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Seneca Park
rochester
improved
threat: inappropriate new construction/development in zoo
section of park
Seneca Park is nationally recognized as an important historic landscape, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, Sr. late in his career. Olmsted is hailed as the “father of American landscape architecture” and was the designer of Central Park in New York City. He himself chose the land along both sides of the Genesee River for Seneca Park with the goal of creating a wild and scenic refuge in a busy urban center. But since the creation of the park in 1893, much of it has been lost to residential, industrial, and roadway development. The area that most retains Olmsted’s design is around Trout Pond in Lower Seneca Park. But that's precisely where the Monroe County administration plans to expand the Seneca Park Zoo and construct an 800-car parking lot. Currently, the zoo occupies 12 acres on a narrow plateau, hidden from the open land, walking paths, mature trees and recreational space of the Trout Pond area. The zoo expansion plan favored by the administration, which has development rights in the city-owned park, would triple the size of the zoo and extend it off of the plateau. Parkland would be lost for animal exhibits, while a seven-acre parking lot would eliminate an open meadow, forested area, walking paths and vistas to Trout Pond. Under strong protest by park advocates, preservationists and neighbors, the development would undo much of the extensive and historically appropriate restoration completed after the devastating ice storm in 1991.
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