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

Preface

XI The Buffalo park and parkway system, which Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux began planning in 1868, was the first of its type in the United States. Most of the system survives today, remarkably, with great integrity as part of the notable cultural heritage of Buffalo, New York. Historians are often more familiar with the architectural aspects of that city’s heritage, from its array of buildings designed by Richardson, Sullivan, and Wright to the imposing grain elevators on the lakeshore. But as Frank Kowsky’s important and authoritative research demonstrates, Buffalo’s tradition of city planning and its living legacy of parks and parkways constitute a unique monument in American landscape planning, significant not only in the context of the city of Buffalo, but for its place in our national history of urbanization and park design. This history of Buffalo’s park and parkway system launches a new series for the Library of American Landscape History and epitomizes much of what the series hopes to achieve. Designing the American Park will be dedicated to publishing new research by outstanding scholars on topics and places in North American park history that have remained understudied in proportion to their significance. Undertaken just a few years after Prospect Park in Brooklyn and while significant portions of Central Park in New York were still under construction, the Buffalo park system has not only been less studied, but it has been less than fully appreciated in terms of its historical significance. When asked by the Buffalo park commissioners for advice for the location for a new park, Olmsted and Vaux proposed instead that they create three parks: the Parade, for recreation and large events; the Front, a smaller park commanding views of Lake Erie at the waterfront entrance to the city; and the Park, a large, pastoral landscape on the city’s northern edge. Broad, tree-lined parkways, inspired by contemporary Parisian boulevards, connected the parks and provided the settings for new residences and institutions as the city grew in the 1870s. Building on the existing 1804 radial grid plan of the city (significant in its own right), by 1876 the designers had overseen the development of a diverse and connected system of parks, playgrounds, civic squares, and parkways. That year, in connection with the display of the Buffalo park plan at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, Olmsted remarked that Buffalo could claim to be “the best planned city, as to its streets, public places, and grounds, in the United States, if not in the world.” Preface XII Preface Francis R. Kowsky, SUNY Distinguished Professor of Fine Arts emeritus at Buffalo State College, is the biographer of Calvert Vaux and a longtime scholar of the life and work of Olmsted as well as a noted historian of American art and architecture. The Library of American Landscape History is pleased to make this important research on the Buffalo park system the inaugural volume of Designing the American Park because it achieves a foremost goal of the series: publishing the leading scholars in the field on those topics in the history of American park design with the most potential for expanding and deepening our understanding of this unique form of cultural expression. This series is dedicated, above all, to the idea that parks, as designed public landscapes, offer rich rewards for art and cultural historians who undertake their study. No category of art better deserves to be called “public” art than parks, which derive their meanings and significance largely from the people who use them. Park landscapes express broad themes of social and environmental improvement , while at the same time embodying the political and economic motivations of urbanization and development . If the conflict of progress and nature is a pervasive theme in American culture, where does it find more complete expression and attempted resolution than in park landscapes? The richness of the history of park design deserves the attentions of our finest art historians . The Library of American Landscape History is proud to publish this authoritative work on a vital chapter in early municipal park design history in the United States. The author’s unique background and approach, and the powerful narrative he has created, weaving themes of social and political context with those of landscape theory and park design, make his work the first comprehensive history of the Buffalo parks. The places called parks in American history have ranged from urban playgrounds to wilderness reservations , and their design has involved a similarly wide range...