Ellicott stated that his plan of the Village of New Amsterdam was “designed by nature for the grand emporium of the western world.” It set the commercial and cultural character of the village and later of the Elmwood District, too. Radial streets sprang from its central Public Square, which was surrounded by inner lots in a dense orthogonal grid and spacious outer farm lots between the far-reaching radial streets. 

The Mile Reservation line formed the eastern border of Ellicott’s village and of the future Elmwood District. His plan’s northern boundary is now North Street, beyond which was forest. It would become the southern border of the future district. In 1849, Forest Lawn Cemetery would both form the eastern frame of the future district and help define the character of Frederick Law Olmsted’s future park lands there. Olmsted would draw on Ellicott’s plan for the form of what would become the Elmwood District as the frame was filled in. The northern frame of the future district was and is Scajaquada Creek.

The early settlement of the village was by fur trader-interpreters and easterners who become entrepreneurs and innovators. They caused Buffalo to be the western terminus for the Erie Canal, an artificial river whose flow over the next two generations of commodities, commerce and people would burst the boundaries of Ellicott’s village and spill north into formidable wilderness. Forest gave way to farms that grew the basics to feed a population that grew wealthy enough over time to afford fruit trees and flowers. As farmland became nurseries, the commercial and aesthetic cultivation of the future Elmwood District was underway. It was designated, along with Black Rock, the 11th Ward during the expansion of Ellicott’s 1804 village, to become the sprawling City of Buffalo in 1853.

The first New York State census to record the expanded City of Buffalo, in 1855, provides a great deal of information on the 11th Ward just before the Civil War and Olmsted’s arrival in 1868:

• Total ward acreage: 2,778 acres. About 10 percent of the city’s 25,343 acres.
• Total ward population: 3,314. About 4.5 percent of the city’s 74,214 residents.
• 1,431 ward residents were born in New York State; 281 outside of the state; and 1,600 in another country, mostly England, Ireland, Germany and Canada.
• 657 families resided in the ward.
• There were 596 buildings, including two churches, three schools, seven grocery stores, two hotels and five retail stores.
• They shared the ward with 252 cows, 229 horses, 140 hogs, and 57 pigs under six months of age. 

Having roughly one animal per family suggests that agriculture was still important during this mid-century transition from Ellicott-era farm lots to nationally significant villas being constructed in the future Elmwood District.

Only one large, open, public space served the city’s surging population. Forest Lawn Cemetery opened in 1849 and was quickly overcrowded with visitors. Small, private gardens and groves helped. But civic leaders recognized the “poverty of rural recreation” and sought a plan “by which so beautiful and capacious a park might be secured for the recreation of all inhabitants…. a public park, free for all.” Their thinking reflected a prevailing moral sense among the city’s affluent that their wealth was to be used for a larger common good to help elevate Buffalo to the status of an important American city and to give respite and refreshment to their workers. As did Ellicott, they desired to make a city of such aspirational potential that it would be a place in which to invest and to live well.

So, Buffalo’s civic leaders invited Frederick Law Olmsted and his partner Calvert Vaux to design a park that would rival their recent effort in New York City—Central Park. It would be a place where “men, women and children should have some place of recreation and refuge from the toil and drudgery of the office, the workshop, the factory and the nursery…to do something to promote the health and enjoyment of the present generation…that Buffalo should have a Public Park, and one that shall be adequate to the present and prospective wants of its population…a Park calculated to meet the wants of the people and do credit to the city.”

After accepting their invitation and “making a cursory examination” of the city and its suburbs, Olmsted envisioned even more. On August 25, 1868, he presented to a gathering of some 70 leaders his vision for three parks linked by parkways, at the head of which would be a 400-acre central park with Scajaquada Creek threading through it. Access from east and west population nodes would be via broad parkways, whose juncture would be a modest central circle from which extended north a grand boulevard to The Park, all in Buffalo’s mostly vacant Eleventh Ward, where the land was inexpensive. That evening, attendees resolved that a committee of them would procure from Olmsted “a more detailed plan of a Park for Buffalo” and began forming themselves into the Buffalo Park Commissioners.

Five weeks later, Olmsted described his plan in a 17-page report. The Eleventh Ward was to have three, half-mile long parkways radiating from a central circle he called Soldiers Place, all set within the orthogonal grid of the few existing roads, making the Eleventh Ward the grand forecourt to The Park. This grid and radial scheme that echoed Ellicott’s plan became the armature around which the Eleventh Ward grew at a furious pace over the next generation to become the Elmwood District. 

Buffalo’s growing population, increasing wealth, changing work and family culture were key factors in making this possible, as was the introduction of streetcars. The people who moved into the Elmwood District led modern lives. Husbands commuted to work downtown, likely to an office, and wives maintained a mini-estate of house, garden and part- or full-time staff. No car was needed. Wives could walk each day to shops along Elmwood Avenue that served household needs. Husbands took the streetcar to work, traveling for a nickel about two miles in 15 minutes. By contrast, their grandfathers or fathers would have walked about three quarters of a mile in 15 minutes between home and work, provided they did not live and work in the same building. Streetcars made Buffalo’s modern streetcar suburb possible.

The Elmwood District grew, attracting cultural, commercial, educational, religious and public services that elevated the quality of life to a level it would not attain again for more than 100 years. In 1902, an article in the Greater Buffalo journal, titled “The New Elmwood District,” reported: “Every city has its favorite residence district. The people of Buffalo have decided, and not without good reasons, that their favorite district is that called the Elmwood.” The publication Commerce echoed that sentiment in 1903, with a nod to Olmsted: “Nature and man seem to have worked harmoniously in the creation of what is known as Buffalo’s ‘Elmwood District’.”

In 1901, Mary Bronson Hartt, an 1890 graduate of the Buffalo Seminary and a nationally prominent writer, predicted in the Buffalo Courier what the impact of the Pan-American Exposition’s location across Scajaquada Creek from the Elmwood District would be: “Incomparably the finest legacy of the experience will be an awakened civic consciousness. The rush and vigor of a thoroughly lively town are going to leave behind them a divine discontent with the old order of things. And that means civic regeneration.” Yet it would take more than three generations for that civic regeneration to take hold in the district. 

President William McKinley was shot at the Pan-American Exposition and died in an Elmwood District residence. Many of the Buffalo business leaders who had made the city great enough to attract the exposition began to suffer business setbacks and many district estates were sub-divided following the ruin of their owners during the Great Depression. Significant new investment and new construction would all but cease in the district for decades. Single-family houses were subdivided into apartments, especially during World War II and the Korean Conflict, to accommodate workers for the defense plants located to the north. Many homeowners needed the extra income.

The nearly all-white Elmwood District population was spared the dreaded “C-Declining” and “D-Hazardous” designations of the “redline maps” of the 1930s that directed federal mortgage support, effectively financing white flight from the city by subsidizing new housing and infrastructure in the automobile suburbs. This racist approach impacted everyone. The descendants of many original district residents—and their religious congregations—abandoned the area. 

In 1948, Elmwood Avenue, which had been sized for pedestrian, horse-powered and then streetcar transportation, was widened to accommodate automobiles. Tree-lined sidewalks gave way to parking spaces for shoppers. Buildings were demolished for parking lots, leaving a gap-toothed streetscape. State Route 198, the Scajaquada Expressway, severed the Elmwood District from The Park, its reason for being. Scajaquada Creek was so polluted, it was deemed dangerous.

Buffalo’s industrial might rusted. National market forces and the new St. Lawrence Seaway by-passed the place that had been a continental center point that created the wealth of business leaders who attracted Olmsted and made the Elmwood District a place worth living in. 

Then, grassroots leadership rallied around that Olmsted legacy to reverse the decline of the Elmwood District. 

Joan Bozer led the forming of the Buffalo Friends of Olmsted to regenerate Delaware and other parks. Michael Attardo led the formation of Forever Elmwood to regenerate Elmwood Avenue’s retail and restaurant culture. Shakespeare in Delaware Park and The Lexington Co-op brought nourishing culture and food to the district. Buffalo State College began progressive childhood education and offered cultural events, often in collaboration with the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. Elmwood District residents formed the Landmark Society of the Niagara Frontier to save historic buildings. Dan Sack and others lit up Elmwood Avenue with neon murals. Tony Bannon and others made the Burchfield Penney Art Center nationally significant and locally relevant.

Two additional district residents and Buffalo business leaders stepped up. William M. E. Clarkson led efforts to catalog Buffalo’s historic masterpieces in Buffalo Architecture: A Guide, that showed the magnificence of so many places taken for granted, and, with his brother Max, founded the Clarkson Center, a human resources center. Stanford Lipsey initiated a cultural enterprise, The Buffalo News Summer Jazz Series at the Albright-Knox, as well as a commercial enterprise, the Richardson Center Corporation. This began the adaptive re-use and historic rehabilitation of the massive former Buffalo Asylum through a public-private partnership with the State that had not been seen since the Buffalo Park Commissioners and the City of Buffalo partnered to design and construct Olmsted’s parks and parkways system in 1868.

The result of this “divine discontent with the old order of things…that means civic regeneration” expected by Ms. Hartt in 1901? In 2007, the American Planning Association designated the Elmwood District, branded as the Elmwood Village, as one of the nation's 10 great neighborhoods. Yet, this story continues. The cooperating values of commerce and culture that created the Elmwood District have been clashing there too often recently. A new zoning ordinance and the economics of local commercial investment favor bland, bulk buildings over investment in caring for the fine-grained historic buildings that distinguish the district, nationally.

The Elmwood District needs more investment, a more diverse population and an awakened civic consciousness to grow the rush and vigor of a thoroughly lively city to stay alive and well and relevant, lest it return to its moribund decades. But its businesses cannot thrive if their only customers are residents. Where are outsiders going to park?  Current government planning, zoning and historic preservation regulatory processes are not attracting the new investment needed to retain the Elmwood District’s character and heritage. There must be a better way to continue to grow the district, to keep its competitive edge as a place in which everyone can live well.

Trinity Episcopal Church’s Rev. Matt Lincoln told his congregation, “We are stewards of a sacred place.” These same words suggest the obligation to care for the Elmwood District with a curatorial, conservationist approach by creating an Elmwood District Conservancy. This approach, used by Buffalo’s Medical Campus, Buffalo Place, the Larkinville and Silo City districts—as well as the Buffalo Olmsted Parks Conservancy city-wide—fits the Elmwood District today. The Chautauqua Institution and its Chautauqua Grounds may be the best example most familiar to everyone. The idea is to think like Olmsted: gracefully balance the commercial and the cultural, renew rather than replace, bring an ecological approach to renewing the Elmwood District as an everyday, living heritage landscape. It’s not easy, but it is feasible.

In August 2022, as we commemorate Olmsted’s arrival to Buffalo in August 1868, we can think of the rise, decline and renewal of the Elmwood District as a story in which we can write the next chapter. The Elmwood District, and other districts across Western New York, could echo the final words of Olmsted’s 1868 report: “On reviewing all the circumstances, it cannot be doubted that they present an opportunity of [renewing a place] at comparatively moderate cost, which, when gradually improved, as from year to year may be expedient, will ultimately be of inestimable value to your city.”