| Buffalo
has an extraordinary legacy of six major parks designed by Frederick Law Olmsted's
landscape architectural firm during the 19th century. While the parks that his
firm designed are beautiful, it is the parkways which linked his first three Buffalo
parks that made the parkway system here the first of its kind in America. When
Olmsted designed Buffalo's parkway system in 1868 he envisioned broad expansive
thoroughfares planted with double rows of American Elms to link his parks. Where
the parkways had strategically placed junctures, he designed spacious circles
of green that would serve as a link between Buffalo's original three parks (The
Front, The Parade, and The Park) and their connecting parkways. The
first of these circles was known as the North Street Circle (or simply the Circle)
at the junction of Porter Avenue, Richmond Avenue, North Street, Pennsylvania
Street and Wadsworth Street. Olmsted
wrote in 1868 that a ride down one of the parkways he designed would be "in the
midst of a scene of sylvan beauty, and with the sounds and sites of the ordinary
town business, if not wholly shut out, removed to some distance and placed in
obscurity." Olmsted stated that his parkways would "thus be more park-like than
town-like." | 
