Beyond the garden walls
Olmsted's greening of mental health care, revisited
A few weeks ago, I was in Buffalo to experience something that I had wanted to see for over a decade—the city’s linear park network, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted during the mid-19th Century. The Buffalo Olmsted Parks were basically the precursor to Boston’s Emerald Necklace. A chain of interconnected green spaces bridging city neighborhoods and offering a reliable respite from the cacophony of urban life. But when I arrived in Buffalo to take my inaugural ramble through the Japanese garden at Delaware Park, I ended up stumbling across an even more consequential innovation from Olmsted; something that was camouflaged into the place where I was staying.
For easy access to the Buffalo Olmsted Parks, I ended up at The Richardson Hotel; a relatively recent arrival to the city’s lodging marketplace. Housed within a gargantuan complex of Romanesque buildings that brings to mind Marlinspike Hall—aka Captain Haddock’s estate from the Tintin books—The Richardson features tall copper-roofed towers that can be seen from several points across Buffalo’s University District. The hotel is located next to SUNY Buffalo State University, and its visibility makes it a local landmark. But the landmark nature of The Richardson isn’t just architectural—it’s also medical. Because, as I learned upon entering the lobby and finding an entrance to a little museum tucked within the guts of the hotel, The Richardson campus was where Olmsted got to field-test the theory that spending time in natural green spaces can be a tonic for mental recuperation. It’s a Big Idea which has echoed across generations, with outcomes that are heartening and troubling, depending on where you’re looking.
