THE PARK SYSTEMS OF AMERICAN CITIES 
By Andrew Wright Crawford 
I.—BUFFALO 
T HE movement toward “ The City Beau¬ 
tiful,” toward the reasonable realization 
of the hopes of men who were once thought 
idealists, is broad in its scope. The great ag¬ 
gregation of homes and business houses and 
manufacturing plants that we associate with 
the thought of “a metropolis” has no mo¬ 
nopoly of the agitation. Smaller cities, cities 
“of the third class,” boroughs, villages, are 
sharing in it; the good roads movement is 
but a manifestation of it; and there has 
lately been a clarion call for improvement in 
the architecture of our farmhouses. The 
need that is felt for the beautiful is not con¬ 
fined to one class nor to one section, nor is 
it bounded by any form of political division, 
be it local, state, or national. 
One marked feature of this movement is 
the desire to preserve the works of nature 
where they are worth preserving, and to re¬ 
store some semblance of natural beauty 
where all trace of it is gone. The ob¬ 
vious short-cut to the attainment of these 
objects is to preserve places of unusual 
natural attraction, such as public parks, 
and to replace disease-breeding hovels of 
squalid ugliness by squares or playgrounds. 
The last de¬ 
cade has seen 
much accom¬ 
plished in ac¬ 
tual results, 
and much more 
in the awaken¬ 
ing of the pub¬ 
lic to an appre¬ 
ciation of the 
utilitarian as 
well as esthetic 
advantages that 
are to be gain¬ 
ed. But the 
movement did 
not secure 
spontaneously 
the headway 
sufficient to achieve what has actually been 
done. During the entire century it was 
slowly gathering force. In Philadelphia, 
the first third of the nineteenth century 
saw the acquisition of the Fairmount Water¬ 
works, the nucleus of Fairmount Park. 
The Park grew slowly until, by the Act of 
1868, the appointment of the Board of Fair- 
mount Park Commissioners was authorized; 
and the great area of the Park was soon se¬ 
cured, giving Philadelphia a leadership that 
was held for twenty years and lost only as a 
result of the impetus given the movement 
throughout the country in 1893. 
In 1856 New York began the acquisition 
of Central Park, and finished it in 1867. 
The Buffalo Park Commission was appointed 
in 1870. Boston secured Franklin Park in 
the seventies. Other cities were obtaining 
parks in a desultory sort of way. Individ¬ 
uals were urging action and devising plans. 
But no system was officially adopted, no 
well-thought-out scheme of civic adornment. 
For two-thirds of a century the City of Wash¬ 
ington tried to forget as much as possible of 
its original plan and grew as the surveyors 
found easiest. Then, in the seventies, came 
Boss Shepard, 
who laid out 
the northern 
and northwest¬ 
ern section so 
that it is now 
the most beau¬ 
tiful quarter of 
any city in this 
cou ntry, — but 
Boss Shepard 
was put out of 
the town be¬ 
cause thereof. 
Elsewhere 
spasmodic ef¬ 
forts were made 
but there was 
no continuous 
kf. - 
A VIEW ON DELAWARE AVENUE 
The Principal Residential Street of Buffalo and a Parkway in all but name 
95 
