Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
visual compositions, park-makers increasingly devoted their energies to
protecting surviving tracts of woodland from adverse development. Exist-
ing forests were often improved through scientific management practices,
but development was generally limited to the provision of circulation sys-
tems and simple shelters. Selective vista clearing was still commonly prac-
ticed, but the elaborate pictorial effects favored by mid-nineteenth-century
designers were increasingly viewed as fussy, antiquated, and “unnatural.”
Parks were cast not so much as picturesque set pieces meant to inspire tra-
ditional aesthetic or religious contemplation, but as relics of primeval
America where soft and over-urbanized modern Americans could associate
with the same environments that had theoretically ennobled their pioneer-
ing forefathers or experience the more abstract spiritual virtues and physi-
cal pleasures that wilderness advocates such as John Muir ascribed to
encounters with untrammeled nature. The rapid expansion of the national
park system around the turn of the century reflected this shifting emphasis.
On the metropolitan level, Massachusetts led the way with the creation of
a system of reservations designed to preserve scenic areas in the greater
Boston area. When Rock Creek Park was officially authorized in 1890,
it united these two trends, joining Yosemite, Sequoia, and General Grant
(now King's Canyon) as the first generation of new national parks since
Yellowstone.
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Between 1890 and 1918, the Army Corps of Engineers constructed a
series of paths and carriage drives to promote public access to Rock Creek
Park.When it came to the management of vegetation and other aspects of
the park's “natural” environment, however, biological processes were more
or less allowed to take their “natural” course.The result of this “hands-off ”
management strategy, which stemmed at least as much from budgetary con-
straints as from conscious intent, was that the grassy meadows, open wood-
lands, and varied understory that had endowed much of Rock Creek Valley
with a picturesque, park-like character as former estates and recently aban-
doned farmlands gradually gave way to an overgrown environment of dense
second-growth forest and riotous underbrush. Landscape architects influ-
enced by traditional park design practices called for modest vista-clearing
efforts and other aesthetic improvements throughout the first third of the
nineteenth-century, but to little avail; “nature” continued to reclaim the
park. The resulting landscape may have lacked the refinement and pictur-
esque variation envisioned by Michler and his contemporaries, but the
public clearly enjoyed the park's sylvan paths and shady drives, along with
