Avenue (landscape)

An avenue at Alexandra Park, London
An avenue at Weissenbach an der Triesting, Austria
Tree alley in Normandy, France

In landscaping, an avenue or allée is traditionally a straight path or road with a line of trees or large shrubs running along each side, which is used, as its French source venir ("to come") indicates, to emphasize the "coming to," or arrival at a landscape or architectural feature. In most cases, the trees planted in an avenue will be all of the same species or cultivar, so as to give uniform appearance along the full length of the avenue. The French term allée is used for avenues planted in parks and landscape gardens, as well as boulevards such as the Grande Allée in Quebec City, Canada, Bologna Alley in Zagreb and Karl-Marx-Allee in Berlin.

History

The avenue is one of the oldest ideas in the history of gardens. An avenue of sphinxes still leads to the tomb of the pharaoh Hatshepsut (died 1458 BCE); see the entry Sphinx. Avenues similarly defined by guardian stone lions lead to the Ming tombs in China. British archaeologists have adopted highly specific criteria for "avenues" within the context of British archaeology.

In order to enhance the approach to mansions or manor houses, avenues were planted along the entrance drive. Sometimes the avenues are in double rows on each side of a road. Trees preferred for alleys were selected for their height and speed of growth, such as poplar, beech, lime, and horse chestnut.[1] In the American antebellum era South, the southern live oak was typically used, because the trees created a beautiful shade canopy.

Sometimes tree avenues were designed to direct the eye toward some distinctive architectural building or feature, such as a chapels, gazebos, or architectural follies.[2]

In Garden à la française Baroque landscape design, avenues of trees that were centered upon the dwelling radiated across the landscape. See the avenues in the Gardens of Versailles or Het Loo. Other late 17th-century French and Dutch landscapes, in that intensely ordered and flat terrain, fell naturally into avenues; Meindert Hobbema, in The Avenue at Middelharnis, 1689, presents such an avenue in farming country, neatly flanked at regular intervals by rows of young trees that have been rigorously limbed up; his central vanishing point mimics the avenue's propensity to draw the spectator forwards along it.[3]

Street name

Hobbema's Het Laantje van Middelharnis (1689)
Old Avenue Steinfurter Bagno leading to the local castle in the background, used as twofold bicycle path

Avenue as a street name in French, Spanish (avenida) and other languages implies a large straight street in a city, often created as part of a large scheme of urban planning such as Baron Haussmann's remodelling of Paris or the L'Enfant Plan for Washington D.C.; "avenues" will typically be the main roads. This pattern is very often followed in the United States, indeed all the Americas, but in the United Kingdom this sense is less strong and the name is used more randomly, mostly for suburban streets developed in the 20th century, though Western Avenue, London is a main traffic artery out of the city, if not very straight.

In cities which have a grid-based naming system, such as the borough of Manhattan in New York City, there may be a convention that the streets called avenues run parallel in one direction – roughly north-south in the case of Manhattan – while "streets" run at 90 degrees to them across the avenues; roughly east-west in Manhattan. In Washington, DC the avenues radiate from the centre running diagonally across the grid of streets, which follows typical French usage of the name (in France "boulevards" are often main roads running round the city centre). In Phoenix, Arizona, "the avenues" can colloquially mean "the west side of town", due to the numbered north-south running roads being called "Avenues" in the western part of the city, separated from the eastern "Streets" by a "Central Avenue". Similarly, "the avenues" in San Francisco, California refers to the Richmond District and the Sunset District, the two neighborhoods on the Pacific coast, north and south of Golden Gate Park, respectively.

In Anglophone urban or suburban settings, "avenue" is one of the usual suite of words used in street names, along with "boulevard", "circle", "court", "drive", "lane", "place", "road", "street", "terrace", "way" and so on, any of which may carry connotations as to the street's size, importance, or function.

See also

References

  1. ↑ Muir, Richard (2004). Landscape Encyclopedia. London: Windgather Press. p. 7. ISBN 0-9545575-1-4.
  2. ↑ Muir 2004, p.7.
  3. ↑ Painting of the Month. "Special Feature: The Long Road Home". National Gallery, London.

External links

Wikisource has the text of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica article Avenue.
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