Last night was closing night on Shakespeare Hill, though nobody in the crowd probably said it that way out loud. Sunday's performance of The Taming of the Shrew was the final one Shakespeare in Delaware Park will put on this year. If you were up on the hill with a blanket and a picnic, you caught the end of something. If you weren't, that particular clock has now run out until next June.
Tonight, a few hundred yards away at Hoyt Lake, nothing about the park looks like it's slowing down. It's Monday, which means the Buffalo Flow Collective's Flow Jam starts at 7pm, same as it has every Monday since Memorial Day, and will keep doing for at least one more week. Fire performers, live musicians, and a crowd that regularly runs into the hundreds will show up tonight the same way they have all summer.
That contrast is the thing worth understanding about Delaware Park in late August. The 350 acres Frederick Law Olmsted designed as Buffalo's answer to Central Park don't run on one summer schedule. They run on at least five, and this particular week is when several of them wind down at once while others keep going like nothing happened.
The five clocks
Each institution in the park sets its own calendar, and the calendars don't line up.
| What's running | This year's schedule | Where it stands on August 17 |
|---|---|---|
| Shakespeare in Delaware Park, mainstage | Pericles, Prince of Tyre, June 18 to July 12; The Taming of the Shrew, July 23 to August 16 | Closed as of last night |
| Buffalo Croquet Club's USCA tournament | July 30 to August 2 | Wrapped two weeks ago |
| Buffalo Maritime Center boat rentals on Hoyt Lake | Daily, noon to 7pm, into early autumn | Still running, weeks left |
| Buffalo Flow Collective's Flow Jam | Every Monday, Memorial Day through late August | Running again tonight |
| The Meadow Loop and the Hoyt Lake loop | Year-round | Never stops |
Knowing which clock you're dealing with changes how you spend the next two weeks in the park.
What just closed
Shakespeare in Delaware Park's 51st season is the one that gets treated like the whole summer, but its actual run is short and specific. Pericles, Prince of Tyre opened the mainstage season on June 18, the company's first time ever staging that particular play, and ran through July 12. The Taming of the Shrew, directed by Brendan Didio, took over Shakespeare Hill from July 23 through last night. Executive Director Lisa Ludwig has described a night on the hill as "a community picnic where there happens to be a free professional performance happening before you," and for six weeks each summer that's what several thousand people a night get, for free, on a lawn a short walk from the Rose Garden.
That mainstage is done until next June. The company's touring production, Fools and Foes, is still moving through other Western New York towns on nights when the hill would otherwise be dark, but the thing that fills Shakespeare Hill itself has wrapped for the year.
The Buffalo Croquet Club's marquee weekend closed even earlier. The club, founded in 1999 and now more than 50 members strong, hosted its United States Croquet Association-sanctioned tournament on the Delaware Park courts from July 30 through August 2, drawing competitors from across North America to play American Six-Wicket rules on four three-quarter-size lawns built on what used to be the park's lawn-bowling greens. That weekend has already come and gone. The lawns themselves, tucked near the Buffalo Olmsted Parks Conservancy's offices off Parkside Avenue, sit quiet again until next year's field is set.
What's still running, for now
Two of the park's clocks haven't stopped yet, and neither will wait long.
The Flow Jam is the more forgiving of the two. It runs every Monday from 7 to 10pm near Hoyt Lake, an unofficial tradition that pulls in fire performers and live musicians for a free show that has nothing to do with any official park brochure. It's been going since Memorial Day, and tonight is one of the last Mondays before the season quietly ends.
The boats are the other one, and they run on a tighter margin than most people assume. Buffalo Maritime Center operates both the wooden rowboats and the flamingo-shaped paddle boats known locally as FLOATmingos out of a rental shed behind The Terrace at Marcy Casino, on the south side of Hoyt Lake. Rentals run daily from noon to 7pm, weather permitting, with the posted season stretching into early fall. A rowboat runs $15 for 30 minutes or $20 for an hour. A FLOATmingo runs $20 for 30 minutes. Life jackets come with either one, and reservations are worth making if you don't want to gamble on a walk-up spot on a nice afternoon. Once the shed closes for the year, both fleets come off the water until next summer.
There's one more date worth circling before the month is out. Explore Buffalo has a Hoyt Lake walking tour scheduled for August 27, a 90-minute, 1.8-mile loop starting at the Abraham Lincoln statue in front of the Rose Garden, across Lincoln Parkway from the Buffalo AKG Art Museum. It covers the design decisions behind the lake and the garden in a way most people who walk that loop every week have never actually heard explained.
The one clock that doesn't care what month it is
While all of that shifts around it, the park's actual trail system just keeps going. The paved Meadow Loop runs about 1.75 miles alongside Meadow Road, and the separate loop that circles Hoyt Lake itself covers roughly 1.1 miles, much of it on a crushed-gravel bridle path that plenty of runners prefer over pavement. Both stay open year-round, free, with no permit required, and both stay dog-friendly on a leash.
What changes isn't whether the loop is open. It's who's on it and when. Through the peak of summer, the paths around Hoyt Lake get busy enough that regulars know to go early or wait until evening. As the Flow Jams and boat rentals wind down over the next few weeks, that congestion eases first around the lake, then across the rest of the loop, and the park starts to feel like the version longtime residents actually prefer: room to walk, still light enough in the early evening to make it worth leaving work a little early for.
If you're deciding what to do with what's left of the month, it comes down to which clock you care about. Catch the Flow Jam tonight if you want the one that still has some Mondays left in it. Get out on a rowboat or a FLOATmingo before the shed closes for the season. Put the Explore Buffalo tour on the calendar for August 27 if you've walked the loop a hundred times and never once heard the story behind it. And if none of those windows work for you, the loop itself will still be there in September, in October, and long after this particular summer's five clocks have all reset to zero.
Susan Lenahan has spent more than four decades tracking the small stuff that makes Buffalo's neighborhoods worth knowing, not just the big listings. If Delaware Park's rhythm is part of why you love this stretch of the city, or part of what you're weighing as you think about a move here, Susan Lenahan can walk you through the rest of what makes this park, and this part of Buffalo, worth paying attention to.
