Olmsted's Parks

Frederick Law Olmsted came to Bridgeport twice. Both times he looked at land donated by wealthy industrialists and turned it into something that belonged to everyone.

The first donation came in eighteen sixty-four from P. T. Barnum, the sewing machine manufacturer Nathaniel Wheeler, and William Noble, who bought a long strip of land along Long Island Sound and gave it to the city. The result was Seaside Park, a narrow coastal green that still runs along the water's edge south of downtown, one of the finest urban shorelines in New England. Olmsted designed it in his characteristic style: simple, uncluttered, given over to grass and water and long views.

The second donation came in eighteen seventy-eight from a farmer named James Beardsley, who gave the city more than one hundred acres of hilly, wooded land along the Pequonnock River, stipulating that it be kept the same forever as a public park. Olmsted assessed the site and called it pastoral, sylvan and idyllic. His plan was deliberately spare, meant to make the land available to as many people as possible without compromising the qualities that made it worth preserving.

The zoo that opened in Beardsley Park in nineteen twenty-two was not part of Olmsted's design, but it has become the anchor of the park for the generations that followed. It is the only Association of Zoos and Aquariums-accredited zoo in Connecticut, and it sits in a park that Olmsted described as a better picnic ground than any the city of New York possessed.

Bridgeport calls itself the Park City for these two gifts and the thirty-five parks that followed them. Both parks carry Olmsted's signature sensibility: restraint, access, the conviction that ordinary people deserve beautiful land to walk on.