In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

133 The city had thus been so built as to secure within itself much of the sanitary advantages of a suburb. —Frederick Law Olmsted, “Late Additions to the Plan of Buffalo,” 1876 Almost as soon as their work on Buffalo’s park system began, the park commissioners realized that the project they were directing would have a profound effect on the lands beyond the parks’ borders. In their Third Annual Report of 1873, they stressed to the Common Council the importance of commissioning a survey of the northern and eastern portions of the city, “with the view of having the streets so laid out to harmonize with a general system, with the Parks and their approaches as the objective points.” It was as if the specter of Joseph Ellicott had pointed the way to them. Furthermore, these practical-minded men of business asserted that “the adoption of some general plan as here indicated would enhance the value of the land and bring it speedily into the market, soon to be occupied by suburban homes.”1 Homes were certainly much on the minds of Olmsted and Vaux when they first came to Buffalo to design the park system. Vaux had written a book on domestic architecture in which he had stated, for example, “It is not for ourselves alone, but for the sake of our children, that we should love to build our homes, . . . [for] the young people are mostly at home; it is their storehouse for amusement, their opportunity for relaxation, their main resource; and thus they are exposed to its influence for good or evil unceasingly.”2 For his part, Olmsted was in the process of preparing a volume of his own on the subject. He was paying special attention to the evolution of suburban residential neighborhoods set apart from business and industry, something that he felt distinguished the modern city from its historic predecessors. Ten years earlier he and Vaux had proposed to lay out the residential neighborhood of Washington Heights in streets that respected the natural topography in stark contrast to the rest of Manhattan’s gridiron plan, which Olmsted considered both inefficient and monotonous. In Buffalo, Olmsted hoped to have the chance that he and Vaux had missed in New York to plot a new section of town where residents might enjoy home life as he had depicted it in 1860, as affording the benefit of tranquility and opportunities for recreation. Olmsted later elaborated on this idea to his Buffalo clients: SIX Parkside, Buffalo State Hospital, and Smaller Parks 134 THE BEST PLANNED CITY IN THE WORLD My observation convinces me that there is a radical change taking place in the style of city building. People are hereafter going to do business in one quarter of a town and live in another. Cars, telephone, and other modern conveniences for rapid transit and still more rapid communication have made this a more desirable way of living. Let the citizen build up his stores and his warehouses as high and as close together as he pleases, but he doesn’t want to live among them and there is no longer any need of his doing so. He can live in much better style and cheaper in a part of the city entirely given up to dwellings.3 In February 1870 Olmsted addressed the subject of the modern city and its improvement in a notable lecture at Boston’s Lowell Institute. Olmsted approved of the shift from agrarian to urban society that was transforming America. It was only in well-designed cities and their suburbs, he believed, “that many of the graces of civilization could be enjoyed: effective and effortless sanitary arrangements, goods and physical comforts, obtainable in the country only by hard work; services to match every need; and leisure, society, recreation, and intellectual pleasures,” as Olmsted’s primary biographer, Laura Roper, observes.4 His ideal of middle-class life envisioned families living in comfortable homes with spacious grounds and front lawns. He did not, however, wish people to live so far apart that they felt isolated from one another. “Probably the advantages of civilization can be found illustrated and demonstrated under no other circumstances so completely,” he remarked, “as in some suburban neighborhoods where each family abode stands fifty or a hundred feet or more apart from all others, and at some distance from the public road.”5 Together with ease of travel to the center city and other parts of town, such a physical arrangement ensured...

Share