Hello, I’m Mark Roessler. Panorambles is the name for my panoramic tours of Olmsted Parks and other historic locations.
This website is a collection of those tours (ready for you perusal at anytime), promotion for my books (many of them print versions of my tours), and Rambles—a new blog featuring my latest writings and adventures.
Welcome! If you’re in a hurry, you might bookmark me and come back later: lingering on Panorambles is strongly encouraged. (Especially when you should probably be doing other things!)
PANORAMBLE: an interactive, visual tour of an historic landscape or building. Each tour includes dozens of high-resolution panoramas linked together so visitors can explore freely. Panorambles is the next best thing to being there.
My goal for each panoramic tour is to document a space I want to share with others. In part, I’m hoping to drum up interest and support for these places, but I’m also hoping to create a record for current and future historians, educators, planners, and explorers.
For years, I took on paid assignments (clients included the Department of Energy and West Point) and sought out my own projects. My criteria was simple: buildings and landscapes that inspired or interested me. Often, these places were threatened, as was the case with my first large tour taken in 2001 of the Northampton State Hospital, a place that tragically no longer exists. Some locations, like the Providence Atheneum, or the Lyman Plant House at Smith College, thrilled me simply by stepping inside. I couldn’t resist.
This summer, though, I have decided to dedicate my time and resources to documenting all of the parks designed by Frederick Law Olmsted Sr. Depending on how you count, there are at least 30 more than the one everyone is familiar with in the center of Manhattan.
As a child of the 1970s, I fell in love with Central Park when it was covered in spray paint and littered with trash. My dad worked as a preservation architect on the park’s renewal, and I’ve since learned of the herculean effort of an army of park advocates to save most of Olmsted’s parks from the neglect that threatened their existence. I’ve met some of these people, along with current leaders of many of these park conservancies, and I know something of the daily struggles underway to maintain and improve these historic parks. Arguably and ironically, many of the parks have never been in better condition, while being so under threat.
Even before the current president returned to the scene to threaten the very idea of democracy itself, public parks have long been endangered spaces.
During his own lifetime, Olmsted spent a good deal of his energy warding off threatened construction on park land. After he retired, his sons maintained vigilance for decades. All of them lost more fights than they won; few of the parks have escaped dramatic alterations to the designers’ original intent.
I’m interested in visiting them all, photographing them, and making the tours available here. I want to see how they’ve evolved from Olmsted’s original plans, and I want to celebrate this astonishing body of work in a way not done before.
I want to find and visit all of these spaces and present the parks in a single location online that anyone can visit.
Why? Earlier this year, I heard an advocate against the construction of a private sports stadium in Boston’s Franklin Park say he thought Frederick Law Olmsted should be considered an honorary founding father of the United States. I don’t think this is hyperbole, and I entirely agree. The fame for his first park has obscured the enormity of Olmsted’s accomplishments.
As ubiquitous as they have become, it’s easy to overlook the importance of public parks and think of them merely as unbuilt space. Although they appear to be wilderness, Olmsted’s parks are as carefully planned as the buildings around them. Whereas skyscrapers and factories seek to maximize commerce and industry, Olmsted designed to counteract the stratification and dehumanization that happened in buildings. A remedy, if you will. The parks he created were healing spaces where democracy could flourish across the country.
These democratic spaces are what I want to identify and capture so that we all have an inventory of what’s available to cherish and what we stand to lose.
The new version of this site includes a complete tour of Fort Greene in Brooklyn. I’m currently working on documenting the second park, Walnut Hill in New Britain, CT. Already on the site are tours of Fairsted (Olmsted’s home and offices) and World’s End, an Olmsted property in Boston Harbor now used as a park.
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