DESIGN OF PARK AND RECREATION AREAS 215 



which is to enable the public to travel from one part of its course to another 

 under conditions which are made more enjoyable, by almost any means, 

 than those of an ordinary city street. Many of the important streets and 

 avenues in the older part of Washington, D. C, are better entitled to 

 classification in this group than many so-called 'boulevards' and 'park- 

 ways' laid out as such in other cities with much blowing of trumpets. 

 And obviously the group may be considered to include anything from a 

 reasonably dignified and handsome street with no more than a single row 

 of trees in each sidewalk (there are few pieces of such so-called 'parkways' 

 only seventy feet wide between property lines, to be found among the 

 'parkways' of the Boston Metropolitan Park System) up to such elaborate 

 undertakings as the Fairmount Parkway in Philadelphia. What distin- 

 guishes them from the first type is that they are in effect parts of the general 

 city street system (even though much glorified and embellished parts, and 

 even though their roadways may be limited in whole or in part to passenger 

 vehicles) and that normally the buildings abutting upon them largely 

 influence, if they do not mainly determine, the net aesthetic impression 

 made on those who travel over them. 



4. A type of parkway somewhat intermediate and transitional between 

 the first and the third is one which includes considerable widths of ground 

 treated in a more or less parklike way with turf and plantations and often 

 with water in the form of a stream or ponds or lakes, and in which the main 

 aesthetic interest centers in these parklike features regardless of the adjoin- 

 ing private buildings, but in which no deliberate attempt is made, as it is 

 in parkways of the first type, to effect so complete a separation between 

 the abutting private buildings and those who drive along the parkway that 

 the former are unnoticeable and the users of the parkway might feel that 

 they have got inside of a park of indefinite extent. 



In some parkways of this fourth type the main drive is at one side 

 and serves as a street of access to buildings on the side of it which is away 

 from the parklike area. A large part of the beautiful Riverway in the 

 Boston Park System is of this description. In some there is a main drive 

 of this sort on each side of the parklike area, each drive having buildings 

 abutting upon it at a moderate distance on the side away from the central 

 ribbon of park. Where the total width is rather limited, say up to two or 

 three hundred feet, or sometimes even more, and where a distinctly parklike 

 aspect of spaciousness within the parkway is regarded as more important 

 than avoiding a sense of close proximity to buildings at the expense of 

 hedging in the park drive in a narrow space between dense plantations, 

 this type of parkway has the great advantage (except under peculiar topo- 

 graphical conditions) that pushing the roadway or roadways to one or both 



