working as a farmer, olmsted had had many times the experience of conducting his goods to market and having a wagon get stuck in a road. that spelled disaster which meant the produce taken to market would be bad, and olmsted would not get money. when olmsted became an

architect, he kept that lesson with him, and so ouch clients were puzzled as congress, the client in this particular was. they wonder, you know, we hired you for this project, and here you are with these roads. olmsted would explain, it doesn't matter how beautiful a design i create if it doesn't have a rationale way for people to be qughted over the grounds. it will be confined to failure. this was born in his time as a farmer the second project to describe in the context of olmsted's earlier experiences and how they came to bear was his absolutely visionary design for the world fair in chicago in 1893 which what was called the columbian exposition. they cited the fair, where the grounds would be, and he decided it would make sense to put the fairgrounds on the shore of lake michigan. that was a really striking backdrop. then olmsted came up with this really kind of out there idea. he decided that he wanted to cut

channels that would travel from lake mashes, through the fair -- michigan, through the fairgrounds so there was waterways through the fairgrounds, and it was possible for people to go to attraction to attraction at the fair by boat. now, olmsted had a vivid, almost a lose nate -- hallucinating vision of the boats. he wanted them to be seat to seat a maximum of four people, wanted them to have brightly colored awnings and modeled this in his mind from china that he saw in his sea voyage 50 years before. now, daniel burnum, the administrator of the fair, thought this was a ridiculous idea. why would you, if you have people travel by boat, stroke of

genius, great idea, but traveling in little boats four at a time made absolutely no sense to him, so burnum went behind his back and forged a relationship and signed a contract, in fact, with a steam ship company, now, when olmsted learned about this, he was furious. he wrote burnum a series of memos that are obsessive, demented, but logical. he made the argument that first of all that ultimately the world's dpair would be con finded to memory. it would open in the spring of 1893, close in the autumn of 1893, and that would be it, so the point that olmsted made was what would people rather remember? a big steam ship going along, people leaning over the railings, waving hats a steam whistle going off, or remember little colored boats gliding along the waterways? he had an argument that that

would provide the greatest amount of good to the greatest amount of people. olmsted conceded if you had a handful of boats carrying four people at a time, not everybody got to take the boat trip, but he made the point that everybody would enjoy the am bee yans of having the boats, the lovely quiet boats traveling over the warways. now, burnum was a man of indome minable will meeting his match in olmstead. when the fair opened in the spring of 1893, what was available were a handful, very small, brightly colored boats that seated a maximum of four people as olmsted saw in his trip to china 50 years before, and the white city, as the fair has become to be known, has a place in the america's memory, and people remember the atmosphere and one of the things that contributed to that was the waterways with the little small boats traveling over them.

the final land scape that i wanted to describe or land scapes plural is the park systems, and this is an incredible idea. olmsted and vox were thee pioneers of the park system building the first one in the world in buffalo in 1868, and then once olmsted and vox's partnership broke up, olmsted continued on, and he perfected the concept driening a park system in milwaukee, wisconsin, designed one in louisville, kentucky, one in rochester, new york, and then developed a system in boston. now, one of the things that made the park system a really great idea is you were no longer -- what it was was a series of two or three or more parks attached or they were connected by parkways, and it meant you were no longer tied to a single piece of land for a park, and you wouldn't have to have something like central park, which was, until it was designed, a really

un attractive piece of land. you could have several pieces of land that were, that might have different landscape attributes. for instance, would be could be hilly, another with a natural lake, but far more important to olmsted than this variety of different pieces of landscapes was the facts it meant television the center of the city, within the middle of the city, there was a variety of different parks, all 6 them serving -- all of them serving different neighborhoods, and in the different neighborhoods, you had all kinds of different people who would be able to, from all different backgrounds, be able to mix and mingle in the park. now, this was completely drawn, so very drawn, the idea of the park system, on olmsted's earlier travels through the south, on the eve of the civil war for the "new york times". while making that trip, one of his most enduring observations was the south in this time was in the grip of a kind of cultural poverty, and olmsted described the poverty to the factt