An ‘Emerald Necklace’ for the Northeast

Shortly after the Civil War, Frederick Law Olmsted designed the nation’s first greenway, an uninterrupted corridor of parkland stretching from Boston Common to a 520-acre park.

It was linked by stately Commonwealth Avenue, marshy, reed-filled fens, parks, river ways and a Harvard-run arboretum.

Olmsted called it the Emerald Necklace.

Now, 200 landscape architects want to create an emerald necklace stretching from the Maine woods to Long Island Sound. They formally announced their plan last summer in the Back Bay Fens to honor Olmsted, the father of their profession, on the 100th anniversary of the American Society of Landscape Architects.

“It’s particularly fitting to hold the unveiling here since Olmsted’s emerald necklace design was the nation’s first to link individual parks over several miles, and this plan is the first to link greenways in a network over several states,” said Barry W. Starke, president of the Landscape Architects Society, which held its annual meeting here.

Over the last century, the six New England states have preserved 19,011 miles of parks and trails.

The Boston chapter of the society wants to add to that 19,300 miles of greenways and trails and another 8 million acres of protected land--nearly 20% of New England.

The project, called “New England Greenway Vision Plan,” took more than a year to create by a team composed of landscape architects, government officials, greenway advocates from each of the six New England states and students from three schools of landscape architecture.

The group concluded that one way to create a New England-wide emerald necklace would be for all the states to emulate Massachusetts’ Rivers Protection Act of 1996, which protects 200 feet on both sides of every flowing river-- or about 20% of the land in the state.

The law gives Massachusetts four times as much protected green space as Maine and at least double that of any other New England state. It also provides an ideal network of potentially interconnected green space.

The Greenway Vision Plan would also transform old railroad beds and canals into trails. Canals that once connected Northampton to New Haven, Conn., Sebago Lake to Portland, Maine, and Worcester to Providence, R.I., could do so again in the form of trails.

The plan notes that only 283 miles of New England’s old railroad beds have been converted to hiking and biking trails, leaving 2,764 miles that could become greenways.

Winning Over the Locals

Local property owners often oppose the creation of bike paths but eventually become their biggest boosters, according to Rhode Island Lt. Gov. Charles Fogarty, who came to Boston for the Greenway Vision Plan announcement.

Fogarty said he wishes he could spend more time riding his old 10-speed along the 14.5-mile East Bay Bike Path in Providence. The path attracts 2,500 bikers on a typical summer day and has prompted enthusiasts to push at least 15 proposals for more such paths.

The Greenway Vision Plan supports existing proposals for more green space, such as a plan by a group called RESTORE: The North Woods to establish a new 3.2- million-acre Maine Woods National Park surrounding Baxter State Park in north central Maine.

Protecting open space requires money, and the group depends on federal highway money to fund many of its proposals. Since 1991 the federal government has required states to spend 10% of their highway money on projects such as bikeways, scenic highways and preservation of historic sites.

In the end, the landscape architects say their proposal will double the region’s tourist industry without harming the environment.