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

Epilogue

217 Twenty-three years after Anthony Trollope remarked that apart from grain elevators there was “nothing specially worthy of remark at Buffalo,” the writer Charles Burr Todd told readers of Lippincott’s Magazine that “the most admirable feature” of the city was “its system of parks, park-ways and avenues.” Buffalo was certainly on Olmsted’s mind when, late in his career, he wrote that the many large and small parks he had planned around the country were “a hundred years ahead of any spontaneous public demand, or of the demand of any notable cultivated part of the people. And they are having an educative effect perfectly manifest to me—a manifest civilizing effect.” In 1937 the urban planner Walter Curt Behrendt contended that the city could find no better way to express its gratitude for what Olmsted and those early citizens who supported him had achieved in Buffalo “than by a strong and never-ceasing vigilance assuring that this most valuable inheritance will never be impaired or destroyed.”1 The efficient and beautiful city that embodied the wisdom of Olmsted’s theories and vision, however, did not survive the postwar shift from public transit to the private automobile as the predominant mode of transportation and from city to suburban living as the preferred way of life. “It would take the automobile, urban renewal, and a less sensitive generation of planners to undo Olmsted and Vaux’s achievement,” the urban historian Witold Rybczynski writes of Buffalo.2 Constructionof new roads and highways accelerated the extension of the earlier residential character of areas like North Buffalo, which today is referred to as an “urban” neighborhood , farther and farther from the center of town, a center that itself has lost its role as the hub of commerce . Furthermore, as in cities elsewhere in America, steady waning of business and industry has reduced the quality of life in Buffalo, a phenomenon poignantly portrayed by Verlyn Klinkenborg in his book The Last Fine Time (1991). “During the thirty years following the Second World War the Olmsted firm’s design legacy suffered,” the Olmsted scholar Charles Beveridge notes. “Neglect and the intrusion of incompatible uses beset many of the parks and public spaces designed by the firm.”3 Buffalo proved no exception to this sad decline, and its historic parks and parkways suffered greatly from lack of means and appreciation. In addition, the outbreak of Dutch elm disease, which began to appear in the area in the 1950s, eventually devastated the magnificent monoculture forEpilogue 218 THE BEST PLANNED CITY IN THE WORLD est that had grown up along parkways and avenues. In the 1970s a group of park advocates set out to revive the city’s memory of its neglected heritage. Reflecting a national reawakening to the Olmsted legacy encouraged by the reissuing of F. L. Olmsted Jr. and Theodora Kimball’s Forty Years of Landscape Architecture (1970), the presentation in 1972 of a major exhibition on Olmsted at the National Gallery of Art and the inauguration of the Frederick Law Olmsted Papers Project, and the publication in 1973 of Laura Wood Roper’s FLO: A Biography, the Buffalo Friends of Olmsted Parks came into being in 1978 with the goal of preserving what remained of Buffalo’s Olmsted parks and parkways. The Friends became a voice for the city’s outstanding tradition of park and urban planning. To achieve their aims, the Friends and their allies adopted procedures that historic preservationists had used to protect notable buildings. In 1979 the Friends Aerial view of the former water park section of Delaware Park showing the high-speed divided highway (N.Y. State Route 198) that replaced the original carriage drive and the Scajaquada Parkway, 1961. The former farmlands of the Buffalo State Hospital, which in the 1920s became the campus of what is now Buffalo State College, are visible near the upper left. Courtesy Buffalo State College. 219 Epilogue initiated a survey of the park and parkway system and compiled historical documentation. This effort led in 1981 to listing what remained of these sites in the National Register of Historic Places. The administration of Forest Lawn Cemetery achieved listing of the venerable burial ground in 1990. The buildings and grounds of the Buffalo State Hospital (later known as the Buffalo Psychiatric Center) had already been listed in 1973, but local preservationists succeeded in 1986 in having them elevated to National Historic Landmark status...