Documenting America's National Park Roads and Parkways

Abstract

America's national park roads and parkways are outstanding design achievements exemplifying the harmonious integration of highway engineering and landscape architecture. By designing roadways to showcase scenery with minimal impact on their surroundings, the National Park Service created an internationally renowned road system that provides access to America's most treasured landscapes while standing as a remarkable social, artistic, and technological achievement in its own right. From 1988 to 2002, the Historic American Engineering Record conducted a documentation project that produced more than 4,000 photographs, 476 measured and interpretive drawings, and more than 10,000 pages of written history. These reports document the roads’ physical characteristics and articulate their social, technological, and aesthetic influences. Not every park could be surveyed, but the most prominent roads were documented in detail. Several non–Park Service roads were also documented, including the Historic Columbia River Highway and the Merritt, Bronx River, and Taconic State Parkways. This documentation has multifold purposes: it provides a permanent record of America's design heritage; it serves as a guide for management, planning, preservation, and public outreach activities; it provides a rich source of information for contemporary context-sensitive design efforts; and the research methodology provides a model for future efforts to document large-scale engineering works. The documentation has appeared in numerous exhibitions and publications, including a 400-page volume titled America's National Park Roads and Parkways: Drawings from the Historic American Engineering Record (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004).