Emerald Metropolis

Karl Haglund .i

One hundred years ago the founders of Boston’s Metropolitan Park Commissionrealized a transcendentalist vision by reserving as public open space "the rockhills, the stream banks, and the bay and the sea shores" of the region.

At the height of the Panic of 1893 CharlesFrancis Adams and his brother Henry "packedup our troubles and made for Chicago" to seethe World’s Columbian Exposition. Like thou-sands of others they were captivated and aston-ished by the fantastic ensemble of images theysaw there-neoclassical buildings, all perfectlywhite, arrayed according to Frederick LawOlmsted’s site plan to display "the successfulgrouping in harmonious relationships of vastand magnificent structures." Employing thetalents of America’s best architects, the fair’s"White City" generated enormous enthusiasmfor what soon came to be called the City Beau-tiful movement.’ 1

In his autobiography, Henry Adams puzzledover the exhibits and the architecture of the

exposition. Given that these extraordinarywhite structures had been "artistically in-duced to pass the summer on the shore of Lake

Michigan," the question was, did they seem athome there? More than that, Adams wonderedwhether Americans were at home in the fair’sidealized New World city. But neither of theAdamses, in their published works or privatewritings, connected what they saw in Chicagowith Charles’ work as chairman of the Metro-

politan Park Commission in Boston.In January 1893 the six-month-old park

commission had published its report, writtenby Sylvester Baxter and Charles Eliot, thecommission’s secretary and landscape archi-tect ; Adams wrote the introduction. Their re-

port addressed the urban environment, but notby focusing on the city center as Chicago’sWhite City had done. Nor did they advocatetaking control of suburban development-street plans and public transportation as wellas parks-an approach that Olmsted and oth-ers had unsuccessfully urged in New York Cityin the 1870s. Looking instead to the marginsand the in-between spaces of the region, theyenvisioned an "Emerald Metropolis." Morethan a city in a park, more than a second Em-erald Necklace, more, even, than a system ofparks, it was a visual definition of the region’sstructure that could be sustained, they wereconvinced, even in the face of unimaginedgrowth. The Emerald Metropolis would helpBostonians feel at home by preserving whatEliot called "the rock-hills, the stream banks,and the bay and the sea shores" of greaterBoston-the natural edges, paths, and land-marks of the region. 2

The Idea Defined

Eliot and Baxter moved to shape the region byreserving as open space large tracts hithertounbuildable but now on the verge of develop-ment ; the shores of rivers and beaches still

marshy or shabbily built up; and the most pic-turesque remaining fragments of the aboriginalNew England landscape. The natural featuresof the region should establish the armature forurban development, not the existing haphaz-ard assemblage of streets, lots, railroads, and

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By the 1890s the Middlesex Fells was entirely surrounded by rapidly growmg towns whose boundaries met inthe middle of the woods. The towns had already begun to purchase land around the ponds to protect their watersupply when the reservation was created m 1894, expandmg the protecuon of the watershed. This view looksacross Spot Pond toward Pickerel Rock. From Report of the Board of Metropolitan Park Commissioners, 1895.

streetcar lines. Once set aside, these reserva-tions would forever enhance the city’s fitnessfor human habitation, joining unique and char-acteristic landscapes to the placemakingpower of the city’s historic landmarks. Thepark commission’s plan offered the citizenry ofBoston an opportunity to see the metropolis inan entirely new way; the figure and ground ofthe region’s topographical features would betransposed.

Baxter and Eliot had begun formulatingthese ideas several years earlier. In February1890, Eliot responded to an editorial byCharles Sprague Sargent in his new periodicalGarden and Forest that since the cities andtowns around Boston had failed to act, the pro-vision of "well-distributed open spaces" forpublic squares and playgrounds would have towait for the establishment of a commission bythe legislature. Eliot, however, was concerned

with another sort of open space. He looked outfrom the State House and saw, within a ten-mile radius, many still-surviving remnants ofthe New England wilderness. There were halfa dozen scenes of uncommon beauty, "wellknown to all lovers of nature near Boston ...in daily danger of utter destruction." He urgedthe immediate creation of an association tohold "small and well-distributed parcels ofland ... just as the Public Library holds booksand the Art Museum pictures-for the use andenjoyment of the public." Generous men andwomen would bequeath these irreplaceableproperties to such a group, just as othersgive works of art to the city’s museums. Eliothelped organize a standing committee oftwenty-five, which set to work in the spring of1890. As an energetic member of the commit-tee, Baxter drew on his ties to newspaper edi-tors and writers across the state and to other

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veterans of the twenty-year-old campaign topreserve the Middlesex Fells. The legislationto create a privately endowed Trustees of Pub-lic Reservations was signed in May of 1891.3Though Eliot did not note the distinction in

his letter, the analogy with the art museumand the public library suggested two ap-proaches to preserving open space, one privateand the other public. Even before the campaignto organize the Trustees was completed, Eliotand Baxter moved-first separately and thenjointly-to promote a public regional park au-thority. Eliot wrote a letter to his boyhoodfriend Governor William Russell in December1890, recommending that the State Board ofHealth develop a plan for metropolitan reser-vations. Three months later, Baxter wrote aseries of articles in the Boston Herald aboutwhat he called "Greater Boston." He tooscanned the ten-mile view from the StateHouse, but he described an image that was thevery inverse of Eliot’s fast-disappearing land-scapes. From that height he observed "a bil-lowy sea of buildings stretching away in nearlyevery direction, apparently without interrup-tion, as far as the feet of the chain of hills thatencircles the borders of the bay from Lynnaround to Milton." The pattern of construc-tion paid little heed to town boundaries, andthe limits of Boston covered only a fraction ofthe true city. The proper management of thisGreater Boston would be a regional commis-sion with authority over all the major publicservices-water supply, sewerage, fire, police,schools, highways, transit, parks. HereBaxter’s perspective joined with Eliot’s. Of allthese functions, Baxter reserved his lengthiestdescription for a chain of pleasure grounds ex-tending (under regional administration) fromLynn Beach and the Lynn Woods to the"mountain-like" Blue Hills range. Taken to-gether with the recently completed parks inthe City of Boston, these large woodland reser-vations would constitute one of the grandestpark systems in the world .4Olmsted urged Baxter to publish the Herald

articles in book form, and soon after Greater

Boston appeared, Eliot read it and proposedthat they work together to realize the metro-politan park system. At their urging the newlyorganized Trustees of Public Reservationsagreed to convene a meeting of park commis-sioners from across Greater Boston in Decem-ber 1891. After public hearings the followingspring, a temporary Metropolitan Park Com-mission was authorized by the legislature inJune 1892.5

Baxter’s concerns were the administrativeinefficiencies and parochial jealousies of themyriad cities and towns in the Boston basin,and Eliot knew firsthand how the wariness oftown officials affected the development of pub-lic open space. From his extensive explorationson the region’s fringes, he knew that town bound-aries often bisected the most scenic areas,especially along ponds and river valleys. Itwould be senseless, he said, for one town to actwithout the other, but too often one city hadrefused to spend money for fear that the adjoin-ing city would enjoy what it had paid for.6

So when the park commissioners planned aseries of daytrips through the district in Sep-tember and October of 1892, they invited cityofficials and prominent residents of the townsto join them. The secretary’s minutes recountthe itinerary of these ten excursions, whichtook the commissioners and their gueststhroughout the metropolitan district. Severalrequired transit by train, carriage, barge, andsteam launch, all in the same day. The placesthey visited were unfamiliar to most of themembers, and Baxter wrote later that the out-ings "were like voyages of discovery abouthome." Again and again the minutes of thesejourneys underline the fascination with ob-taining grand and scenic views. On Milton Hillthey found "one of the noblest prospects in theneighborhood of Boston." The outlook downthe valley of the Saugus River toward themeadowland, the serpentine stream, and theuplands "formed a picture of exceptionalcharm." The view from the twin summits of

Prospect Hill in Waltham was "wide and glori-ous." On their inspection tours the travelers

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The park plan was bounded by the rock hills-the forest reservations laid out along the ring of hills thatsurround Boston about ten miles from the State House. The radial spokes of the park system were the threerivers 2014 the Mystic, the Charles, and the Neponset. The beaches of the bay and seashores comprised the thirdelement of the plan. Parks and parkways were proposed along the rivers, and parkways also linked RevereBeach with the Mystic River and the Middlesex Fells, the Charles River with Fresh Pond, Stony Brook withthe Arnold Arboretum, and the Blue Hills with Franklin Park. By 1899, over nine thousand acres ofreservations and parkways had been acquired. Cartography by Olmsted Brothers; from Report of the Board ofMetropolitan Park Commissioners, 1899.

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Plans and Planners

What we now know as the Emerald Necklacewas conceived and executed as a single, unifiedwork by Frederick Law Olmsted. By contrast, itis impossible to attribute the authorship of themetropolitan park system to a single author.Except for relatively small parcels within thelarger reservations-for example, Revere Beach(1895) and the Charles River Esplanade (1936)2014MPC lands have been largely untouched by "de-sign." They represent the first metropolitanapplication of the idea of "reserving" naturallandmarks that began with Yellowstone,Yosemite, and Niagara Falls.

In the second half of the nineteenth century,many people campaigned to preserve variouswoodlands and undeveloped areas around Bos-ton-including the Lynn Woods, the MiddlesexFells, Beaver Brook, and the Blue Hills. Amongthe park advocates who took a comprehensive,metropolitan view, the most influentialincluded Robert Morris Copeland, SylvesterBaxter, and Charles Eliot.

Robert Morris CopelandA landscape gardener listed in Boston citydirectories from 1855 to 1872, Copeland pre-pared the plan for the village of Oak Bluffs onMartha’s Vineyard and wrote the popular bookCountry Life: A Handbook of Agriculture, Hor-ticulture, and Landscape Gardening. Duringthe park debates of post-Civil War Boston,Copeland wrote a remarkable editorial propos-ing a system of parks as well as a grand circularboulevard around Boston that would follow theits encircling ring of hills; bridges and ferriesacross the harbor islands were to complete theloop. Copeland suggested that the surroundingtowns "were now Boston," but their citizens"come here to earn money, and go home to en-joy it." It should be possible, he thought, tochoose park improvements that would benefitBoston as well as the surrounding suburbs, butthis task was beyond the means of individualcities and towns. He appears to have been thefirst to suggest a "metropolitan commission" asthe vehicle for this parkmaking.1

When Copeland moved to Vermont, his ideasfor a metropolitan system were advanced byhis former associate, the engineer NathanielBowditch. In 1874 Bowditch published a

metropolitan park plan that included many ofCopeland’s ideas and anticipated Eliot’s pro-posal of two decades later. For almost fifteenyears Copeland had lived in a house along BeaverBrook in Belmont, near the famous WaverlyOaks, an area he included in his metropolitansystem. When the MPC was organized in 1893,Beaver Brook was its first acquisition.

Sylvester Baxter

Having determined that he could not afford toattend the recently opened architecture schoolof the Massachusetts Institute of Technology(the first in America), Baxter went to work forthe Boston Daily Advertiser in 1871. It seemslikely that he would have read Bowditch’s 1874proposal for a metropolitan park system in theAdvertiser.From 1875 to 1877 Baxter studied at the uni-

versities of Leipzig and Berlin and was

especially interested in German municipal

Sylvester Baxter (above) and CharlesEliot (facing page) Photographs by ElmerChickering, ca. 1893, courtesy of MDCArchives

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administration. On his return to Boston he be-came involved with Elizur Wright in the cam-paign to preserve "Stone’s Woods" in Malden,Medford, and Winchester. (He also promotedrenaming the area "the Middlesex Fells.") In1880 he wrote Olmsted, who had not yet movedto Boston, about the Fells.

Baxter’s interests covered an extraordinaryrange. In 1881 he joined an archeological expe-dition to investigate Zuni ruins in the South-west, and the following year wrote an articleabout the visit of several Zuni chiefs to Wash-

ington and Boston, where the Zuni conducted asunrise ceremony on the beach at Deer Island.He also wrote several books of poetry as well asa history of Mexican architecture. His abidinginterest, however, was his vision for GreaterBoston.2 .2

Charles Eliot

Periods of elation and tranquility (especiallywhen he was away from Cambridge in nearbycountryside or the wilds of Maine) alternatedwith recurring episodes of self-doubt and de-pression in Eliot’s early life. His mother diedwhen he was nine. By the time he began hisstudies at Harvard, his father had been presi-dent of the college for ten years and was well onhis way to Olympian status in American higher

education. The burden of family privilege andaccomplishment heightened Charles’ anxietieswhen as an upperclassman he realized he"could find no practical bent or ambitionanywhere about me." At one point in his senioryear he came near to giving up his studiesentirely.Not long after graduation a conversation

with his uncle Robert Peabody, an architectwho lived near Frederick Law Olmsted in

Brookline, persuaded Eliot that he should be-come a landscape architect. Since there wasthen no recognized training for the field, he en-tered Harvard’s Bussey Institution, where theDepartment of Agriculture and Horticulturewas located. The following spring Eliot was in-troduced by Peabody to Olmsted, who offeredhim an apprenticeship. Within a week he haddropped out of his classes and taken his firstinspection tour with Olmsted as a full-timeemployee of the firm. He soon discovered howwell his extracurricular pursuits had preparedhim for his profession-the childhood drawinglessons, the long hikes around Boston, the ado-lescent mapping of imaginary towns and realneighborhoods (like Norton’s Woods in Cam-bridge), the college summers organizing a groupof college friends to study the natural scienceson Mt. Desert Island.

After an apprenticeship of two years, Eliotleft for a year in Europe. On Olmsted’s advice,he ignored the monuments of the "Grand Tour"in favor of public parks, botanical gardens, citystreets, and landscape books in the BritishMuseum. He returned with an extraordinarybreadth of professional knowledge-from land-scape construction to styles and philosophies ofdesign. By 1892, after five years of managing hisown office, he was well equipped for his part inthe creation of the Metropolitan Park System.’

1 Robert Morris Copeland, "The Park Question,"Boston Daily Advertiser (December 2, 1869), 2.

2 [Sylvester Baxter] "Sylvester Baxter," in JamesPhmney Baxter, The Baxter Family A Collectionof Genealogies (N.p. 1921), 94-102.

3 [Charles W. Eliot] Charles Eliot, LandscapeArchitect (Boston- Houghton Mifflin, 1901), 1-34.

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also noted unique and distinctive landscapes.They were deeply impressed with the remark-able beauty of the landscape of the ancientWaverly Oaks in Belmont and with the need topreserve them for the public.’The commissioners were able to see beyond

then-current conditions as well. The CharlesRiver shore "was marred by industries merelyin search of cheap land" and made ugly by"squalid hovels, dump heaps and other nui-sances." Its banks were "inky black" with foulsewage deposits, though they should be "apopular pleasure ground." There were a "num-ber of ugly fish houses and an equally uglyHotel" on Nahant Beach, but it was nonethe-less one of the most beautiful sites on the Mas-sachusetts coast. After their ten outings, allthe members presented their views before theboard, and then Baxter and Eliot drafted thereport.8

"Picturing" the Park SystemThe rationale for the Metropolitan Park Sys-tem drew on a reservoir of ideas that datedback more than a generation, ideas that hadnow gained widespread acceptance:The life history of humanity has proved noth-ing more clearly than that crowded popula-tions, if they would live in health and happiness,must have space for air, for light, for exercise,for rest, and for the enjoyment of that peacefulbeauty of nature which, because it is the oppo-site of the noisy ugliness of towns, is so

wonderfully refreshing to the tired souls oftownspeople.9

In Eliot’s summation, these general prin-ciples gave strong support for the concept ofthe park system. The real genius of the 1893report, though, was its integration and exten-sion of a series of earlier, less comprehensiveproposals for the Boston region.

In 1844 an eccentric Scot named RobertGourlay, residing in Boston for two years forthe treatment of insomnia, had proposed "con-necting and exhibiting to the greatest advan-tage those rare and beautiful features whichNature has here thrown together" so that "the

streams, the islands, and the promontories,-all may be made to harmonize in one grandpanorama ..." The landscape gardener RobertMorris Copeland had published a plan in 1869that encompassed not only the ring of hillsfrom Lynn to Quincy, but a grand circuit thatlinked the North Shore across harbor bridgesand ferries to the southern beaches (thoughhe believed the banks of the Charles wouldalways be needed for wharves and docks).Copeland was probably the first to call specifi-cally for a metropolitan commission to ex-ecute this ambitious plan. Separate campaignshad been forwarded for several of the large for-ests around Boston. Elizur Wright and othershad lobbied since the 1870s to create a "forestconservatory" at the Fells, and the Massachu-setts Horticultural Society in its reports hadurged the reservation of both the Fells and theWaverly Oaks. A "water park" for the CharlesRiver Basin had many advocates in the 1870sand 80s, among them Uriah Crocker andCharles Davenport.10The 1893 metropolitan scheme encompassed

the rivers and the shores of Greater Boston in

spite of their then-degraded state. Eliot sketchedthe symmetry of this plan near the end of his"Report of the Landscape Architect":As the ocean at Revere Beach was reached by aten-mile drive from Winchester down the val-ley of the Mystic River, so now the bay shore atSquaw Rock is reached by a ten-mile drive fromDedham down the lovelier valley of the

Neponset. Half-way between these northernand southern nverways we find Charles River,leading, by another course of ten miles, fromWaltham through the very centre of the metro-politan district to the basin just west of theState House. Nature appears to have placedthese streams just where they can best servethe needs of the crowded populations gatheringfast about them." I I

Here, as throughout the two men’s writings,images were crucial to their visionary narra-tives. During the report’s preparation Eliotwrote to the commissioners that his "specialwork" for the park commission was "the pic-turing by printed words, photographs, and

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The most visionary acts of the park commission were the schemes to reclaim the riverbanks and beaches,which were occupied by tenements and industry. The transformation of Revere Beach required the relocationof streets and railroads and the demolition of numerous shanties and saloons. Photograph by Nathaniel L.Stebbms. From Report of the Board of Metropolitan Park Commissioners, 1898

maps of those open spaces which are still ob-tainable near Boston." The "details of the legalmachinery" could all be resolved once this"picturing" aroused the necessary public sup-port.12 Like others before and since who haveprojected greater Boston into the future, thetwo men appealed to the visual as well as themoral imagination.

Eliot divided his report’s twenty-five pagesof "picturing" into three parts. First was aphysical and historical geography of the parksdistrict, followed by a study of "the way inwhich the peculiar geography of the metropoli-tan district ought to govern the selection of thesites of public open spaces." Finally, Eliotdocumented the opportunities still availableto acquire open space according to the prin-ciples he had outlined. 13Those principles reflected widely expressed

contemporary concerns for public order andrational structure in American cities. A study

of the natural features of the region, Eliot be-lieved, would "bring forth the facts in thecase" and result in "the scientific selection oflands for public open space." Such "scientificplanning" would proceed from the greater tothe lesser, recognizing that the larger spacescould never be had if they were not acquired atthe right time. The larger reservations wouldoffer not only the "fresh air and play-room" ofsmaller spaces but also the "free pleasures ofthe open world of which small spaces can giveno hint." Executing these general principleswould require particular attention to the vi-sual and functional logic of the reservations’boundaries. Wherever possible the boundariesshould be established on public roads or onlines where roads would likely be built. Andthe commission should avoid taking "only halfa hill, half a pond or half a glen," since frag-ments of such landscape types would be lesssatisfying as natural scenery. 14

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The Park Commission was authorized to build parkways in 1894 to create jobs in a time of recession. Primanlyintended for "pleasure vehicles, the parkways provided scenic access to the reservations. The Speedway, adeparture from the scenic values of the park system, was bmlt near Harvard’s Soldiers Field. The tidal flatsalong the lower Charles offered the only place near Boston for a mile-long course unmterrupted by crossstreets. From Report of the Board of Metropolitan Park Commissioners, 1902.

Picturing the park system also meant citingappropriate administrative models. ThoughEliot hinted at the possibilities for parkways,Baxter’s "Report of the Secretary" addressedthe issue of public roads in a regional contextand strongly advocated "Special Pleasure-ways" to link the metropolitan parks and res-ervations. One precedent was the boulevardsof Chicago, created by the Illinois boulevardact, which allowed the park commissioners toseek the consent of municipal authorities andabutting landowners to connect parks withsuch pleasure roads. Commonwealth Avenue,the parkways of the Emerald Necklace, theplanned improvements to Blue Hill Avenue,and the proposed parkway from the ArnoldArboretum to Stony Brook were cited as ex-amples, made possible because the annexationof several adjoining towns had given the Cityof Boston the necessary geographical range. By

contrast, the region north of the Charles River,carved up into many small cities and towns,lacked not only extensive parks but clearlydelineated routes to the center of Boston aswell.ls

In Baxter’s view, the proper structure for"the peculiar political geography" of the regionwas not annexation, however; it was the Met-ropolitan Sewerage Act of 1889. Baxter alsosaw a fiscal precedent near at hand for theCommission’s plans to reclaim degraded natu-ral areas. Olmsted’s recreative treatment of theBack Bay Fens was clearly both "the cheapestand most effective" remedy.16

Assembling the ReservationsThe effort of "picturing" the metropolitanparks in the report, aimed at Boston’s "high-handed and liberal" Yankee aristocracy, wascompletely successful. The "legal machinery"

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was passed by the legislature and signed byGovernor Russell, permanently establishingthe Metropolitan Park Commission on June 3,1893. Charles Dalton, the chairman of the Bos-ton Park Commission, thought the reportwould be one of the most important contribu-tions to the literature of public parks evermade. Charles Francis Adams observed to theboard that "Our work is chiefly educational.We cannot expect to accomplish practical re-sults immediately, but to prepare the public todo something in these directions some yearshence.""

Eliot, however, had other intentions. Hemoved with what now seems almost incom-

prehensible speed to map the reservationboundaries, and the Park Commission ac-quired almost seven thousand acres of mostlyopen land in its first eighteen months. Its firsttaking, in 1893, was Beaver Brook, includingthe Waverly Oaks. Responding to the depres-sion, the legislature authorized funding for thedevelopment of parkways the next year. By1899, only six years after the park commissionwas established, the park system comprisedeleven reservations and seven parkways, total-ling over nine thousand acres.18At the heart of Eliot’s vision for the derelict

spaces along the rivers and shores was theCharles River Basin, extending upstream fromthe western slope of Beacon Hill. The basin, hepredicted, would become the central "court ofhonor" of the metropolitan district. Gourlay’svisionary drawings in 1844 had already imag-ined the basin as a single, designed space, butin 1893, the river was still a noisome expanseof sewage-laden tidal flats, unfit for the centralrole in any story of park design or civic fore-sightedness. The river’s frontage was occupiedby two prisons, three coal-burning powerplants, and numerous shabby commercial andindustrial structures. Two large slaughter-houses, one near the harbor and the otherdownstream from Watertown Square, dumpedoffal into the shallow waters. Even in the

elegant Back Bay, said Richard Henry Dana,where a public roadway should face the river,

there was instead "a contemptible scavenger’sstreet, thirty feet wide, backing up against theunmentionable parts of private houses."’9No single reservation took more of Eliot’s

time than the Charles. Before and during histenure as consultant to the MPC, he served onseveral state commissions organized to studythe river’s sanitary problems, and was also thelandscape architect for the new (1893) Cam-bridge Park Commission. Cambridge actedfirst, and at Eliot’s direction the city acquiredand began filling more than four miles of saltmarsh, almost the entire length of the city’ssouthern boundary. Though Eliot hoped thatsome of the region’s riverine marshes would bepreserved, he told the MPC that the ten milesof Charles River salt marsh below Watertown"must sooner or later be made usable." Like

many others, Eliot was persuaded that dam-ming the Charles near the harbor to create awater park would return annually increasingprofits to the community. A separate MPC ap-propriation for land acquisition along the riverwas passed in 1894, and over five hundredacres were purchased during the next threeyears. In spite of these extensive investments,the opposition-led by residents on the waterside of Beacon Street-successfully resistedthe construction of a dam until 1903. (The Es-planade was completed in 1936. )20

Reservations and Natural SceneryFor the forest lands, Eliot pressed vigorously toacquire as much of the identified reservationsas possible, but he struggled in vain to educatethe park board on the need for what he called"general plans" for each reservation beforeroads and structures were built. When the paceof acquisition slowed in 1896, he organized aproject to classify the broad categories of veg-etation throughout the park system. Publishedin 1898, a year after Eliot’s untimely death,Vegetation and Scenery is a detailed comple-ment to his planning principles outlined in the1893 report. Though in the earlier documenthe had advocated a "scientific" selection of

lands, the vegetation study would merely

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record the existing conditions in the reserva-tions ; it was neither "an historical or even ascientific inquiry."21Here we are left to puzzle over what Eliot

meant by "historical" and "scientific." Cer-tainly the Vegetation report corroborated hisearlier statements that both the beauty andugliness of the existing vegetation were prima-rily the work of men, "chopped over, or com-pletely cleared, or pastured, or burnt over, timeand time again." While the reservations dif-fered sharply from each other topographically,recent human action had rendered the vegeta-tion of the woodlands very much alike and "re-

markably uninteresting. "21Then why-apart from a few scattered natural

and geologic oddities-had these forests beenacquired? Natural reservations, Eliot had said,"were the cathedrals of the modern world,"and the metropolitan reservations had beenacquired as a "treasure of scenery." The beachesand the river shores offered expansive waterviews, but the scenery of the rock hills wasproblematic. Only on the rocky summits andin the swamps was the vegetation "natural."The opportunity of the park system’s stewardswas to "control, guide, and modify" the forestgrowth so that the reservations would be"slowly but surely induced to present thegreatest possible variety, interest, and beautyof the landscape." Eliot encouraged his protegeArthur Shurcliff to sketch before-and-afterscenes in the reservations, and Shurcliff’sdrawings were included in the printed reportto "picture" the enhancement of the landscapethrough the judicious use of the axe.23

Standing in the way of such landscape im-provements, Eliot wrote, was a "small but in-fluential body of refined persons" who opposedthese efforts to adapt parks and reservations tonew requirements. He observed that thesepeople could live in a little bower and readThoreau with delight, but they could not un-derstand a whole landscape. They "talk of ’let-ting Nature alone’ or ’keeping nature natural’,as if such a thing were possible in a worldwhich was made for man." The idea that it

might be "sacrilegious" to control or modifythe existing verdure was nonsense. Even thesix thousand acres of the Blue Hills, situated asit was on the rim of the metropolis, did notconstitute a wilderness-in fact, the vegeta-tion was "really artificial in a high degree."Eliot’s priorities for both the large and smallreservations were clear: first, to safeguard thescenery of these natural areas before it was toolate; second, to make that scenery accessibleto the public; and finally, to enrich and en-hance the beauty of the reservations.24Even if there should be sufficient public sup-

port to accomplish the first and second ofthese tasks, could the enhancement of sceneryever be justified at public expense, when "or-dinary people will never appreciate the differ-ence" ? Eliot answered emphatically in theaffirmative. Following Olmsted, he arguedthat in the presence of "unaccustomed beautyor grandeur," even the average person experi-enced "sensations and emotions, the causes ofwhich are unrecognized and even unknown."This principle, he thought, was the basis forthe public commitment to schools, libraries,and art museums. It was well exemplified inmany already completed public parks, and inEliot’s mind it was the foundation for the met-ropolitan reservations .21

The Park System AcclaimedThe significance of the metropolitan parks waswidely acclaimed in Boston, in other Americancities, and especially in Europe. In November1893, after Eliot and Olmsted’s son John hadbecame his partners, Olmsted wrote to them:

... nothing else compares m importance to uswith the Boston work, meaning theMetropoh-tan quite equally with the city work. The twotogether will be the most important work ofour profession now in hand anywhere in theworld.... In your probable life-time, MuddyRiver [part of the Emerald Necklace], BlueHills, the Fells, Waverly Oaks, Charles River,the Beaches will be pomts to date from in thehistory of American Landscape Architecture,as much as Central Park. They will be theopening of new chapters in the art.26

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The popularity of canoeing on the Charles River peaked dunng the two decades after the construction ofNorumbega Park and the Riverside Recreation Grounds m Newton and Weston in the 1890s. More than fourthousand canoes were said to be moored along the middle Charles. The regatta shown here was held at theWaltham Canoe Club about 1912. rust downstream of the canoe club is the smokestack of the AmericanWaltham Watch Company, and on the west side of the nver is Mt. Feake Cemetery. Farther downstream,below the Watertown Dam, the nverbanks were lined with slaughterhouses, power plants, and other pollutingindustries, and boating was dommated by the colleges and the rowmg clubs. Courtesy of the MDC ArchIves.

The endeavor of "picturing" the parks didnot end with the first report, nor was the audi-ence limited to Bostonians. The metropolitanpark commissioners prepared a one-ton plastertopographical model of the metropolitan areafor the Paris Exposition of 1900 that was laterexhibited at the Pan-American Exhibition inBuffalo (1901), at the Louisiana Purchase Expo-sition at St. Louis (1904), and at the Lewis andClark Centennial Exposition in Portland

(1905). A 1905 article by the secretary of theCity Parks Association on "The Developmentof Park Systems in American Cities" includeda lengthy description of the Boston metropoli-tan parks, and suggested that "readers have

doubtless so identified the park movementwith Boston as to be almost totally ignorantthat anything of a similar nature has been un-dertaken elsewhere."27

In 1910 the international competition forthe planning of Greater Berlin resulted in aninfluential exhibition and a widely circulatedtwo-volume catalog. A lavishly illustratedchapter on American park systems describedtheir significance as the basis for city plans andtheir importance in relieving urban conges-tion. Several pages were devoted to the Boston

city and metropolitan parks, with a full-pagemap of the metropolitan park system and pho-tographs of the Blue Hills and Revere Beach.

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The section of the exhibit on American parkswas later mounted separately in several Ger-man cities.28The judgment of planners and civic officials

at the turn of the century has been echoed bymodern urban historians. In their view, it wasin America that "open space first emerged as apotential structural element for the entirecity." The work of Baxter and Eliot has beencalled "the most notable scheme of compre-hensive metropolitan park planning" in theUnited States and "the first such organizationof land in the world." Closer to home, an elo-quent study of the Back Bay Fens authenticatesthe reservations’ importance: "If Mount Au-burn Cemetery was the forerunner of the Fens,

the Metropolitan Park System represented itsevolutionary glory."29 2014 2014 - " «--

The Fate of the Idea

In 1919, the Park Commission merged withthe Metropolitan Water and Sewerage Board tocreate the Metropolitan District Commission(MDC). More than a dozen new parkways wereconstructed in the next decade. The passage ofopen space bonds in the 1980s funded signifi-cant additions to the reservations, and todaythe park system comprises more than 16,000acres. After a hundred years’ experience withthis regional pattern of open space, it is fair toask what these reservations now mean in oururban lives.

Workmg double shifts for eight months, twenty-one people built this model under the direction of the"geographic sculptor" George Carroll Curtis. It took six months to make a wax model, then plaster casts weremade m ten sections The finished model was almost eleven feet in diameter and weighed one ton Its

handpainted surface was "planted" with 200,000 evergreen and deciduous trees and depicted 250 miles ofrailroads, 300 miles of streams, 2,750 miles of streets, and 157,000 dwellings. Even the Frog Pond on Boston

15

The founders of the park system were prac-tical enough to see that the water edges ofrivers and shores could provide open spacewithout taking large tracts off the tax rolls.The city’s ponds and rivers, as Eliot told theCambridge park commissioners, offered "per-manently open spaces provided by naturewithout cost"; capturing their edges for thepublic opened "these now unused and inacces-sible spaces with their ample air, light, andoutlook." But behind these matter-of-factstatements was a transcendentalist vision ofthe mystical power at the edges and margins ofthe natural world. The human craving for land-scapes is most deeply realized where earthconnects with water and sky. Emerson, whose

writings these park advocates knew well, de-clared that "in every landscape the point ofastonishment is the meeting of the sky andthe earth." The New England teacher HoraceMann put it more plainly: "Water is to thelandscape what the eye is to the face."30A hundred years ago Eliot was convinced

that reservations of scenery had become thecathedrals of the modern world. Are they now?The historian Sam Bass Warner has argued thatat the end of the twentieth century "we are

escaping a different city; we are in search of adifferent Mother Nature." It is not just thehighways everywhere, splitting the BlueHills and the Fells, and separating the Espla-nade from its neighborhood. Across the

Common and the bridge over the lake m the Public Garden were shown m scale. The model was exhibitedfust at the Paris Exposition of 1900, then at international expositions in Buffalo, St Louis, and Portland. Foralmost eighty years the model was displayed at Harvard Umversity museums. In 1980 it was moved to theBoston Museum of Science, at the geographical center of the Metropolitan Park System. From G. C. Curtis, ADescription of the Topographical Model of Metropolitan Boston, 1900.

16

country "greenways" are created on formerrailroad beds, along canals, and in other once-unimaginable "public open spaces," andOlmsted is acclaimed as the "father of the

greenways." Greenways, however, are no

longer peaceful byways for "restoring the tiredsouls of townspeople." We now jog, sunbathe,cycle, and skate in many reservations where,until recently, such activities were forbidden.Scenic reserves for many people have becomelandscapes of speed and motion.31The incursion of structures, highways, and

wheels of all kinds notwithstanding, the natu-ral landmarks of Greater Boston, drawn intothe public domain according to the park system’svisionary scheme, have shown surprising stead-fastness. Perhaps the past hundred years havevindicated the definition of stewardship thatBaxter and Eliot propounded: first, secure openspaces that reinforce the park system at everyopportunity, even if they cannot be developedimmediately (remembering the lesson of thereclaimed rivers and shores-that it is nevertoo late to acquire or recover public spaces);next, offer access for people without destroy-ing what has been reserved; and then when themeans permit, improve the natural domain-the hills, the rivers, and the shores-of theEmerald Metropolis.

Notes

1 Jack Shepherd, The Adams Chronicles’ Four

Generations of Greatness (Boston’ Little, Brown,1975), 424. Thomas S. Hmes, Burnham of Chicago.Architect and Planner (New York: Oxford UniversityPress, 1974), quotes Daniel Burnham, the chiefarchitect of the Chicago Fair, on the color of thebuildings, 101; and Charles Eliot Norton, Harvardprofessor of fine arts, on their arrangement, 115.

Walter Creese unnecessarily simplifies the Metro-politan Park System by mapping it as "Eliot’s EmeraldNecklace" in "The Boston Fens," The Crowning of theAmerican Landscape: Eight Great Spaces and TheirBmldmgs (Pnnceton : Pnnceton University Press,1985). Henry Adams, The Education of HenryAdams (Boston: Houghton Mifflm, 1974), 340. For adiscussion of Olmsted and J. J. R. Croes’ 1876-77plans for the Bronx, see David Schuyler, The NewUrban Landscape’ The Redefinition of City Form mNmeteenth-Century America (Baltimore: JohnsHopkins University Press, 1986), 174-79. Charles

Eliot, "Report of the Landscape Architect," Reportof the Board of Metropolitan Park Commissioners(Boston: Wright & Potter, 1893), 91, cited below asMPC Report (1893).

3 Charles Eliot, "The Waverly Oaks," Garden andForest (March 5, 1890), 117-18. Eliot first proposedthat the association be called "The Trustees ofMassachusetts Scenery." The name chosen, "TheTrustees of Public Reservations," was the source ofsome confusion since the organization was privatelyorganized and funded. In 1954 it became "TheTrustees of Reservations." Its history is described inGordon Abbott, Jr., Saving Special Places- ACentennial History of the Trustees of Reservations:Pioneer of the Land Trust Movement (Ipswich, MA:Ipswich Press, 1993).

4 Charles Eliot to Governor William Russell,December 19, 1890, in [Charles W. Eliot] CharlesEliot, Landscape Architect (Boston: HoughtonMifflin, 1901), 356-57, hereafter cited as CharlesEliot. Sylvester Baxter, Greater Boston’ A Study fora Federahzed Metropolis Comprising the City ofBoston and Surrounding Cities and Towns (Boston:Philpott, 1891), 8 (reprinted from the Boston Herald).

5 Baxter’s recollection that Eliot proposed a jointeffort to realize the park system is found in his"Wonderful Progress During the Past Seven Years ofWork on the Great Metropolitan Park System,"Boston Sunday Herald (May 20, 1900), 41; and mBaxter, "Greater Boston’s Metropolitan Park

System," Boston Evening Transcript, Part Five

(September 29, 1923), 1.6 Eliot to Russell, quoted in Charles Eliot, 356.7 Minutes of the temporary Metropolitan Park

Commission, 1892.8 Ibid.

9 MPC Report (1893), 8210 Robert Fleming Gourlay, Plans for Beautifying New

York and For Enlargmg and Improving the City ofBoston (Boston. Crocker & Brewster, 1844), 17;Robert Morris Copeland, "The Park Question,"Boston Daily Advertiser (December 2, 1869), 2;"The Waverly Oaks," Transactions of theMassachusetts Horticultural Society for the Year1884, Part II (Boston: Massachusetts HorticulturalSociety, 1884), 272-73. According to Baxter, paintersconnected with the Boston Art Club had suggestedthat the club purchase the Waverly Oaks in the1870s; "By Bicycle to the Waverly Oaks-II,"Garden and Forest (August 17, 1892) 3(234): 387.Beginning in the 1870s, the Charles was frequentlycompared with rivers in European cities, especiallyHamburg’s Alster Basin, which served in a generalway as the model for the development of the

Esplanade in the 1930s. See City of Boston, CityDocument No 128 (1869), 7, 264

11 MPC Report (1893), 106. Baxter considered Eliot’s

17

"comprehensive reservation of the banks of thethree rivers" unique in a system of parkdevelopment, see Baxter, "Wonderful Progress," 40.

12 Charles Eliot, 383.13 MPC Report (1893), 82-110.14 MPC Report (1893), 83, 92; MPC Report (1894), 14.

For a broad view of the period, see Robert Wiebe, TheSearch for Order, 1877-1920 (New York: Hill &

Wang, 1967).15 Baxter included a draft "General Parkway Law" in

his part of the report. MPC Report (1893), AppendixB, 62-66.

16 MPC Report (1893), 3-19.17 The characterization of Boston politics in this period

as "both high-handed and liberal" is from MartinMeyerson and Edward C. Banfield, Boston. The JobAhead (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,1966), 106; Dalton’s comment is cited in Baxter,"Wonderful Progress," 41.

18 Two decades later, Adams was still startled by thespeed of the Commission’s progress: "Whollyopposed to the policy of rapid growth and what Icould not but regard as premature development, Ifound myself powerless to check it. I was, in fact,frightened at our success in the work we had to do."By June 1895 Adams was "bored to death and fastgetting cross" with week-to-week administrativematters, and resigned from the board. Writing at theend of his life, however, he doubted "whether at anyperiod of my life, or in any way, I have done workmore useful or so permanent in character ... as

saving to the people of Massachusetts the Blue Hillsand the Middlesex Fells." Charles Francis Adams,Diary, June 10, 11, 1895; Charles Francis Adams,1835-1915, An Autobiography (Boston: HoughtonMifflin, 1916), 185.

19 Charles Eliot, "The Boston MetropolitanReservations," New England Magazine 15: 1

(September 1896), 117-118. Richard Henry Dana,letter to the editor, Boston Daily Advertiser, June13, 1874.

20 MPC Report (1897), 43.21 Charles Eliot, Vegetation and Scenery m the

Metropolitan Reservations of Boston (Boston:Lamson, Wolffe, 1898), 8 (hereafter cited as

Vegetation and Scenery).22 Vegetation and Scenery, 9; MPC Report (1895), 31.23 Olmsted, Olmsted & Eliot to the Metropolitan Park

Commission, June 22, 1896, quoted in Charles Eliot,655; Eliot, Vegetation and Scenery, 9, 22.

24 Charles Eliot, "The Necessity of Planning," Gardenand Forest (August 26, 1896), 342; Arthur A.Shurchff, "What Mr Eliot Said," 1897 ms. HoughtonLibrary, Harvard University; Eliot, Vegetation andScenery, 9, 22, MPC Report (1895), 32. For thecultural roots of urban landscape improvement, see

Richard Bushman, The Refmement of America:Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Knopf, 1992).

25 MPC Report (1897), 51.26 Olmsted to Partners (John Olmsted and Charles

Eliot), October 28 and November 1, 1893, OlmstedPapers, Library of Congress. As Keith Morgan haspointed out, all but the first of these parks wereinitiated and directed by Eliot; Keith Morgan, "HeldIn Trust: Charles Eliot’s Vision for the New EnglandLandscape" (Bethesda, MD: National Association forOlmsted Parks, 1991), 1.

27 MPC Annual Report (1905), 30-31; Andrew WrightCrawford, "The Development of Park Systems inAmerican Cities," Annals of the American

Academy (1905), 22328 Chnstlane Crasemann Collins, "A Visionary

Discipline: Werner Hegemann and the Quest forthe Pragmatic Ideal," Center- A Journal forArchitecture m America 5 (1989), 79-80

29 Jon C. Teaford, The Unheralded Triumph. CityGovernment m America, 1870-1900 (Baltimore:Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 256-257;Creese, 168; Anthony Sutcliffe, Toward the PlannedCity. Germany, Britain, the United States, andFrance, 1780-1914 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981), ~,197; Creese, 183.

30 Eliot, Preliminary Report on the Location of Parksfor Cambridge (October 16, 1893); quoted in CharlesEliot, 423-24. George H. Snelhng, "Testimonials inFavor of the Modification of the Plan of Building onthe Back Bay Territory: April 2, 1860"; Ralph WaldoEmerson, "Nature," in Brooks Atkinson, ed., TheComplete Essays and Other Writings of RalphWaldo Emerson (NY: Random House, 1940), 410;Horace Mann is quoted in Creese, 192.

31 Olmsted, Olmsted & Eliot to the Metropolitan ParkCommission, June 22, 1896, quoted in Charles Eliot,655; Sam Bass Warner, Jr., "Open Spaces," NewRepublic 170 29 (March 23, 1974), 30; Noel Grove,"Greenways: Paths to the Future," NationalGeographic 177: 6 (June 1990), 93.

AcknowledgmentsEncouragement for this research was generouslyextended by the Metropolitan District Commissionand by Commissioner M. Ilyas Bhatti. Professor KeithMorgan, Julia O’Brien, MDC Director of Planning,and Sean Fisher, MDC Archivist, offered insightfulcomments. Special thanks is expressed to Katie andTony Strike.

Karl Haglund is the project manager of the New CharlesRiver Basin, the extension of the Charles RiverReservation from the Esplanade to Boston Harbor. Hehas written about historic architecture, urban design,and the landscapes of the American West.