Enduring complexity: A history of Brooklyn's parkways.

摘要

This dissertation concerns the design and historical evolution of Eastern Parkway and Ocean Parkway, two streets designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux and built in Brooklyn in the 1870's. These streets are of interest for urban designers because they are examples of the multi-way boulevard street type. This once celebrated now seldom built street type may offer a model for livable, high-traffic streets in cities today because it has a form which allows heavy traffic to co-exist alongside a pedestrian-friendly environment. This study contributes to a body of recent research investigating many aspects of the potential modern-day usefulness of multi-way boulevards. Its purpose is to explore how multi-way boulevards have existed in an American context over time: how they have been built, socially used, publicly managed, influenced urban form, and adapted to change. The research focuses on the Brooklyn parkways because they are exemplars of the American version of the multi-way boulevard street type.This study is at once a planning history, a cultural landscape history, and a built form history. It conceives of the parkways as both physical public spaces and social institutions, and uses sources that include public documents, literature, newspaper and journal articles, and historic maps and photographs.Part One describes and analyzes Olmsted and Vaux's parkway plan, its implementation, the context into which it was inserted, and the design models that influenced it. Part Two concerns the subsequent history of the parkways, and is treated thematically. The first theme explores how the complex public open space character of the parkways was formed, arguing that it evolved over time on two intertwined levels: that of meaning and that of use. The second theme explores the role the parkways played as catalysts for urban form. Important design characteristics, implementation strategies, and management policies are identified and analyzed. The third theme explores how the parkways have shaped urban life for the communities living around them, arguing that they have created a distinct neighborhood form and shaped a particular kind of urban experience: they are both orienting devices for neighborhood identity and focal lines for public life.