Associate with Landscape Architecture but it wasnt always so. In fact, the modern freeway that you guys drive every day has its roots in Landscape Architecture in the park planning that weve been talking about this semester. Ill start with a little bit of review and this familiar landscape which everyone should, i hope, recognize, which of course is Prospect Park. So we look at the development of central park. Then we look at Prospect Park, which is olmsteds next great park in the late 1860s. They designed roads associated with this park. These were intended to be broad treelined streets spinning off the edges of the park in here. There are originally supposed to be four. Two are actually built eastern and Ocean Parkway. And here is a view of Ocean Parkway from 1894. So if we think about this, which is the first one of the first references to parkways in the United States. Olmstead and vox based their idea off of fauch avenue in paris. So if youre thinking of alfond and housmans work earlier. In this early conception of the parkway, they are thinking about a couple of rather simple ideas. First it is a wider than average street. Its wider. Second, a parkway in the early conception were usually treelined. And weve talked a little bit about boulevards, and essentially, a parkway in the beginning was a wide street with trees, indistinguishable from the term boulevard. So theyre pretty much identical. The most significant aspect or difference is the name which provided a sense of the utility of the parkway as linking a park to park. Norman newton in your text says the parkway provides the, quote, psychological carryover of the restful influence of one large park area into its echo in another with little or no interruption along the way. Ooms. Right . So there is this idea of park. It is connected seamlessly with a parkway. Parkways became to be a little bit more serious with the design of this system which is anyone . Yeah, yeah. The buffalo park system, right . Designed by olmsted and vox in 1871. We can see on these images the parkways connecting the pieces of the park system, the front, the parade, and delaware park. As we talked about earlier, these early parkways were usually aligned with existing city grid forms. So there is some ornamentation here in this part of the plan. But essentially they are these kind of Straight Line grid following boulevard systems. And the parkway as part of a park system spreads across the United States, seen here in chicago west park system. Reminder, jens jenson, the designer. And kansas city park system. And again, there are gridded environments, wide streets, treelined, connecting park to park. These early park systems, as they develop over time begin to expand and get larger and larger so the red box on here is the previous slide. We just looked at that system. We can see it extending to connect the Riverfront Park designed by kessler down to swope park, the large country park that becomes developed later on in the development of kansas city. Early parkways, key aspect here is that they are intraurban within the city. They are used to structure the inside of the city connecting park to park, downtown to park, residences to park. And early parkways having a maximum distance of about 10 to 20 miles. Other wellknown park and parkway systems, we talk about buffalo, chicago, minneapolis, louisville, denver, seattle, essex county. All over the country people begin building these park systems and using parkways as a way to connect them. Just looking at some of the designers, of course, the olmstead firm featuring greatly kessler, Horace Cleveland in minneapolis and jenson, among others, in chicago. Landscape architecture classify them into two parks. The ones weve been looking at known as formal parkways. And another type which they begin to call informal parkways. What does informal mean . It basically means that they are curb linear and no longer follow the grid. The minneapolis parkway system, if you look at this plan, we have the formal system here with memorial drive. This was actually developed later as a formal parkway. A large boulevard. But here we can see the informal parkway rolling along the lakes in minneapolis. Instead of being aligned with the grid system, the informal parkways were aligned with natural features. Now we talked about this a little bit before when we were talking about park systems. But the parkway begins to be thought about as a kind of separate entity when they begin to classify them as informal parkways. And john olmsted as we talked about the stepson of olmsted sr. Becomes a member of the film in the late 1880s writes an important article on parkways called classes of parkways in Landscape Architecture in 1913. He characterizes parkways at this time, and its an interesting article because its going to classify things in a way that people start to think about parkways differently. And he describes them as formal and informal and describes the informal parkway as being superior for a number of reasons, summarized here. The first is that it was curvilinear, as we talked about, and aligned with natural features and adjusted to move along river channels, topographical differences, and other natural features and property boundaries which might not be completely straight as well. Because they were laid out to fit the topography, they could be graded more easily than straight alignments. So this would cut down on their development costs. They also did less damage to the adjacent landscape, so you didnt have to grade so much about the road bed. So he advocates for informal parkways as the preferred form for City Development and for planning future City Development. In part because when you had a parkway curving through a residential district, that area could then become the park for the surrounding residences. And to make this particularly effective, he says that it is worth purchasing or taking the land. Oops, wrong way. And having that land under the Park Commission. The other aspect of the article that is worth looking at is he says that parkways are not just parks, but they are also transportation corridors. And as weve talked about, weve had carriageways, pedestrian paths and bridle paths we talked about in terms of parks. They also have become part of parkways, as seen here in this absolutely gigantic crosssectional drawing. I like this crosssectional drawing because it kind of shows a hypothetical section of a Rapid Transit parkway or boulevard, and its literally 400 feet wide. So your average road, twolane road today, is about 40 feet wide, so this is 10 times the width. And within this, he says that you can begin to, in this Cross Section of the parkway, we can begin to think about putting in different uses. So under here, he says we can have Rapid Transit, electric rail. Weve got a tree strip, so different modes of transit. We would call this today a multimodal parkway. These different areas would be divided by green. Trees, grass, lawn and even park. Okay . So trolleys in the 1900s are one of the preferred forms of public transportation, but i also love this drawing because right in here hes got automobile drive. So 1913 already, John Charles Olmsted is heard as saying, wow, we can put cars on parkways, too. Hes thinking forward. And this is the thing that begins to move Landscape Architects out of the park business and into the roadway business. So lets take a closer look at one of these Cross Sections. Again, looking at a park system that you are perhaps familiar with, the emerald necklace in boston. This is a great example of an informal parkway being used as both a parkway and a transit corridor. And around 1887 when this system was initially being designed, the roads connecting the parks within the necklace included different sections. There was the arbor way connecting the Arnold Arboretum to jamaica pond. Franklin park connected by another section and the riverway connecting the back bay fence to jamaica pond as well. And were going to zoom in on this section and look at that Cross Section in greater detail in a second. But from this plan, id like you to kind of notice that the parkway system is laid out not along the grids of boston, not that boston has a lot of grids because its an old city, but its laid out along the corridor of the muddy river here, so it has a curvilinear path. Another characteristic of it is that its widened, so there are places where it actually widens out to encompass park uses, and then theres places where it gets skinnier to skinny its way in between residential areas. And whats my other characteristic here . It follows the natural terrain of the landscape. Here it is in a photograph view. This is probably from the late 20s, early 30s from a book by Henry Vincent hubbard called park values and land buys. And we can see the character within that Cross Section. Its a beautiful leafy scene here. Weve got lots of trees, main carriageway, frontage road over here, pedestrian or bridle path through this way as well. Its kind of a beautiful, leafy environment that serves both transit and for park. You can take a little stroll. If we look at this slide, this is, again, that same section, jamaica pond is over here, and heres the arbor way and jamaica way to the other section. And ive got three lines here showing different Cross Sections of the parkway. We can see those here, so the red line matches the blue line matches the green line. We can actually see how the parkway expands and contracts to meet its surroundings, right . So in some places its wider, in some places its narrower, and we have different elements including roadway, bridle path, walk and the park on the side of the road. Here its a little bit wider. Main roadway, frontage road allowing, if i live on the residential sides, allowing me to get onto that main roadway. So thats one of the key aspects of the boston parkway system is that it has access. In the early parkway systems, if i live on the side of this, i have direct access. I have the rights of light and air and Public Access to the roadway. Okay. That is a significant part of american parkway park systems in the late 19th and early 20th century. This will change, however, as we move to the modern parkway. So heres a diagram showing that. We have streets, access to the street from the main road, and the individual residences shown with the blue arrows can actually access that roadway as well. Its kind of this integrated system where residential areas parks and roadway are all kind of connected with this happy kind of environment. The first modern parkway is generally considered to be this one, the bronx River Parkway. And like the parkways of the emerald necklace in boston, the which were initially created as a sanitary improvement, the bronx River Parkway was an effort to conserve the polluted bronx river in West Chester County, new york. And this is a sort of scene, a nice sylvan landscape scene. But much of the bronx River Parkway initially looked like this, okay. If we look closely here, weve got peoples laundry back here, and right there that image is an outhouse, right . So if you think about pollution, we actually have sanitary waste pretty much probably flowing down into the bronx river down here. So in 1907, the bronx River Parkway commission, sort of like a Park Commission but a parkway commission, an independent agency of the city, was authorized to survey, acquire, design, and construct a 16myelin yar parkway along the river. Like the muddy river in boston, it was going to be a lets clean up the river project. Pollution control, sanitary, sewers, roads, park, all combined into one. And the property was acquired by 1909. They had some political, financial problems, and they began construction in 1916. Then in 1916, wham, world war i happens. Its delayed until 1919, which is when they begin to construct it. The parkway was designed by a team of designers. And in addition to the Landscape Architects, Herman Merkel and Gilmore Clark was jay downer, the engineer. And the park combined both driving and the reservation of landscape and scenic features. So merkel and Gilmore Clark did the planting, road alignment and slope design while jay downer, the engineer, worked on the technical aspects and a series of bridges across the parkway. In addition, along the driveway, they inserted a series of parks in the roadway along either side. And other fun facts, there was a 40foot drive line situated in the right of way. In terms of parkway design, what makes it modern . This is what makes it modern. The automobile. By 1919, cars are becoming increasingly popular in the United States, and although the road was designed as a parkway, the bronx River Parkway, in contrast to its predecessors, was designed specifically for automobiles traveling at speeds of 25 to 35 miles an hour. Okay. So what makes it modern is this. The idea of combining cars with landscape design. Right . And we combine the features of traditional 19th century parkways with five innovations for accommodating faster moving automobile traffic. So its really the car that begins to transform the parkway from a scenic device, a park device to a transportation device. And this evolution were going to talk about for the rest of the class today, but were going to start by looking at these four innovations that begin to change the parkway. Okay, so number one. The first, and perhaps the most important, is the use of lawn long curves. A lot of you have graded roads in your grading classes, and you have sort of done the math on this. When were looking at a little trail, we can do a lot of curvy wurvey zigs and zag ises because were walking quite slowly, right . As we get moving faster, sharp turns become problematic when youre driving faster and faster. So as were designing a road for faster speeds, the curves begin to be longer. And you can start to see this in this aerial view of the bronx River Parkway where here is a very nice Straight Line, which is anybody want to guess what that is . A railroad. Exactly. And here is the bronx River Parkway. So we can see to accommodate cars moving at 20 to 30 Miles Per Hour, we have these broad curves connected to Straight Line connected to broad spiral curves, right . And it creates this beautiful, sinuous line moving through the landscape, okay. Thats change number one. Change number two is as we accommodate a wide erode bed, 40 feet wide, we get a wider and wider right of way. So this is a Landscape Development plan for the roadway. We can see two things about the right of way. First of all, its not consistent. So its not just a consistent narrow strip running through the terrain, but it actually widens to open up to provide view sheds or actually over here to provide park experiences. And the roadbed gets wider and wider, right . Its up to that 400 feet width that John Charles Olmsted was talking about in his article. In addition, number three, and i like this sort of image, because here we can see the local roads, one of the local roads around it. And youll see there is no access on to the main parkway. To accommodate faster moving traffic, we eliminate that access point. Why . Because small children are going to run out into the cars and get crushed, right . So there is no access or what we would call limited access. So specific points are designed where you can get on the roadway. And in fact to do this, to make this particularly useful, we start to say that were going to allow local traffic to travel over the roadway. So the parkway with its beautiful, sinuous curving line moves through the landscape. And we may perhaps mound up a little soil and build bridge ace loug local traffic to move over that. And at specific places, design what we all know today as a freeway interchange. Essentially, right . So heres road moving over. Here are abutting owners. They have no right of access. So they have to come down, and get on the parkway here. That is a major kind of conceptual change in the design of roadways. And the bridge where does the bridge come from . Where have we seen that bridge before . Anyone . Central park. Exactly, right . The grade crossing elimination structure, okay. Voila. The birth of the limited access roadway through the creation of these particular bridges, right . Okay. So many interesting things here as we kind of look at this road is wow, you kind of feel like youre out in the country, dont you . This beautiful tableau in a park youre driving down. We have this beautiful rustic stone bridge. A little bridle path there. You youve got to love the details. Look at that, the delightful wood lightpost. They can be lit at night. A lovely scene. This is one of the weird parts about parkways. Very modern, the car. The model t running through here, yet we look like were in a bucolic, pastoral landscape. These do not look particularly technologically driven, do they . Right. In fact, as we look at other features on the roadside, this looks like a nice little dutch cottage, doesnt it . It is a gas station, okay. So the gas station has trellises. It doesnt look like your average 7eleven, does it . Its kind of cute. There is the idea of camouflaging almost the modern technology of the automobile with this nostalgic view of the park, pa