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

185 It is time that we began to use our noble lake front for pleasure purposes. —Express, May 27, 1889 From the time of Olmsted’s first visit to Buffalo in 1868, he had explored the possibility of creating a park in the flat, low-lying southern section of town near Lake Erie in the district known as the Thirteenth Ward. In February 1887 a group of citizens petitioned the Common Council to have a park built there, linked to those in the north by a system of new parkways. The council responded favorably to the request and instructed the park commissioners to take steps toward its realization. They, in turn, called upon Olmsted for advice. Fresh from the completion of the plan for the Niagara Reservation , Olmsted visited Buffalo on March 22–23, 1887, to discuss the matter. After making a tour of the area with a committee of the park commissioners’ board, he attended a meeting of Thirteenth Ward citizens who came to air their views on the subject of new parks and parkways on the south side of town. Olmsted apparently said little at the time, but what he saw on the tour and heard at the meeting opened his eyes to a monumental challenge that few in the city seemed to comprehend. About three weeks later he sent a long letter to the commissioners summarizing his impressions and outlining his recommendations. These were the product of Olmsted’s fully evolved gift to perceive park making comprehensively. Olmsted began by recalling conversations he had hadwithcitizensofBuffalonineteenyearsearlier.When Dorsheimer and others had first asked him to advise them on the location for a “rural park,” he recalled having said that “it should, if possible, be on the shore of the lake.”1 He had two main reasons for this. One was that, in his view, nothing was “so refreshing and grateful to a man escaping temporarily from the confinement of ordinary life as an unlimited expanse of natural scenery such as would be provided without cost in any situation overlooking the lake. Every acre of park land, therefore, so situated, may be worth many acres elsewhere.” (Fig. 8.1) The second reason was that “it is a great advantage to a city to have a park approachable by water.” Boats were inexpensive and pleasant vehicles; just taking a ride in one was a relaxing and enjoyable experience. Being a very different mode of travel from that provided by street vehicles, a boat ride, Olmsted observed, was an “anti-urban” form of recreation in and of itself. EIGHT South Park, Cazenovia Park, and Riverside Park 186 THE BEST PLANNED CITY IN THE WORLD The Djurgården, a park situated on a long island in the Swedish city of Stockholm, was a leading instance of what he meant. It was reputed, wrote Olmsted, to be the most beautiful park in the world. When he had spoken of this in 1868, however, his audience failed to listen. To their minds, the lake suggested storms, shipwrecks, and masses of ice that prolonged winter unduly into spring. Nonetheless, in the face of this distaste for the lake, Olmsted had urged the acquisition of the Front and was now pleased that it had become so popular. Now, he happily acknowledged, all Americans were becoming more appreciative of the recreational value of water. As an example, he might have mentioned the plans he had drawn up in 1884 for a thousand-acre park on Detroit’s Belle Isle, an island in the Detroit River. (Fig. 8.2) Locally, Fort Erie, on the Canadian shore of Lake Erie, had become a popular destination for boat trips, with steamboat service running during the summer months from Buffalo to a beach resort there. Buffalonians were right to want a place of their own, accessible by boat, where they could bathe and enjoy the lakeshore. It was now time to act on this desire. Echoing what he had told his listeners in 1868 about his choice of site for the Park, he urged the city to secure outlying land at cheap prices for future park purposes. “If the population of Buffalo should increase at a rate not greatly below the average rate of its increase during the last twenty years,” Olmsted observed, “it will not be long before it is twice as large a city as it was when its present park was begun.” As to the location of this new park, Olmsted enumeratedfourspecificprinciplesthatguidedhisthinking : First, . . . it should be in a...

Share