Humanizing the Urban-Industrial Environment
by Laurence C. Gerckens
Historian Larry Gerckens traces the evolution of greenway and parkway systems, and their role in softening the edges of the urban environment.
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The concept of structuring the American city through provision
of narrow green travel corridors, generally following waterways,
received considerable impetus with construction of the Bronx
River Parkway at the end of the First World War. Extending
northward from New York City into Westchester County, the Bronx
River Parkway, America's first "parkway," became the model for a
system of parkways lacing through all of Westchester County that
was adopted in the 1920s. This, in turn, inspired the Long
Island parkway system realized in the '20s and the '30s, and the
Interstate highway system that linked all of America with
auto-focused greenways.
The greenway was a method for preserving stream beds and river
bottoms from development, for assuring the continued experience
of green spaces, trees and fields in the daily travel patterns
of urbanites, and for providing safe limited-access travel ways
connecting the far-flung parts of megalopolis. The greenway lent
the appearance of "naturalness" to an industrialized America,
provided recreational open space close in to urbanized
districts, and softened the hard edges of an industrialized
state.
There are great opportunities at the local scale to acquire
greenways for auto travel, for pedestrian ways, and for bicycle
paths through the comprehensive community planning process,
through "dedication" requirements in land subdivision control,
and through planned unit developments. The greenways given to
the people of Kansas City and Boston over a hundred years ago
are still giving to the people of those cities today.
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