Vaux, on his own and in various partnerships, designed and created dozens of parks across the northeastern United States, most famously in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Buffalo in New York.

In addition to landscape architecture, Vaux was a highly-sought after architect until the 1870s, when his modes of design could not endure the country's return to classical forms.

His partnership with Andrew Jackson Downing, a major figure in horticulture, landscape design, and domestic architecture, brought him from London to Newburgh, New York, in 1850.

There, Downing's praise of Gothic Revival and Italianate architecture contributed to Vaux's personal growth as a designer of homes and landscapes.

He left Newburgh in 1856 to grow his practice in New York City, where he began, received and completed commissions with Olmsted, Withers, and Jacob Wrey Mould.

He trained as an apprentice under the architect Lewis Nockalls Cottingham, a leader of the Gothic Revival movement interested in Tudor architecture.

Rejected in his offer to Alexander Jackson Davis to form a partnership, Downing traveled to London in search of a new architect who would complement his architectural vision.

[3] In two separate periods of partnership, interrupted by the Civil War, their projects included multiple houses in Newburgh, the Hudson River State Hospital, and the Jefferson Market Courthouse.

In 1856, he gained U.S. citizenship and became identified with New York City's artistic community, “the guild,” joining the National Academy of Design, as well as the Century Club.

They obtained the commission through the Greensward Plan, an excellent presentation that drew upon Vaux's talents in landscape drawing to include before-and-after sketches of the site.

Less familiar are twelve projects Vaux designed for the Children's Aid Society in partnership with Radford; the Fourteenth Ward Industrial School (1889), pp.