The Best Planned City in the World

Winner, J. B. Jackson Book Prize from the Foundation for Landscape StudiesThis award-winning book is the definitive account of the creation and development of the country's first urban park system.Beginning in 1868, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux created a series of parks and parkways for Buffalo, New York, that drew national and international attention. The improvements augmented the city's original plan with urban design features inspired by Second Empire Paris, including the first system of “parkways” to grace an American city. Displaying the plan at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, Olm-sted declared Buffalo “the best planned city, as to streets, public places, and grounds, in the United States, if not in the world.”In this book Francis R. Kowsky illuminates this remarkable constellation of projects. Utilizing original plans, drawings, photographs, and copious numbers of reports and letters, he brings new perspective to this vast undertaking, analyzing it as an expression of the visionary landscape and planning principles that Olmsted and Vaux pioneered. “In 1868, an invitation was made to Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, the men who had designed Central Park, to come upstate and pass their judgements on the opportunity for Buffalo to demonstrate its civic arrival with a grand new park. This is the story that Francis Kowsky tells, and he does so virtually to perfection.” —Landscape Journal“Kowsky reminds us that parks are not open spaces awaiting development, and that people need trees, meadows, expanses of water, and walking paths, and biking trails. . . . [His} masterful book makes the visionary landscape and planning principles Olmsted and Vaux pioneered in Buffalo clear, with the hope that restoration efforts will once again allow it to become the best planned city in the world.” —Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide“In his magnificent new book, with its lucid prose and deft organization, Kowsky follows the evolution of Olmsted and Vaux's astonishing creations in Buffalo—those ‘landscapes of recreation, residence, memory, and healing,' as he so gracefully describes them. . . . An extraordinary variety and abundance of illustrations fill the book, including photographs new and old, maps, diagrams, paintings, and lithographs.” —Site/Lines