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Preservation Case Study: Indianapolis Park and Boulevard System and the Jensen Landscape at Riverdale “A park system may be divided into three parts: the smaller parks and squares, the larger parks and the boulevards connecting them with each other. The smaller ones, in the thickly populated parts of a city, become the breathing spots and often playgrounds, independent or more or less connecting with each other. These are necessarily merely oases in a desert of houses and make life more tolerable.” George Kessler, also known as the “landscape architect of the American Renaissance,” spoke these words in 1893. By this time, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux had created a park and boulevard system in Chicago, as had Horace Cleveland in Minneapolis. Kessler, though, “may have been the first to suggest a hierarchy of parks that served a variety of needs,” writes the Kessler biographer Kurt Culbertson in Midwestern Landscape Architecture. Kessler’s important contributions to landscape architecture—in Cincinnati, Dallas, Houston, Kansas City, and St. Louis—have resulted in a new understanding of his place in American landscape history. Beginning in 1905 Kessler also designed a remarkable system of parks and boulevards for Indianapolis. This countywide network of transportation and recreation corridors has become a driving force in what might be seen as rebirth of the city in the twenty-first century. In 2004 the Indianapolis Park and Boulevard System was listed on the National Register of Historic Places, after a concerted effort was made by local, state, and national preservation officials and a local landscape architecture firm, Storrow Kinsella Associates. At 3,474 acres, it is the state’s largest single National Register listing. The designation will likely lead to the preservation of roads, bridges, structures, and plantings, according to Meg Storrow, principal at Storrow Kinsella. “Today the park system is in fair condition, but the connecting boulevard system is fragmented,” she observes. Her firm is working with the Indianapolis Department of Public Works to repair a section of the network as a demonstration project. The city also will likely seek preservation grants to rehabilitate parkway landscapes and landmark bridges. The first steps, however, will be to restore views, control invasive plants, and strengthen the system’s identity. The Kessler plan links five cultural districts and more than fifty historic districts and sites that are either listed or eligible for inclusion on the National Register. A steering group is exploring ways of more visibly tying the Kessler system with some of these nationally recognized historic landscapes, such as Oldfields, at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. Kessler died in 1923, having fallen ill while on park business in Indianapolis, at the age of sixty. Culbertson writes, “It is remarkable that a man of such professional accomplishments, one so loved and respected throughout a vast region of the country, could be virtually forgotten.” Efforts like those under way in Indianapolis are introducing a new generation to Kessler and his contributions to the quality of life in cities throughout the Mississippi River Valley. A Jensen Landscape at Riverdale Jensen (1860–1951), a Chicago-based landscape architect associated with the Prairie School, created more than 350 residential landscapes in the Midwest in the early twentieth century, though fewer than 10 percent of them survive. The Danish immigrant who embraced indigenous plants and flowing open spaces “attempted to relate forms and materials to the surrounding native landscape” in his designs, writes landscape architect and Jensen biographer Robert E. Grese, in Pioneers of American Landscape Design. Riverdale comprised all of Jensen’s signature features: a large meadow, naturalistic ponds, a stream, a player’s green for outdoor performances, and Jensen’s most identifiable element, a council ring—a stone seating circle with a central fire pit for communal gatherings. In 1936 the founders of Marian College acquired Riverdale and later bought two adjacent estates built by Carl Fisher and Frank Wheeler, auto-parts manufacturers who, with Allison and another partner, started the Indianapolis Motor Speedway as a test track in 1909. Their properties lined a road nicknamed Millionaire’s Row. “This was the Newport of Indianapolis,” says Deb Lawrence, special assistant to the president for community engagement at Marian College. Landscape architect David Roth, an associate at Storrow Kinsella who researched the history of Riverdale’s landscape for a cultural landscape report in 2003, explains that as other parts of the campus developed, the Riverdale grounds gradually fell into benign neglect. Some older trees survive, including cedars providing a backdrop for the player’s green. Jensen’s meadow now supports a baseball field, and the lakes have become wetlands. In 1995 a statewide historic-landscape survey identified Riverdale as a Jensen landscape, but specifics of the design were not uncovered until 2000, when a Marian College biology professor led a project to restore a wetland and forest on the estate. Further investigation turned up copies of the plans in the college’s maintenance office. The Allison mansion, which houses the college president’s office and is used for special events, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1970. Roth and Lawrence will seek funds to amend the mansion’s listing to include the entire estate. Grese, who has visited the estate since the excavation, says, “portions of Riverdale have a great deal of integrity or could be restored. It might be one of the best preserved examples of Jensen’s integration of a player’s green in a formal garden setting.” Roth says his firm and Lawrence would like to raise money to restore the formal gardens near the house—a $2 million undertaking—with the idea that this will build awareness to fund rehabilitation of the larger landscape. Photographs: |
