The Birth of Rochester’s Parks: Many Advocates, Different Priorities
by: Katie Eggers Comeau
What is a park? How should it be used? Not everyone agrees today, and the same was true when the Rochester park system was created in the late nineteenth century. Leaders who advocated for the establishment of the city’s ambitious park system had different visions of what they were creating, and within the first few decades after the parks were designed, a plethora of new ideas arose about how parks should function in a democratic society.
The topic of how Indigenous Americans and the white settlers who displaced them viewed and used the landscapes that now make up the Rochester park system is important - but this article will focus more narrowly on the time period when the Rochester municipal park system we know today came to be, from its origins in the 1880s through its heyday in the early twentieth century.
Popular advocacy for creating a municipal park system in Rochester arose in the second half of the nineteenth century from multiple sources, representing two main sets of priorities. On the one hand, humanitarians, philanthropists, public health advocates, and outdoor enthusiasts raised awareness of the need for extensive public spaces for the benefit of society. For example, Dr. Edward Mott Moore, a local physician, was convinced that outdoor recreation offered immense benefits; his family was one of the first in Rochester to spend summers at Lake Ontario. Bishop Bernard McQuaid, first bishop of the Catholic Diocese of Rochester, was involved in humanitarian causes, most notably education, and favored providing public facilities for sports.
On the other hand, business leaders, large landowners, and government figures saw the creation of parks primarily as an investment that would increase property values and attract wealthy residents. Parks would expand the city’s tax base while also enriching investors in land and transportation systems – wealthy, well-connected white men with multiple business interests and political power. George W. Elliott, a member of the Common Council (precursor to today’s City Council), was a leader among a group of businessmen who favored reducing the city's debt burdens by developing land at its outskirts, thereby increasing the tax rolls. As chairman of the Common Council’s parks committee, he proposed developing a system of parks linked by a parkway, seeing both parks and parkways as enhancements that would raise property values. After losing two children to cholera, Elliott also supported the creation of parks for their health benefits, particularly in giving children access to places with fresh air. Nurserymen George Ellwanger and Patrick Barry similarly had multiple reasons for supporting park development, among them the fact that they were transitioning their horticultural business into a real estate development company. They subdivided portions of their nursery grounds into residential neighborhoods and viewed public parks as an amenity that would raise property values. Their other business interests included streetcars, which also stood to profit from the development of parks accessible via trolley.
In 1883, Ellwanger and Barry offered to donate part of their nursery grounds, surrounding Mt. Hope Reservoir, to the City, on the condition that it be developed as a public park. It took four years for the Common Council to accept the donation, as some members opposed spending any public funds on park creation. Faced with unrelenting public pressure, the Council finally voted to accept the donation in 1887. In 1888, having been lobbied by Rochester park advocates, the New York State Legislature created an independent Board of Park Commissioners charged with financing and creating Rochester’s park system. The Commission selected Frederick Law Olmsted, Senior, who had designed Buffalo’s sophisticated network of large parks and parkways, to design a park system for Rochester. By the 1880s Olmsted was over three decades into his legendary career as a landscape architect, and had designed hundreds of public parks, private estates, campuses, and residential subdivisions.
Olmsted’s design for a system of large parks, each evoking a different landscape theme or style, linked by fashionable, tree-lined parkways with grassy medians, appeal to all of the park advocates, whether their primary interests were humanitarian or economic: protection of the river for its scenic and recreational benefits, provision of outdoor space and fresh air for passive recreation, and creation of desirable amenities that would attract development of expensive houses and encourage streetcar ridership. Economic and humanitarian motivations for park creation converged in the creation of the system. As the system developed over the next few decades, these interests continued to be both in tension and cooperation.
The parks were always open to all, in keeping with Olmsted’s view that parks are to be enjoyed by people of all walks of life. By serving one of their intended functions in promoting the construction of expensive housing, however, they were an early indicator of an emerging pattern in Rochester’s housing market in which U.S.-born white families lived in the newest, most expensive housing with the most amenities, while immigrant and African American families were only able to live in neighborhoods near the center of the city where housing was old and increasingly crowded. This pattern intensified during the early twentieth century, as practices like exclusive zoning, restrictive covenants, and redlining contributed to segregation throughout the Rochester area. (The book The Color of Law, by Richard Rothstein, is an excellent source for information about these practices on a national scale; a 2020 report by the City Roots Community Land Trust and Yale Environmental Protection Clinic, Confronting Racial Covenants, documented their use in Rochester and Monroe County.)
While parks were attracting middle- and upper-middle-class housing development, living up to the hopes of those who saw parks primarily as investments in the local economy, they were also facing pressure to serve a new set of social goals that Olmsted had not anticipated. Olmsted had designed Rochester’s parks primarily as “pleasure ground” landscapes, meant for passive recreation such as walking and riding, but they were built during an era when pleasure grounds were falling out of fashion in favor of new concepts of park design and usage, aligned with the Progressive Era. The Progressive-Era “Reform Park” movement emphasized active recreation, particularly organized activities intended to teach children and adults (especially those from low-income and immigrant backgrounds) what reformers perceived as “middle-class values” such as patriotism, productivity, hygiene, cultural education, and cooperation.
As middle-class and upper-middle-class residents enjoyed more leisure time, they formed clubs and associations organized around activities like boat racing, golf, baseball, and swimming, and lobbied the Park Commission to allow them to build private or semi-private facilities for their groups on public parkland. Olmsted adamantly opposed any privatization of public parkland, including construction of facilities in public parks that would only be accessible to paying customers or club members, but his philosophy was not shared by the powerful Rochesterians who saw the scenic riverfront at Genesee Valley Park as the perfect spot for their private boathouses.
As the Rochester Park Commission carried out the construction of Olmsted’s designs, they corresponded regularly with Olmsted, then, after his retirement, with his son and stepson who carried on the firm. They asked for advice on how best to accommodate new facilities like playgrounds, running tracks, swimming holes, or private boathouses. Olmsted, Senior, did his best to dissuade such new introductions; the younger Olmsteds often found themselves having to accommodate these facilities as best they could while respecting the original design. On more than one occasion, a member of the firm was startled to find an intrusive new structure in the park during a scheduled visit.
The Olmsteds continued to act as consultants to the Park Commission into the mid-1910s, most notably providing their guidance on how best to mitigate the damage to Genesee Valley Park when the Barge Canal bisected it. By then, the city had added two more large parks (Cobb’s Hill Park and Durand-Eastman Park) and a number of smaller parks and squares to the system, so that while the distribution of parks was never truly equitable, Rochesterians had opportunities to enjoy parks and playgrounds in most neighborhoods, not only those on the city’s outskirts.
Today, we can hardly imagine Rochester without the ambitious network of world-class parks that shaped the city’s growth in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Likewise, the visionary park leaders whose humanitarian and economic goals converged to create the system could not have imagined the varied, often conflicting, priorities that would arise as the parks developed from drawings to reality, resulting in a system that embodies the complexity of urban life and evolving social needs.
*Blog image from the collection of the Rochester Public Library Local History & Genealogy Division.