Baxter Boulevard
Near Portland, Maine
This wide, tree-lined parkway sweeping around Back Cove is the work of one stubborn mayor and one famous design firm. In the late eighteen hundreds, Back Cove was a foul, polluted mudflat reeking of industrial runoff. James Phinney Baxter, several times mayor of Portland, dreamed instead of a ring of connected parks.
In eighteen ninety-five he hired the renowned Olmsted firm, heirs to the designer of New York's Central Park, who proposed a promenade circling the cove. It took more than two decades to finish, and the wide boulevard finally opened in nineteen seventeen. Many of its trees were planted in nineteen twenty-one as a living memorial to the dead of the First World War.
