Olmsted’s work in Utica began in the opening months of 1906, when Thomas R. Proctor hired him to design Roscoe Conkling Park. In the spring of 1906, presumably due to Proctor’s influence, the Chamber of Commerce hired Olmsted to create a detailed report on Utica, a pioneering urban planning study and one of Olmsted’s first such studies. Among other things, the report recommended the creation of the Parkway, which was built in 1906-19 according to Olmsted’s design and with his active involvement, and in 1912-14 Olmsted worked again for Proctor on the design of Frederick T. Proctor Park.

However, this hardly defines the limit of what this renowned architect and his celebrated firm, Olmsted Brothers, accomplished in Utica. Between 1913 and 1928, Olmsted Brothers designed 5 neighborhoods in Utica, in addition to a small but pleasant development in the adjacent Village of New Hartford.

Taken together, the 5 neighborhoods and the large parks and parkway system designed by Olmsted and his firm in 1906-27 give Utica an impressively large “Olmsted footprint”—indeed, it covers about 10% of the city of Utica (a much higher percentage, if you exclude Utica’s large wetlands area from the calculation). This underpins our notion that Utica deserves to be considered an “Olmsted City.”

Olmsted designed these neighborhoods as a contractor to local construction and real estate development companies, notably Harry Roberts Company (who operated under the name of the Tilden Realty) and the Hugh R. Jones Company. These neighborhoods were meant to offer an approximation of country living within the orbit of an urban center, and in this regard they embodied the movement, more prominent after World War II, by the American middle class away from city centers and toward places that offered a supposedly more bucolic lifestyle.

In all of these neighborhoods, the usual Olmsted design principles were used, notably tree-lined streets that generally followed the natural contours of the land, carefully graded building lots, and small public parks like traditional village greens. Buyers of building lots in these developments were also often required to build houses that cost a certain minimum (at least $4,000-5000, or about tent times what the average Utica textile worker made in 1915-20) and to landscape their properties in strictly-prescribed ways; this was particularly true of the earlier neighborhoods like Brookside and Proctor Boulevard.

Olmsted Brothers also created landscape designs for individual homes in Utica (notably in Sherman Gardens and the adjacent area known as Sherman Hills), in the villages of New Hartford and Clinton, and in other local communities when contracted by their owners to do so. The blueprints of such work still exist, and on some of these properties, one can still find some traces of the original Olmsted landscape design.

Olmsted Brothers were active in the Utica area until at least the 1940s. They produced designs for the Sherman Hills and Nob Hill neighborhoods, just off the Parkway, which included a plan for a series of lovely ponds. They also produced several designs for neighborhoods in New Hartford—notably the Cook Tract, near Paris and Jordan roads on Pippin Hill—a new city hall and civic center for Utica, and a campus of Utica College, none of which came to fruition.

What Utica’s Olmsted Era left behind in the form of realized work, though, remains impressive relative to the size of this community—it is very much worth treasuring and preserving because it is not only inherent beautiful and contributes to the local quality of life, but is a part of American history.