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A Passage on Greenways

"By 1870 Olmsted had carried his thinking about parks beyond his original conception of the big landscape park, lying in the midst of the growing city. He saw that even better tracts of land might be destroyed on the outskirts, and that by the time the urban mass has reached these outlying areas they might be just as badly needed. Hence he outlined the conception of the complete park system. This system began with the individual square for local promenade and meeting, and the individual playground for active recreation. Such grounds were connected up by strips of roadway, greensward, and rows of trees, called parkways: elongated versions of the strip common of New England- already embodied in the Avenue des Champs Elysees. Accordingly, by increasing passages of open space, it led into such neighboring wild landscapes- like that of the Palisades in New York or Middlesex Fells in Boston - as might and should be preserved. Olmsted's disciple, Charles Eliot, Jr., saw the further necessity of using the riverside and sea-coast areas, no less than the pastoral or mountain landscape so dear to the older romantic planner; and had Eliot's timely warning been carried into political action, by creating permanent park strips and footpaths along the beaches and promontories of Massachusetts and Maine, that splendid coast would not have been turned into the dissolute landscape-slum so much of it had now become.

This conception of a continuous environment of public greens and open spaces as an essential element in urban planning- and not an afterthought or a mere embellishment- was an important contribution to sound contemporary city design: in a more systematic and highly developed form it must still govern every rational conspectus of the new city. Neither the medieval town not the baroque town had such continuous areas: indeed, the notion of the country and the city as being continuously inter-related and inter-penetrating was foreign to the earlier conception of urban organization."

-from Jane Jacob's The Culture of Cities, p.220

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