Park Background: In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, South Buffalo was growing rapidly. The area's residents found the city's prized parks remote and insufficient to serve their recreational needs and sought a new park to be located in the southern portion of the city. In 1887 Frederick Law Olmsted, the famous landscape architect, was commissioned by the city's Board of Parks Commissioners to prepare a design for a new park. His earlier design of a coordinated system of parks (which we now know as Delaware, Front, and Martin Luther King Parks) and an elaborate system of connecting parkways had given Buffalo America's first park system. Olmsted's initial proposal for a South Buffalo park projected a large water park on the shore of Lake Erie just south of what is now Tift Street and extending east to the railroad.
Olmsted's plan was rejected as being too costly, subject to damage by lake storms, and too remote from the residential area of South Buffalo. The following year the Park Commissioners began a search for another site in or near the city or adjacent West Seneca suitable for park use. One of the sites considered was a tract of land on the southwest side of Abbott Road which had formerly been the farm of the Hart family and which had been unsuccessfully been promoted as the site of a residential development. The site, one of three identified as suitable, was noted for its fine stand of shade trees. No single site of sufficient size to serve the area's needs could be located, and it was decided to build two parks instead of the large one originally intended.
In 1890, the 76 acre Hart farm site south of Cazenovia Street straddling Cazenovia Creek was purchased for park use, as was a site just south of what was then the city boundary which would become South Park. The name of "Cazenovia Park" was officially designated the following year. The name was chosen due to its relation to Cazenovia Creek, adjacent Cazenovia Street, and the never completed "Cazenovia Park" residential development.
This 'cache has been approved by the Buffalo Parks Department. Park background text used with permission. ©1996-2002 Stanton M. Broderick
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