Presenting Nature

Cover

Contents

Foreword

Acknowledgements

Overview

Stewardship

Design Ethic Origins
(1916-1927)

(1916-1927)

Western Field Office
(1927-1932)

Park Planning

Decade of Expansion
(1933-1942)

State Parks
(1933-1942)

Appendix A

Appendix B

Bibliography

Presenting Nature: The Historic Landscape Design of the National Park Service, 1916-1942

III. A POLICY AND PROCESS FOR DESIGN, 1916 TO 1927 (continued)

DEVELOPMENT OF PARK ROADS

The development of roads took on major importance during Hull's years with the service. By the end of 1925, a substantial amount of Hull's and Vint's time was spent on the construction of roads. The landscape engineers worked with the Civil Engineering Division, then headed by Bert H. Burrell, and the Bureau of Public Roads from the initial on-the-ground inspection of the territory before the road was surveyed to the final approval of the work. A landscape engineer carefully went over the preliminary road lines, suggesting changes to protect landscape features or to take advantage of scenic points previously overlooked. The landscape engineer made a number of visits during construction to review the work and advise on landscape matters, "particularly with the idea of making the finished result the best possible in its relation to the landscape." The landscape engineers also paid considerable attention to the design, construction, and workmanship of the bridges. [96]

Ever since Punchard's tenure, the landscape engineers had collaborated with the civil engineers to develop park roads as scenic routes. Under George Goodwin, the service's first civil engineer, the roles of the civil and landscape engineers were differentiated. Civil engineers were concerned with the technical aspects of road construction, while the landscape engineers were concerned with the protection of significant features and locating the road in reference to scenic vistas. Roads were more than just a necessity leading visitors to scenic points and the comforts of developed areas; they were an integral part of the park experience.

From 1883 until 1917, when the service hired George Goodwin, park roads were built under the supervision of an engineer from the War Department. Built under the direction of the army engineer Major Hiriam M. Chittenden, Yellowstone's roads were the best of all the national parks. Among his engineering achievements were the road over Mount Washburn, the 200-foot Golden Gate Viaduct—a series of eleven concrete arches built into a cliff wall, and the Yellowstone River (later Chittenden) Bridge—a 120-foot arch of steel and concrete. Chittenden also built the first road into Mount Rainier, funded by Congress from 1903 to 1906 and involving passage over rough, mountainous terrain. By 1910, a "barely passable" road was built as far as Paradise Valley. [97]

Creating a curving roadway that flowed with and lay lightly on the land had been the goal of park designers even before the creation of the National Park Service. Writing of the extension of park roads in Yellowstone in 1915, Chittenden stated,

As a general policy, the extension of the system should be restricted to actual necessities. The Park should be preserved in its natural state to the fullest degree possible. . . . But a road once found necessary should be made as perfect as possible. So far as it may detract from scenery, it is far less objectionable as a well-built work than if left in a rough and incomplete state. The true policy of government in dealing with this problem should therefore be to make the roads limited in extent as will meet actual necessities, but to make such as are found necessary perfect examples of their class. [98]

Funding for roads remained a problem into the 1920s, particularly in Yosemite, where in 1923 only eight of the park's 138 miles of road had been constructed under congressional appropriations. Roads were narrow, unsurfaced, and exceedingly steep; there were numerous sharp curves, and frequent accidents were reported. Increasing numbers of visitors came to the parks by automobile, placing greater and greater pressure on the National Park Service to make roads safer and increase visitors access to various points within the park. New entrances into parks were opened as approach highways were built by state highway departments or the U.S. Forest Service. Throngs of visitors entered the parks, requiring new entrance stations, park roads, parking, and campgrounds. In 1923, when the Naches Pass Highway opened, twenty-five thousand visitors traveled across the Cascades and entered Mount Rainier park at the White River Entrance.

ROAD DESIGN AND CONSTRUCTION

Park road designers endeavored to eliminate the hazardous curves, sharp turns, and steep inclines that characterized mountain roads. Switchbacks, where a road changes direction at a tight angle, were common in early roads such as the Fall River Road in Rocky Mountain National Park built in the 1910s by the state of Colorado. Switchbacks on most roads were gradually replaced by radial curves.

It was the Columbia River Highway. constructed between 1913 and 1922 by Samuel Lancaster, an engineer of the Oregon Highway Department, that established the state of the art for building scenic roads in mountainous areas. The Columbia River Highway. originally seventy-four miles in length, featured a 100-foot-minimum curve radius, a 24-foot wide roadway. and maximum grade of 5 percent in its first section. Naturalistic tunnels were carved out of the steep rock embankments that rose from the river; several had arched buttresses that alternated with open galleries to provide the motorist with river views framed by jagged rockwork. Guardrails in a variety of designs and bridges were incorporated into the design. Particularly well known was the series of radial curves that enabled motorists to ascend the steep banks that rose sharply from the Columbia River to Crown Point. Skirting the edge of the national forests and providing access to popular attractions, the road provided opportunities for recreational development. The U.S. Forest Service built its first campground at nearby Eagle Creek, and the state of Oregon developed a visitor center and observation tower at Crown Point and visitor facilities including a lodge, trails, and bridges at Multnomah Falls. The aesthetic and engineering achievement of the road would greatly influence the construction of park roads in the next decade. [99]

For the national park roads, the civil engineers focused on the practical and technical details of road construction that included gradient, drainage, excavating, grading, surfacing, and the construction of revetments, culverts, and bridges. Meanwhile, the landscape engineers were interested in aesthetic and scenic concerns, such as the location of the road, provisions for viewpoints and vistas, the external character of structures, and the creation of a smooth flowing road that followed the natural contours of the land. As stewards of the park landscape, the landscape engineers also ensured that significant natural features and scenic qualities would be protected from construction damage as well as from damage related to road location and use. Scenic views, especially those from trails, other roadways, and scenic overlooks, were to remain undisturbed by roads or other forms of development. Where such interference was unavoidable, efforts were taken to blend the road way into the natural setting and to conceal any construction scars.

Cut-and-fill operations bored into the natural hillsides on one side of the roadway and built up areas of fill on the other to create an even grade. The construction of roads initially relied upon tangents and radial curves. By the 1920s, tangents gave way to curvilinear stretches interconnected with radial curves. By the end of the 1920s, superelevations were being built into roadways and bridges. As the National Park Service gained experience in designing parkways in the East in the 1930s, smooth transitional curves based on spirals and superelevations were introduced, raising the standard of park roads. The National Park Service endeavored to maintain a maximum grade of 5 percent, although as much as an 8 percent grade was sometimes allowed. [100]

Downing's classification of approach, circuit, and service roads of the nineteenth-century pleasure grounds influenced the character and the classification of national park roads. The idea of the circuit road would be extensively applied at various scales in national park design, from Yellowstone's Grand Loop to campground roads. So well did the circular movement of vehicles serve park designers that loop developments occurred at all scales to control and facilitate the flow of traffic, from the headquarters at Mammoth Hot Springs to spur roads to scenic overlooks. Although it was never realized, Frederick Law Olmsted Sr., had recommended a circuit road in Yosemite Valley in 1864.

Photographed in 1915, Mitchell Point Tunnel was one of several naturalistic tunnels constructed along the Columbia River Highway in Oregon from 1913 to 1922. Carved out of a steep rock embankment that rose from the river, the tunnel was 390-feet long and had arched buttresses that alternated with open galleries to provide the motorist with river views framed by jagged rock work. (Oregon Historical Society).

Several important developments had occurred in the design of park roads and parkways by the 1920s. Not only had the nineteenth-century parks provided carriage roads separate from bridle and pedestrian trails, but the idea of interconnected parks and parkways that the Olmsted firm had pioneered in Brooklyn and other East Coast cities had spread across the nation, and by 1920, such park and parkway networks were also developing in Buffalo, Essex County (New Jersey), Seattle, the District of Columbia, Kansas City. Memphis, and other cities.

Like the landscape engineers, the civil engineers looked to the nation's experts for advice on park development. Major William A. Welch, the nation's foremost park engineer and general manager of the Palisades Interstate Park in New York and New Jersey. visited a number of the parks in 1921 and provided advice on engineering issues from the construction of roads to the development of sanitary facilities. Featured as a model of park development at the 1917 national parks conference, Welch's work remained in the forefront of state park work through the 1920s. Those attending the 1922 meeting of the National Conference on State Parks saw firsthand Welch's dramatic Storm King road. Although Welch's work was held in high regard, his designs for stonemasonry guardrails in the Craftsman style would be criticized several years later by national park designers for their quaint, peanut-brittle-like character. The scarring of monolithic Storm King visible from the Hudson River and the nearby Bear Mountain Bridge too disturbed park designers who sought ways to conceal and subordinate artificial construction. [101]

The civil engineers relied heavily upon the work of the U.S. Forest Service, which, in collaboration with the Bureau of Public Roads, had been constructing wilderness roads for many years. Their technical specifications, including solutions for log bridges and trestles, cribbing, culverts and retaining walls, dry rubble masonry. riprap, and wooden guardrails were published annually in Specifications for Forest Road Construction. Frost's Art of Road Making and Blanchard and Drowne's Highway Construction were state-of-the-art manuals for road engineering, treating subjects such as road gradients and cross sections. [102]

The Bronx River Parkway, constructed from 1913 to 1925, pioneered in the development of scenic roadways by reclaiming land along the riverfront. This development was an effort to clean up unsightly and unsanitary conditions along the Bronx River and protect the river from further pollution while at the same time creating a pleasure drive and network of cross-county roads. It was the collaborative effort of chief landscape architect Hermann Merkel, superintendent of landscape construction Gilmore Clarke, and engineer Jay Downer. Field trips to see this pioneering work were featured at the 1922 meeting of the National Conference on State Parks. By the late 1920s, Vint and Clarke were well acquainted and had exchanged staff for short periods of time to increase their experience. Stanley Abbott and Wilbur Simonson, designers of parkways for the National Park Service in the 1930s, had worked under Clarke in Westchester County before joining the National Park Service.

Landscape architects likely heeded the philosophical and practical advice of Hubbard and Waugh. Hubbard described the "good park road" as one that, often following uneven topography. "may be irregular in curvature, shrubbery grown at the edges, somewhat steeper in gradient, slightly rough and inconspicuous in surface, sunk below the surrounding surface in places to avoid interruption of a view, even slightly irregular in width if thereby it might carry its traffic to the points intended with less interruption of the natural character of the landscape." [103]

Hubbard stressed the practical necessity of roads in natural areas but upheld their aesthetic value. He recommended the development of circuit roads:

If the park is large, perhaps several circuits large and small, different in the views they command. The various scenes which are to be displayed to the visitor by automobile, should be revealed to him to good advantage and in pleasing succession, that their characters may enhance one another. The circuit drive should of course be far enough within the park to allow of a sufficient screen between the drive and the outside city: the drive should be in the park, that is, not between the town and the park. [104]

The distinction of roadways for varying purposes and different modes of transportation was an inherent characteristic of nineteenth-century urban parks. Frederick Law Olmsted, Sr.'s emphasis on separate systems for different types of transportation was so fundamental to the development of national parks that it is often taken for granted, and the origins of the idea in the principles of landscape architecture are often overlooked. The idea of separation meant that not only would roads for motor traffic be separate from bridle trails or pedestrian trails, but that to protect the forests from fire, a separate network of fire or truck trails could also be developed and maintained in an inconspicuous way. This concept would prove to be of great value in national parks where it was desirable to separate motor roads from trails and scenic roads traveled by visitors from roads serving administrative purposes. Such separation reduced the visual intrusions presented by other forms of construction and ensured that the sequential experience and pleasure of traveling scenic park roads or hiking wilderness trails remained uninterrupted.

By the end of the 1930s, most parks had developed independent circulation networks serving various functions. These were coordinated under each park's master plan. Annual roads and trails appropriations, public works allotments, and emergency conservation work by the Civilian Conservation Corps made construction of the various roads and trails possible. Shenandoah National Park had five different, intersecting systems of circulation. First was the Skyline Drive, a scenic road constructed along the ridge as the linear backbone of the park from 1930 to 1937. Second was a section of the long-distance Appalachian Trail, which, built in the 1920s, predated the founding of the park. The trail followed the ridge from north to south, crossing the drive at various points and intersecting with recreational trails that led to scenic peaks and picturesque hollows. Sections of the trail were relocated during the 1930s to accommodate the ridge drive. A system of truck trails provided a network of administrative roads used for controlling fires and patrolling the park boundaries. These penetrated distant areas of the park and connected Skyline Drive with local roads in the hollows below. The park also had an extensive network of recreational trails for hiking, which intersected with the Appalachian Trail and Skyline Drive and led to picturesque features such as waterfalls, rock formations, springs, and hemlock groves or to ridgetop outcroppings where spectacular views could be had. Many of these were built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s. In addition, there was a network of sturdier bridle trails, which brought visitors on horseback to some the finest scenic features and, in the late 1930s, connected with stables developed at Skyland, one of the developed areas on the drive. In addition, each developed area had its own system of loop and spur roads. Approach roads, in the form of state highways, crossed or adjoined the park in several locations. These were improved through roadside cleanup, planted medians, wye intersections or grade separations, and attractive park entrances.

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Last Modified: Mon, Oct 31, 2002 10:00:00 pm PDT
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