"The Best Planned City"

Frederick Law Olmsted and his partner Calvert Vaux, already known for designing New York's Central Park, came to Buffalo in August 1868 to propose an innovative plan of three parks in different parts of the city connected by broad, tree-lined parkways. The city accepted their proposal, beginning a decades-long relationship that produced the nation's first comprehensively planned municipal park system, later listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982. Olmsted carefully chose park sites to use Buffalo's geographic advantages, and Front Park, originally called The Front, linked the park and parkway system to the waterfront while offering commanding views of Lake Erie entering the Niagara River, a sunset scene Olmsted called "a view approaching art." The 1870 plan worked in tandem with Joseph Ellicott's 1804 radial street plan for Buffalo, which Olmsted admired and sought to complement. The connected network of parks, parkways, and streets tied the parks to each other and to the center city, while the parkways also served as healthful green ribbons through new residential neighborhoods, becoming in effect "the lungs of the city." After the system's completion in 1876, Olmsted declared Buffalo "the best planned city, as to its streets, public places and grounds in the United States, if not the world."

Buffalo, New York · United States