Well, the Olmsted park vision DID include roads. Central Park has four transverse roads that are like the Middle Earth version of a freeway, totally separated from pedestrian paths by picturesque stone bridges and little tunnels. Olmsted recognized that, especially in New York, traffic would need to move through his park between the East and West Sides of Manhattan. It also has a ring road that was intended for slow pleasure drives.
The Chicago parks and boulevards never really had the bridges to separate pedestrians from through traffic. All the park roads were intended for pleasure drives. Trucks and commercial traffic were simply banned from park roads by city ordinance, and car commuting was not popular enough to cause a traffic problem or a safety problem. When the 1950s rolled around and everyone started hopping in their car to go everywhere, the Park District simply surrendered all the boulevards and park roads to CDOT and they became the domain of the automobile.
Technically, trucks and commercial vehicles are still banned from boulevards and park roads, but the rule is seldom enforced except (occasionally) on Lake Shore Drive.
For the issue of Cornell, it's hard to make a decision in terms of what would be "faithful to Olmsted's vision". The guy died in 1903, five years before Henry Ford introduced the Model T. Automobiles, in his world, were expensive, maintenance-intensive pleasure devices for the rich. (Basically the same way we regard boats today.) Olmsted could not possibly anticipate how car traffic would reduce the public's enjoyment of his parks, so it's hard to endorse his vision of park roads as an appropriate idea for the 21st century.
__________________
la forme d'une ville change plus vite, hélas! que le coeur d'un mortel...
|
Threaded Mode