This vintage postcard shows Delaware Park in Buffalo, New York in 1900 complete with bandstand, people strolling along the lake shore, and boaters enjoying the summer day. This postcard is a great snapshot of Victorian life in Buffalo.
Frederick Law Olmsted designed and created an interconnected park system in Buffalo, New York in the early 1900s of which Delaware Park is one. These parks are now considered historic sites and are protected as such.
Delaware Park is one of the first in this series of parks around Buffalo and consists of three-hundred-fifty acres of meadow, forest and lake alongside the famous Delaware Avenue, which in the year 1900 was lined with the mansions of Buffalo’s most elite and wealthy citizens.
Originally, outside the front doors of the Parkside Lodge in Delaware Park was a Quarry Garden created from an actual quarry on that site. The city of buffalo used this quarry to remove large amounts of stone for most of the structures in the parks as well as others around the city. In designing Delaware Park Olmsted transformed this working quarry into a beautiful quarry garden complete with reflective pools, stone arch bridges, and a number of trees and shrubs to accent the natural stone walls. This quarry garden was later lost and filled in due to a highway being built nearby. Today, groups in Buffalo are committed to unearthing it and re-establishing the Quarry Garden in Delaware Park to its original grandeur.
Except for the clothing, this vintage postcard of Delaware Park, may be a summer day today in Buffalo, as people still flock to the park for band concerts, picnics, walking, rowing on the lake, and other summer time events. Delaware Park was a great resource for the people of Buffalo in 1900 and still is today.
This image of Delaware Park during summer from the early 1900s is also part of our Vintage Buffalo, NY Wall Calendar created from this and other vintage postcards of Buffalo.