Hamlin Park
Location: East Side of Buffalo
Dates: Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2013
Architecture: Foursquare, Homestead, Bungalow Style houses
District: Hamlin Park Historic District
Important Notes: Named after horse racing aficionado Cicero Hamlin, who opened a 300 acre horse track in the current district area
The Hamlin Park Historic District, in the heart of Buffalos east side, has a unique and interesting background. Before the tragedy of the Kensington Expressway which destroyed Olmsted's grandest Buffalo Parkway (Humbolt), Hamlin Park was a beautiful plot of land bordering the parkway which connected The Parade (Martin Luther King Park) and Forest Lawn (connected to The Park, aka Delaware Park). In 1888, the area hosted the International Industrial Fair, drawing tens of thousands of people to Buffalo before the infamous Pan-American Exposition.
After Hamlin's Driving Park closed, land owner August Hager and developer John Cook began carefully laying out Hamlin Park as a residential neighborhood with heavy influence from Olmsted's recently completed Parkside Neighborhood while tailoring new houses to the emerging middle class population. Dubbed as a "zone of emergence", Hamlin Park offered first time home-ownership opportunities for many German and Jewish-Americans during the early 1900s. The neighborhood flourished for decades, becoming a prominent middle-class neighborhood with dozens of churches, synagogues and community centers lining the park. Today, the Hamlin District is bounded by Jefferson Avenue in the west, Main in the north, Humboldt Parkway in the east, and Ferry in the south.
