American Bungalow Magazine - The Magazine published in the interest of preserving and restoring the modest American 20th Century Home, the Bungalow, and the rich lifestyle that it affords.

By Douglas J. Forsyth

Can great architecture, design, and craftsmanship stabilize a neighborhood during a long economic downturn, and eventually contribute to its revitalization? The Parkside neighborhood in Buffalo, New York suggests that they can. The neighborhood owes its origins to the park system designed for the city by Frederick Law Olmsted, beginning in 1868. Olmsted was already renowned for his work on Central Park, in Manhattan, and Prospect Park, in Brooklyn, at the time, but his proposal for Buffalo represented his first effort to design a system of municipal parks, linked together by the broad roads he would later call parkways. By coincidence, Olmsted was working simultaneously on his first suburban residential community, Riverside, to the west of Chicago. For Riverside, Olmsted proposed curving avenues, to break the monotony of the grid characteristic of the city’s streets, along with generous lots, with ample room for trees. Olmsted was soon transferring aspects of his Illinois design to his work in Buffalo.i As early as 1872, there is a reference in a city report to a neighborhood called ‘the Parkside,’ which Olmsted intended as a border for what is today called Delaware Park, the centerpiece of his Buffalo park system. This report described it as: “a detached suburb adjoining the Park on the north and on the east, designed by private enterprise, so as to secure to it a permanent sylvan character distinct from the formal rectangular streets of the city proper…a district nearly three square miles in area, extensively planted, and guarded against any approach to dense building.ii” Elam Jewett, a prominent local landowner and newspaper publisher, laid out Jewett Parkway in 1874 as a broad avenue running from Main St., the principle north-south thoroughfare, to an entry to Olmsted’s park, dissecting the proposed neighborhood.

Parkside was still well beyond the perimeter of urban development in Buffalo at the time, but the explosive growth of the city, which had become a major distribution and manufacturing center, would soon change that. In 1883 the New York Central Beltline Railway opened two stations offering easy transportation downtown for residents of the future community, including one at the intersection of Jewett Parkway and Main St. In 1885 the Parkside Land Improvement Company was formed, to realize Olmsted’s vision. Olmsted’s original plan called for lots as large as 100’ x 100’. Jewett Parkway looks today the way the entire neighborhood was originally envisaged, with large homes on large lots. But sales were slow, and officials of the company soon asked Olmsted to redesign smaller streets, with smaller house lots, in the area surrounding Jewett Parkway. This created greater socio-economic diversity, and gave Parkside the substantial middle class population, which it retains today. Many of the photos which accompany this article feature houses built on smaller lots on these streets: Woodward Ave., Summit Ave., Crescent Ave., and Tillinghast Place.

To Olmsted, add Louis Comfort Tiffany, Joseph Lyman Silsbee, and a clutch of prominent local architects. Elam Jewett, a devout Episcopalian, instigated the construction of the Church of the Good Shepherd on the parkway bearing his name. In 1887 the contract went to Joseph Lyman Silsbee and James Herbert Marling. Silsbee was one of the first prominent American architects to be influenced by the English Arts and Crafts movement. He maintained partnerships in three cities in the late 19th century: Chicago, Buffalo and Syracuse. His practice was a significant incubator of the Prairie style and other strains of early 20th century modernism; Frank Lloyd Wright, George Grant Elmslie, George Maher, and Irving Gill passed through his studios at one time or another. Silsbee pulled out of his partnership with Marling shortly after the firm began work on Jewett’s church. By the time it was consecrated in 1888, Marling had formed a new partnership with Herbert C. Burdett, an early assistant in the office of H. H. Richardson. The exterior of the church clearly references the Richardsonian style, while the interior suggests the English Arts and Crafts movement. Jewett commissioned Tiffany to create a splendid cycle of windows, some of which are captured in the accompanying photos by Alexander Vertikoff. Around the Church of the Good Shepherd rose a group of houses by prominent local architects, including William Sidney Wicks and his partner Edward B. Green, the partnership of August Carl Esenwein and James A. Johnson, and Henry L. Spann, in styles mixing historicism with ideas drawn from the English Arts and Crafts movement.

Among the most intriguing structures from this early phase of residential construction in Parkside is the Knowlton Mixer house, built in 1901, on Tillinghast Pl. Mixer was co-owner of a prominent lumber company, and the house is lavishly furnished in fine wood. The designer was Mixer’s wife, Jessie May Anthony Mixer (born April 1869), a woman with no formal higher education, but with a lively mind and a strong sense of self-empowerment. Jessie’s father was a prominent businessman and freemason; she was a relative also of the women’s suffrage advocate, Susan B. Anthony. Jessie Mixer painted, and designed theater sets and costumes. In 1907 she dramatized a work by English poet W. Graham Robertson titled “A Masque of May Morning” and directed a production of it by the Girls Friendly Society of St. Andrew’s Church. She helped the painter Alice B. Muzzy execute a cycle of murals on the walls of the Studio Club in 1906. She was vice-president of the Society of Artists in Buffalo repeatedly at the beginning of the 20th century. She was also prominent among the organizers of a conference on the Arts and Crafts movement in Buffalo in April 1900, at which the renowned local furniture maker Charles Rohlfs, among others, spoke. In March 1910, when May Morris, the daughter of William Morris, visited Buffalo, Jessie May Mixer organized a dinner in her honor. The Mixers were also public supporters of women’s suffrage, among the sponsors of a Buffalo visit by nationally and internationally known advocates of women’s suffrage in October 1915, including Ethel Annikin, the wife of the prominent British Labour Party politician, and future Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Snowden, and Edmund Keating, a US Congressman (D-CO).iii

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