The Best Planned City in the World: Olmsted, Vaux, and the Buffalo Park System

5. Parkways, Circles, and Squares

107 If an artist had carte blanche . . . [and] the good fortune to be able to plan a future city, I would recommend the study of the beautiful plan of the able American landscape architect Mr. F. Law Olmsted for the city of Buffalo. The diverse parts of town are bound together by a system of parks and shaded boulevards that is most grand and sensible. —Édouard André, L’Art des jardins, 1879 In the spring of 1876 Olmsted wrote to William F. Rogers, who was then secretary of the Buffalo park commission, explaining his plan to prepare a map and several characteristic views of the Buffalo park system for the Centennial Exhibition being held later that year in Philadelphia. In addition to showing the location of recreation grounds, the map would highlight the city’s exceptional “convenience of street arrangements.” The map and explanatory text would illustrate how Olmsted and Vaux’s “late additions” of the parkways to Joseph Ellicott’s original plan of wide radial “trunk thoroughfares ” combined to make the city a model of urban engineering. “Whether used for pleasure travel, or for general traffic,” Olmsted declared, “the fortunate location and liberal width of the trunk thoroughfares of the older portion of the city most happily exemplify the wise forethought of Mr. Ellicott. The parkways provide equally liberal accommodation for travel through the newer sections, and simply supplement the original plan in fit accordance with the general design.” This included the “advantages which the city will possess in respect to fire risks, the parkways having an important bearing in this regard.”1 Presumably he meant that, as with Haussmann’s Paris boulevards, the exceptional width and geographical span of the parkways would speed the arrival of emergency vehicles to scenes of trouble. For the same reasons, they might also serve to limit the spread of building fires, one of the now forgotten menaces of earlier urban life. Together with the parks, the system of parkways, circles, squares, and avenues one hundred feet wide would serve as a example to other cities of how to promote the public well-being through thoughtful planning. Buffalo was justifiably proud of being lauded by Olmsted as “the best planned city in the United States, if not the world.” In September 1881 the Express published its own updated version of Olmsted’s vision of the city.2 The pamphlet included a color-coded map titled Olmsted’s Sketch Map of Buffalo, which graphically depicted how the entire vast low-density residenFIVE Parkways, Circles, and Squares 108 THE BEST PLANNED CITY IN THE WORLD Fig. 5.1. Olmsted’s Sketch Map of Buffalo (1881). Parks and parkways under the control of the park commissioners were indicated in green. Other public spaces and streets that coordinated with the parks and parkways were shown in purple. Author’s collection. 109 Parkways, Circles, and Squares tial quarter that was developing around the park and parkway system in the northern part of the city was integrated with the older lakefront city by means of extending preexisting streets. (Fig. 5.1) As if to emphasize how convenient it had become for people to work in one part of town and reside in another, the map highlighted streetcar and passenger rail lines. The text enumerated the significant efforts that the park commissioners had made in the past eleven years to realize Olmsted’s far-reaching plans. During that time the city had spent $375,000 for land and $875,000 for improvements . This money had funded one of the most extensive construction projects in the country. Six hundred acres of parkland and twelve miles of parkways and avenues had been “worked over and graded,” all soil in the parks had been “deepened and enriched” so that good turf could be established, surface and subdrainage systems—including a bypass which ensured that sewage from Scajaquada Creek would not enter Gala Water—had been installed throughout the park system , sewer and water lines laid, and “permanent macadam ” surfaces had been constructed on all drives and paths.3 Moreover, the commissioners had undertaken the greening of the new cityscape. Nearly 75,000 trees and shrubs, embracing four hundred different species, had been planted in their jurisdiction.4 In addition to paved and well-lit streets, water lines, and sewers, Buffalo residents in the 1880s began to make use of natural gas (abundant in the area) for heating and lighting their homes...