If you love Riverside’s iconic winding streets and green space, one resident may have written the perfect book for you.
“Olmsted’s Riverside: Stewardship Meets Innovation in a Landmark Village,” written by resident Cathy Jean Maloney and published Dec. 18, 2024, details the 150-year history of the village and its design, created by Fredrick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux in 1869. In the book, Maloney shares how residents throughout Riverside’s history have adapted to the changing world to preserve the village’s charm and how its design has influenced other suburbs around the country across 15 decades.
“What it’s about is the 150 years of caring that residents and other people who love Riverside have done to keep Riverside the treasure that it is,” Maloney said in an interview with the Landmark. “It has history in it, but the emphasis is really on the various activities that people have done to protect the heritage of Riverside as well as observe the changes, the progress, and be able to incorporate that into the original vision for Riverside.”
In the course of her research, which resulted in about 250 footnotes within the book, Maloney said she learned that change often started small within the village.
“I was hoping that there was a secret sauce for how to keep what’s precious in Riverside there, but it really varied with each situation. I will say that a lot of times, it was a single individual that raised an issue or a concern and helped figure out a solution,” she said. “Sometimes it was a group. Sometimes it was the village board … After we became a landmark, sometimes it was through guidance from national or other organizations. So, there was no real simple solution to each challenge that came up.”
She said that research occurred intermittently over three decades until she committed to writing the book around 2018.
“Believe it or not, [the idea for the book] was always in the back of my mind since we moved there, which was 1988. I always wanted to return something to Riverside, and I wasn’t sure what the book would cover. In the interim, I did five other books that had to do with landscape history or environmental history or garden history, and along the way, whenever I would run across something having to do with Riverside, I’d make a note and tuck it in the corner,” she said. “It finally dawned on me: How the heck has this village stayed as true to the vision that was why we’re landmarked, the whole holistic design? How were we able to do that over the years, when so many other well-designed places have fallen apart?”
Maloney said she was shocked by the number of “repeated” discussions that Riverside residents had over the years.
“A lot of things recur over the generations, oftentimes having to do with, ‘We got to have something for the children to do,’ and, usually, by ‘children,’ they meant ‘teenagers,’” she said. “I think every parent everywhere wonders, ‘How can we keep our teenagers happy?’ In the ’20s, there was a proposal to put a movie theater in Riverside, and, oh my gosh, that caused a furor because movies were just scandalous, and we could not have our teenagers watching movies.”
The other surprising thing she learned had to do with the verdant space Riverside is known for today.
“If everything that had been proposed to be put in Riverside’s green spaces had been built, there would be, basically, no green spaces” left today, she said.
While the book’s first seven chapters detail the designing of Riverside and how residents adapted to change from the 1870s through today, the eighth and final chapter is titled, “The Next 150 Years.” Maloney told the Landmark she took the chance there to opine on the challenges that will face Riverside through the year 2175.
“I think the main issue for the next 150 years is going to be climate change and how we respond to that. We have issues with the river already, with additional flooding,” she said. “There are issues of invasive plants that weren’t around when Olmsted was around: How are we going to deal with that in the natural areas that border the river? There are the issues of carbon dioxide emissions and so forth … I really think that climate change is going to be the major issue, as well as the continuing issue about the trade-off between how you use public space or not. That’s been the one issue — the usage of public space — that we, as a community, continue to wrestle with, because it’s public space. Everybody has a say.”
Maloney said she hopes the book will inspire residents to “understand what it is that’s precious that we have in Riverside, and that’s the overall design,” and to stay aware of how modifications to the village could affect the Riverside experience for future generations.
“Olmsted’s Riverside” is available to purchase in bookstores and online, where it retails for $27.95.
