Mount Royal Park in the context of Laurentian Mountains

Frederick Law Olmsted (April 26, 1822 – August 28, 1903) was an American landscape architect, journalist, social critic, and public administrator. He is considered to be the father of landscape architecture in the United States. Olmsted was famous for co-designing many well-known urban parks with his partner Calvert Vaux, beginning with Central Park in New York City, which led to numerous other urban park designs including Prospect Park in Brooklyn, Cadwalader Park in Trenton, New Jersey, and Forest Park in Portland, Oregon.

Olmsted's projects encompassed comprehensive park systems, planned communities, and institutional campuses across North America. His major works included the country's first coordinated system of public parks and parkways in Buffalo, New York, the Emerald Necklace in Boston, Massachusetts, the Grand Necklace of Parks in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and parks for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. He designed one of the first planned communities in the United States, Riverside, Illinois, and created master plans for universities including University of California, Berkeley, Stanford University, and the University of Chicago. Notable individual projects included the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, North Carolina, Mount Royal Park in Montreal, Quebec, and landscape work for the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C.

Downtown Montreal (French: Centre-Ville de Montréal) is the central business district of Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

The district is situated on the southernmost slope of Mount Royal, and occupies the western portion of the borough of Ville-Marie. It is bounded by Mount Royal Park to the north, Le Plateau-Mont-Royal to the northeast, the Quartier Latin and Gay Village areas to the east, Old Montreal and the Cité du Multimédia to the south, Griffintown and Little Burgundy to the southwest, and the city of Westmount to the west.