How Buffalo Became a City Within a Park

Amanda McGowan: Have you ever been in a work meeting and all of a sudden your boss calls on you to give a presentation just on the spot? This has only happened to me in my nightmares, but this was Frederick Law Olmsted’s reality in the summer of 1868.

Frederick Law Olmsted, the great landscape architect, was visiting the city of Buffalo, New York on a business trip. So, he was brought to the home of this prominent local guy, probably thinking he was going to stop in and have a cup of tea. But then when he walked through the front door, he found 200 people staring back at him. As it turned out, he was the guest of honor at a community meeting and was expected to give a speech. Oh no.

Here’s the backstory. The city of Buffalo had invited Olmsted to town because they really liked some work that he had done in New York City designing a park: Central Park. You’ve probably heard of it.

Buffalo wanted its own Central Park and they had picked out a few potential spots. They brought Olmsted around to these spots. He took some notes and he told them he’d be back in a couple of days once he had time to think it over.

Then, of course, when he returned, they sprung that little surprise on him. He walked into that house and found that a full-on public meeting had been convened and they were expecting him to give a speech to unveil his pick for the park’s location. There were 200 people sitting there waiting for this news, including a former president of the United States, Millard Fillmore. He was a Buffalo boy. Who knew?

I like to imagine Olmsted walking up to the front of this crowd, maybe pulling on his collar a little bit, maybe sweating a little bit. But as it turned out, he had some tricks up his sleeve. As it turned out, he wasn’t going to pick just one of these locations. See, Buffalo told him that they wanted a Central Park. So, you know, one park within the city. Olmsted thought they could do something a little bit bigger than that.

Why not make Buffalo a city within a park?

Catie Stephenson: This moment was monumental. That decision is a moment that changed landscape architecture and urban design forever. It was never the same after that.

I’m Amanda McGowan and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world’s strange, incredible and wondrous places. This episode was brought to you in partnership with Visit Buffalo. And today, we are going to Buffalo to see this scheme that Olmsted cooked up. A system of interconnected city parks, almost like green arteries running through town. We’ll take a look at Olmsted’s quest to bring nature to the masses and the challenges that this groundbreaking system faces even today.

This is an edited transcript of the Atlas Obscura Podcast: a celebration of the world’s strange, incredible, and wondrous places. Find the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast apps.

Amanda: Buffalo’s park system is enormous. Let me run some numbers by you.

Catie: So we have six major parks, seven parkways, eight traffic circles, landscape circles, which total 850 acres of historic parkland. If you have a vehicle and you want to drive the entire system, it can take three to four hours to drive the entire system.

Amanda: This is Catie Stephenson. She’s the executive director of the Buffalo Olmsted Parks Conservancy. Olmsted’s parks wrap around the city like the arms of a big green sweater. At various points along the way, you can stroll around a lake, pop into an art or science museum, run through a splash pad, or take in a panoramic view of Lake Erie. But for first-time visitors getting their bearings, Catie suggests stopping by the Conservancy HQ.

Catie: We have an exhibit on display that shows the evolution and the development of the Olmsted system here in Buffalo. So you can learn more about him and learn more about what we have here in Buffalo. That’s a great place to start.

Amanda: When Olmsted first arrived in Buffalo in 1868, he was probably the most famous landscape architect in the entire United States. But this was a career that he had stumbled on kind of accidentally.

Catie: It’s funny because when you think about, you know, the way that we operate today, it’s like you’re 18 and you go to college and you have to figure out your path for life and you’re going to do that forever. Olmsted did not take that course at all.

He grew up in Connecticut and his mother died when he was a child. And the way that he and his father managed their grief was by going for walks out in nature. And so Olmsted established this love of nature very early on and recognized as he got older the role that nature had played in helping he and his dad, you know, manage their sadness.

Amanda: As a young man, Olmsted bounced between jobs. He worked at a dry goods store, trained as a surveyor, even became a sailor and went to China. But then he got a job as a journalist and started traveling around a lot. And he found himself thinking about nature wherever he went.

He took a trip to Europe and saw some of the giant planned public parks there. And he traveled through the American South in the years leading up to the Civil War. The trip convinced him that slavery was wrong. And it also made him think about democracy and public space.

Catie: That really influenced his belief that public space should be open to everybody, regardless of race, ethnicity, economic background, where you lived in the city. You really should have access to great public space.

Amanda: But by the late 1850s, Olmsted was out of a job. He heard that the city of New York was holding this competition to design a brand new park in the middle of Manhattan. Olmsted had never really designed a park before, or really designed much of anything. But he knew from his own experience and from his travels how important access to nature was, both for the body and for the mind.

Catie: He knew about the benefits of letting your feet touch the grass and letting your kids run around and play and like falling backwards and looking up and seeing the trees and feeling wind. And so he really wanted everybody, whether you had the resources to live across the street from a park or you didn’t, you were still able to have access to those spaces within walking distance of your home.

Amanda: He also luckily teamed up with a first-rate architect, a guy named Calvert Vaux, and together they put in a bid to design a city park, Central Park, which is now, of course, one of the most iconic parks in the world.

Buffalo saw what New York City was up to, and they wanted in. And when Olmsted arrived for the first time in 1868, he saw that the city was absolutely booming. Thanks to the Erie Canal, built just a few decades earlier, the city was now a major shipping port and link between the eastern United States and the west. Between 1860 and 1868, Buffalo’s population had tripled, from 100,000 people to 300,000 people in just eight years.

Catie: People at the time were living in very cramped quarters. The industrial nature of cities at the time made cities dirty and smoke-filled, and that type of living was stressful.

Amanda: Olmsted even wrote, “An escape from Buffalo to anything like rural quiet is difficult and disagreeable, if not impossible.”

So this was what Olmsted was thinking about when officials showed him around to the three locations they had picked out for a possible park. Each one was lovely. But if you didn’t live nearby, realistically, how often would you be able to go?

So Olmsted thought, “You know what, let’s just go with all three.” And then he took it one step further and said, “Let’s also connect them.”

Catie: The purpose of that was to allow people to have access to parks and to be able to travel between those park spaces without leaving a park-like setting.

Amanda: He came up with an idea for something called a parkway. And yeah, you’ve probably been on a parkway before. Today, the definition is a little bit loose and can just mean basically a street with trees on it. But Olmsted had something more specific than that in mind.

Catie: They are incredibly wide stretches of green space with roads on either side. There’s typically three to four trees that line those green spaces in a diagonal pattern. And when you walk down those sidewalks or down the center of the parkway, you’re in a park. You feel like you’re in a park.

Amanda: This was not going to be a park within a city. This was a city within a park.

Something this ambitious had never really been tried before. But Buffalo was game. In 1870, construction began and the first phase was completed in about four years.

To start with, there were three core parks in the Olmsted system, each one meant to be used in a slightly different way. First, starting in the north, was Delaware Park. This was a place to relax. Really, Olmsted wanted people to just hang out and wander around.

Catie: So his pathways are, you know, they’re undulating, they curve around a park. Every time you come around a different curve, you’re seeing something different.

Amanda: In Delaware Park, you can walk over these beautiful stone bridges, visit a rose garden. There’s even this giant man-made lake that was dug out, which you can row across in a rowboat in the summer or skate across in the winter.

The park was built around the existing Buffalo Zoo, and today there are other museums in Delaware Park as well that you can pop into as you’re working your way around.

But let’s move on to stop two. If we head south, we can visit a park that in Olmsted’s time was called The Parade. Today, it’s been renamed MLK Junior Park. This park was all about activity and recreation.

Catie: MLK Park was an incredibly active space. It had a huge basin that kids would swim in. It has a working greenhouse. It had a beautiful building that was open to the public for different types of events. When I look at old photos of MLK, it’s just amazing to see how active that park is.

Amanda: Finally, as we move west, you hit The Front, as in The Waterfront. This park was designed to connect the people of Buffalo with Lake Erie and the opening of the Niagara River.

Catie: And I think just standing in Front Park on the hill and looking at the water, it’s an amazing moment because you can get a sense of what Olmsted saw when he was here and why that space was so meaningful to him.

Amanda: And of course, connecting all of these parks were Olmsted’s new invention, the parkways, which brought people from one green space to the next.

Catie: There’s so much to do. You could come to Buffalo and spend a weekend and just explore the Olmsted system.

Amanda: Olmsted’s new connected park system in Buffalo kicked off basically a frenzy in American landscape architecture. Cities across the United States scrambled to have Olmsted come to their town and design their own systems.

Catie: Boston is a good example with the Emerald Necklace. There is a park system in Louisville, Kentucky. They’re a little bit different from what we have here, but they’re definitely in alignment with his concept.

Amanda: And this first phase of construction wasn’t even the end of Olmsted’s grand plan for Buffalo. Over the years, he added more parks to the city. And his dream was that these all would be connected by parkways, so you could travel pretty much anywhere around town and stay within a park the entire time. Unfortunately, this did not completely pan out.

Catie: There are parts of the system that were not realized. There are parts that have, you know, the connection points were not built, unfortunately. Then there are parts where the connection point was destroyed.

Amanda: Olmsted died in 1903, and over the years, the parks faced little tweaks and changes. Buildings decayed here, a rose garden bulldozed over there, a swimming basin replaced with a splash pad. But the most significant changes came in the years after World War II.

All over America, cities took really drastic steps to make themselves more car-friendly. And that sometimes meant tearing down entire neighborhoods and replacing them with highways. This came to be known as “urban renewal.” And in Buffalo, urban renewal came for the Olmsted parks.

Catie: And so one of the parkways that Olmsted had called the most beautiful in America was destroyed by the Department of Transportation when they put in the Kensington Expressway. That happened in a predominantly Black community. You can see the impact that that has had on that community today. I mean, the homes are beautiful. The homes are beautiful. But their front yard is a sunken highway.

Amanda: By the 1970s, a group of community members got together to push back on this. They formed a group called the Buffalo Friends of Olmsted Parks, and they started advocating for the park system, getting it listed on the National Registry of Historic Places, and gradually taking on more and more preservation and conservation work. Then in the year 2005, the city of Buffalo took a pretty remarkable and unprecedented step.

Catie: The city, you know, realized after decades of disinvestment that they just couldn’t do it alone. The city came to us and said, like, “We just can’t afford to do the maintenance.” And so we took that on. It was a really visionary, courageous moment.

Amanda: The Conservancy became the first nonprofit in the country to manage an urban park system. And they have really big dreams. They not only want to preserve the Olmsted System in Buffalo, but they also want to expand it. And Catie tells me they even are trying to get those highways removed. Still, Olmsted’s legacy lives on in Buffalo today. Ninety percent of Buffalo residents live within a 10-minute walk of a park. And that includes Catie.

Catie: The way that we live our lives is like, it’s so ingrained with the parks. We go there every day. We ride bikes there. My kids play there. They run around, play sports. I think for me, it’s like, it just brings such a sense of calm and a sense of neighborhood and place. And, like, building core memories with your family. I hope my kids remember this time.

What I think about a lot is that, like, Olmsted built parks not for himself. There obviously was a benefit for the people of his generation. But what he was really thinking about was the next generation. I think about that a lot. Because when I bring my kids to parks, I am hoping to instill in them a love of public space and a feeling of ownership over that public space so that they can be, you know, good stewards of that space for the future.

Amanda: If you would like to take a visit to Buffalo and visit Olmsted’s hidden masterpiece, we will post a link in the episode description with more information and tips on how to plan your itinerary. In Buffalo, you might say, it’s pretty easy to be green.

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