ABSTRACT
The Emerald Necklace is a linear system comprising nine ‘parks’ of greatly differing character. They extend, like beads on a roughly U-shaped string, for 7 miles (11 kilometres) from the downtown Boston Common to Franklin Park in the inner suburbs. The three inner parks were created between 1643 and 1856; the six outer parks were designed by Frederick Law Olmsted (1822–1903) and/or the Olmsted firm between 1878 and 1895 – the year in which Frederick Law Olmsted retired. 1 Olmsted’s six parks were either physically contiguous or linked by ‘parkways’ of the type that he had advocated in New York and Brooklyn. Marine Park, an oceanfront park southeast of the downtown, intended as the other end of the Necklace, was not opened until 1891 and the causeway from there to Castle Island was not built until 1932 (Marcus 2002: 141–2). The nine parks include land both in the city of Boston and in the adjacent town of Brookline – so named because much of its boundary with Boston is the centreline of the Muddy River.
