Emerald Necklace Guide

• Emerald Necklace Parks
• Emerald Necklace Legacy
• Frederick Law Olmsted
• Greenspaces Nearby
• Park Stewards
• Map Donors

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Emerald Necklace Parks

Nestled amid the bustle of a vibrant modern city, a delightful urban oasis beckons: the Emerald Necklace. Weaving continuously for seven miles from the historic center of Boston through a dozen neighborhoods, this inviting green space connects people and nature, just as landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted intended more than 100 years ago. Nine distinct parks, varied yet unified, offer a full range of experiences, be it a tranquil respite on a shaded bench or active pastimes such as basketball, hiking, and sailing. From an arboretum to a zoo, the Emerald Necklace’s attractions are as diverse as the New England seasons. Ice skate, garden, play golf, toss a football . . . or simply stroll along the curving pathways and admire the next picturesque vista. The Emerald Necklace: A world apart, but just steps away.

Franklin Park

This "country park" is the largest park--almost 500 acres--and crowning jewel of the Emerald Necklace. Named for Benjamin Franklin, the park was to provide “complete escape from the town” and brings together rural scenery, 200 acres of woodlands, and active recreation facilities. These include tennis and basketball courts, baseball fields, the region’s premier cross country track, and an 18-hole golf course. A 72-acre zoo is also part of what the park has to offer, along with miles of some of the best walking trails in the city.

Arnold Arboretum

Established in 1872, this is North America’s first public arboretum and one of the world’s leading centers for the study of plants. A National Historic Landmark, it is owned by the City of Boston and managed by Harvard University under a 1,000-year lease signed in 1882. A unique blend of beloved public landscape and respected research institution, the arboretum’s 265 acres of rolling land include meadows, forest, and ponds. Its collection of over 15,000 trees, shrubs, and vines is one of the largest and best documented in the world.

Parkways

Parkways were an integral element of the portion of the Emerald Necklace park system designed by Frederick Law Olmsted. Originally laid out as carriage roads, the parkways were intended as pleasure routes following the meanderings of the Muddy River, connecting the parks from the Back Bay Fens in the heart of the city to the more rural Franklin Park. Although the parkways have become major commuter routes, they continue to provide scenic glimpses into the parks and a more verdant experience for drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians alike.

Jamaica Pond

An early water source for Boston, this 68-acre “kettlehole” was formed by retreating glaciers. Olmsted was enamored of the pond’s “great beauty in reflections and flickering half-lights." Today, the Boathouse at Jamaica Pond provides facilities for sailing and row boating. Visitors can fish (by permit), and the pond is stocked each year. A beautiful 1.5-mile path around the pond is a favorite of strollers and runners alike. In October, the annual Lantern Festival brings thousands of people, some in full Halloween costume, for a walk around the pond to create their own “flickering half-lights”.

Olmsted Park

Olmsted Park was designed as “a chain of picturesque fresh-water ponds, alternating with attractive natural groves and meads.” Pathways, bridges, and plantings, designed in tandem, allow the visitor to experience a series of visual vignettes as scenery changes with every step. To help draw wildlife into the park, Olmsted built two islands in Leverett Pond to provide “well-guarded seclusion” for birds who wished to nest there. Today, people are drawn to the athletic fields, the wildflower meadow, the seclusion of the woodlands, and the restored Allerton Overlook.

The Riverway

The Riverway, which forms part of the border between Boston and Brookline, is a narrow park of approximately 34 acres that runs along the Muddy River. Olmsted described the Muddy River as "a fresh-water course bordered by passages of rushy meadow and varied slopes…” While it looks like a natural landscape, this park was almost completely constructed, including over 100,000 plantings. It contains some of the most beautiful bridges within the Emerald Necklace, many designed by the successor architectural firm to Henry Hobson Richardson, the famed 19th-century architect and designer of Boston’s Trinity Church in Copley Square.

Back Bay Fens

Frederick Law Olmsted’s challenge in 1878 was to reclaim an area that was described as “the foulest marsh and muddy flats to be found anywhere in Massachusetts…” He succeeded by combining sanitary engineering and landscape art to create what today would be called an ecological restoration. Significantly filled and altered during the 20th century, the Back Bay Fens now provides a variety of recreational opportunities, from gardening, to concerts, to sports. The Fens is surrounded by some of Boston’s major cultural and educational institutions.

Commonwealth Avenue Mall

This grand allée of shade trees forms the central spine of the Back Bay neighborhood and a strong link in the Emerald Necklace park system. The Mall features memorial sculptures honoring outstanding people; from Revolutionary War heroes to fallen firefighters. The residential streets of Back Bay are some of the best preserved examples of late 19th-century urban architecture in the country.

Because of space limitations, this map highlights only four of the nine sculptures along the mall. For more information about the sculptures: www.walkboston.org/resources/images/commaveMap.pdf

Public Garden

The Boston Public Garden was established in 1837 by a group of Proprietors as the first public botanical garden in the United States. In 1852 it was returned to city control, and after passage of the Public Garden act of 1858, it was laid out essentially in its present form. The beauty of the Boston Public Garden lies in the Lagoon, Swan Boats, sculpture, fountains, elaborate flower beds, and its notable trees. All these features make the park a favorite spot for small weddings (by permit).

Boston Common

The oldest park in the United States, the Common has been shared land since 1634 and holds a unique place in the history of Boston and the nation. Though the landscape has changed from pastures and militia training grounds to a well-loved park with open lawns, shaded pathways, ballfields, tennis courts and a playground, the Common remains an active meeting ground in the heart of historic Boston. For over 350 years it has been a center and a mirror of civic life.

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The Emerald Necklace Legacy

The richly varied parks of the Emerald Necklace reflect people’s very different attitudes about, and uses of, landscape across more than four centuries--from the colonists of the 1600s to the “father of landscape architecture” in America, Frederick Law Olmsted, in the late 1800s, to the present day.

Not long after arriving in Boston, early colonists—in the English custom—set aside a shared pasture, or “common,” for grazing livestock. Today, human activity fills Boston Common, America’s oldest public park, which anchors the northeast end of the Emerald Necklace in the city’s dense downtown core.

Adjacent to Boston Common, the Public Garden was built in 1837 as the country’s first public botanical garden, an expression of the Victorian era passion for ornamental plantings. The Commonwealth Avenue Mall (1856), a grand 12-block approach to the Public Garden, was laid out in the Parisian-inspired boulevard style as the central spine of the new Back Bay residential district.

As the Common, Public Garden, and Mall were responses to historic needs and circumstances, Olmsted’s work in the 1880s was a response to the needs of his generation. With the city having tripled in size and home to nearly a half-million residents, Olmsted saw the need for an expanded common ground to which all people could come for healthful relief from the city’s noise, pollution, and congestion.

Olmsted designed six additional parks, each distinct yet connected, forming a continuous seven-mile green space. But unlike their more formal predecessors, he designed the new parks in a fluid, naturalistic style.

In some places, such as at Jamaica Pond, he subtly reshaped the landscape to enhance its existing picturesque qualities. Other parks required enormous feats of engineering, such as altering the topography of the Riverway to transform a river, once dangerously polluted, into a public pleasure ground.

More than a century later, the Emerald Necklace is still an exceptional example of landscape design and urban planning. Olmsted’s parks, as well as the Common, Public Garden and Mall, are listed in the National Register of Historic Places and attract visitors from around the world. They give particular joy and satisfaction to all who seek beauty and respite from the dense urban environment, a common ground connecting people and nature.

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Frederick Law Olmsted

Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903) is recognized as the founder of American landscape architecture and the nation’s foremost parkmaker. Beginning with Central Park in 1858, Olmsted changed the way cities looked and provided much needed space for people to escape the harsh conditions of the 19th-century city. He also believed that bringing nature into the city could make not only the individual healthier and happier, but would nurture the democratic spirit of all citizens. After the Civil War, Olmsted would expand his portfolio to include the design of suburban communities, college campuses, the grounds to hospitals, as well as other landscapes. He also became active in the nascent conservation movement and helped to have Yosemite Valley set aside as public space.

Olmsted began his work on the Emerald Necklace during the late 1870s and believed his effort would be opening “new chapters” in the art of landscape design. “Twenty years hence,” he told his sons and associates, “you will be looking back to Muddy River as I do Central Park”. Today the Emerald Necklace is considered a paradigm for the planning of linear park systems.

Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site

Frederick Law Olmsted moved his home from New York to suburban Boston in 1883. At “Fairsted” he established the world's first full-scale professional office for the practice of landscape design. During the next century, his sons and successors perpetuated Olmsted's design ideals, philosophy, and influence. Today the two-acre site is a unit of the National Park Service and holds a vast archival collection representing over 5000 projects across North America. This includes over 2000 plans and close to 1000 photographs of the Emerald Necklace. The site also offers a variety of public and curriculum-based education programs.

99 Warren Street, Brookline, MA 02445
617.566.1689 | www.nps.gov/frla

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Greenspaces Nearby

The Esplanade

The Storrow Memorial Embankment known as “The Esplanade” is the crown jewel of DCR’s Charles River Basin. Stretching three miles along the river, the Esplanade provides for a diversity of recreation including biking, boating, and playing ball. The Hatch Memorial Shell is located here, which attracts hundreds of thousands of people to special events including the Boston Pops July 4th concert. Water quality in the Basin has improved dramatically in recent years, creating better habitat for wildlife and attracting people back to the river.

Southwest Corridor Park

This 4.7-mile, 52-acre, linear park stretches from the Back Bay to Forest Hills. Some of the parkland is decked over the Orange Line tracks, providing a diversity of greenspace, recreational facilities and miles of biking, jogging and walking paths. The park was built as a result of community protests in the ’50s and ’60s against the plans for a major highway along the railroad right-of-way between Boston and Rte. 128. Highway funds were instead used to develop mass transit, open space and recreational facilities.

Forest Hills Cemetery

Predating most of the Emerald Necklace, Forest Hills Cemetery was designed by Henry A.S. Dearborn in 1848 as Boston’s first rural cemetery. It immediately became popular as a picturesque park and arboretum as well as burial ground. With its winding roads and scenic overlooks, groves of pine forest, and ornamental lake, Forest Hills embodied the romantic concept that nature is essential to consoling the bereaved and to the spiritual and physical well-being of city dwellers. Its 250 acres are filled with treasures of sculpture and memorials to legendary Bostonians. Information on tours and events: www.foresthillstrust.org.

Boston Nature Center

Mass Audubon’s Boston Nature Center is a 67-acre community education center and wildlife sanctuary in the heart of the city. Some 2.5 miles of trails and boardwalks traverse meadows and wetlands where wildlife abounds, including coyotes, pheasants, and many species of migratory birds. The George Robert White Environmental Conservation Center is Boston’s first municipal building designed and constructed using ecologically sound construction practices such as photovoltaic shingles, geothermal climate control, renewable resources, and recycled materials.
www.massaudubon.org/boston.

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Park Stewards

The extraordinary 1,100 acres of the Emerald Necklace are owned and cared for by the joint efforts of Boston, Brookline, and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. These public agencies hold the parks in trust for the public, ensuring the parks are open to everyone, everyday, year-round.

Boston Parks & Recreation manages most of the Necklace’s park land, which accounts for more than half of the department’s total park acreage. In the 1990s, BP&R under the leadership of late Parks Commissioner Justine Mee Liff helped spearhead the renewal of the Olmsted-designed parks.
www.cityofboston.gov/parks/emerald | 617.635.PARK

Brookline Parks & Open Space manages the western sides of Olmsted Park and the Riverway. Brookline has the unique distinction of having added to the acreage of Olmsted Park in the late 1990s by converting a redundant road into a fully landscaped, dual path system.
www.brooklinema.gov/parks | 617.730.2088

The Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation has “care, custody and control” of The Emerald Necklace Parkways, which are managed as scenic, pleasure vehicle roadways and protected under the Massachusetts Historic Parkways Initiative.
www.massmgov.dcr | 617.626.1250

Emerald Necklace Conservancy brings people together to renew, enliven and advocate for the Emerald Necklace parks designed by Frederick Law Olmsted. Programs and projects reflect this mission and include: Parks restoration and maintenance; stewardship and volunteer activities; education programs and tours; as well as events in the parks. The Conservancy builds strong partnerships with the public-sector park owners, with neighborhoods and individuals, businesses and organizations, in order to keep these world-class, Olmsted-designed parks healthy and vibrant for today and tomorrow.

Since 1970, the Friends of the Public Garden has been dedicated to preserve, protect and enhance the Public Garden, Boston Common and Commonwealth Avenue Mall, Boston’s three premier historic parks in the heart of the city. Through a highly effective partnership with the City, the Friends have planted and maintained hundreds of specimen trees, restored fountains and monuments, helped to establish and support the Park Rangers, and created educational and recreational park programs. Through advocacy, education and hands-on care, the Friends play an essential role in ensuring that these public treasures continue to be healthy, vital places for those who live, work and visit the City of Boston now and in years to come.

Directory of Stewardship Organizations

Arborway Coalition - 617.276.5093 | www.arborway.net/coalition
Arboretum Park Conservancy - www.arboretumparkconservancy.org
Emerald Necklace Conservancy - 617.522.2700 | www.emeraldnecklace.org
Emerald Necklace Greenway Project - 617.777.7151
Fenway Garden Society - 617,267.6650 | www.fenwayvictorygardens.com
Franklin Park Coalition - 617.442.4141 | www.franklinparkcoalition.org
Friends of Jamaica Pond - 617.524.7070 | www.friendsofjamaicapond.org
Friends of Leverett Pond - www.highstreethill.org/folp
Friends of the Muddy River - 617.566.9720
Friends of the Public Garden - 617.723.8144 | www.friendsofthepublicgarden.org

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Map Donors

This map is made possible by the following generous donors:

• Emerald Necklace Conservancy
• National Park Service (Challenge Cost Share Program)
• John & Naomi Tomfohrde Foundation
• Department of Conservation and Recreation
• Friends of the Public Garden
• Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University
• Brookline Parks & Open Space
• Arborway Coalition
• Boston Parks & Recreation
• Forest Hills Cemetery
• Forest Hills Educational Trust
• Medical Academic and Scientific Community Organization (MASCO)
• Mass Audubon Boston Nature Center
• Fenway Alliance
• NewEnglandTravelPlanner.com
• Wellesley Garden Study Group
• Zoo New England
• Friends of the Muddy River
• Ferris Wheels
• Jill Conley

Credits:

• Jill K. Conley, graphic design/map design
• Ken Dumas, cartography
• Alan Banks, Ken Krause, writers
• Don Eunson, project manager
• Dan Tobyne, cover photo