Olmsted, in designing his landscapes, made particularly good use of adjoining spaces which were already green space.
Most notably, in laying out The Park (present Delaware Park) the grounds adjoined the large, rural-format Buffalo City Cemetery, better known today as Forest Lawn Cemetery. Founded in 1849, the cemetery covers 269 acres of treed rolling ground to the southeast of the park. On the southwest, the park abutted the grounds of the Buffalo Insane Asylum, which originally encompassed 203 acres of landscaped grounds and farm fields. It was established in 1865, with design work completed in 1870 and construction commencing in 1871. Those grounds were well familiar to Olmsted, for he designed them. To the park’s north, his designs for a private residential community, implemented as Parkside as well as by Villa Park, provided an expansive green buffer for the park from a linear city streetscape or commercial uses.
At The Front, now Front Park, the grounds of Fort Porter to its north were unfenced with spacious grass drill grounds and plentiful trees, and the public was not discouraged from wandering the 20 acre space.
East of The Front, the existing Prospect Park, just off Porter avenue, was redesigned by Olmsted and added to the green space of that park approach.
Along Humboldt Parkway, the route Olmsted selected passed right alongside the new Buffalo Driving Park, which also included a polo field, to its immediate west. Not only did it add a large area of green space next to the parkway, but patrons attending the harness racing or polo games there could walk or drive their carriages along Humboldt Parkway to either Delaware Park or The Parade (today’s Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Park). The latter was the more likely choice for the racing enthusiasts, as the Parade House offered more tempting forms of liquid refreshment. The Driving Park ceased operation in 1888, although it remained undeveloped for a considerably longer period. It was sold for residential development in 1920, unfortunately, using a grid street pattern rather than a Parkside-like format of sinuous streets. The area today is known as the Hamlin Park neighborhood.
During the expansion of the park system into South Buffalo, the same mindset caused Olmsted to utilize the existing Heacock Park as the northern anchor of the Southside Parkways.
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