Boston's Metropolitan Past: Baxter & Eliot's 1893 Plan

 

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Planning historians describe the Baxter-Eliot plan as an antecedent to city planning, important for its future influence and representative of pre-city planning trends and ideas. Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. once commented that the birth of city planning, an event that he was both a participant in and a witness to, can be traced to “three streams of thought:” public health and sanitation, landscape, and civic art (Peterson 2003).

In this way, several authors consider the plan to take place before modern city planning began. Another concern of planning historians is the influence the Baxter-Eliot plan may have had on future plans, such as Chicago’s “outer park system” (Peterson 2003).  A potentially fruitful analytical approach sets the Baxter-Eliot plan in the context of other metropolitan initiatives introduced to the Massachusetts state legislature during this period (Scott 1969).

Thus, city planning historiography includes but does not adequately address the planning and implementation of the 1893 Boston Metropolitan Park plan.