CHARLES
W. ELIOT 2nd: LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT 1899-1993
Courtesy
of Harvard University Archives
I have indeed been fortunate in family affection and good
friends, and in the opportunities to work in fields and
for causes that were exciting, challenging, and satisfying.
I just had an idea that planning—looking ahead—might
be both fun and useful. About the only place in this country
where one could get some training for planning in 1920
was the Graduate School of Landscape Architecture. Family
and friends gave me opportunities and my thesis plans
for a Spy Pond Park and the low rate of my first professional
fees combined in convincing the Town of Arlington that
I could make them a Town Plan. From that came chances
to work in Bedford, Duxbury, and Yarmouth. Among these
first jobs was a report on traffic around the Yard and
Harvard Square for the Harvard Corporation—one of
the many fruitless attempts to by-pass traffic around
the buildings of the University.
In the summer of 1925 came a telegram from Washington—Job
here would have jumped for at your age—and so I began
eighteen years as a civil servant. As city planner and
later as director of planning for the National Capital
Park and Planning Commission it was my job until 1933
to advise the commission on the location and boundaries
of areas which were purchased for parks and playgrounds,
on location of highways and public buildings, and all
kinds of public improvements—including sewers. The
high spots were the efforts to get the Potomac Valley
reserved for park, the Parkway to Mount Vernon, an unsuccessful
battle for adequate parking space in the Triangle, and
a great deal of public speaking about future Washington.
There is a tremendous satisfaction in being able to say
(not just to oneself), I had a part in saving this stream
valley, in laying out this street, or opening that vista.
As I learned more about our country, the need and possibility
of national planning became my chief interest. I tried
to get the Hoover administration interested and when Roosevelt
was elected, I thought I wanted to be an Assistant Secretary
of the Interior in order to influence national conservation
policy. Fortunately that didn’t work out and instead,
in August, 1933, I started ten years as executive officer—later
director—of the National Planning Agency. The National
Planning Board, headed by Frederic A. Delano, ‘85,
was first organized as a part of the Public Works Administration
and our first undertaking was a ‘plan for a plan’
which we presented to the President at Hyde Park in June,
1934. My nomination as director of the National Resources
Planning Board went to the Senate and was confirmed.
The principle tangible result of those ten years of work
is a long list of printed reports which bring together
data on our resources—natural, man-made, human, and
institutional—as the basis for policy proposals.
We printed so much material that I was accused of trying
to outdo the Five Foot Shelf. The Resource Planning shelf
is longer. With the outbreak of the war in Europe the
board’s activities were concentrated on defense planning
and by special instruction of the President in January,
1940, we turned to post-defense or postwar planning.
The
trouble with an account like this one is that the really
important things don’t get proper place and emphasis—a
very happy marriage, four vigorous youngsters, and decidedly
an eventful life. I have indeed much to be thankful for!
Abridged
from the 25th Anniversary Report of the Harvard Class
of 1920 , courtesy of Harvard University Archives.
REMEMBRANCE
by Charles M. Sullivan, Executive Director, Cambridge
Historical Commission
Charles
W. Eliot 2nd was a product of his New England heritage,
which gave him a strong sense of the power of place as
well as the compelling role models who shaped his career.
Courtesy
of Harvard University Archives
The
Eliots were among the original Boston Brahmins. Catherine
Eliot, the daughter of a wealthy merchant, established
the Cambridge branch of the family in 1821 when she used
her inheritance to purchase the Shady Hill estate, off
Kirkland Street. Her husband Andrews Norton, the Dexter
Professor of Sacred Literature, and her brother, Samuel
Atkins Eliot, the future mayor of Boston, created Norton’s
Woods, a thirty-acre landscaped setting that nurtured
generations of landscape architects.
In 1858, Samuel Atkins Eliot and his family also settled
at Shady Hill. His son Charles W. Eliot, shortly before
he became president of Harvard University, helped finance
their new house and lived in half of it until 1867. Here
Samuel’s grandson Charles Eliot the landscape architect
was born in 1859.
Young Charles Eliot “early developed a talent for
sketching, a sense of locality, a fondness for maps, and
an appreciation of scenery.” After graduating from
Harvard in 1882, he took a junior position with Frederick
Law Olmsted, who had just established his office in Brookline,
and then traveled in Europe. On his return, he established
an independent practice in Boston and began an extraordinary
career as an advocate of parks and public open spaces
for American cities. He helped found the Massachusetts
Trustees of Public Reservations, the first landscape preservation
organization in America, and helped plan and implement
the Boston Metropolitan Park Commission, which in a short
time built a regional park system extending from the Blue
Hills in Milton to Revere Beach.
Eliot returned to the Olmsted firm in 1893 and participated
in projects throughout the United States. His untimely
death from meningitis in 1897 cut short a life of great
potential. President Eliot wrote a biography of his son
to memorialize his work and to express his unfulfilled
mission.
Two years after Charles’s death, his brother Samuel
produced President Eliot’s first grandson. Eliot
decided that he would also be named Charles and would
become a landscape architect. With these inescapable expectations,
the boy’s career seemed predestined.
Courtesy
of Harvard University Archives
Charles W. Eliot 2nd must have developed his strong personality
in reaction to his grandfather, who became the dominant
figure in his life. He entered Harvard College in 1917
but left the following year to join the American Red Cross
as an ambulance driver on the Italian front. Returning
to college, he graduated with his class in 1920 and received
a master’s degree in 1923 from the School of Landscape
Architecture; according to Eliot, his grandfather had
established the program in 1900 with him in mind. Like
his late uncle, he studied Norton’s Woods, apprenticed
with the Olmsted firm, toured Europe, and on his return
established an independent practice in Boston and became
secretary of the Trustees of Public Reservations.
After President Eliot’s death in 1926, Charles left
Boston to join the National Capital Park and Planning
Commission, where he worked until 1933. He served as the
director of the National Resources Planning Board from
1939 until Congress abolished it in 1943. He then moved
to Pasadena, California, where he worked for private foundations
in Los Angeles and for the San Diego City Planning Commission.
Charles returned to Cambridge after his parents died in
the early 1950s and moved into his childhood home at 24
Reservoir Street. He resumed his practice as a planning
consulant and in 1954 joined the faculty of the Graduate
School of Design as Charles Eliot Professor of Landscape
Architecture. He joined the board of the Trustees of Reservations
(its modern name) and served as president of the Cambridge
Historical Society from 1970 to 1978. He fought to save
the sycamores on Memorial Drive and to prevent the construction
of an office building on Cambridge Common. He helped establish
the Cambridge Historical Commission in the early 1960s
and remained a member until his death.
From “Rememberance,”
Essays on Cambridge History (Cambridge: Cambridge
Historical Society,Volume 45, 1998).
