Buffalo Olmsted Parks Conservancy

The Buffalo Olmsted Parks Conservancy, originally established as the Friends of Olmsted Parks in 1978, is the first nonprofit organization in the nation to manage and operate an entire historic urban park system that consists of 850 acres of beautifully designed parks, parkways and circles.

The Buffalo’s Olmsted System includes the popular urban green spaces: Cazenovia Park, Delaware Park, Front Park, Martin Luther King, Jr., Park, Riverside Park and South Park as well as their adjoining parkways and circles which weave throughout the city of Buffalo.

Our Olmsted Parks were designed by America’s first landscape architect, Frederick Law Olmsted in 1868; celebrating the sesquicentennial in 2018. Olmsted designed parks in nearly every major city in the country. However, his work in Buffalo – the first park and parkway system designed and built in the – is considered his very best.

Since the 2004 agreement with the City of Buffalo and Erie County, the Olmsted Parks Conservancy has retained full responsibility for the management and maintenance of these green spaces. Park maintenance including turf care, litter pickup and trash removal, graffiti clean-up, tree, shrub and flower plantings and pruning are managed year round by Olmsted staff and volunteers. In 2008, the Conservancy adopted the Plan for the 21st Century, the blueprint necessary to restore the parks to Olmsted’s original vision while expanding and completing the system as originally conceived, a “city within a park.”

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