Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux won the 1857 competition for New York's Central Park with their Greensward Plan, announced in 1858, and built it over the following fifteen years. The design pioneered naturalistic landscape composition and the separation of pedestrian paths, carriage drives and sunken transverse roads to keep cross-town traffic out of sight. Olmsted, widely regarded as the father of American landscape architecture, went on through his firms to shape thousands of parks, parkways and campuses. Central Park became the progenitor of the urban parks movement in the United States.
It established landscape architecture as a profession and made the large public park a standard component of the American city.
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