Nicklaus wants to redesign Delaware Park courses

Jack Nicklaus, the retired golfing great, wants to redesign golf courses in two of Buffalo’s Frederick Law Olmsted parks.

His Nicklaus Design, based in North Palm Beach, Fla., has offered to build two destination-caliber golf courses, one a smaller footprint in Delaware Park and the other a nine-hole course on a privately owned parcel near South Park.

The plan addresses two goals Olmsted fans embrace: returning more of the Delaware Park meadow to its natural state and restoring Olmsted’s neglected vision for a South Park Arboretum by removing the golf course.

“Kevin’s idea to combine our course design work with Buffalo’s efforts to restore its Olmsted legacy is innovative,” Nicklaus said in a statement to The Buffalo News.

Gaughan said he got the idea of reaching out to Nicklaus Design in February 2014 while running around Delaware Park and thinking about the disparity between public and private golf courses.

John Reese, the company’s CEO, who attended the meeting, said Nicklaus liked the idea of redesigning the golf course built in 1930 inside the 376-acre Delaware Park because it was in an Olmsted-designed park and used by inner-city residents.

Olmsted designed the 155-acre South Park in 1894 as an arboretum with more than 2,300 types of trees, shrubs and plants, but only remnants of his vision remained after the golf course, which takes up about one-third of the park, was installed in 1915.

Reconstructing the Delaware Park golf course would cost $4 million, Gaughan estimated, and $10 million would be needed to build the South Buffalo course.

The site eyed for the South Buffalo golf course is a brownfield on Hopkins Street adjacent to South Park.

The 201 acres include landfills, wetlands, slopes and railroad tracks, reducing the usable area for golf to 62 acres, according to a “South Buffalo Golf Course Feasibility Study” prepared in 2014 for the City of Buffalo and the Buffalo Olmsted Parks Conservancy.