Cruise east through the Esplanade, a green masterpiece designed by Frederick Law Olmsted.

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The Biltmore experience begins with the dramatic three-mile-long Approach Road, one of landscape designer Frederick Law Olmsted's signature achievements.

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That's when it was put up in the plaza the first time by Calvert Vaux and his partner Frederick Law Olmsted, the Lincoln partisan and landscaper of Prospect Park.

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The war created a veritable "republic of suffering, " in the words that Frederick Law Olmsted chose to describe the wounded and dying arriving at Union hospital ships on the Virginia Peninsula.

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They hired Frederick Law Olmsted, who designed Central Park, to create an open campus with no walls, vast gardens and thousands of palm and Coast Live Oak trees, and California mission-inspired sandstone buildings with red-tiled roofs.

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We could've stared south at Canada, or crossed the bridge to Belle Isle, the island playland larger than Central Park, with elements designed by famed landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted and Detroit favorite Albert Kahn.

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