Take a virtual walk around Front, Columbus and Prospect Parks. Front Park is one of three original parks included in Olmsted’s initial plan for Buffalo’s park system.

Its chief feature was the semi-circular terrace designed to command a panoramic view of Lake Erie and the opening of the Niagara River. Here, Olmsted remarked, one could observe “a river effect such as can be seen, I believe, nowhere else — a certain quivering of the surface and a rare tone of color, the result of the crowding upward of the lake waters as they enter the deep portal of the Niagara.”