Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland: Olmsted’s Landscape of Curves, Trees and Bay Views
By Matthew Martinez, Founder, CEO & Managing Broker, Diamond Real Estate Group. California DRE #01869679.
Oakland’s Mountain View Cemetery is organized around a productive contrast. A straight approach establishes direction near the lower ground, while curved roads and paths negotiate the hills beyond it. The design brings geometry and topography into the same landscape.
Understanding that arrangement gives the site a place in Oakland’s architectural history beyond its monuments. It is a substantial designed landscape in which movement, planting and views work together.
The project began with a hillside site
The National Park Service’s Olmsted account records establishment of the cemetery in 1863 and Frederick Law Olmsted’s initial plan in 1864, followed by further refinement. It describes a 209-acre hillside property and planting selected for drought resistance, wind protection and views.
These conditions made the project specifically Californian. A planting plan had to respond to the local climate and exposed ground rather than reproduce an eastern landscape simply because the designer had worked elsewhere.
A formal avenue meets a curving hillside system
The cemetery’s own historical account describes the straight, tree-lined avenue on lower ground and lanes curving across the slopes of six hills. Their geometry allowed more gradual ascent and descent.
The two patterns give a visitor different ways of understanding the site. The avenue establishes a strong orientation. The hillside routes reveal the landscape incrementally, changing direction and elevation as they move through it.
A curving route is not automatically decorative. On sloped ground it can reconcile movement with terrain, while creating changing views rather than one continuous vista.
The trees form part of the composition
The operator’s history describes California live oaks alongside Italian cypress, cedar of Lebanon and Italian stone pine. Their differing shapes contributed to the larger landscape arrangement.
A columnar tree and a broad, spreading canopy create different edges and visual effects. Planting can mark a route, frame a view, provide shelter or soften a transition between open ground and built structures.
Those relationships are more useful to understanding a designed landscape than a simple count of trees. Species, spacing and mature form influence how the whole place is experienced.
The design continued to evolve after the initial plan
The Olmsted Online archival project record describes the Olmsted Brothers returning to work on the cemetery in the 1940s. The later commission involved a mausoleum and landscape grading, with reference to the earlier plan.
This is a reminder that a historic landscape can contain several generations of design work. The original organizing idea and later projects may coexist without being identical in date or authorship.
The operator also describes the growing prominence of family monuments and chapels. These additions changed the balance between planted landscape and built memorials over time.
The setting is both architectural and civic
The cemetery records changing tastes in commemoration, but its roads and planting also reveal an early approach to large-scale landscape planning in the East Bay. The whole composition is more informative than any isolated monument.
It also provides a useful comparison with residential landscapes. A property’s slope, approach, long views and planted edges determine how land is used and perceived, even when the scale is much smaller.
Oakland’s character includes designed open landscapes
Explore real estate and home for sale in Oakland and our housing comparison. Contact Diamond to compare homes with attention to their topography, setting and relationship to the city’s distinctive public and institutional places.
Sources checked October 28, 2026. Mountain View is an active cemetery; consult the operator for current access arrangements and respect memorial activities.
