Heacock Park, more recently known as Heacock Place, predates the Olmsted park system of Buffalo. A roughly three acre plot of land was deeded to the city of Buffalo in January, 1854, by Reuben B. Heacock (1787-1854) and his wife, the former Abigail Peabody Grosvenor. It is located at the northern end of McKinley Parkway, and was triangular in layout. McKinley Parkway (formerly South Side Parkway) connects the park with South Park, and via Red Jacket Parkway with Cazenovia Park.
The park’s name derives from its donor, Reuben Bostwick Heacock. He was a banker and merchant prominent in the business affairs of Buffalo even before it became a city. His most prominent endeavor was as a founding member of the Hydraulic Business Association in 1827. That company constructed a canal in the bed of Little Buffalo Creek, running some three miles from what is now West Seneca to Lake Erie, to provide water power as an enticement for industries to locate along its banks. The canal’s terminus was the “Commercial Slip” on the Erie Canal, which has been recreated at the present Canalside on the Buffalo Waterfront.
The so-called Hydraulic Canal lay largely within the territory of the Buffalo Creek Reservation of the Seneca Nation of Indians, who were paid only a nominal rent for the privilege. A treaty was proposed in 1838 which attempted to summarily extinguish Seneca Nation rights to their land in New York and to force the Nation to relocated to Wisconsin and to Kansas. It failed to gain United States Senate approval. In 1842, that patently unfair treaty proposal was renegotiated and subsequently ratified by the Senate. By that treaty, the Seneca Nation’s Buffalo Creek reservation was surrendered and vacated, and the former reservation lands were sold to the Ogden Land Company. The Seneca Nation retained the lands which now comprise the Allegheny and Cattaraugus reservations. Mr. Heacock speculated in the lands made available by that forced relocation, and the ground of Heacock Park was a part of the property he had thus purchased. His gift of the land for park use was made very shortly before his death in April, 1854.
Very little, however, was done to improve the wooded tract until it came under control of the Buffalo Park Commissioners and the South Side Parkways were being planned. When the parkway was laid out in 1891, its northern terminus was to pass directly through Heacock Park and join the intersection of what was then a section of South Park Avenue (now Southside Parkway) at its intersection with Abbott Road. When plans for the parkway were finalized in 1895, the Board of Park Commissioners determined that its northern terminus would be more appealing if it were realigned. Rather than cut through the existing wooded park exposing a view of a city streetscape, they decided to create a pair of access roadways bearing to the west and east of the original line of the parkway. One would end at what is now Southside Parkway and the other at Abbott Road. The approved configuration would separate parkway traffic from the main intersection, and allow the landscaping of Heacock Park to buffer for northbound travel in McKinley Parkway. The revision to the plan required that some privately held parcels on either side of the new parkway be acquired. The city council agreed, and the acquisitions were accomplished, increasing the size of the park to about four acres and permitting the desired termination of the parkway within the park. The park design, it should be noted, did not originate with the Olmsted firm. As with the two designs of the South Side parkways and their two circles, Park Board staff created and carried out the plans locally, in the manner of Olmsted.
At the surrounding neighborhood grew, Heacock Park was used to host regular band concerts and picnics. When a fervor for tennis swept the country about 1910, a tennis court was installed there, with a second added in 1915. Organized matches, as well as recreational play, were held for several years. Eventually, when “tennis fever” subsided, the park tennis courts were removed.
As vehicular traffic continued to increase over the years, the alignment of parkway access drives created problems for traffic flow, causing delays and backups between the parkway access drives and the main intersection. Vehicles awaiting changes of the traffic light often blocked access to and from McKinley parkway. To ameliorate this congestion, in the early 1980s the easterly drive connecting with Abbott Road was closed off and replaced with turf. That is the configuration in place today.
In September, 2025, the State of New York listed the McKinley Parkway Historic District on the New York State Register of Historic Places, the largest such district in the state, and the district includes Heacock Place within its boundaries. The district has been nominated to National Park Service for further recognition to the National Register of Historic Places, and hopefully that application will also be approved.
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