In 1912, the Tilden Realty Company, which was owned by local real estate developer Harry Roberts, had acquired much of the property along the Parkway east of the Olmsted-designed development called Brookside. The last legs of the Parkway were built through this property between 1911 and 1919, and already by the early 1920s, Roberts was enjoying success marketing lots along the city’s new Olmsted-designed boulevard. In 1922, he approached Olmsted Brothers about laying out this area for further development. This new neighborhood would become known as Sherman Gardens.
Sherman Gardens follows the Parkway as it curves gently to the north, east of Mohawk Street, and it stretches from the southern side of the Parkway northward down to Sherman Drive and Armory Drive, which curve down in a westerly direction from the Parkway to Mohawk Street. The original plan envisioned a development almost twice as large, encompassing what is now the campus of Mohawk Valley Community College, which runs along Sherman and Armory drives; presumably this more easterly part of Sherman Gardens was not developed as a result of the Great Depression. However, as is the case with other Olmsted neighborhoods in Utica, Sherman Gardens included two large public greenspaces along Sherman Drive (which would have been in the center of Sherman Gardens had it been fully developed), as well as a lesser one bounded by Armory Drive, Hilton Avenue, and Arthur Street, within sight of Proctor High School.
Although it was one of the largest of the area’s Olmsted-designed neighborhoods, relatively little can be said about how it was marketed. Hugh R. Jones, who commissioned and marketed the other local Olmsted-designed developments that substantially came to fruition, was a modern marketer. He prepared lavish illustrated multipage prospectuses for some of his developments, and he was media savvy—he published eye-catching advertisements in local newspapers and at least one time held a contest in which the public was invited to suggest names for streets and even for an entire development.
In contrast, Roberts appears to have taken a more low-key, traditional approach to real estate marketing. In some respects, he had less reason than Jones to make recourse to aggressive marketing. Sherman Gardens was large and ambitious and, most importantly, was built along and off of Utica’s brand-new Parkway. The location did not need to be pitched as desirable—after years of building the new four-lane boulevard called Parkway East (the last leg of the group of streets known collectively as “the Parkway,” and the leg that was an entirely new creation), the public enthusiastically embraced it as the most desirable of places to reside.
The Olmsted papers therefore have much more to say about individual lots that Olmsted Brothers landscaped intensively than they do about the planning and design of Sherman Gardens as a whole, and local newspapers are oddly silent about Sherman Gardens—except for a handful of small advertisements that Roberts’ company, Tilden Realty, placed in newspapers regarding individual homes his company had built and was seeking to sell in what the advertisements identified as Sherman Gardens. The most eloquent document we have regarding this neighborhood is a blueprint drafted by Olmsted Brothers in 1923.
As happened with other local Olmsted-designed neighborhoods, Sherman Gardens was laid out, and lots were sold, but much of it (particularly the northern parts more distant from the Parkway) remained vacant until after the Second World War. The oldest homes in the development are therefore located along the Parkway and closer to Brookside, the region’s oldest Olmsted-designed neighborhood.
Roberts continued to work with Olmsted Brothers on the development of the hills to the south of Parkway East, especially on and adjacent to upper Sherman and Tilden avenues, through the Depression. Although more mainstream customers had to pull back from building new homes during the 1930s, Utica’s elite not only continued to build, but they constructed some of the most lavish homes in the region in the Sherman-Tilden neighborhood despite the national economic crisis. The grounds of many of these homes, as well as many on or immediately off Parkway East, were landscaped according to plans created by Olmsted Brothers; traces of this work can be found on the grounds of some of these homes to do this day.
Offices of the Tilden Realty Company, the real estate development firm that commissioned Olmsted Brothers to design Sherman Gardens—photograph from the papers of Olmsted Brothers (circa 1922-23)
Sherman Gardens at Parkway East, looking east from Madison Avenue, around 1925.
The Olmsted landscape design (1926) for 1109 Parkway East
1109 Parkway East today
The Olmsted design (1925) for Sage Court, a small Sherman Gardens enclave off of Parkway East.
Sage Court in the midst of construction in the mid-to-late 1920s.
Sage Court, viewed from the same perspective today.