The plan allowed all Buffalonians access to recreation, as it still does to this day. The Olmsted firm’s vision included a system of six major parks and traffic circles, linked by pretty parkways (at first called “park ways”).

But he and his partner, Calvert Vaux, came up with much more than a single park - in fact, what they conceived has a special place in the history of American urban planning: the first city-wide park and parkway system in the entire country. In 1868, Olmsted, the man now considered America’s greatest landscape architect, was asked to plan a centralized park somewhere in Buffalo. If your passions take you to the Botanical Gardens, or you can visit the Burchfield-Penney art museums, take a boat ride on Hoyt Lake or wander through the Japanese Garden at the foot of the History Museum-it was Olmsted who made it possible. Park, or when you head out for a summer evening of Shakespeare in the Park, you’re in Olmsted’s terrain. When you bike around the Ring Road in Delaware Park, when you watch children splashing in the wading pool at Martin Luther King, Jr.

When you’re in Buffalo you walk in the footsteps of the great landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted.

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