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Presenting Nature
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Design Ethic Origins
(1916-1927)
Design Policy & Process
(1916-1927)
Western Field Office
(1927-1932)
Decade of Expansion
(1933-1942)
State Parks
(1933-1942)
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Presenting Nature:
The Historic Landscape Design of the National Park Service, 1916-1942 |
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VI. A DECADE OF EXPANSION, 1933 TO 1942 (continued)
DEVELOPMENT OF PARKWAYS
A major advancement in the landscape program of the National Park Service during the 1930s was the development of scenic parkways. This work was planned and carried out by the landscape architects of the Eastern Division of the Branch of Plans and Designs, which had evolved from the Yorktown field office staffed in 1930 and headed by Charles Peterson. It was established primarily to plan and design the Colonial Parkway between Yorktown and Jamestown, Virginia, in the 1930s. This office was responsible for the development of parks in the East in the 1930s, which included Acadia, Shenandoah, Great Smoky Mountains, and many of the historic sites, battlefields, and encampments that came into the national park system in 1933 and thereafter. It was also in charge of the park service's first historic preservation projects at George Washington's birthplace and the Revolutionary War sites at Morristown, New Jersey. The partially completed George Washington Memorial Parkway outside the nation's capital was also added to the park system in 1933.
The five-hundred-mile Blue Ridge Parkway was an essential link in the plan for a park-to-park highway connecting Shenandoah and Great Smoky Mountains national parks. It brought together the aesthetic and engineering influences of the Westchester County parkways and the National Park Service's Western Field Office. Furthermore, it reflected new ideas about regional planning and recreational development and forged an ethic of scenic preservation based on cultural history as well as natural features.
Parkway development required the acquisition of a continuous narrow margin of land upon which to build a road, the protection of scenic views through the acquisition of easements, the design of overlooks, and the development of waysides and visitor facilities in larger areas spaced at regular intervals along the route. The design of these roads opened up new opportunities for landscape gardening, the clearing of vistas, the cleanup of roadsides, the planting of native vegetation, and the development of recreational facilities.
In 1939, Henry Hubbard defined a national parkway as "an elongated park, featuring a developed highway solely for the passenger car and recreational purposes, bordered by adequate buffer strips on which occupancy, commercial development, and access are restricted." Parkways were "a recent development of a recreational and conservation nature which offers a means of injecting park values into automobile travel." [62]
In the area of conservation, the parkway preserved scenes of beauty and interest along a route selected to avoid unsightly developments, such as distracting advertising, dilapidated structures, monotonous stretches of farmland, and other discordant elements. Parkway development was based on the idea that the motorway was part of a larger area having natural attributes, such as forests, lakes, and streams, that were to be preserved or restored to their pristine state. The parkway was furthermore a linear refuge or sanctuary for the protection of wildlife and flora. Hubbard explained the concerns of parkway design:
The National Park Service has found it necessary to establish standard requirements in the design of parkways to assure the proper degree of safety and driving ease essential in real recreational motoring. Dangerous grade crossings of main highways and railroads are avoided in all cases, and the points of ingress and egress are selected, at spaced intervals, to eliminate unnecessary interruptions in the flow of the parkway traffic stream. It is sometimes necessary to provide a system of secondary parallel roads to permit local traffic to reach a selected access point. By thus excluding private frontage on the parkway and by limiting access roadways, the chances of marginal friction are greatly reduced and opportunity is created to permit the proper control and development of natural surroundings over the entire length and width of the project. Likewise, high standards of road design, incorporating well-studied alignment, gradient, and landscape treatment to take advantage of scenic features, all add to the enjoyment and ease of driving over the completed parkway. [63]
Not only was the parkway to provide facilities for travel and recreation at regular intervals, but adjoining areas having unusual scenic features or offering recreational opportunities were also to be acquired and developed for recreational use. Foot trails, bridle trails, campgrounds, and picnic areas would be developed in some areas, and boating, swimming, and various outdoor sports developed in others. The location and distribution of these developed areas along the parkway was a primary consideration in designing a national parkway.
The construction and extension of parkways had national interest and importance, particularly within the context of national recreational planning. Funding from the Public Works Administration and other relief measures made possible the acquisition of land for parkways and adjoining recreational areas and the construction of the roads themselves. It was the CCC that built adjoining trails and overlooks, developed campgrounds and picnic areas along the parkways, cleared vistas, and carried out the plantings that naturalized the area after construction, provided improvements such as signs and water fountains, and even turned deteriorating log cabins and homesteads into interpretive displays. By the close of the New Deal, park designers envisioned an extensive system of national parkways to connect important state and national recreational areas. [64]
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Last Modified: Mon, Oct 31, 2002 10:00:00 pm PDT
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