The Best Planned City in the World - Table of Contents
Press releases and reviews - The Best Planned City in the World
By Francis R. Kowsky
Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 2013
| It's hard to imagine the world’s major cities without their public
parks. The greatest examples, such as London’s Hyde Park, the
Tuileries Garden in Paris, and Central Park in New York City, are
defining aspects of the urban experience. It wasn’t always so, as Francis R. Kowsky shows in his new history, The Best Planned City in the World. Until the 1850s, the concept of a “pastoral environment in the heart of the city available to all classes of society” simply didn’t exist. The movement for healthy verdant spaces open to all citizens required visionary men. In 1868 two of them, Fredrick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, set their sights on Buffalo, New York. Their goal: to create nothing less than the most extensive park system in the world. - 2013 press release
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| 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 carefully
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 Centennial Exposition in
Philadelphia, Olmsted declared Buffalo the best planned city, as to
streets, public places, and grounds, in the United States, if not in
the world. Olmsted and Vaux dissolved their historic partnership in 1872, but Olmsted continued his association with the Queen City of the Lakes, designing additional parks and laying out important sites within the growing metropolis. When Niagara Falls was threatened by industrial development, he led a campaign to protect the site and in 1885 succeeded in persuading New York to create the Niagara Reservation, the present Niagara Falls State Park. Two years later, Olmsted and Vaux teamed up again, this time to create a plan for the area around the Falls, a project the two grand masters regarded as the most difficult problem in landscape architecture to do justice to. 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 a cohesive expression of the visionary landscape and planning principles that Olmsted and Vaux pioneered. - 2013 press release
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| But what stands out, in reading
the history of the parks, is a thing I tend to romanticize about the
post-Civil War era in US history. The thing that made an Olmsted (see
also Central Park in NYC) possible. And that is the palpable, widely
shared idea that Americans were building a civilization in its cities,
and it was a civilization that would be publicly shared by everybody. Okay, go ahead, lecture me about elitism and robber barrons and all the rest. I’ll listen, and probably agree with most of what you have to say. And probably all the late 19th century talk about civilization was self-serving and plenty convenient for the leading citizens of the city, and the nation. Stipulated. But it’s also pretty clear that they believed it. And that belief resulted in the building of an exquisite and breathtaking network of greenspace, threaded though the city, and enjoyed to this day. Which brings us to this day. We still have elites, and the robber barrons are back. But what do we have now that is comparable to this belief in building a civilization? - Tom Toles, A Pastoral Reverie Washington Post, July 22, 2013 (online July 2013)
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