Piedmont Way

Olmsted came to California in 1863 to run the Mariposa mining estate, and the College of California's trustees hired him to plan their Berkeley campus and a tract of house lots whose sale would pay for it. He thought little of the ground, calling the soil "hard, bare, dead and bleak," and told them to plant trees instead of watering eastern-style lawns. The trustees sold everything to the new university in 1867, and his campus was never built. The residential tract was laid out, and Piedmont Way, curving along the foot of the hills, is its clearest surviving line.

What the plaque says

Piedmont Way Piedmont Way was conceived in 1865 by Frederick Law Olmsted, America's foremost landscape architect. As the centerpiece of a gracious residential community close beside the College of California, Olmsted envisioned a roadway that would follow the natural contours of the land and be sheltered from sun and wind by "an overarching bowery of foliage." This curvilinear, tree-lined parkway was Olmsted's first residential street design. It has served as the model for similar parkways across the nation. California Registered Historical Landmark No. 986 Plaque placed by the State Department of Parks and Recreation in cooperation with the Friends of the Frederick Law Olmsted Papers, April 26, 1990.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Muir Woods National Monument — 17 mi
  A redwood canyon saved from a reservoir by a gift, and named for a man who had been there once.
• Muir Beach Overlook — 18 mi
  A cliff edge on Highway 1, and the concrete dugouts where two-man crews watched the sea after Pearl Harbor.

More markers nearby

• University of California, Berkeley Campus — 0.4 mi
• Berkeley City Club — 0.6 mi
• Camino of Rancho San Antonio — 3.2 mi
• Site of Shell Mound — 3.3 mi