Only one Olmsted-designed neighborhood was fully launched in Utica’s suburbs, the one in New Hartford known originally as Oxford Heights—today commonly known as Hoffman Road—although though it never fully came to fruition.  

In the fall of 1923, the Hugh R. Jones Company of Utica approached Olmsted Brothers with a request to develop plans on 50 acres, located off Oxford Road in the Village of New Hartford, that was known as the Hoffman Tract.  

Oxford Heights was envisioned (in the words of its elaborately-produced promotional brochure) as “an unusual development for moderately priced homes.”  Although many Uticans consider the Village of New Hartford to be a more upscale community in the early twenty-first century, in the 1920s it was a relatively modest—the “big money” was still largely concentrated in Utica at that time, and the anticipation was that it would remain so or that Utica would simply swallow much of the township of New Hartford, as it had been doing in increments since the late nineteenth century.  

As a consequence, when Oxford Heights was in planning, Hugh R. Jones and E.C. Whiting of Olmsted Brothers had a number of exchanges regarding whether they would permit—in striking contrast to other Jones projects in Utica—the construction of two-family homes, as well as modest bungalows.  Ultimately, that is not what happened, and no expense was spared in trying to create the impression that Oxford Heights would offer gracious living at modest prices.  Indeed, promotional materials emphasized that the Yahnundasis Country Club and the Utica Country Day School were in close proximity to Oxford Heights.

The plan called for a small, characteristically Olmsted-style public greenspace about 150 yards from the Oxford Road entrance to Hoffman Road, which was realized, as was the first half mile of Hoffman Road.  

However, the plan also would have entailed a looping road through a park built around a ravine on the tract as well as another set of building lots located along a second road (the entrance to which maps onto today’s Woodbridge Road) that would have forked to create an island of lots (which does not exist in today’s Woodbridge Road), much in the fashion of Proctor Boulevard, before reuniting the roads as one and looping around the envisioned park.  Unfortunately, none of these other features were created; in all, including the park that was never built, only about one-third, or less, of the plan was realized.  Still, what was created—which is to say, Hoffman Road itself—remains one of the finer neighborhoods designed by Olmsted Brothers in the Greater Utica Area.

The original plan for Oxford Heights.  Only a portion of Hoffman Road, at upper right, was completed.

One of Hoffman Road’s greenspaces, an original part of the Olmsted design, as it appears today.

Part of the ravine off of Hoffman Road that would have become part of a park under the original Olmsted plan.