Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
owners were equally enamored of long, uninterrupted pleasure drives. A
mixture of formal and informal parkways would perform similar functions
in other parts of the city. Longer parkways would extend along the
Potomac to Great Falls and Mount Vernon.
43
Despite the Senate Park Commission's prestige and its success in initiat-
ing the wholesale transformation of the Mall, little progress was made on
broader park and parkway development initiatives during the first quarter
of the twentieth century. Rock Creek and Potomac Parkway was not
authorized until 1913, and land acquisition for the project dragged on into
the 1920s. Citing the loss of natural areas to development, park advocates
pressed the case for additional protection and improvements. Local and
national lobbying efforts led to the creation in 1924 of the National Capi-
tal Park Commission, an advisory federal agency intended to promote and
coordinate park development throughout the region. Reflecting the
increasingly broad-based agendas of such bodies, the agency was renamed
the National Capital Park and Planning Commission 2 years later. The
removal of “park” from the title 25 years later bore witness to the waning
influence of traditional park-making concerns on the evolution of the
modern urban fabric.
44
By the 1920s, the traditional vision of the urban park as a place of pas-
toral repose for the contemplation of picturesque scenery was fast disap-
pearing. The traditional landscape park ideology was giving way to the
notion that urban nature should provide opportunities for active sports and
games. Aesthetic resistance to the rigid geometry of playing fields and class
prejudices against the probable participants in publicly subsidized sports had
led Olmsted and other nineteenth-century park designers to banish these
elements from the genteel confines of their edifying compositions. By the
1920s, however, groups such as the National Recreation Association and the
National Conference on Outdoor Recreation were vigorously promoting
the creation of parks designed for active sports and structured play. Play-
grounds and athletic fields would theoretically improve the physical and
moral fiber of urban Americans, who were thought to be not only less
robust than their predecessors but also inclined to juvenile delinquency,
Bolshevism, and just plain laziness.While the Senate Park Commission plan
had included modest provisions for playground development, the district
and federal governments increased their activities in this area during the
1920s. Depression-era relief programs helped provide funds and manpower
to build new playgrounds and transform sections of existing parks into
