FROM THE LEXICON - CUDC Quarterly 4:2 - Summer 2005

Parkway

A typical evolutionary pattern is for the initial phase of a new genera to exhibit a prolific variety that is gradually restricted to one or two types. In the case of high speed motorways in America, the environmental condition that mattered was the availability of federal funding after World War II, and the species that survived were the ones the could adapt to the defense-related specifications of the new Interstate Highway System.

In the early years of the Cold War, the highway lobby successfully used the example of the German Autobahn and the spectre of Stalin’s nukes to give an appearance of military necessity to the new highway network. The result was a strenuous ideology of utility. Overpasses would be high enough to allow trucks loaded with missiles to pass under them, and all roads had to accommodate massive military vehicles moving at high speeds. Natural selection doesn’t have to rational, just selective, and the massive subsidies that created our highway system led to a one-size-fits-all solution, the modern American freeway.

It appears that before the war a far more interesting range of highway types had been considered. The word “Parkway” can stand for many of these waylayed possibilities.

Its definition and history are not so clear. Some of the earliest examples (including some that pre-date the automobile) were truly roads that ran through parks. These were essentially recreational routes. By the 1920s, however, parkways began to follow new commuter routes. They became linear parks meant primarily to be seen from vehicles. Robert Moses used the term for many of the motorways he built to expand the reach of New York, and the first of Los Angeles’ “freeways” was the Arroyo Seco Parkway between Downtown LA and the then airy heights of Pasadena.

Nearly all of the various parkways of the early 20th Century seem to have had two things in common. First was a heritage derived from Frederick Law Olmsted’s belief that a healthy city must be punctuated by artful and relatively “natural” parks. The second is the idea that a roadway should be an aesthetic experience, and that bridges and overpasses should ornament the experience.

Beyond the overwhelming requirements of bureaucracy and military utility, it may be that parkways dropped out of the design vocabulary because they did so little beyond just looking nice. With a new emphasis on green design, however, the parkway might deserve a new look. Instead of donwgrading redundant freeways into “boulevards” (like that proposed for Cleveland’s lakefront), we could turn them into bio-regeneration parkways, street/parks that clean their own run-off and offer recreation to people to who aren’t in cars. When it comes to re-thinking the infrastructure of our cities, names matter and so do images. ”Parkway” deserves another look as we try to build roads that serve people, instead of ICBMs. –Steve Rugare