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The city of Buffalo is the best planned city,
as to its streets, public places,
and grounds, in the United States,
if not the world. Frederick Law Olmsted.
[Narration] In 1868 Frederick Law Olmsted was the most
famous American landscape architect in North America.
With his partner Calvert Vaux,
he had designed Central Park in Manhattan
and Prospect Park in Brooklyn -- the two largest
and most popular public parks in North America.
Now Olmsted and Vaux were being courted by other
cities interested in creating great public parks.
One of the first to call was Buffalo, New York.
[Narration:] In the years after the Civil War,
Buffalo was the center of
America -- the place where the Erie Canal ended,
linking East and West.
It was among the most productive and
wealthy industrial cities in the nation.
But it would soon be known for
something entirely different:
the first park system in America.
Buffalo would change
forever the way cities are planned and scenery preserved.
[Francis R. Kowsky: ] When Olmsted was
invited to come in 1868,
Buffalo was really a booming city.
Its industry was flourishing,
its transportation was flourishing.
It was also the center of a growing agricultural region.
It was a time to spend money on municipal improvement.
[Narration:] Olmsted took a one-day
tour of the city in August of 1868.
He immediately saw that
Buffalo needed a park. Desperately.
[Quote: Frederick Law Olmsted:]
A comprehensive park scheme is peculiarly desirable,
because the immediate environs of
the town are not at all attractive.
And escape from Buffalo to anything like rural quiet,
is difficult and disagreeable if not impossible.
[Narration:] But Olmsted also saw
that the city had very good bones.
[Francis R. Kowsky:] The original city plan of
Buffalo was laid out in 1804 by Joseph Ellicott,
a surveyor who had worked in Washington with Pierre L’Enfant.
He took the idea of a radiating city plan.
Olmsted thought this was a really brilliant idea.
It was a very unusual plan for an American city.
[Narration:] On the tour
Olmsted was taken to three sites local
citizens thought suitable for
Buffalo's version of Central Park.
But within a week Olmsted let Buffalo know that his
plan would not be Central Park transplanted upstate.
It would be something much more ambitious.
[Francis R. Kowsky:] He comes up with the idea that this city
would be better served with three
parks in different parts of town.
[Narration:] Three unique sites, three unique designs.
To the west, along the Niagara River,
Olmsted and Vaux created The Front,
with a terrace for viewing the scenic Niagara.
On the east side, they placed The Parade,
with grounds for marching and for active sports.
To the north, the park
eventually known as Delaware would
be a pastoral landscape, a country place within the city.
But there was more to the plan: they linked three parks
together with a new type of public space: the parkway.
[Quote: Frederick Law Olmsted]
A parkway is a series of roads and walks
adapted exclusively for pleasure travel,
occupied by turf, trees, shrubs and flowers.
Thus, at not great distance from any point of the town,
a pleasure ground will be suitable for a short stroll,
a playground for children, an airing ground for invalids.
The way itself would thus be more park-like than town-like.
[Narration:] The ways were park-like but they
were also Parisian. The wide boulevards mirrored
the grand streets of the city of Paris,
and brought a bit of French romance to upstate New York.
[Francis R. Kowsky:] Olmsted and Vaux
were very knowledgeable about Paris.
The idea of having circles where the parkways come
together in Buffalo was something taken from the Paris.
And the way the parkways link the
city to the main park was also Paris.
The main parkways are 200 feet wide,
which is a very wide street,
obviously, and they were lined with
multiple rows of the American Elm.
Old pictures of the parkways lined with those trees
are just spectacular.
They're truly cathedrals of green.
[Narration:] Buffalo accepted the Olmsted-Vaux plan,
and in 1870, work began on what
would be America's first park system.
[Francis R. Kowsky:] Olmsted and Vaux are always
thinking in comprehensive terms. So when they design a park,
it's not just to be a pretty place
or a place to play baseball,
it's always connected to the rest of
the city and the way the city functions.
He saw this whole city as
being a kind of organism of living,
working, commerce all connected by a
very functioning system of movement.
[Narration:] By 1874, the three parks were
largely complete - and a resounding success.
Olmsted and Vaux had ended
their partnership two years earlier,
but Olmsted continued to design parks for Buffalo.
And his interest in the area extended
beyond the city - to the great natural wonder,
Niagara Falls, twenty miles to the north.
[Francis R. Kowsky:] Olmsted had come to Niagara Falls even
as youngster and he was very impressed,
as many people were.
And when he started to work
here in Buffalo in the late-1860s,
it renewed his interests in the falls.
He was very upset by the fact
that much of the land around
the falls had been bought up in
parcels by private individuals.
[Narration:] The local property owners
had lined the banks of
the Niagara River with a shoddy
mix of factories and tourist traps.
For Olmsted, the buildings were defacing a landscape of sublime
beauty - not only the great waterfalls,
but an entire waterscape.
[Quote: Frederick Law Olmsted] The illumined spray
and mists and fleeting waters, the water-worn rocks,
the rare beauty of the old woods,
the infinitely varied play of light and shadow,
refractions and reflections,
and much else that is indefinable.
[Narration:] Olmsted had laid out a
philosophy of scenic preservation before,
in a report about Yosemite Valley in California.
Great natural scenery, he wrote,
should be preserved from development,
and yet made available for everyone to see.
He now brought this philosophy to bear on Niagara.
[Kowsky:] Niagara Falls
was really the first
big national campaign on behalf of scenic preservation.
Olmsted called it the
"Free Niagara Movement" and it could be in
some ways be seen as the
beginnings of the National Park movement.
[Narration:] In 1879 Olmsted and the Free Niagara
movement submitted a report to the New York legislature
calling for the state to buy the land and tear down the
buildings that surrounded the falls.
The state refused.
So Olmsted began the first national
public-relations campaign for scenic preservation
that had ever taken place in America.
He used tactics that have now become familiar:
public petitions, letters-to-the-editor
and celebrity endorsements,
including the writers Henry James and Thomas Carlisle,
the painter Frederick Church, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes,
and the future President Grover Cleveland.
In 1885, Olmsted and his supporters won.
New York State bought back the
land along the riverbank,
and the island in the river, above the falls.
The new state reservation would be designed,
of course, by Frederick Olmsted.
And he turned to his old partner,
Calvert Vaux, for help.
[Francis R. Kowsky:] To be sure, their plan of
1887 was never fully implemented,
but the ideals were.
That is, that it should be kept as a natural
site that would be open primarily to pedestrians.
What he wanted people to see there
was mostly the beauty of the waterscape.
The falls, of course, but he even
thought the rapids were more impressive and
compelling than the falls, and he
wanted people to have easy viewing access.
The gem of the Niagara Falls State Park is Goat Island,
and to Olmsted and Vaux that in fact was
in fact the most beautiful part.
Areas of it are as they would have known it,
especially the Three Sister Islands.
You can walk out onto the third island the way Olmsted
and Vaux could have and see the rushing rapids coming on.
And if the mist is rising at the right angle,
you don't see the casinos and the
towers on the Canadian side and for a brief
period you could put yourself back in time.
Olmsted would work in Buffalo for three decades.
After his retirement his sons carried on his business.
He and his successors really had a
great role in shaping the city of Buffalo.
[Narration:] But over the years,
parts of the Olmsted system were changed.
Much of the Front, the park along the river,
became a traffic plaza.
On the east side of Buffalo,
bulldozers reduced the once-elegant
Humboldt Parkway to a commuter freeway.
It was called Progress.
But more recently, another kind of
progress came to Buffalo - a grassroots community
group that would become the Buffalo
Olmsted Parks Conservancy was formed in 1978.
The Conservancy now manages and
protects all of the Olmsted parks in Buffalo,
in a public-private partnership with the city.
Well over a million people visit these parks each year.
[Quote:] A park is a work of art,
designed to produce certain effects upon the mind of men.
The purpose of parks is to provide a feeling
of relief experienced by those
entering it on escaping from the cramped,
confined, and controlling
circumstances of the streets and towns.
In other words, a sense of
enlarged freedom is to all and all times
the most certain value and gratification
afforded by a park. Frederick Law Olmsted.