Project Details Page

synopsis

Inspired by Olmsted Brothers’ Uplands subdivision in Victoria, BC, Boston developer David Gould asked J.C. Olmsted to plan a similar development for a very different, flat desert site in anticipation of Kennewick’s growth. Olmsted visited the 440 acre property three times, and produced multiple plans and reports over two years. To enhance marketing, “Olmsted Addition” featured Olmsted Park,

Inspired by Olmsted Brothers’ Uplands subdivision in Victoria, BC, Boston developer David Gould asked J.C. Olmsted to plan a similar development for a very different, flat desert site in anticipation of Kennewick’s growth. Olmsted visited the 440 acre property three times, and produced multiple plans and reports over two years. To enhance marketing, “Olmsted Addition” featured Olmsted Park, but ultimately little of the subdivision was built.

Olmsted Addition reveals the reach and reputation of the Olmsted firm in the Pacific Northwest, extending to Washington’s unlikely, rural corners. It also bears witness to the feverish pace of Western land speculation, partly fueled by East Coast investors. The fact that the client was an irrigation company indicates how water availability drove development and agriculture in the arid inland West.

No doubt David Gould knew the Olmsted firm's landscape design work from Boston, and apparently kept abreast its expansion into the far Northwest. He may have been naïve to assume that the Olmsted name would prove a magnet for lot purchasers in Kennewick, where large-scale agriculture was just getting underway. Equally unrealistic was Gould’s notion to translate Victoria’s scenic Uplands subdivision to his flat desert expanse without trees, water or mountain views.

John Charles Olmsted accomplished remarkable amounts of work during his trips around the Northwest. His pace is evident from associate James Frederick Dawson’s early note to Gould’s Yakima agent, “Mr John Charles Olmsted is now or will within a few days be in Spokane in connection with Park work & a large land subdivision and could probably arrange to take up the work at once on his way to the coast.” He continually juggled far-flung public projects and private commissions large and small. Trains and hotels were his office for weeks at a time.

Olmsted generated 36 plans and 264 items of correspondence for this job, investing significant effort to create a plan that met his client’s desires for character, market appeal and financial feasibility. As Olmsted had done at the Uplands, he laid out curvilinear, tree-lined roads and varied-size lots, the largest located near a neighborhood park. He sited the park in a depression where natural moisture would best support plantings and “a fine park meadow which could be easily flooded.” He suggested, “… it would be advisable to make changes in the boundary streets of that park so as to throw more of the low land into the park and to exclude some of the more saleable land southwest of the park.” Olmsted understood the imperative to maximize both amenity and profits.

The plan incorporated further features adapted to arid local conditions. Olmsted noted, “I have always thought that where the climate was such that the parking strips could be easily taken care of and kept green it was rather a swindle on the public to take them out of the street in effect and add them in effect to the private lawns but it does seem that in this case where irrigation is required the advantages of doing so are sufficient to justify the arrangement.” Along the streets he suggested using rambling wichuriana rose or Japanese barberry atop low irrigation dikes at property boundaries, a decorative feature that eliminated water-thirsty lawn more typically used in the East.

An impressive 1909 marketing publication attracted few buyers; little in way of planned improvements followed. In an October 1912 update sent to Olmsted, a local reported, “There are less than twenty houses in the Olmsted Addition and these on the main road from town mainly as this is practically the only road opened for traffic. Kennewick is steadily growing and will make a good showing in a few years I believe.” No park, curvilinear streets or innovative plantings exist today. Olmsted Addition is among several unrealized speculator’s schemes to which Olmsted lent his design talent but from which we enjoy no tangible landscape remains.

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