The layout of Washington Park that evokes the natural rural landscape and separates the park from the city surrounding it is a result of the influence Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux had in the park’s planning in the late 1860s. Albany natives John Bogart and John Yapp Culyer (who had worked under Olmsted on New York City’s Central Park and Brooklyn’s Prospect Park) and especially William S. Egerton, who presided over Washington Park for 38 years, gave the park its formal gardens and plantings.

But over the course of the 20th century, Egerton’s Washington Park was altered—plantings were moved, paths reconfigured, and structures taken down. One of the most dramatic changes, however, was imposed by nature in the 1960s and 70s. As it did the elm trees lining America’s main streets, Dutch Elm disease decimated the elms that lined Washington Park’s Knox Street Mall.

Today the members of the Washington Park Conservancy, in partnership with the City of Albany and its Department of General Services, are working to restore some of the most distinctive elements of the park’s original design. Soon after the Conservancy’s founding, in the mid-1980s, a tem of nationally recognized landscape architects and park experts was hired to prepare a historic landscape report and master plan for Washington Park. Then Conservancy members oversaw the design of a bench—The Albany Bench—for the park that would draw from the appearance and materials in the park’s original benches.

The Conservancy’s most notable recent accomplishment is the restoration of the Knox Street Mall to its original 30-foot width with crushed stone paving and a granite-paver border. Phase Two of the Mall restoration involves planting disease-resistant elm trees along both sides of the walkway, which is now also lined with Albany Benches, to re-establish the canopy that once so beautifully shaded the Mall.