Pioneer Information
Born in Deposit, New York, Skillman earned a B.L.A. in 1960 from the State University of New York’s College of Environmental Science and Forestry. He worked as a landscape architect for the National Park Service beginning in 1960, first in Philadelphia and then in Washington, D.C., where his projects included the design and construction of Lansburgh Park, and the Custis-Lee Mansion (now Arlington House) garden in Arlington National Cemetery. He worked briefly from 1966 to 1968 as a site planner for the Public Buildings Service of the U.S. General Services Administration, and from 1968 to 1970 as chief of the Pennsylvania Bureau of State Park’s Project 500. From 1970 to 1987, Skillman was employed by the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA), initially as a site planner working on the Washington Metro, and subsequently as a senior development specialist. He left WMATA in 1987 to open a private firm, Lee Skillman Associates, specializing in transit-related site planning, which he ran until 1994.
Photo by Larry Levine.
