John Nolan (June 14, 1869 - November 18, 1937) was an American landscape architect and civil engineer active throughout the United States in the first half of the 20th century. Nolan was born an orphan in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He placed at the Girard School for Orphaned Boys where in 1884 he graduated first in his class. In 1891, after several years working as a grocery clerk, he enrolled at the prestigious Wharton School of Finance and Economics at the University of Pennsylvania. He developed his interested in architecture and urban design in 1895 while on a trip to Worcester College, Oxford, England. Selling all of his possessions to finance the effort, he enrolled in the Harvard School of Landscape Architecture to study under New York's Central Park designer, Frederick Law Olmstead (1822 - 1903). He graduated in 1905 and immediately joined the American Society of Landscape Architects. His first urban design work was in Madison, Wisconsin, where he began laying out city parks as early as 1908. He went on to significant projects in Virginia, Georgia, and California. His most significant work was in and around San Diego, where he complied two influential city-wide plans (1908, 1926) that defined the city's subsequent growth. More by this mapmaker...

Kenneth Alexander Gardner (July 2, 1893 - November, 1964) was an urban planner and landscape architect active in San Diego in the early 20th century. Gardner was born in Evanston, Illinois and west to high school at Lowell Preparatory. Gardner matriculated at Harvard in 1916, taking a degree in Landscape Architecture. He was initially employed in John Nolan's (1869 - 1937) Cambridge, Massachusetts, Landscape Architecture office, but relocated at Nolan's request to San Diego in 1923 to become the city's first full time Planning Engineer. At the same time, he partnered with Nathaniel E. Slaymaker (1880 - 1962), to form 'Gardner and Slaymaker', a private landscape design enterprise that constructed such prestigious buildings as the Scripps Lath House in La Jolla - a kind of greenhouse build of solid wood slats popular in southern California to promote the growth of shade-loving plants. After 1932, his professional record disappears. He may have returned to in 1932 Boston then traveled in Europe. He died in California in 1864. Learn More...