Brookside was Utica’s first Olmsted-designed real estate development.
In May 1913, a group of real estate investors—Hugh R. Jones, Willis J. De Peyster Lynch, and John Seifert—announced that they had formed the Brookside Park Company and hired Olmsted Brothers to transform part of the Dr. J.H. Glass farm into a development of 219 building lots. The developers boasted that the creation of this neighborhood would entail planting 1000 trees, which was part of the “grading and ornamentation” as well as street design that they hired Olmsted to carry out. They also noted that it offered beautiful views of the Deerfield hills to the north (now obscured by the trees planted during and after the neighborhood’s development) and that it was only 500 feet from the east end of Roscoe Conkling Park, which had been opened to the public only 4 years before.
“Never in the history of Utica have such modern and up-to-date methods been employed in the improvement of property,” said an early advertisement. “It is now possible to live in a park, and yet be right in the heart of the city. The brook from which the place takes its name, will be terraced, and bordered with trees and shrubbery. Wide avenues, adorned with trees, run through to and join the new Parkway.”
As with Utica’s other early Olmsted-designed neighborhoods, a prominent selling point in the days before automobiles were ubiquitous was Brookside’s proximity of “car service,” which is to say the Mohawk Street trolley line. The real estate developers also openly guaranteed that “undesirables” would not be able to reside in this neighborhood at least partly because it would lack multifamily homes and therefore be inhabited by owner-occupiers only—a proposition far too expensive for immigrants and other working-class “undesirables”—in addition to lacking “stores, saloons, and other buildings detrimental to an ideal residential section.” People interested in buying building lots were contractually obligated to spend at least $4-5000 on building their new homes, which was 8-10 times what many textile workers earned. There were no covenants in the property deeds or suggestions in advertising for this or any other Olmsted neighborhood in Utica that directly promoted racial, ethnic, or religious discrimination—instead, the discrimination was predominantly socioeconomic, and secondarily it was, if anything, aimed at excluding recent immigrants, notably the southern Italians and Poles who comprised the bulk of Utica’s working class in those days (Utica was 99.5% white in those days).
Brookside covers an area that stretches from just east of Mohawk Street to Madison Avenue, along the newly-constructed Parkway on the south side and down to Van Buren Street, on the north end of the tract. Its streets are mostly named for early US Presidents—Madison, Monroe, Van Buren, and Harrison (interestingly, Andrew Jackson was omitted), plus two more not named for presidents. The first of these two streets was named De Peyster (the middle name of one of the developers) and the second named, fittingly, Brookside, which follows a curvilinear, northwesterly path through the neighborhood. James Street, which was extended 1000 feet to the east from Mohawk Street when Brookside was created, serves as the neighborhood’s east-west axis.
Before it joins the Parkway on the south, Brookside Avenue forks to create a characteristically Olmsted public green space through which a brook (the Ballou Creek) once flowed; the brook was later encased in a culvert that is now covered by the lawn of Brookside Park and by Brookside Avenue.