Dec. 21, 1979 Gusto cover story: South Park Botanical Gardens

 

How bad were things for Buffalo’s cultural treasures in the 1970s? Pretty dismal. As a newly-minted gardening enthusiast – I had transformed the front yard outside my old apartment building four years earlier – I had a special interest in this one.

Dec. 21, 1979 

An Oasis

         Like the heroic dome of Our Lady of Victory Basilica down the street, the Botanical Gardens in South Park at first seem like a mirage. What else is one to make of such an unexpected piece of grandeur? Here’s a veritable Victorian crystal palace of a conservatory rising right out of the otherwise unpretentious landscape of cozy old South Buffalo. All that’s needed is a majestic stone arch at the park entrance and the illusion would be complete.

         Actually, there is an arch, though not of stone. It’s inside the conservatory, at the entrance to the main domed room. The eyes travel up and up the trunks of a pair of incredible palm trees that are so tall they press against the arched glass ceiling high overhead. Palm trees in Buffalo. Who would believe it? They’re Canary Island date palms, to be exact. A sign on one of them indicates that it’s older than the conservatory itself.

         After the palms and the other exotic tropical broadleaf specimens that grow in their shade, the wonderment continues under 11 more glass ceilings. The popular favorites are the huge banana plants, the prickly cactus garden, the orchids, the Venus flytrap and other carnivorous species (which are locked under glass) and the fern garden with its fish pond full of golden carp. Nearly 150,000 visitors delight in it yearly. And admission is free.

         During the growing and flowering seasons, the sights can be spectacular. Twice a year, the Botanical Gardens go all out with flowers – once during the week between Palm Sunday and Easter and again for the Chrysanthemum Show in November. Even now, when the days are darkest and shortest, it can be an oasis of inspiration and reassurance. In winter, even an occasional bloom seems like a miracle and there are plenty of random miracles to be found. The cacti are flowering. Here and there is an orchid or a bird-of-paradise. Though the banana-growing season is over, the orange and lemon trees are still bearing fruit.

         For the home gardener, the place is a revelation. Here are magnificent 50-year-old jade trees, the biggest in town. Here are ferns and philodendrons and all the other household favorites, all rampant in this plant paradise. Some of them are actually in flower. They never did that at home. Here occasionally are the real names for some of those mysterious specimens on the windowsill back in the kitchen. So that’s a donkey-tail, eh?

         In charge of it is O. Burke Glaser, a genial and highly-regarded superintendent who has spent his past 26 years with the city’s Parks Department. A graduate of McKinley High School’s horticultural program (one of his instructors was News garden columnist Tobbio Martino), he’s been at South Park since 1958. He bought a house on McKinley Parkway, he says, “so I can walk to work.”

         If there’s a question about anything in the conservatory, Glaser’s got the answer. The glass in the dome of the palm room is dirty and brown because of pollution from the Bethlehem Steel plant, he says. It was last replaced in the ‘40s after a particularly vicious hailstorm. The benefits of better pollution control can be seen in the smaller domed rooms, where the glass is relatively clear. These were reglazed in the ‘60s.

         The banana plants look sickly, Glaser remarks, because they’re just recovering from an attack of red spiders, a malaise household gardeners understand all too well. Spraying with malathion was put off until after the flower show in November. Insecticides are used much more carefully these days, the superintendent observes, than they were 20 years ago. He recalls how the place used to liberally laced with DDT.

         Most of the plants appear to be quite healthy, however. Spunkiest of all are the cacti, a new collection of which was just installed this year thanks to federal snow disaster funds. The old cactus garden was lost during the Blizzard of ’77, the victim of windows broken by icy winds. The blizzard almost wiped out the entire conservatory.

         What happened was that the furnaces nearly ran out of heating oil. At the height of the winter, the building requires about 10,000 gallons of oil a week. If the heat fails, it’s only a matter of a couple hours before it cools off to the danger point. With oil running low the day after the blizzard struck, Glaser chased down a fuel tanker stuck at Clinton Street and Bailey Avenue. Aided by a dump truck with a plow, it still took Glaser five hours to lead the oil truck to South Park.

         “A couple times,” he says, “I don’t know how we ever got through.”

         It was lucky that he did. As the truck arrived, the building’s fuel supply had dwindled to a mere 300 gallons. It wouldn’t have lasted through the night.

         Glaser’s efforts averted a $6 to $8 million catastrophe. That’s what it would cost to replace the collection in the Botanical Gardens, it’s estimated. Chances are, if it was destroyed, it would not be replaced. The city is hard pressed just to provide police, firemen, street maintenance and garbage collection these days. Like everything else, the Botanical Gardens have been squeezed to the bone by the past decade of municipal belt-tightening. Besides Glaser, there are only seven full-time staffers, three of them CETA workers.

         This year for the first time Buffalo officials balked at the Botanical Gardens’ $450,000 budget. One reason they hadn’t noticed it before is because funding is part of the general Parks Department allocation. Perhaps by oversight, then, the Botanical Gardens have become the last of the city’s municipally supported cultural attractions.

         “I’m not a botanist or a flower nut,” says South District Councilman James P. Keane, “but I can still appreciate the value of that place, both as an educational facility and a tourist attraction. The problem is this: While it’s located in a City of Buffalo park, it is really a regional attraction. More than three out of four visitors are from outside the city. What we’ve got here is a case of the city completely financing a regional attraction. All the rest of them are funded by the regional sales tax. It should never have been left off the list.”

         Seeking outside revenues for it isn’t so simple, though. Unlike the zoo, it has never been officially designated as a cultural attraction. A campaign to give it such status was led by County Legislators Michael Fitzpatrick, Marie Gannon and William Stachowski. But despite a 13-7 vote by the County Legislature, County Executive Rutkowski just last week vetoed the proposal.

         The Botanical Gardens cannot even accept simple cash contributions from individuals. That would take a resolution by the Common Council, maybe in 1980. At present, all donations go into the city’s general fund. A gift shop might bring in revenues, but the florists’ association this year shot down a proposal to sell cuttings from the conservatory. Nobody wants to charge admission. As for Glaser, he’s hoping he can get permission to drill for natural gas. The surrounding area is dotted with working gas wells.

         It also may qualify as a national historic landmark. Opened in 1899, the South Park Botanical Gardens were one of famed park builder Frederick Law Olmsted’s final projects. Olmsted, best known as the father of New York City’s Central Park, laid out all of Buffalo’s major parks in the late 19th century and played a prominent role in establishing the nation’s first state park at Niagara Falls.

         Olmsted’s first phase established the parks in the northern part of the city. South Park, Cazenovia Park and the South Buffalo parkway system were proposed in the 1880s. The conservatory, modeled on the Royal Botanical Gardens (Kew Gardens) in London, was built for $100,000. It in turn served as a model for the Bronx Botanical Gardens in New York City. The present building is not the original. The original had curved-glass domes on all the greenhouses. When it was reconstructed in 1930-31 (at a cost of $181,244), straight glass was used for everything but the three major domes.

         The first director, noted Buffalo botanist Professor John F. Cowell, supervised an ambitious planting program in the conservatory and in the park around it. He discovered several new species. One variety of orchid he named after Mayor Fuhrmann. Prominent Buffalonians also added to the collection. Mr. and Mrs. James Ward donated their herbs and mosses. John J. Albright, the art gallery benefactor, gave $40,000 worth of palms, ferns and cydads. That immense Canary Island date palm may well be one of Albright’s.

         Cowell planted tens of thousands of trees and shrubs, following Olmsted’s design. Olmsted had called for stands of oak, ash, walnut, maple, elm, vines and pines. When smoke and gasses from the new industrial plants on the lake shore began killing some of the plantings in 1906, Cowell substituted hardier species. By 1930, the South Park Botanical Gardens were unique in America – the only such municipally-supported operation. At that time, there was a staff of 45.

         “This used to be just botanical gardens,” says Glaser. “There was no golf course. There was a big cactus garden outdoors in the summer and a big perennial garden. They used to grow shrubs and flowers here for the whole city parks system. It still has one of the better collections of trees in the city. But the golf fad came along and there was a trend in the middle of the century when people didn’t do much with plants. It’s just been this past 15 years that there’s been a revival of interest. Lately, attendance has been going up each year.”

         Despite the changes, the conservatory and the rest of South Park stand pretty much the way Olmsted designed them more than 90 years ago. In Patricia Marie O’Donnell’s 1979 “Survey of Buffalo’s Olmsted Parks for National Register of Historic Places Nomination,” she noted that Olmsted’s plan is “90% intact” at South Park and cites an Olmsted historian’s claim that South Park Lake is the “best example of an Olmsted urban park water feature.”

         County Legislator Joan Bozer, who is helping organize a national conference on Olmsted Parks here next spring, sees outside support of the South Park Botanical Gardens as an idea whose time has come. Where the support will come from and how the transitions will be made are factors that are still unclear.

         “I think it’s appropriate now to move it to a broader base of support,” Mrs. Bozer says. “If the county assumes responsibility, there’s the problem of deciding who the staff people work for. We don’t want to recreate the zoo fiasco. The question is how do we best help the city. We need to look at all the options. There’s a lot of sentiment for preserving the Botanical Gardens. The question is how do we do it.”

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IN THE PHOTO: The Botanical Gardens Conservatory on a vintage postcard. Judging from the automobile and how the women are dressed, the image probably dates back to the Roosevelt administration. Teddy Roosevelt, that is. The front of the card has a box for a one-cent stamp, which was the going rate until 1952.

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FOOTNOTE: It took a while, but the Botanical Gardens slowly got rescued. Erie County bought them in 1981 and a non-profit organization, founded shortly after this article appeared, runs them with money from the county, the state and other sources. Yes, they now accept donations.

In 1982, the Gardens found a spot on the state and national Registers of Historic Places. A new boiler system was installed in 1999. Greenhouses and domes have been renovated. New exhibits have blossomed indoors and out. A multi-million-dollar expansion is about to begin. Since 2005, the Gardens also have charged admission. These days a ticket is $16.50 unless you're a member, like me, in which case, no charge.