Bethesda Terrace, Central Park, New York, NY - Philatelic Photographs on Waymarking.com

In 1858, English-born architect Calvert Vaux along with a relatively inexperienced Frederick Law Olmsted won a design contest for New York City’s Central Park. Over the next 40 years, Olmsted, often in collaboration with Vaux, became the most prolific designer of urban park spaces, greenways, college campuses and other nature reserves in the United States.

The central feature of Central Park in New York is the Bethesda Terrace. It’s where carriages dropped off affluent park goers to enjoy the open spaces. The terrace overlooks the lake and a fountain which also became known as Bethesda (and which also has appeared on a U.S. postage stamp). An image of this terrace can be seen in the middle of the stamp’s design.

Also found in the overlapping images on the stamp is Olmsted’s plan for Brooklyn’s Prospect Park (you can see the long meadow in the upper left corner and the elliptically shaped Grand Army Plaza on the right) and his plan for the park system of Buffalo NY. The only part of this latter plan that’s visible on the stamp is some ornate foliage around the edge of the plan.

The portrait of Frederick Law Olmsted on the stamp reproduces a detail of an 1895 oil painting by John Singer Sargent commissioned for the Biltmore Estate in Ashville NC. Olmsted designed the extensive gardens present on the estate, one of which was featured on another U.S. postage stamp. The portrait hangs in Biltmore House alongside a companion portrait of Biltmore architect Richard Morris Hunt (also by Sargent).

The stamp was issued in 1999, the centenary of the establishment of the American Society of Landscape Architects in 1899. Frederick Law Olmsted was one of the founders of the ASLA which currently boasts over 15,000 members.

Stamp Issuing Country: United States Date of Issue: 12-Sep-1999 Denomination: 33c Color: multicolored Stamp Type: Single Stamp Relevant Web Site: Not listed

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