page 21

Contents : Previous : Next

passenger travel is most dense. Especially with an isolated and limited business district like that of Pittsburgh, made up almost wholly of narrow streets and connected with the rest of the city by a series of bridges and of bridge-like gaps in the hills which wall it in, it becomes of the utmost importance to secure the formation of a wide circuit street connecting these outlets together, so that not all the travel is forced to filter slowly through the midst of the business district.

Shaded promenade upon the embankment that protects Lyons from the floods of the Rhone

A third undeveloped asset of the Pittsburgh water front is its value for recreation and as an element of civic comeliness and self-respect. One of the deplorable consequences of the shortsighted and wasteful commercialism of the later nineteenth century lay in its disregard of what might have been the esthetic by-products of economic improvement; in the false impression spread abroad that economical and useful things were normally ugly; and in the vicious idea which followed, that beauty and the higher pleasures of civilized life were to be sought only in things otherwise useless. Thus pursuit of beauty was confounded with extravagance.

View of the same water front at Lyons, showing the commercial quay

Among the most significant illustrations of the fallacy of such ideas are the comeliness and the incidental recreation value which attach to many of the commercial water fronts of European river

Contents : Previous : Next

Last modified on 22-Dec 1999
Design format: copyright 1997-1999 Bruce S. Cridlebaugh
Original document: Frederick Law Olmsted, 1910