Park Drive

Park Drive
Street in Boston
The course of Park Drive marked in red
Basic data
place	Boston
District	Fenway – Kenmore
Created	19th century
Hist. Names	Audubon Road
Connecting roads	Commonwealth Avenue , Riverway
Places	Back Bay Fens
use
User groups	Car traffic , public transport
Technical specifications
Street length	1.0  mi (1.6  km )

The Park Drive with separation in the middle (left in the picture) and parking areas on the right.

East end of Park Drive near Boylston Street .

The Park Drive is a one- to two-lane for the most part Parkway in the district Fenway-Kenmore in Boston in the state of Massachusetts of the United States . The street was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted in the late 19th century as part of the Emerald Necklace system of parks and parkways that stretches from Boston Common on Beacon Hill to Franklin Park in Roxbury . The Park Drive runs parallel to Fenway past the Back Bay Fens , combining the Commonwealth Avenue with the Riverway . Part of the route also runs along the Muddy River . The street is part of the Metropolitan Park System of Greater Boston and is administered and maintained by the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation .

background

In 1875, the Boston electorate and the Massachusetts legislature approved the establishment of a parks commission to prepare and promote the establishment of public parks in the city. The landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted , who already the Central Park in New York City had designed, spent from this point much of his time in the area and was asked in the late 1870s by the Park Commission, of the outcome of a contest with 23 submitted proposals for the design of a new park to decide. Olmsted considered all of the competition entries unsuitable because, in his opinion, they either did not take into account the control of the tides or, on the contrary, did not take sufficient account of the aspects of a public park. The Muddy River and Stony Brook flowed through the Back Bay Fens , which at the time was exposed to the tides, storm surges, and sewage .

The Park Commission, disappointed with the verdict, asked Olmsted to join them as a professional consultant and landscape architect. Under his guidance, the construct now known as the Emerald Necklace took on tangible forms. He decided that the fens should be dredged, leveled, planted and turned into a near-natural salt bog to purify the running water. On this basis, Olmsted built a series of parks that stretched from the Fens near Commonwealth Avenue to Franklin Park a few miles away . The individual parking areas were connected by scenic parkways , including Park Drive on the northern and western sides of the Back Bay Fens.

The street was originally called Audubon Road , as it branches off from the Audubon Circle roundabout of the same name . The name was chosen in honor of the Audubon Society and the large gatherings of birds in the Back Bay Fens. The name was changed to Park Drive between 1928 and 1938, when structural changes in the Back Bay Fens were used to fill a large part of the artificial marshland in favor of more parking space.

As part of the Metropolitan Park System of Greater Boston , Park Drive is administered by the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation (DCR) rather than the City of Boston.

The section between Boylston Street and Brookline Avenue opened on January 3, 1892, the continuation to Mountfort Street was inaugurated in 1895.

Route

The Park Drive begins near the intersection of Boylston Street and Ipswich Street and carries two lanes south to Peterborough Street . From there you can park in an additional lane on both sides, which is separated from the flowing traffic by a strip of green with trees . The road leads in this way to the end of the Back Bay Fens , where the parking area joins the main carriageway and the Fenway also joins. From there the path continues towards Brookline Avenue .

After crossing it, two more lanes are added to the Landmark Center at Audubon Circle . The two left lanes then turn left onto the Riverway and in the opposite direction onto the Fenway , while the two right lanes continue straight ahead and run next to two lanes in the opposite direction. After the intersection with Beacon Street , Park Drive is only two lanes and continues as part of Massachusetts Route 2 to Mountfort Street near the Massachusetts Turnpike . From its beginning on Boylston Street to Brookline Avenue, Park Drive runs parallel to the Muddy River .

Web links

• Website about the work of Frederick Law Olmsted
• Emerald Necklace Conservancy website

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c} Alexander Garvin: The American city . what works, what doesn't. 2nd Edition. McGraw-Hill , New York 2002, ISBN 978-0-07-137367-8 , pp. 60 ( digitized version in the Google book search).
2. ↑ ^{a b} Alex Krieger, David A. Cobb, Amy Turner et al .: Mapping Boston . MIT Press , Cambridge 2001, ISBN 978-0-262-61173-2 , pp. 212 ( digitized version in the Google book search).
3. ^ Robert Fishman: The American planning tradition . culture and policy. Woodrow Wilson Center Press, Washington 2000, ISBN 978-0-943875-95-8 , pp. 306 ( digitized in Google book search).
4. ↑ Park Drive ( Memento from February 29, 2012 in the Internet Archive )
5. ↑ Christina Pazzanese: Mixed signals at a tricky intersection. In: Boston Globe . October 26, 2008, accessed December 13, 2011 . 
6. ^ William Jackson: Annual report of the Park Department . Boston Park Department, Boston 1892, p. 65 ( digitized version in the Google book search).
7. ^ William Jackson: Annual report of the Park Department . Boston Park Department, Boston 1896, p. 118 ( digitized version in Google book search).
8. ↑ ^{a b} Emerald Necklace Parks. (PDF) (No longer available online.) In: The Emerald Necklace Conservancy. Archived from the original on April 11, 2010 ; accessed on December 13, 2011 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  

Coordinates: 42 ° 20 '30 "  N , 71 ° 5' 40"  W.