Imagine you are the sons of Frederick Law Olmsted, America’s first and most celebrated landscape architect, and you get a call from an old family friend. It’s Mary Louise Curtis Bok and she’s one of your firm’s most important and long-standing clients.
Her father was Cyrus Curtis. He had recently died and Mary Louise, his only daughter, had an idea to honor him. She wants to demolish most of the family home that her father had built along with the gardens designed by their father some 30-40 years earlier. In its place, she proposes to create a space for trees and public recreation and she'll donate it all to the town in honor of her father.
And that's exactly what happened.
Can you imagine the type of environmentalism and philanthropic vision it takes to come up with a plan like this? This is the type of courage, generosity, and leadership that Mary Louise Curtis Bok and the Olmsteds partnered in over and over again.
And make no mistake, Mary Louise was far from being a simple funding source for these projects. She wrote letters, observed, opined, compromised and negotiated with groups and individuals that were sometimes frustrating and small-minded.
But Mary Louise Curtis Bok was a woman of unusual creativity and intelligence who used her family’s political and economic position to do extraordinary public good. She was also surrounded by a family who set similar standards for themselves, and she took every opportunity to employ the most cutting-edge naturalists in landscape design.
Cyrus Curtis was the publishing giant who printed some of the most popular and widely read material in the country and Frederick Law Olmsted invented landscape architecture. Yes, invented it. Everything before that was really just called gardening. But Olmsted rejected the term and saw his role as curating the unique genius of the place, working with nature to design public spaces where all people could enjoy the benefits of the natural environment.
“Service must precede art, since all turf, trees, flowers, fences, roads, walks, water, paint, plaster, posts, and pillars in or under which there is not a purpose of direct utility or service are inartistic if not barbarous... So long as considerations of utility are neglected or overridden by considerations of ornament, there will be no true art.” -Frederick Law Olmsted.
Curtis hired Olmsted to plan the gardens at his family estate in Wyncote, Pennsylvania called Lyndon. The existing home was soon demolished and replaced by a stone renaissance revival style structure designed by the architect William Lloyd Baily (with considerable input from Mr. Curtis who was himself quite knowledgeable in the field). This was approximately 1895 and Frederick Law Olmsted was hired by Curtis to landscape the grounds and gardens.
After Olmsted’s death in 1903, his sons took over the firm and went on to design hundreds of parks and landscapes all over the country, including several in Camden. The Curtis — and later Bok — families kept a steady stream of work in the pipeline for the Olmsted Brothers.
Olmsted, Curtis, and Bok all shared a progressive —and sometimes radical—vision for the importance of nature in the urban environment. You can read more about Olmsted's design principles at the Olmsted Network website. They have some special material dedicated to Olmsted parks and using the principles of nature-based solutions to address climate change. olmsted.org/olmsted-parks-and-places-adapt-in-the-face-of-climate-change
The name Mary Louise Curtis Bok gets thrown around in political circles in the town of Camden most frequently when someone is trying to make a point about preserving something in the same way that they have known it. That’s how I first became aware of her incredible gifts to the town, at least.
The same is true of the Olmsted landscape design dynasty. Knowing nothing about the values and philosophy of Mary Louise nor the Olmsteds, I knew only that they were the most commonly cited reason for the rules about amplified music on the Village Green or the reasons we might not be allowed to have picnic tables or kayaks in Harbor Park.
For many years, this was enough to satisfy any curiosity I may have had about Frederick Law Olmsted, his sons, or the Curtis/Bok family.
Today, though, thanks to a few other Camden residents and visitors, I dream about what they might say now if they could be here helping us grapple with challenges and opportunities we face today. Rather than a river and harbor that were too dirty to touch, they’d find a vastly transformed use of the beach, as just one example.
The portion of the shorefront that had been reserved as “grounding out space” for big boats to be painted and repaired is now a favorite place for children and the young at heart to examine crabs and periwinkles and dip their feet into the sea. The ramp that we now use to access the beach was there simply to give the Town a place to haul out the floats so they could be stored for winter.
They’d be delighted at some of these evolving benefits, I’m quite certain, but they’d probably describe the public landing in the same way as Mrs. Bok had done before. Disappointing. Dreary. Too much parking. Not enough trees.
As was always the case for Mary Louise, she would see many buildings in need of moving still today. In their place, we’d have trees or grass or views out over the harbor and river. If you look through the designs and photos of the Olmsted archives that relate to the projects she hired them to do, nearly every building pictured had been documented with thought of removing it if possible.
You might almost look at those photos as a type of hit list for buildings and I’ve come to find a certain amount of humor in it. Many of them are actually scattered around town in what she would consider to be more appropriate places.
She faced plenty of opposition in town as well. I’ve tried to be gentle in my sharing of some of these stories about the obstacles she faced in Camden because I know there are still so many opportunities to fulfill aspects of Mrs. Bok’s vision that were not quite ripe for the moment. But the opposition was not limited to Camden.
A 1937 article described public opposition from neighbors of Cheltenham Township at the idea of accepting a donation of 40 acres from the family which included the grounds of her father’s former home. Sixty residents showed up at a meeting of the elected officials to protest the gift, fearing that the playground and park “would attract undesirable people.”
As we talk about change here in Camden, I like to think about what it would have been like to be Mary Louise Curtis Bok in the 1920s and 30s as she mediated between the Town and the Olmsted brothers? She was so much more than a philanthropist.
While it’s true that most of her money came from her parents’ publishing business, her contributions to that business were anything but typical, especially for a woman born in 1876. At the age of 13 she was one of sixteen people on staff at the Ladies Homes Journal. Like her mother, she had a talent for writing and was published under her mother’s maiden name as Mary L. Knapp (her mother was Louisa Knapp).
I mean let’s just dwell on that for a minute. In 1890, 30 years before women got the right to vote, 13-year-old Mary Louise Curtis was writing for the Ladies Home Journal. That was also the year that Edward Bok took over as editor of the publication. Six years later, when Mary was 19, they were married.
The life of her husband was documented in a short autobiography titled The Americanization of Edward Bok and tells the story of how his family came to the United States after losing everything.
Edward Bok died of a heart attack in 1930 and shortly after his death, Mary Louise received a letter from Helen Keller, noted advocate for people with deaf blindness. An excerpt from the letter reads as follows but it is worth reading in its entirety. https://boktowergardens.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p16755coll1/id/65
Surely we would all clamor to be associated with Helen Keller’s work today, but can we be sure how we would have behaved before we knew who she would become?
“Dear Mrs Bok.... There will be many a tribute to the great editor, the philanthropist, the peace advocate, the lover of birds and all things beautiful... this eagerness to share, to help, to call forth the best in men and women that endeared Mr. Bok to all who knew him... how warmly he encouraged me in my youthful efforts to write — how he held up my hands in the early days of my work for the blind...”
Today, it’s hard to imagine what Camden would be like without public spaces such as Harbor Park or the Village Green, but we also tend to forget how radical and even controversial the ideas were at the time.
Each time that major events such as fires forced a reorganizing of the landscape, Mrs. Bok swept in and purchased the properties, waiting until the pieces of the puzzle could be brought together with the help of the Olmsteds.
At the time, much like the design at Central Park had to work around the oddly unnatural and rectangular reservoir that pre-existed the park (and his since been removed), Mrs. Bok and the Olmsteds had to work around property boundaries that were outside their control.
Much like in Central Park where they had to accommodate the reservoir, they worked to naturalize and buffer buildings and the dam with trees and shrubbery as best they could in Camden. But we must realize that neither Mrs. Bok nor the Olmsteds ever saw their work as finished, and the designs that we have today include many compromises.
Today, the challenge of climate change and habitat destruction threatens both our parks and our ecosystem, but we have an opportunity to apply the same design principles that the Olmsteds and Mrs. Bok held dear as we plan for the future. The Olmsteds were the original proponents of using Nature Based Solutions, and it was long before the term became fashionable.
Even though the type of flooding we are seeing in Harbor Park and elsewhere in town is overwhelming, any careful reading of the Olmsted/Curtis/Bok philosophies would lead most people to see these challenges as opportunities to take everything that has been learned in the past 100 years and build back better and in greater alignment with nature.
The Town of Camden and the Camden Public Library are well positioned with funding from the National Coastal Resilience Fund to plan for the future by answering the question, what would Mary Louise Curtis Bok and the Olmsted Brothers do today?
Take a look at information on the National Coastal Resilience Fund and you'll swear that Olmsted himself had a hand in designing the program. http://nfwf.org/programs/national-coastal-resilience-fund
