Frederick Law Olmsted Sr. invented American landscape architecture: Central Park, Prospect Park, the U.S. Capitol grounds, Biltmore, Stanford's campus, the 1893 World's Fair. When he retired in 1895, his sons John Charles and Frederick Law Jr. took over, renamed the firm Olmsted Brothers, and completed more than 3,500 commissions across the continent.
In 1928, this firm — the most respected landscape practice in the world — was hired by the City of Lake Wales. Why a small citrus town on the Florida Ridge? The 1920s Florida land boom had made Lake Wales ambitious, and Olmsted Jr. was already working a few miles away on Bok Tower Gardens. He knew the topography, the lakes, the groves, the longleaf pine. He walked the streets.
The plan delivered in 1929 worked with the land instead of against it. Streets followed the contours of the Ridge instead of forcing a rigid grid. Drainage respected natural water flow. A connected green network — what modern planners now call green infrastructure — linked every neighborhood through tree-lined boulevards, lake-edge greenways, and neighborhood commons.
Tree species were specified street by street: live oaks, camphors, native shade trees, intended to grow into a continuous canopy that would drop summer temperatures ten to fifteen degrees and turn walking from chore to pleasure. The downtown was organized around a central civic space. Sidewalks were generous. The pedestrian came first — remarkable foresight at the dawn of the automobile age.
The Great Depression hit just as the plan landed. Some pieces were built — the street grid, parts of the park system, the civic architecture that still gives downtown its character. Many were not. The connected greenway was only partially realized. The tree canopy was never fully planted. The Northwest neighborhood — Lincoln Avenue's corridor — was largely excluded, an omission whose consequences persisted for nearly a century.
Lake Wales Connected, adopted in 2020 and designed by Dover, Kohl & Partners, is an explicit 21st-century update to the Olmsted vision. Street redesigns, restored tree canopy, connected parks and greenways, form-based zoning, and — for the first time — equitable infrastructure investment in the Northwest neighborhood via the $22.9M federal RAISE grant.
The principles Olmsted articulated in 1929 — respect for the land, connected green infrastructure, walkable streets, civic beauty as public good — are exactly what cities are now scrambling to retrofit in the face of climate change and automobile-dependent sprawl. Lake Wales has a ninety-five-year head start. It just took ninety-five years to realize it.