Mountain View Cemetery: Frederick Law Olmsted's Oakland

In eighteen sixty-three, Frederick Law Olmsted came to Oakland. He had been working on Central Park in New York since eighteen fifty-eight, and he had a commission here: a cemetery for Oakland's Gold Rush wealthy, situated in the hills above the city with views of the Bay.

His instructions for Mountain View Cemetery were specific. The grounds should feel like a park. Drives should curve. Plantings should vary. The relationship between the living landscape and the dead beneath it should be legible and comfortable, grief normalized into the topography of the everyday. Death, in Olmsted's vision for the American landscape, should not be hidden. It should be walked through.

The California History journal and the Online Archive of California document Olmsted's Oakland commission and its place in his broader landscape philosophy. Among those buried at Mountain View are early California governors, the founders of the Bank of California, and Domingo Ghirardelli, whose name is still on a chocolate company and a San Francisco plaza.

The same Gold Rush wealth that paid for Olmsted's cemetery funded the railroad monopoly that funded Stanford University that eventually funded the venture-capital corridor two miles south of here. The money moved. The landscape it made stays put.

Mountain View Cemetery is still operating, still private, still Olmsted's design at its bones, still with those Bay views on the right morning. The Gold Rush men buried here built the California that built everything that came after them. Olmsted gave them a park to lie in.