1. What is the Buffalo Park system?

How did it transformed the Urban problems of the City of

Buffalo?
- The Buffalo Olmsted Park System is the America’s first system of parks, parkways and circles,
and was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1982. It was also the oldest
coordinated system of public parks and parkways in America. The designers and planners
incorporated some concept of “French romance” in to the design of the park which is the
very concept of the city of Paris. The Buffalo park system consist of three different parks
with three unique sites and three unique designs: the Front a public ceremonial space, the
Parade a military drill ground, and the Delaware a very large park featuring a naturalistic
landscape. All three parks were connected by broad “parkways” which excluded all
commercial traffic. They form green corridors which extended the park experience
throughout the city.
the original plan for the city had provided for good transportation, sewage disposal, and
housing, but had neglected its “environs.” He went on to describe how his 1872, “late
additions,” had solved this problem by introducing “a series of new features.”
Olmsted did more than “counteract the dangers” of the growing city’s “unhealthful” and
“cheerless landscape conditions.” The comprehensive park plan he and Vaux began designing
for the city of Buffalo in 1869 featured the first coordinated parkway system in the nation and
introduced the concept of a municipal recreational system. In his plan for the Buffalo Park
System, Olmsted established the standard for park design.
In 1868, when Olmsted was called in by city commissioners to create a park for Buffalo, he
quickly perceived possibilities beyond the imagination of his peers. His design expanded on the
lines of the city laid out by Joseph Ellicott, a former assistant to Pierre L’Enfant in the planning of
D.C., and created “improvements” ranging from solving problems of drainage and soil quality to
developing the six hundred acres of park land for civic enjoyment. Olmsted envisioned not one
but three primary parks: the Parade, a ground dedicated to recreation and “popular festivities”;
the Front, a slightly elevated area with dramatic views of Lake Erie; and the Park, a 350-acre
pastoral landscape at the edge of the city. These parks were connected by a network of broad,
tree-lined streets called parkways, some of which contained separate lanes for carriages,
equestrians and pedestrians. Although Olmsted and Vaux developed the idea of a scenic
parkway for ProspectPark in Brooklyn and also attempted to sell the concept in Chicago, Albany,
and Newark, it was the Buffalo park design that finally gave him the freedom to install the
country’s first coordinated parkway system.
The BuffaloPark system provided visitors with the recreational amenities of city parks—including
ballfields and facilities for social events, as well as “pristine” scenery and secluded areas—all
connected with parkways that provided easy transportation from places of work to this oasis of
recreation and relaxation. Olmsted was acutely conscious of the need for public transportation
to the park from the suburbs and distant portions of the city, a priority illustrated by the black
and red lines highlighting his map’s various train routes. In an April 1876 letter to George
Waring Jr. written the month before the Centennial opened, Olmsted called Buffalo “the best
planned city, as to its streets, public places, and grounds, in the United States, if not the world.”
Two years later, his map display was presented at the 1878 Exposition Universelle in Paris.