Economy
When the Road of the Future Looks a Lot Like the Past
Pittsburgh is planning to revive a radical alternate vision for its Boulevard of the Allies, in an effort to reconnect a long-bypassed neighborhood.
In the earliest years of the 20 century, Pittsburgh’s roads were a mess, with no logic to the layout. To sort the streets out, the city recruited Frederick Law Olmsted Jr.*, the nation’s first dean of urban planning, in 1909 to bring some order to the city’s ad hoc patchwork of cobblestone, gravel, brick, and sand-clay roads.
Olmsted found a lot of promise in the waterfront areas lining Pittsburgh’s Monongahela and Allegheny rivers, despite the fact that these embankments had already been carved up pretty well by railroad tracks.