Blake Park (Brookline, Massachusetts)

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In 1880, Boston banker Arthur Welland Blake engaged landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted to draw plans for the subdivision into roads and lots of the Blake family estate in Brookline, Massachusetts. Olmsted and his firm drew numerous plans for the Blakes over the next 15 years, but they were never executed. The estate remained something of an anomaly: a large tract of open land, renowned for its landscaping, in the heart of a community rapidly developing as a "streetcar suburb" just minutes from downtown Boston,

It wasn't until 1916 that land was sold, roads were laid out -- somewhat differently than Olmsted had envisioned them -- and the development of "Blake Park" was announced with some fanfare. The death of one developer (right after the project was announced) and a financial scandal involving another delayed development for another decade. Finally, in 1925, with both Blake and Olmsted long dead, a new largely middle-class neighborhood began to emerge, populated by the families of bankers and brokers, doctors and lawyers, salesman, college professors, contractors, and local merchants.

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