Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
suburban parks or residential neighborhoods, they exemplified the City
Beautiful goal of combining traditional social and aesthetic motivations
with more modern concerns about the health, efficiency, and economic
vitality of rapidly growing metropolises. Parkways were often located along
polluted urban watercourses, where they were used to eradicate public
health menaces, rejuvenate degraded environments, and replace threatening
lower-class neighborhoods with soothing naturalistic landscapes devoted to
middle-class leisure and recreation.
41
The lower portion of Rock Creek Valley seemed ideally poised for this
type of development. While the region from Dupont Circle north to the
southern boundary of Rock Creek Park remained attractively wooded, the
lower valley and the Potomac waterfront had become a combination indus-
trial zone and public dumping ground. Ramshackle tenements and huge
banks of refuse lined the creek. The C&O Canal and a number of small
industrial concerns robbed the creek mouth of any semblance of natural
beauty. Small factories, a brewery, and the towering facilities of the Wash-
ington Gas Light Company loomed over the Potomac Waterfront in the
area now occupied by the Watergate apartment complex and the Kennedy
Center. Conditions along the creek were so bad that a number of citizens'
groups lobbied to enclose the stream in a culvert and fill in the valley to
create a level connection between Washington and Georgetown. A grand
formal boulevard would trace the route of the covered creek and, it was
hoped, serve as the spine of an attractive residential district along the lines
of Boston's Back Bay, which had also been constructed on land reclaimed
from an urban “wasteland.” Another group of local reformers argued that
the stream should be cleaned up and the valley restored to a semblance of
its original conditions so that it would afford an attractive and seemingly
“natural” link between the Mall and Rock Creek Park.
42
The Senate Park Commission weighed both options and ruled in favor
of the restored valley plan, which it deemed preferable on aesthetic, eco-
nomic, and practical grounds. Restoring the valley would require an enor-
mous investment of time and money, but the commission insisted that a
winding creekside drive surrounded by naturalistic scenery would afford a
more appropriate and attractive addition to the city's park system. A major
attraction of the streamside location, it was noted, was that there would be
no cross-streets to interfere with recreational traffic on the parkway drive.
There were fewer than 8,000 automobiles in the entire country, and the
commission made no reference to the needs of motorists, but carriage
