By Doug Draper
More than 150 Buffalo area residents braved icy rain this past weekend to rally for a not-for-profit community organization continuing to maintain and preserve that city’s historic Olmsted Park system.
Conservancy leader David Colligan addresses supporters at Buffalo rally. Photo by Doug Draper
Those who rallied this past Sunday, Dec. 13 at Martin Luther King Jr. Park – one of several parks, including Delaware Park, boulevards and circles that make up the city’s 1,200 acres of Olmsted parklands – want to see the Buffalo Olmsted Parks Conservancy continue managing the lands. They are convinced the Conservancy can do a better job of managing them than the city, which is poised to take back control of them in this coming January.
“The (Olmsted) parks are not for the politicians. They are for the people,” said one of the conservancy’s leaders, David Colligan, during the rally. “We believe we have earned the right to maintain the parks and restore them.”
The Olmsted Parks Conservancy which has its own history going back to the late 1970s as the Friends of the Olmsted Parks, was hired by Erie County more than five years ago to look after the parks when the county too over the park system from the city. But the county has since expressed its desire to return control to the city and the conservancy’s continued involvement remains up in the air even though at least some city residents, including those attending the rally, believe the conservancy would do a better job of caring for the parks than the city.
Some residents have expressed concern that the city doesn’t have the money or enthusiasm to look after the parks as well as the conservancy has with its army of financial supporters and volunteers. Colligan told reporters toward the end of the rally that the conservancy managed to raise about $8 million for the parks over the past five years and is poised to raise much more in the future.
According to a petition the conservancy is urging people to sign in support of its efforts to convince Buffalo’s city council to allow it to continue maintaining and enhancing the Olmsted parks, it says the funds it has raised have been spent on pathways, trails, pools and numerous other restoration and improvement projects for the parks.
Those interested in adding their name to the petition can access it online at http://www.petitiononline.com/BPOC/petition.html, and can learn more about the conservancy by visiting www.buffaloolmstedparks.org.
Buffalo’s Olmsted Parks go back to the late 1800s and are the work of America’s pioneering landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted who launched his career in the field with the design of Central Park in New York City in the mid 1800s.
Olmsted has also left his stamp on other lands in the greater Niagara area, including the plans for the Goal Island parklands in Niagara Falls, N.Y. and Montebello Park in St. Catharines.
