Works in this Exhibition

William Bridges and Peter Maverick, Map of the City of New York and Island of Manhattan, 1811

Lewis Hine, Boys Picking Garbage from "The Dumps," Boston, 1909.

Lewis Hine, "The Dumps" Turned into a Play Ground, Boston, 1909

Lewis Hine, Play Ground in Tenement Alley, Boston, 1909

Photographer Unknown, Fenway Court from the Fens, about 1905, courtesy Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

Map of the Metropolitan District of Boston, 1898

Proposed park system from the Common to the West Roxbury Park, now Franklin Park,1882

George Washington Bromley, Atlas of the City of Boston, Roxbury, from Actual Surveys and Official Plans, 1899

Daniel Burnham, et. al, Plate 103 Plan of Existing and Proposed Parks and Boulevards, about 1909

Frederick Law Olmsted (1822–1903) was a landscape architect, journalist, and progressive social reformer who believed in the power of parks as vehicles for urban improvement. Olmsted’s early work as a journalist influenced his lifelong pursuit of social reform. In the 1850s, he traveled the American South, writing about the conditions of enslaved African Americans. He published his chronicles about the slave economy in The Cotton Kingdom: A Traveler’s Observations on Cotton and Slavery in the American Slave States. In 1857, Olmsted accepted a civil service position as superintendent of a newly proposed central park in New York. In that role, he entered a competition for the park’s design, which he won with architect Calvert Vaux. In 1883, Olmsted moved to Brookline, Massachusetts, where his firm designed the Arnold Arboretum, the Back Bay Fens, and the Emerald Necklace park system. His practice went on to design influential public park projects across North America. Photo courtesy of the NPS.

Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840–1924) was a visionary collector who believed in the power of art to change people’s lives. While living in Boston’s Back Bay in the 1880s, she and her husband Jack took extended trips to Europe and Asia, where she started collecting artworks and gained inspiration from, especially, the city of Venice, Italy.  Based partly on their experience of travel, the Gardners committed to building a public museum to encourage personal encounters with art as a means to improve society. Following Jack’s death in 1898, Isabella was one of the first to purchase land in the new Back Bay Fens district, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, and in 1903 she opened her namesake museum. In addition to endowing it, she was an advocate and substantial contributor to a range of social and urban reform causes, sponsoring a tenement garden contest and fundraising for the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. Photo courtesy of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

Charles Eliot (1859-1897) was a landscape architect and city planner who championed urban reform. As apprentice at Olmsted's firm, Eliot drew the plans for Franklin Park, the Arnold Arboretum, and the Back Bay Fens, among others. In 1886, he opened his own practice and made early proposals to design the Charles River Esplanade and Fresh Pond in Cambridge. Eliot believed in landscape conservation as a part of social reform, arguing that its role was equal to those of libraries and museums in preserving cultural resources. Following Eliot's death at age 37, his father, Harvard president Charles W. Eliot, established the first academic degree program in Frederick Law Olmsted's "new art" of landscape architecture at Harvard in 1900. Photo courtesy of the Massachusetts Archives.

Lewis Wickes Hine (1874-1940) was a sociologist and photographer who used photography to urge social reform and legislative protections for immigrants and children. Hine began his career recording the conditions for immigrants on their arrival to the US. As staff photographer for the National Child Labor Committee, a nonprofit group promoting child labor reform, he traveled across the country documenting the working lives of children forced into various forms of industrial and agricultural labor. Hine photographed hundreds of boys and girls toiling in mills and factories across Massachusetts, in places such as North Adams, Fall River, and New Bedford. In 1909, he traveled to Boston to document working lives of immigrant children laboring in the city's material economies. Throughout his career, Hine produced powerful documentary photographs in service of education and social reform. Photo courtesy of the George Eastman Museum.