Preservation Buffalo Niagara is recognizing outstanding preservation projects and those contributing to preservation efforts at its annual awards ceremony May 31, 11:30 AM at Kleinhans Music Hall. Buffalo Rising is profiling this year’s winners leading up to the event. The Days Park Block Club along with the Allentown Association and the Buffalo Olmsted Park Conservancy are being recognized for their stewardship of Days Park.
Since 1987, the Days Park Block Club has transformed the park and the community from a barren, almost treeless field surrounded by dilapidated, vacant housing to a restored green space welcoming both visitors and a new generation of families as homeowners. The extraordinary acts of ordinary people shepherd private, public and historical resources to return Days Park to its legacy as an urban oasis.
In 1887, when Frederick Law Olmsted returned to create additional parks for the city of Buffalo, where he built the first park system in the nation, he was asked by the Buffalo Parks Commission to look at tiny Days Park. Days Park was one of Buffalo’s first public parks, donated as perpetual parkland by its namesake, Thomas Day, in 1859.
Days Park is located in the Allentown National Historic District. From the 1850’s until the Great Depression, Days Park was a beautiful and welcoming greenspace, featured on 19th century postcards. Unfortunately, as the urban landscape changed in the mid-20th century, so did the park, losing its trees, its families and finally, its sense of refuge.
It is the extraordinary acts of ordinary people that rescued Days Park, beginning with Warren Day Ferris, the donor’s descendant, who sued and won to keep the space whole in 1957. A decade later, David Urgo, a college student, convinced a farmer to donate 60 wild oak trees, and the City of Buffalo Parks Department to plant them. Thirty of those trees survived into 1987, when the Days Park Block Club began to restore the park and the surrounding homes.
During the next decade, the block club would raise funds by selling baked goods, plants and t-shirts, and through government and private support. The block club would insist that the city enforce housing codes and provide better police protection.
In 2000, Frederick Law Olmsted’s designs were rediscovered and Days Park reclaimed its heritage. What was a barren, neglected crime-ridden field fronting vacant, boarded houses is now a popular greenspace welcoming families, school picnics, kickball games and visitors to the Allentown Art Festival. Housing values have risen more than 600% (Business First, 2003) and more than $3.4 million has been invested in the park and the surrounding neighborhood.
The Days Park Block Club is one of the oldest, continuing block clubs in the city, first formed in 1987. It was one of the first community groups to actively speak out on sentencing in the City of Buffalo’s Housing Court and had landlords fined, tossed in jail or persuaded to sell their derelict properties.
Restoration includes gardens, recreating the Olmsted design for the berm at the west end of the park, dozens more trees and the installation of a Victorian era fountain, surrounded by a fence, as pictured in postcards from the early 1900’s. The fountain was silenced in 2010, when the fence was hit by a car. As part of its ongoing stewardship, the Days Park Block Club worked with the Buffalo Olmsted Parks Conservancy and Councilmember David Franczyk to replace the fence with a custom built wrought iron replica of the 19th century original. This past summer, the Buffalo Olmsted Parks Conservancy planted 50 native shrub roses around the fountain.
The successful stewardship of Days Park illustrates the economic value of beautiful, safe and well-maintained parkland. When the Buffalo Board of Education vacated Buffalo Public School #36, located on Days Park, the sale by the City of Buffalo resulted in two determined buyers for the vacant property.
The neighborhood is delighted that the Elmwood Village Charter School opened this past September in the building, purchasing the school and investing more than $2.4 million. The restoration of Olmsted’s historic design has also restored the legacy of a thriving school on Days Park, and added a new partner for the stewardship of the historic landscape in the 21st century…well, actually 300 partners, ages 5 to 13.
The restoration of Days Park represents stewardship at its very best; creating a legacy of caring through building partnerships, advocacy and commitment.