The A-Y-P, the Olmsted Brothers and the City Beautiful Movement

America’s most famous landscape architects, the Olmsted Brothers, designed the University of Washington campus for the A-Y-P. Today, the campus still reflects the fair’s original footprint: From Drumheller Fountain, known as Geyser Basin in the busy summer of 1909, the vista of Mt. Rainier has been preserved, and both Architecture Hall and the Women’s Center (known as Imogen Cunningham Hall) survive from the A-Y-P.

The Olmsted Brothers’ layout of the exposition grounds reflects the spirit and principles of the City Beautiful movement, which was partly rooted in the progressive notion that moral and civic virtue could be created through the city beautification. This goal would be achieved through the imitation of the wide boulevards, dramatic vistas, powerful focal points and the neoclassical architectural styles found in the capitals of Europe. The Champs Elysees in Paris and the monumental Arc de Triomphe, which closes that majestic boulevard’s long vista, are good example.

The siting of Seattle’s Asian Art Museum in Volunteer Park on the crest of a ridge with views to the city, mountains and sound, reflects City Beautiful influence.

The Olmsted Brothers embraced the City Beautiful idea that urban American squallor could be eliminated through social reforms expressed in the landscape. Working across the nation, they were known for scattering parks throughout cities and making sure each one had a great playground for children.

The Olmsteds were first invited to Seattle in 1903 to design a park system for the city. Their interconnecting system of boulevards brought swaths of green to neighborhoods along with grand vistas to the mountains, lakes and sound. The Olmsted plan discretely placed small parks along the boulevard system and in every neighborhood.

Also In 1903, well before anyone had thought of the A-Y-P, the regents of the University of Washington hired the Olmsteds to redesign their new campus. John Charles Olmsted, the older brother, took charge of the project. (John C. Olmsted and Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. were stepbrothers and cousins. Frederick Law Olmsted, Sr. married his brother’s widow Mary. John was Mary’s son by her marriage to Olmsted Sr.’s older brother.) The resulting 1904 design proposed two quads, one for arts and one for sciences at right angles to it. The northern quad survives and is known for its collegiate-gothic style buildings, quirky gargoyles and phenomenal springtime cherry blossoms. The 1904 work disregarded the two poorly sited buildings (Denny and Parrington Halls) dating from the university’s move from downtown Seattle in the 1890s.

When selected in 1906 to design the grounds of the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, the Olmsteds used the southern two-thirds of the campus (260 acres) for the fair grounds. There they borrowed from the City Beautiful movement, siting the major buildings around a central core, called the Arctic Circle. It opened to a grand, green promenade with vistas to Mt. Rainier. Curving boulevards circled the site and made it easy to move from one zone to another.

A major axis sprung out to the south from the main entrance at NE 39th Street and led to a watergate on Lake Union. This section, known as the Pay Streak, stood in striking contrast to the homogenous, orderly structures of the adjacent Arctic Circle. The Pay Streak consisted of a chaotic mix of eclectic buildings that formed the fair’s entertainment zone. The cascading stream, fountain and the neoclassical designs of the central core combined with the peripheral but essential Pay Streak echo in designing the Chicago’s World Columbian Exposition of 1893.

Designed by the founders of the City Beautiful movement—architect Daniel Burnham and the Olmsted brothers’ father, Frederick Law Olmsted—the Chicago fair launched the City Beautiful ethos in American design. Generally, the City Beautiful advocates sought to improve their city through beautification, which would sweep away social ills, as the beauty of the city would inspire civic loyalty and moral rectitude in the impoverished, achieve cultural parity between American and European cities, and create a more inviting city center that while not bringing the upper classes back to live there would certainly entice them to work and spend money in the urban areas. The Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition reflects all three of that movement’s goals.

“The reform movement in America, which had largely been concerned with corruption in local government, exploitation of the laboring classes by big business, improvement in housing conditions in large cities and other social causes, quickly embraced the concept of the City Beautiful as an American goal.” —John Reps