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

by Francis R. Kowsky

Beginning in 1868, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux created a series of parks and parkways for Buffalo, New York, that drew national and international attention. The improvements carefully augmented the city's original plan with urban design features inspired by Second Empire Paris, including the first system of "parkways" to grace an American city. Displaying the plan at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, Olmsted declared Buffalo "the best planned city, as to streets, public places, and grounds, in the United States, if not in the world."

Olmsted and Vaux dissolved their historic partnership in 1872, but Olmsted continued his association with the Queen City of the Lakes, designing additional parks and laying out important sites within the growing metropolis. When Niagara Falls was threatened by industrial development, he led a campaign to protect the site and in 1885 succeeded in persuading New York to create the Niagara Reservation, the present Niagara Falls State Park. Two years later, Olmsted and Vaux teamed up again, this time to create a plan for the area around the Falls, a project the two grand masters regarded as "the most difficult problem in landscape architecture to do justice to."

In this book Francis R. Kowsky illuminates this remarkable constellation of projects. Utilizing original plans, drawings, photographs, and copious numbers of reports and letters, he brings new perspective to this vast undertaking, analyzing it as a cohesive expression of the visionary landscape and planning principles that Olmsted and Vaux pioneered.

Published in association with Library of American Landscape

304 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 2013

Reviews

[Aaron Arnold · Rating 4 out of 5]

You can learn a lot about a city from its relationship to its park system. Spending a lot of time in Buffalo as a child gave me an appreciation for the city, especially its parks, yet I had no idea that most of the largest ones were designed by Frederick Law Olmstead, who also designed New York City's Central Park. Kowsky presents a great history of how Buffalo came to punch above its weight in the parks department, taking advantage of its radial grid system to allocate enough land to give Buffalo a world-class park system for its time. There's good digressions into the philosophy of park-building, some discussion of how parks factored into ethnic tensions (how would parks be used by those rowdy beer-drinking Germans?), and a frank overview of the inherent compromises involved in constructing these tableaus of tamed nature. Recommended to anyone who's spent any time in Delaware Park, or who appreciates the history of public spaces in the 19th century, or is interested in Olmstead's career.

[Ron Davidson · Rating 4 out of 5]

A thorough history of the Olmsted parks systems in Buffalo and Niagara Falls, NY, it shows the genius of Olmsted and his colleagues in creating a beautiful network of parks for all the people. The author does not ignore the tragedy of the loss of much of Olmsted's vision through the destruction of many of its components by way of "improvement." Fortunately, he concludes with a bit of optimism, noting the resurgence of respect and support for the parks and the historical character of the community through groups such as the Buffalo Friends of Olmsted Parks.