History

Historic photo (c. 1912) from Brookline archives	The Riverway portion of Olmsted's Muddy River Improvement starts at Huntington Avenue (formerly Tremont Street) and ends at the intersection of Brookline Avenue and Park Drive (formerly Audubon Road). Olmsted asserted that the Muddy River Improvement, which included the parks now known as Riverway and Olmsted Parks, would not be an “isolated local park of limited extent and value” but part of “a long chain of truly metropolitan pleasure-grounds”. Olmsted described his vision of the Riverway as “a small, placid stream, with quietly sloping, grassy and reedy banks, planted with such trees and shrubs as are natural under such circumstances in New England.” In the process of creating the Muddy River Improvement, using a survey by Brookline’s engineer, Alexis French, the boundary between Boston and Brookline was shifted to run through the center of the new waterway. In this process of land trading, Brookline gained a little over a acre, and paid Boston about $20,000.
	To screen the Boston and Albany Railroad from the park, a “continuous mound, higher than a man’s head” was built. At the corner of Carlton and Colchester Streets, he specified a footbridge to provide neighborhood access to the park. In fact, the sub-title of the above map includes the phrase "showing the proposed change in the Town boundary and the relation of the proposed pleasure ground to the neighboring streets."