The Parkway’s Early YearsSuccessThe Bronx River Parkway Reservation was a success long before the parkway was completed. The project strongly influenced public sentiment in favor of supporting additional parkways, recreational facilities, and improved transportation routes. As early as 1913, a similar treatment was proposed for the nearby Hutchison River. Hutchinson River Parkway proponents were so pleased with the BPC’s work that they wanted the commission to approve their concept and make it part of the BPC. In recognition of demand for additional parkway development, Westchester County officials authorized the creation of a Westchester County Park Commission (WCPC) in 1922 to facilitate future developments and oversee the Bronx River Parkway when the BPC’s mandate expired in 1925.(267) The parkway’s broader recreational amenities attracted a wide variety of outdoor enthusiasts long before the main driveway was completed. Opening the parkway to motor traffic brought even more people into the reservation. Even before the entire road was open, 17,700 vehicles were counted at 233rd Street in the Bronx during a thirteen-hour period in 1924. By the summer of 1927, as many as 35,000 cars traveled the drive on sunny weekends and holidays. While weekday use was not as high, by 1931, officials noted that approximately 30,000 vehicles a day were using the road.(268) As the world’s first public parkway designed to accommodate modern motorcars, the Bronx River Parkway attracted national – and even international – attention. Numerous civic leaders, chambers of commerce, and city officials from around the world contacted the WCPC for information about building parks and parkways. Officials in Nanking, China, announced their interest in building a parkway patterned after the BRPR and requested information from the WCPC. Thomas MacDonald, chief of the U. S. Bureau of Public Roads, visited Downer to learn more about Westchester County’s parkways, which were to be used as a model for the design, landscape treatment, and development of a new parkway along the Potomac in Washington, D.C. Knoxville, Tennessee officials also announced they wanted to build a similar parkway to the new Great Smokey Mountains National Park.(269) Visitors from England, Canada, Japan, and the United States toured Westchester County parkways to learn about the Westchester experience. Landscape architects John Wosky and Kenneth McCarter of Yosemite and Yellowstone National Parks spent two months working in the WCPC offices, observing its landscape designers and construction work.(270) Public support for attractive new parkways was also growing. "In varying degree but practically all over the country the response to this demand," according to Downer, there was "a decided trend toward the conservation of whatever natural beauty exists along the roadsides, its cultivation or creation through landscape treatment, tree and shrub planting, and the exclusion of all forms of man-made ugliness."(271) |
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| (267)Bronx
Parkway Commission, Minutes, February 13, 1914, 56-58; Westchester County
Park Commission, Report, 1924, 39. |
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