Designing the Parkway and Drive

Landscape Development

Consulting landscape Hermann Merkel was primarily responsible for the parkway’s landscape design. Merkel exerted a pervasive influence on design matters large and small. As an expert in forestry, horticulture, and tree-pests, he was closely involved in the particulars of the landscape rehabilitation program. He also devised the original layout of the parkway drive and laid out the overall framework for the BRPR’s landscape development. Insisting that the parkway was intended to improve, protect and present the region’s inherent beauty, Merkel asserted that the principal attractions of the Bronx River valley were the river and its magnificent tree growth. Describing his design objectives in 1918, Merkel emphasized the importance of celebrating the Bronx River as the parkway’s principle landscape feature. "Any treatment losing sight of this motive," he added, was "objectionable." The rehabilitated river would wind through a diversified array of restored woodlands, picturesque plantings, and luxuriant meadows that would appeal to motorists and visitors on foot or horseback. Merkel described his plan as an attempt to create a landscape that would be:

sufficiently diversified to create woodland groups and vistas of all the types that belong; broad enough that he who runs (or rides) may see; with intimate bits for those who wish to pause; with material prevailingly indigenous, but always suitable to the situation and its requirements.

Although the BPC reports frequently stated that the commission’s goal was to restore natural conditions, Merkel emphasized that the BPC would not literally attempt to return the river valley to its natural state. Instead, he sought to create a "humanized naturalness" or naturalistic landscape that would replace visual blight and haphazard tree growth with carefully composed scenery designed to emulate natural conditions. While this treatment was ostensibly meant to reprise the region’s primeval appearance, the BPC’s conception of desirable natural scenery was strongly influenced by the conventions of landscape painting and park design. Merkel maintained that restoring the Bronx Valley to a semblance of its original condition was neither practical nor desirable. The landscape had been severely impacted by logging, agriculture, and other forms of development. Removing all signs of these developments would require an enormous expenditure of time and money and the resulting landscape would not fulfill the commissions’ goals. Returning the valley to wilderness conditions might please certain types of nature lovers, but it would not make the area useful as a public park. A park should have varied scenery including open fields and meadows that required extensive maintenance to keep "natural" growth at bay. Parks should also provide a range of recreational opportunities, not just offer deep woodland scenes to soothe contemplative souls. Paths, benches, and facilities for active outdoor recreation were inherently unnatural, but they were essential to the project’s popularity as a public park. The roadway was also critical to the parkway’s success, though it was a manifestly artificial structure.(152)

(152)Bronx Parkway Commission, Report, 1916, 81; Report, 1918, 52-53, 56.