The Emergence and First Flowering of the Greenway Concept

Interest in greenways in Providence first arose in the context of a nationwide movement for comprehensive, interlinked, urban park systems.  Landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted and his colleagues initiated this movement in the mid 1860s when they realized that the aesthetic, medical, moral, spiritual, and social benefits of parks could be greatly expanded by linking them to each other and to the neighborhoods surrounding them.  The linkages would be landscaped pathways and parkways for pedestrians, horseback riders, and carriages.  One of the first cities to adopt such a system was Boston.  Intrigued by Olmsted’s new concept, the Massachusetts State Legislature authorized the establishment of a metropolitan park system for Boston and its surrounding towns in 1870.  By 1893, Boston’s new Metropolitan Park Commission began to carry out Olmsted’s plan for a five-mile-long system of linked parks, ponds, and parkways.  Boston’s "Emerald Necklace" soon inspired cities all over the country.  

In the final decade of the 19th century, Providence’s Public Park Association, a voluntary group organized by leading Providence citizens, adopted the concept of the linked urban park system with great enthusiasm.  In her 1891 address to the Advance Club, the Association’s president, Augustine Jones, argued against the "checkerboard plan," advocating instead a continuous curvilinear form for Providence’s parks.  She proposed that the city link all its parks "in a crescent from the Seekonk to the sea around the north, west and south, terminating with Fields Point, by broad, tree-lined boulevards, making them in this way all one park, these connecting boulevards to follow and include the present streets, and to wind in and out with curves of every variety."[1]  

This vision of a comprehensive metropolitan park system for Providence was first translated into a concrete plan by Henry A. Barker, the treasurer of the Public Park Association.  For the first three years of the new century, Barker, with the assistance of the Olmsted Brothers, perfected the details of his grand plan to federate Providence and its suburbs into one great metropolis through a 40-mile system of interlinked parks and reservations.[2]  At the same time, the Public Park Association lobbied for the creation of a Metropolitan Park Commission similar to Boston’s.  They enlisted the support of diverse local and state organizations, including the Rhode Island Medical Society, the Rhode Island School of Design, the Commercial Club of Providence, the Rhode Island Horticultural Society, and the Sons of the American Revolution.[3]  In 1903, the General Assembly of Rhode Island responded by creating the Metropolitan Park Commission.  The Commission was formed specifically for the purpose of planning a park system for Providence and the surrounding cities of Pawtucket and Central Falls, the towns of East Providence, Cranston, Johnston, Warwick, North Providence, and Lincoln, and the Valley Falls district of Cumberland.  This Greater Providence area encompassed 77 square miles and included nine rivers, the Narragansett Bay shores, twenty ponds and lakes, and 357,000 people.[4]  

The rationale for the metropolitan park system was as grandiose as the physical scheme itself.  Parks, according to their advocates, would meet the needs of all classes of society by facilitating exercise, instruction, and psychic restoration.  In her 1891 address, Jones stressed the importance of parks and parkways "for the masses who are confined to the town."[5]   Medical benefits of parks were said to lead directly to financial benefits for the city by restoring the health and productive powers of the working class.  More transcendent values were noted in the same breath as economic gains: "Schools, churches, cultivated homes, architecture, parks, and tree-lined parkways minister to the nobler and diviner nature.  The city which gives heed to these things draws to itself riches like a magnet. . ."[6]  A sense of competition also drove the crusade for urban parks.  The Public Park Association claimed that creating a comprehensive park system would help Providence outpace its "rival cities in the race for prosperity."[7]  Finally, there was a sense of civic duty to "make Providence as perfect a home as our limitations permit."[8]  

The Metropolitan Park Commissioners projected the population of Greater Providence to reach 1,500,000 by 1950.[9]  Expecting such tremendous growth, they were determined to take immediate action to ensure the rational and aesthetically appropriate development of the area.  As the Commissioners stated in their first report: "The site upon which this Greater Providence is being built offers the choice of a city grandly beautiful and picturesque or one shockingly ugly and ill-arranged.  It must needs be developed logically and artistically instead of accidentally and whimsically. . . "[10]  In 1904 the Metropolitan Park Commission produced a plan based on Barker’s prototype and hired the Olmsted Brothers to investigate the area and consult on the plan.  The Olmsteds seem to have served in such an advisory capacity for nearly a decade.[11]

According to the Commission’s plan, the connecting parkways and boulevards were to be used for walking, riding, and driving.  Criteria for selecting these linkages included their directness in linking larger parks, their connection of populous areas, cheapness of land, and the potential for building on adjacent properties.[12]  River edges were to be "set aside almost without exception."[13]  The values of riparian zones included their natural beauty, their recreational uses for boating and skating, their function as transportation arteries, their enhancement of neighboring real estate, and their health benefits as the "lungs of the community."[14]  In addition, there was a strong imperative to clean up the filthy rivers of the industrial corridor and preserve them from further "pestilential" influences of new building development.  As a 1905 Providence Journal editorial declared, "Every great city will be tested in the future by its manner of treating its rivers.  The Woonasquatucket and Moshassuck run through the heart of the town.  They are for the most part neglected streams, muddy and filth laden."[15]    

The Commissioners spelled out an agenda for acquiring prioritized lands, estimating the total cost of all acquisitions at $1,960,500.[16]  As time passed, the Commissioners and the Public Park Association became increasingly concerned about the difficulty of obtaining these funds and criticized Providence’s stinginess: ". . .the average city devotes 2 3/4% of its income to parks and public grounds, while Providence devotes only about 3/4% to such purposes."[17]  Although voters responded in 1906 by approving a $250,000 bond issue for the Commission to begin to implement its extensive plan, a tone of urgency soon developed in the reports of the Metropolitan Park Commission and the Public Park Association as the city and state ignored requests for additional bonds and larger appropriations for parks.  Henry Barker, now secretary of the Commission, stated in a 1911 letter to the editor of the Providence Journal: "The Metropolitan Park Commissioners believe that the work they have been delegated to carry on fully ranks in importance with public schools, good roads, and decent sanitation, but it differs from these other enterprises in the urgency of attention, because immediate favorable opportunities and enormously valuable public assets which now exist are about to disappear forever."[18]  

Despite these frustrations, several linking parkways were developed during these years.  Blackstone Boulevard, connecting Blackstone Park with Butler Hospital and Swan Point Cemetery, had first been proposed in 1886 by the directors of Swan Point Cemetery.   Implementation of Horace W.S. Cleveland’s plan for this 200-foot wide boulevard began in 1892.  In 1904 the central median was completed and landscaped according to plans suggested by the Olmsted brothers.  In 1909, the city purchased a 0.6-mile strip of land following a stream and connecting Davis Park to the Promenade along the Woonasquatucket River.  With assistance from the Olmsted Brothers, the land was developed into a 150-foot wide parkway with a landscaped median strip in the center.  Several additional parkways were completed outside of Providence, including the Narragansett Parkway in Warwick and the Barrington Parkway (today known as Veterans Memorial Parkway) in East Providence.     

Ultimately, these modest advances were overpowered by the social and technological forces of a rapidly changing society.  In the early years of the 20th century, the working class began to consider leisure to be a right and demanded recreational facilities such as athletic fields, tennis courts, and playgrounds.  Even some prominent upper-class citizens, influenced by novel ideas about the importance of play in socializing the young, believed that playgrounds for children should take priority over the linkages essential to the original park system plan.  After 1920, the Greater Providence Metropolitan Park System was increasingly conceived as a collection of distinct reservations and recreational facilities rather than an interconnected system of parks.  New highways and roads offered efficient linkages among fragmented parks as automobile use escalated.  With the onset of the Depression, the city and state’s attention and financial resources were diverted from parks altogether.  By the mid 1930s, the director of the park-recreation service of the National Recreation Association pronounced Providence’s park system to be inadequate, noting that "a magnificent system of parkways and boulevards connecting with each other and touching all the larger existing and proposed park properties of the system. . . is probably now an idle dream."[19]  Under the state reorganization act of 1935, the Metropolitan Park Commission was dissolved and became a part of the Division of Forests, Parks and Parkways within the Department of Agriculture and Conservation.  This marked the true end of an era of grand aspirations for an interlinked park system for Greater Providence.  

Recent Revival of the Greenway Concept

After fading from public consciousness during the second third of this century, the greenway concept enjoyed a popular revival in the late 1960s and early 1970s.  In the context of the new environmental movement, the greenway was reincarnated as an innovative conservation strategy.  At the same time, increasing interest in outdoor activities prompted new enthusiasm for trails and ultimately led to a widespread resurrection of the urban greenway.  The first modern citywide greenways system was designed in 1970 for Raleigh, North Carolina.  The plan for this system inaugurated a new era of greenway planning by spelling out in great detail a rationale for greenway development and the specifics of greenway implementation.  In 1987, the swelling greenway movement came into the national spotlight when President Reagan’s Commission on Americans Outdoors wholeheartedly endorsed the greenway concept.  The Commission concluded: "We have a vision for allowing every American easy access to the natural world: Greenways.  Greenways are fingers of green that reach out from around and through communities all across America, created by local action.  They will connect parks and forests and scenic countrysides, public and private, in recreation corridors for hiking, jogging, wildlife movement, horse and bicycle riding."[20]  By 1990, an estimated 500 individual greenway projects were underway in the United States, and numerous cities were planning comprehensive greenways systems.[21]    

Rhode Island’s initial response to this new movement was the construction of several recreational greenways.  In 1978, Rhode Island’s Department of Environmental Management developed a plan for a hiking trail linking several state management areas along the western border of the state.  Over the next twenty years, this greenway, known as the North South Trail, would grow into a 72-mile multi-use trail for hiking, biking, and horseback riding.  In the 1980s and 1990s, plans were unveiled for the East Bay Bicycle Path, the Blackstone River Greenway, the Coventry Greenway, the Ten Mile River Greenway, the Chepachet River Park, the Pawtuxet River Path, the South County Bikeway, the Saugatucket River Greenway, and others.  By 1994, the Rhode Island greenway movement reached a peak with the publication of A Greener Path. . .Greenspace and Greenways for Rhode Island’s Future.  Produced by the central planning agency of the state government, this document presented a 25-year plan for a statewide network of greenways and greenspaces which will ultimately include a third of Rhode Island’s land area and provide 765 miles of natural greenways, bikeways, and trails.[22]  In 1995, the Rhode Island Greenways Act established the Rhode Island Greenways Council with the mission of providing education about greenways, offering technical assistance to greenway planners, and coordinating a statewide greenway network.  Rhode Island is the only state known to have passed such legislation.[23]  Members of the council include representatives from the state’s Departments of Administration, Environmental Management, and Transportation, from the Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation, and from cities, towns, and the public.    

In Providence, the resurrection of the greenway concept has resulted in several local greenway projects.  In the late 1970s, the city launched the Capital Center Project with the goal of revitalizing the sixty acres between the State House and Downtown.  This effort soon led to the River Relocation Project, which sought to uncover the hidden, neglected Providence, Woonasquatucket, and Moshassuck Rivers at their downtown convergence.  This undertaking culminated in the 1996 completion of architect William D. Warner’s Waterplace Park and River Walk, which follow downtown segments of the three rivers with a half-mile landscaped walking path.  In 1993, the city turned its attention to the Woonasquatucket River with an application to the National Park Service for funds to help improve the water quality and accessibility of the river.  These efforts soon evolved into a plan for a 4.4-mile greenway along the river from Waterplace Park to the Providence-Johnston border.  Under the leadership of the Providence Plan, this $10-million project has garnered grants from Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund, the Trust for Public Land, Citizens Bank, and the federal, state, and city governments.  Scheduled for completion within a few years, the greenway will include bike paths, walking trails, nature preserves, community gardens, and canoe landings.  In 1996, the city hired a local landscape architecture firm to develop a greenway plan for Mashapaug Pond.  Still in its infancy, this project will ultimately result in a two-mile forested trail along most of the pond’s perimeter.  Although these efforts represent an impressive start, Providence offers several additional opportunities for greenways.  As the former Associate Director of the Providence Department of Planning and Development suggested at a recent statewide greenways conference, "There should be a greenway buffer zone along every water body in the city."[24]