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Preservation Case Study: Skyline Parkway Horace William Shaler Cleveland (1814–1900) was at the pinnacle of his career when he visited Duluth, Minnesota, in the 1880s. He had published his influential book, Landscape Architecture, as Applied to the Wants of the West, a decade earlier. When he came to Duluth to speak in support of a scenic parkway planned by the new city park commission, he was designing a sweeping park system in Minneapolis that embodied some of the central ideas expressed in his book. In his speech, Cleveland stressed that the parkway befitted this vision of grandeur. The commission’s proposed route followed a raised glacial rim providing expansive views of the lake, the city, and the St. Louis River Valley. “Cleveland told the group, ’Those long views are pretty special—we don’t have anything like that in Minneapolis,’” says the Minnesota-based historian and preservation planner Patrick Nunnally. Construction on what became Skyline Parkway started in the 1890s and intensified during the 1920s and 1930s. By the 1940s the completed road wound 46 miles through wild and urban landscapes viewed from a series of scenic turnouts—a carefully orchestrated Picturesque design linking more than a dozen public parks and forests. Native stone used in bridges and walls underscored the road’s connection to the wild landscape. During the second half of the twentieth century, the city’s focus shifted from maintaining the parkway to building ballfields and other recreational amenities. Skyline Parkway evolved into a heavily used corridor for commuting, sight-seeing, and pedestrian recreation. The increased use, while attracting new advocates, also created more car traffic and maintenance issues, not to mention conflicts among users. “In some places the shoulders are so narrow that the congestion of walkers, runners, cyclists, and cars is pretty bad,” says Nancy Nelson of the Skyline Planning and Preservation Alliance, a volunteer advocacy group. Today, partly because of such conflicts, only about 25 miles of the parkway remain open to automobiles, and the road bed, shoulders, walls, and bridges need repair. A lack of coherent signage causes confusion, and aesthetic issues—from tour-bus parking to trash dumping—have undermined the route’s scenic value. These were among the problems reported in the Skyline Parkway Corridor Management Plan released in 2003. The plan identified features that would qualify the parkway for designation as a national scenic byway—it was declared a state scenic byway in 1998—and recommended management strategies. “Proponents from the city and the state think it’s suitable for national scenic byway designation, and we agree,” says Steve Durrant, one of two landscape architects from the Minnesota office of URS Corporation who helped produce the plan. But the parkway’s unique character, defined in large part by diverse scenery, complicates preservation efforts. For example, the plan identifies six segments with different paving, widths, and viewsheds. How to unify the quality of each section without altering the changing experiences is one of the chief questions the plan tackles. Although the plan includes a historic-preservation perspective, Durrant says that what the city ultimately does will depend on funding, as well as on which of many public viewpoints holds sway. “Some people see it as an important commuting road, which is not always compatible with a historic parkway,” he says. Meanwhile, the Duluth Heritage Preservation Committee, a citizens’ advisory group, is reviewing the plan. The city has kept up bridge repairs and mustered a grant for a way-finding study. But with funds tight, most of the recommendations may be shelved for the foreseeable future. Still, Nelson feels hopeful about the plan’s longer-term prospects. After a former mayor tried to raze part of an old-growth forest to build a golf course near the parkway, Nelson says advocates are pleased to see a new administration reaching out to citizens on planning issues. The situation, she says, “looks much more optimistic than it used to.” Photographs: |
