BEST PLANNED CITY in the WORLD Olmsted, Vaux, and the Buffalo Park System

THE BEST PLANNED CITY IN THE WORLD Olmsted, Vaux, and the Buffalo Park System

FRANCIS R. KOWSKY

University of Massachusetts Press Amherst and Boston Library of American Landscape History Amherst A volume in the series Designing the American Park Edited by Ethan Carr

ISBN 978-1-62534-006-1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kowsky, Francis R., 1943– The best planned city in the world : Olmsted, Vaux, and the Buffalo park system / Francis R. Kowsky. pages cm. — (Designing the American park) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-62534-006-1 (cloth : alkaline paper) 1. Parks—New York (State)—Buffalo—History—19th century. 2. Parks—New York (State)—Buffalo—Design and construction—History—19th century. 3. City planning—New York (State)—Buffalo—History—19th century. 4. Landscape design—New York (State)—Buffalo—History—19th century. 5. Olmsted, Frederick Law, 1822–1903. 6. Vaux, Calvert, 1824–1895. I. Library of American Landscape History. II. Title. SB482.N72B83 2013 333.78’3097471—dc23 2012047390

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Photographs by Andy Olenick were specially commissioned for this book and are © Andy Olenick. They include the chapter frontispieces appearing on pages 2, 22, 54, 78, 92, 106, 132, 152, and 184, which show, in order, Chapin Parkway, Forest Lawn Cemetery, Delaware Park, Front Park, Martin Luther King Jr. Park, Gates Circle and Chapin Parkway, the Towers of the Buffalo Psychiatric Center, Niagara Falls from the American side, and Cazenovia Park.

Frontispiece: Map of Buffalo showing the new park and parkway system, prepared by Frederick Law Olmsted in 1876 for display at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. It was also shown at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1878. Courtesy Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site.

The photograph of Frederick Law Olmsted near the conclusion of his career, page 216, is from James Terry White, ed., National Cyclopaedia of American Biography (1921).

Endpapers: (front) Spire Head House and the Beech Banks on the south shore of Gala Water; (back) the Parade. Both watercolor drawings were commissioned by Olmsted for the 1876 Centennial Exhibition. Courtesy Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society.

Publication of this book was aided by a generous grant from

Furthermore: a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund Generous support for the publication of The Best Planned City in the World was provided by the following organizations:

Viburnum Trilobum Fund of the New York Community Trust

Furthermore: a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund

The Baird Foundation

The Cameron and Jane Baird Foundation

the margaret l. wendt foundation Fig. 2.30. John Ross Key, Delaware Park Lake. Oil on canvas, 1901. This painting depicts three new structures by Green & Wicks: the casino that replaced Vaux’s boathouse (left), the Albright Art Gallery (left center distance), and the third Lincoln Parkway bridge (center right). Courtesy Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society. to read a paper on public parks. His words were well new building in the park. The preferred site was the received and nationally circulated, but his presentation Prospect Concourse overlooking Gala Water. McMil- was more a eulogy for the Romantic landscape tradi- lan had taken a stand against the proposal and probably tion than a manual for the future.65 By the early 1890s, lost his job because of it. When John C. Olmsted, heir men like Richard Morris Hunt, Charles McKim, and to his ailing stepfather’s office in 1895, wrote a strongly Stanford White had succeed in establishing the Classi- worded letter objecting to the plan to use this prime cal Revival style of architecture and art as expressive of spot for viewing the landscape for a building, the presi- America’s new status in the world. Neoclassical archi- dent of the park board, William Hengerer, dismissed tecture and Baroque Rome were to be the models for his objection as “silly.” Eventually the new white marble the short-lived exposition at Chicago and the long-last- Neoclassical edifice, the creation of the French-trained ing City Beautiful movement that swept the country in local architect George Cary, went up on another nearby its wake. site overlooking North Bay. (Fig. 2.31) During the Pan- The effects of the White City (as the central part of American Exposition, which took place in Buffalo in the Chicago fair was called) were soon felt in Delaware 1901 adjacent to the northern border of the park, Cary’s Park. In 1897 state senator Henry W. Hill succeeded in building served as the New York State Pavilion.66 (Fig. getting the legislature to pass a law enabling the his- 2.32) In 1899 construction began on the Albright Art torical society, of which he was a benefactor, to erect a Gallery, another, even grander white marble temple,

74 THE BEST PLANNED CITY IN THE WORLD Fig. 2.31. George Cary’s Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society Fig. 2.32. The Pan-American Exposition, 1901. The grounds of the building (1900), c. 1905. Courtesy Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society. fair were immediately to the north of Delaware Park. In this view, the park lake is visible at the bottom. Courtesy Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society. on the site originally proposed for the historical society building. The architects were Green & Wicks of Buf- falo.67 (Fig. 2.33) As a park commissioner from 1897 to 1900, William S. Wicks had voted to fire McMillan, the staunch advocate of Olmsted’s view that such buildings did not belong in parks. That same year Wicks’s firm planned the replacement for Vaux’s boathouse, designing a bulky masonry building reminiscent of Pompeian villas which was far more conspicuous in the landscape than its predecessor had been. (Fig. 2.34) Thus Olmsted and Vaux’s design philosophy—rooted in the Roman- tic love of nature—that architecture in country parks Fig. 2.33. The Albright Art Gallery, designed by Buffalo architects should be subordinated to the landscape was turned on Green & Wicks and opened in 1905, occupies a former carriage con- its head, as prime viewing locations in the park gave course. Postcard, c. 1905. Courtesy Catherine Schweitzer. way to prominent edifices. Epic sculpture also began to intrude on the pasto- ral landscape. In 1903 Andrew Langdon, a wealthy coal merchant, onetime park commissioner, and staunch promoter of the historical society building, donated to Delaware Park a life-sized bronze reproduction of Michelangelo’s Carrara marble statue of David. (Six years before, Langdon had been instrumental in plac- ing a jet spray in the eastern end of tranquil Gala Water, in order, he said, “to give a brightening effect to the dead surface” of the lake.)68 At Langdon’s sug- gestion, the former West Bluff Concourse became the Fig. 2.34. Green & Wicks’ boathouse of 1900 replaced Vaux’s earlier site for the heroic nude. (Fig. 2.35) The location was structure. Postcard, c. 1900. Courtesy James Mendola.

The Making of the Park 75 far more respectable place than it had been. The new lent candelabra fountain would spray and sparkle in the designs, which arrived in Buffalo in January 1896, were center. In summer, the shallow water welcomed wad- greeted with special pleasure by East Side residents. (Fig. ing children; in winter, the ice hosted skaters. Between 4.8) “They felt that at last the Park Board, which they the reflecting pool and a smaller circular basin, the firm had considered an enemy to their section of the city and placed a 275-foot-long rectangular basin for aquatic a friend only to the West Side, had taken notice of them, plants. (Fig. 4.10) A stone buffalo, carved by Buffalo’s and was going to do something for them,” reported the own budding young sculptor Charles Cary Rumsey, Express.29 surveyed the lush lily pond from the center of the far The firm’s plans called for the creation of outdoor wall. Jets of water animated the third basin (175 feet in and indoor flower displays and significant water fea- diameter), which was apparently intended to be used as tures consisting of three shallow basins on the former a bathing pool. (Fig. 4.11) Together with the construc- parade ground. The largest of these was a reflecting tion of these revisions, many new shrubs, trees, and pool five hundred feet in diameter and nearly five acres flowerbeds would be planted throughout the park. The in extent, located at the eastern end of the green. (Fig. Parade had been reinvented, and the strictly decorous 4.9) Newfangled electric light standards would ring the character and arrangement of the water features, color- basin with a nocturnal necklace of lights, and an opu- ful flowers, and exotic plants signaled the taste for for-

Fig. 4.8. Olmsted, Olmsted & Eliot’s revised preliminary plan for Humboldt Park, 1895. Courtesy National Park Service, Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site.

102 THE BEST PLANNED CITY IN THE WORLD Fig. 4.9. The large basin in Humboldt Park, c. 1900. Courtesy James Mendola. mality that was fast gaining ground in American park Park and Cal Anderson Park in Seattle and Riverside and garden design. Following the Buffalo example, in Park and Forest Park in Springfield, Massachusetts. the early twentieth century the Olmsted firm would Inspiration for the park makeover seems to have install similar basins in other parks, notably Volunteer come from the example of London’s Metropolitan Public Gardens Association. Founded in 1882, the association promoted the creation of gardens and playgrounds in London’s underprivileged East End. By 1892 the association had laid out sixty- five attractive gardens. It also lobbied for public gymnasiums and for outdoor public swimming pools. Under the lead- ership of the earl of Meath, the group and its allies came to exert considerable influence on the redesign of older public parks. Additions to Victoria Park, the major East End park, which had been

Fig. 4.10. Aquatic garden in Humboldt Park, c. 1900. Courtesy James Mendola. created as a country park in the 1840s,

The Parade 103 Fig. 7.2. The unobstructed edge of Prospect Point was the spot where early visitors stood to view the entire cataract. Photograph by George Baker, 1860s. Courtesy Janice and Dale Rossi.

of men and women of easy virtue. If tourists wished, they might descend on the inclined railway, built in 1844, to the river’s edge, “where a sublime view of the Ameri- Fig. 7.1. Niagara Falls is located on the Niagara River about halfway between Lake Erie and Lake Ontario. Courtesy New York State Archives. can Fall can be had from its base.” On clement nights, electric lights powered by “Brush’s Dynamo-Electric Machines” afforded visitors the opportunity of behold- here that in earlier days painters and photographers, ing the “sublime and novel effect of the reflected light unimpeded by a wall, had often stood to take the best and the Electric Bow painted upon the spray-clouds of view of the cataract. (Fig. 7.2) the American falls and its surroundings.”2 To Olmsted’s The eleven-acre wooded grounds of Prospect Park sensitive eye, the blatant aim of the tourist businesses at offered many other attractions. For those willing to pay the falls was “to make money by the showman’s meth- the forty-cent entrance fee, the owner touted a large ods.”3 He knew that Niagara had so much more to offer. pavilion for “dancing, recitations, singing, etc.,” and Standing in pristine wilderness near Prospect Point an art gallery with “several hundred representations of in 1678, Father Louis Hennepin, the Belgian Franciscan the most notable scenes of European and Oriental” his- missionary who is reputed to have been the first Euro- torical and natural sites, “all enlarged microscopically, pean to publish a written and visual account of Niagara and so arranged that one hundred persons may at the Falls, reported how “two great sheets of water, which are same time be pleasantly occupied in their examination.” on the two sides of the sloping island that is in the mid- There were also small “refreshment rooms” throughout dle, fall down without noise and without violence, and the grounds, which had the reputation as a rendezvous glide in this manner without din.” He was describing

154 THE BEST PLANNED CITY IN THE WORLD the parting of the broad and seemingly placid waters of bounds and seethings, with that perpetual cloud rising the Niagara River on either side of Goat Island, a sixty- above the cedars and spruces.”4 acre piece of land that divides what are now called the After the French and Indian War, Niagara Falls American Falls from the larger Canadian or Horseshoe passed from French to British hands. Two decades Falls. (Fig. 7.3) And no one has penned a more evoca- later, following the American Revolution, the Niagara tive description of these two 180-foot-high cascades River became the boundary between the United States than Father Hennepin. “When this great mass of water and Canada. Since the international border follows the reaches the bottom,” he wrote, “then there is a noise middle of the river, the falls are divided between the two and a roaring greater than thunder. Moreover the spray nations. The eastern shore (called the mainland above of the water is so great that it forms clouds above this the falls) and Goat Island are part of New York State; abyss, and these are seen even at the time when the sun the western shore belongs to the Province of Ontario. is shining brightest at midday. . . . [A]ll these waters fall Impressive rapids enliven the waters on either side of with an impetuosity that can be imagined in so high a Goat Island immediately before the river plunges over fall, so prodigious, for its horrible mass of water. There the falls. These are known as the American Rapids or are formed those thunders, those roarings, those fearful the Upper Rapids on the New York State side of the

Fig. 7.3. Bird’s-eye view of Niagara Falls, N.Y., seen from Canada. Goat Island, in the middle of the river, divides the American Falls (left) from the Horseshoe or Canadian Falls (right). In the Canadian Rapids are the Three Sisters islands. The village of Niagara Falls is on the mainland shore. Lithograph by H. Wellge, 1882. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

The Emancipation of Niagara 155 Fig. 8.16. The Cazenovia Park lake in 1857. Courtesy Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society.

208 THE BEST PLANNED CITY IN THE WORLD developed into a popular venue for baseball players and acquire the additional upstream property that the firm their fans. Tennis, football, and softball also brought had included in its extended plan. The city, however, many to the park over the years, up to the present had no success in this endeavor until 1907, when the day. In 1895 the commissioners opened proceedings to Olmsted plans were finally realized. Further expansion of the park upstream took place in 1925, when another eighty acres were acquired for a new golf course. The boathouse, which included a small refectory as well as facilities for storing boats, went up in 1912 to designs by the local architectural firm of Esenwein & Johnson. Later in the twentieth century, Cazenovia Park underwent numerous changes. A continual source of maintenance problems, the lake and the dam that created it disappeared in the 1970s, and the creek, partly redirected from its original course, now flows once again through the landscape. Today the boathouse sits Fig. 8.17. The Cazenovia Park lake, c. 1910. Courtesy James Mendola. high and dry on the edge of the spacious lawn that occu-

Fig. 8.18. Cazenovia Park, 1920s. Courtesy James Mendola.

South Park, Cazenovia Park, and Riverside Park 209