Edward Vose Babcock (1864-1948), born near Fulton, New York, built a major lumber business in Pittsburgh with his brothers Fred and Oscar and became a civic leader after his appointment as a Pittsburgh councilman in 1911, his election as the city’s 45th mayor in 1918, and his election as Allegheny County Commissioner in 1925. As mayor, he built playgrounds, provided free transportation within parks, and appointed the first woman to lead the Bureau of Public Recreation. Seeking to preserve rural land from suburban growth and provide for future recreation, he personally bought about 4,000 acres and sold them to the county at cost to create North and South Parks, later expanded by additional county land purchases into the foundation of a nine-park system of more than 12,000 acres by 1979. To design and build the new parks, Babcock hired landscape architect Paul B. Riis in 1927 as the first director of the Allegheny County Bureau of Parks. Riis, influenced by Jens Jensen’s Prairie Style, planned North and South Parks with native plants, layered stone, winding waterways, roads, trails, picnic groves, sports fields, a pool, a golf course, and signature features including North Park Lake and Boathouse. After new county commissioners hired architect Henry Hornbostel as parks director in 1932, North Park was completed during the Great Depression with New Deal programs and a Civilian Conservation Corps camp established in 1933. North Park, a designed landscape of 3,075 acres, includes streams flowing from the 65-acre lake into Pine Run and then the Allegheny River, high-quality woodlands and diverse habitats such as Hemlock Grove, Rocky Dell, and the Latodami Grasslands, and trees including white oak, sycamore, and catalpa, some more than 200 years old. Its natural resources are preserved and interpreted through the 250-acre Latodami Nature Center, based on a circa-1914 dairy barn and offering year-round programs, displays, artifacts, trails, hives, wetlands, gardens, and an orienteering course. North Park also holds historic and archaeological sites, including a once exceptionally large swimming pool, its bathhouse, the golf clubhouse, stone bridges, North Park Lodge and Observation Tower, converted barn dance halls, and later additions such as the Flag Retirement Plaza within the 80th Division Monument and Garden, while continuing to offer recreation from kayaking and fishing to golf, sports, and wooded trails.