Ezra Clarke Stiles (September 26, 1891 - January 27, 1974) was an artist, landscape architect, urban planner, and cartographer, long active in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. A descendant of prominent Yale University President Ezra Stiles (1727 - 1795), Stiles the younger was born in Upstate New York and attended Pennsylvania State University, earning a degree in Forestry and Landscape Architecture in 1914. He briefly worked as an urban planner in Charlotte, North Carolina and then for a landscape architecture firm in Boston before moving to Pittsburgh in 1915 to work for the landscape design firm A.W. Smith. He joined the U.S. Army during the First World Was and was assigned to the 44th Depot Detachment of Engineers, performing a variety of functions related to his drafting and drawing skills, eventually teaching at the Army Engineer School at Langres, France. Returning to Pittsburgh after the war, Stiles founded his own firm in 1926 and quickly became celebrated as one of the premier landscape architect working in the city, designing gardens for local grandees, universities, corporations, public parks, and others. He even designed two complete parks for Pittsburgh's centennial as well as the McKeesport Rose Garden and Arboretum, and later in his career worked to expand the Allegheny County Park System. Stiles wrote three books on landscape architecture and drew four pictorial maps during his career, the latter including a map of Frick Park in Pittsburgh, a birds-eye view of Pittsburgh in 1939, a related historical view of Pittsburgh in 1889 (the two were reprinted together in a smaller format in Fortune magazine), and, in conjunction with historian Paul Bowman, an historical map of the American Expeditionary Forces in World War I.
