Olmsted's First Complete Park System

Frederick Law Olmsted came to Buffalo for the first time in eighteen sixty-eight and found a city that was, by any measure, an industrial success. The canal trade had made it wealthy. The grain elevators had made it famous. The steel works to the south were beginning to make it powerful. What Buffalo did not have, in Olmsted's assessment, was any serious provision for the human need for rest, greenery, and the kind of space in which a person could forget, for a few hours, that they lived in a city.

Olmsted had already designed Central Park in New York with his partner Calvert Vaux. He came to Buffalo with a proposal: not a single park, as cities typically built, but a system. Six major parks connected by broad, tree-lined parkways, with landscaped circles at the intersections. The parkways were not roads. They were meant to feel, in Olmsted's phrase, more park-like than town-like. At two hundred feet wide, with separate lanes for different kinds of traffic, they were designed to carry a visitor from one green space to another without ever feeling they had left the park.

Delaware Park, the centerpiece, was designed as a pastoral landscape in the English tradition. A two hundred acre meadow of rolling terrain, grazed by sheep and dotted with mature oaks and maples, opened beside a forty-six acre lake. Construction ran from eighteen seventy to eighteen seventy-four.

When Olmsted presented the completed Buffalo plan at the eighteen seventy-six Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, he called it the most complete system of recreation grounds of any city in the United States. He was correct about its completeness. Buffalo's was the first coordinated park and parkway system ever built in America. Every city that followed, including Chicago, Kansas City, and Louisville, studied what Olmsted had done here first.