The Parkway: Features

The Parkway, particularly its earliest first half mile, from Genesee Street to the Parkway, is home to a number of monuments, the first of which, the Swan Memorial Fountain, was erected in 1910.

Municipal tennis courts are located along the Parkway, just east of Oneida Street, as is a small playground on the west side of the courts. The Parkway Recreation Center is located to the east of the courts. Heading uphill and to the east from the Recreation Center are the Utica Zoo (1914) and the Valley View Golf Course, which was opened 1925 and was then redesigned and expanded in 1938 by the WPA according to a plan devised by the famous American golf course designer Robert Trent Jones.

Two Olmsted-designed neighborhoods are located along the eastern half of the Parkway, beginning just past Mohawk Street. They consist of two originally separate real estate development projects—Brookside Park and Sherman Gardens—that now seamlessly appear as one neighborhood. These neighborhoods were developed by the local Tilden Real Estate Company, owned by local real estate developer Harry Roberts according to designs created by Olmsted Brothers.

The Sherman Gardens, one of two neighborhoods along Parkway East that were designed by Olmsted Brothers.

A tree-lined stretch of Parkway East, toward the end of what was originally Olmsted’s Sherman Gardens development.

An Olmsted sketch for a landscape design of an individual home in Utica.

The first of these developments was known as Brookside Park, and it was created in 1913. It stretches from just east of Mohawk Street, along the north side of the Parkway to Madison Avenue and southward down to Van Buren Street; almost all the streets in this development were named for early American presidents (Madison, Monroe, Harrison, Tyler, and Van Buren—interestingly, Jackson was omitted, and in place of his name there is a street now named DePeyster). Brookside Park—parks of this sort were common features of Olmsted neighborhood design—is still clearly visible as you drive down the Parkway, but the eponymous brook has disappeared under the park’s lawn, having been consigned to an underground culvert shortly after the launch of this project.

The other adjacent, larger development, Sherman Gardens, was planned to extend along the northern and southern sides of the Parkway, down past Sherman Drive, and it would have included the site of today’s Mohawk Valley Community College. It also stretches northward down to the starting point of Sherman Drive at Mohawk Street and today follows the arc of that street up to its Parkway intersection and continues into the hills, which contain a number of homes whose landscaping was done on special contract by Olmsted Brothers in the 1920s and 1930s. The bulk of Sherman Gardens was eventually developed as planned by Olmsted, although like Utica’s Ridgewood neighborhood, which was also designed by Olmsted Brothers, homes were not built on many lots in Sherman Gardens until after the Depression and Second World War. Nevertheless, this neighborhood contains three more small, meadow-like parks, two along the northwestern part of Sherman Drive and a smaller one on Armory Drive, across from Thomas r. Proctor High School, that were part of the original Olmsted design.

Payne Hall at Mohawk Valley Community College.

Other features of the Parkway include the main campus of Mohawk Valley Community College, founded in 1946 as the New York State Institute of Applied Arts & Sciences in Utica, the first community college established in the State New York State in response to the great expansion of educational opportunity under the 1944 federal legislation known as the “GI Bill,” The current campus was opened in 1960, and it was designed by Edward Durell Stone (1902-78), the architect who more famously co-designed Radio City Music Hall and designed the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan, the campus of the State University of New York at Albany, the National Geographic Society Museum and the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, and the campus of Harvey Mudd College in California, among many other prominent creations in the United States and abroad.

Also noteworthy is the turreted, fortress-like New York State Armory (1930), designed by William E. Haugaard (1889-1948), who was also the architect of the Alfred E. Smith State Office Building in Albany and Attica Prison, among other structures. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

The Buckley Pool, located across the street, in T.R. Proctor Park, was built during the 1930s by the WPA and is one of two such Depression-era municipal pools in Utica (the other is in another Proctor-built park, Addison Miller, in the city’s west side).

The New York State Armory, as it appeared in the 1940s. It retains this appearance to this day.

The Buckley Pool, shortly after its construction by the WPA in 1938.