The Bronx River Parkway and photography as an instrument of landscape reform

Abstract

Shifting focus In the classic history of landscape architecture, Norman Newton's Design on the Land, the noted Harvard professor implied he was drawn to the profession by a series of photographs depicting the creation of the Bronx River Parkway, which appeared in official reports and popular magazines in the 1910s and 1920s.1 Newton reproduced two of these images in his book (figurer). The first photograph portrayed conditions on the Bronx River prior to the creation of the parkway, showing denuded river banks lined by small frame houses, privies, and factories. The second photograph showed the same spot several years later. The stark scene of pollution and poverty had been transformed into a pleasingly picturesque landscape, in which a clear stream. wound invitingly through pristine meadows frarned by luxuriant trees and bushes. Frorn. Newton's perspective, these photographs documented landscape architecture's unambiguous triumph over the blighted byproducts of ignorance and avarice, which, in the eyes of many reformers, had turned the environs of many US cities into physical, social, and aesthetic disasters.