Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 20, 1994 TAG: 9403200030
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: D-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JAN VERTEFEUILLE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
The Blue Ridge Parkway, for all its natural beauty, was never meant to be a wilderness experience or to exist untainted by human intervention.
"It was absolutely orchestrated and manipulated; and it was so well done, the average person doesn't think about it," said Roanoke architect David Hill.
"That's the thing about the parkway - it isn't real. It's better than real."
The Depression-era roadway was meant to highlight the best of rural Appalachian life.
Park buildings were built around a "pioneer theme," and parkway land was leased to farmers so "you had the feeling the parkway was just passing through with no boundaries or fences," said Carlton Abbott, a Williamsburg architect whose father, Stanley, designed it.
Nature was even supplemented, with certain trees planted in specific places to add "color and texture" in the fall.
But that human intervention was carefully planned. What happens when that rural culture takes on an urban flavor and unchecked growth is allowed along the parkway?
What happened in Roanoke County last year is a good example, where - despite zoning laws - a clash occurred between developers and preservationists. It was then that Friends of the Blue Ridge Parkway - and later the Fifth Planning District Commission - started a group to develop guidelines to save other areas of the parkway before "progress" gets to them.
"As a national treasure, it had gotten to the point we were taking it for granted," said Wayne Strickland of the Fifth Planning District Commission, which serves the Roanoke area. "The parkway was suffering from benign neglect."
So planners, tourism folks, the National Park Service and conservationists got together and began an experiment that has never been tried before at a national park. Can 29 counties in two states and thousands of adjacent landowners agree on standards to protect the parkway? Members of the new Coalition for the Blue Ridge Parkway say yes.
"This is the prototype, the pioneering effort," said Jim Ryan, chief planner for the parkway. "Six months ago, it would have been hard for me to believe all these people would have come together and agreed on a goal."
"That's the kind of movement it's going to take," said Vera Guise, a consultant to nonprofit groups who was hired to direct the Friends of the Blue Ridge Parkway, a grass-roots advocacy group made up of parkway lovers.
"No one - public or private - is going to be able to do [by himself] what needs to be done."
Because the view is the main attraction, the parkway is more vulnerable than most parks to what goes on outside its borders. The farms along its corridor have slowly disappeared or been subdivided, diminishing the "viewshed." Suburban sprawl pushes up against the parkway, and small towns seek to expand along the road to reap the economic rewards.
Tools that have been suggested to protect the parkway include everything from voluntary standards on building materials for contractors to tax incentives for adjacent landowners who don't develop their property.
But property rights are considered near-sacred in the areas through which the parkway passes. And some preservationists acknowledge that public awareness campaigns and voluntary compliance by landowners will need to be supplemented with such things as state legislation and - possibly - uniform "overlay" zoning districts adopted by each county along the parkway's path.
Those could be a tough sell to rural counties that have resisted even basic zoning ordinances. While Roanoke County would be willing to look at tougher zoning along the parkway, County Administrator Elmer Hodge said, "You only have to go one county out, and they have no zoning ordinance."
Perhaps because the Len Boone development has heightened Roanoke County's awareness of the issue, Hodge is the only county official in either state who has joined the coalition.
"I'd like to see other local government people get involved," he said. "I'd like to see Asheville [N.C.] get involved."
Computerized mapping of the whole parkway is being discussed; there is talk of creating a private land trust to accept easements and mediate between landowners and the park service. And plans have begun for a conference or series of conferences this year to bring national experts, local landowners and anyone with an interest in the parkway together to find solutions.
"We haven't really done anything with the parkway in 30 years," said Strickland, whose planning district brought all the parties together last fall to form the coalition. "I'm not sure a long-range strategic plan has been done. What do we want the parkway to be in 10 or 15 years?"
Members of the coalition are consciously trying to avoid setting up the issue as one of property rights vs. the environment. Instead, they frame it as a juggling act of private rights and the public good and hope to get those on all sides involved in the process.
`Snapshot in American history'
Chiseled onto the spine of the Blue Ridge Mountains to provide the sensation of gliding over the landscape, the parkway seemed in the 1930s to be a park without boundaries. But most of the land seen from the parkway is owned by private landowners. Around the most heavily populated areas of the parkway - Asheville and Roanoke County - urban reality interrupts the pristine rural impression.
"We sell it as a snapshot in American history," Strickland said. "Can we help educate people that the parkway goes beyond a snapshot? It's also a part of America and the changes that occur. People understand when they stop at an overlook in Roanoke, there's going to be . . . businesses, subdivisions and so forth.
"Unless we put a bubble over it, it would be difficult for us to freeze it in time."
Beyond the issue of scenery is the parkway's economic importance to Virginia and North Carolina. If development eats away the borders, the parkway's attraction for tourists could erode. Twenty-three million people a year drive the parkway, which connects the Shenandoah National Park to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
A federal study a few years ago showed that - directly and indirectly - the parkway contributes $800 million a year to North Carolina's economy and $500 million a year to Virginia's, said Ryan, the chief parkway planner.
"Why destroy the very thing that attracts people to the area?" asked Abbott, son of the parkway's designer.
It was Roanoke County's struggle over rezoning near the parkway that spawned the coalition. Development along the Asheville section is more extensive than in Roanoke County, but that growth was gradual. When local developer Len Boone suggested 100 houses on property overlooking the parkway off Cotton Hill Road, the magnitude of the development scared neighbors and parkway lovers.
Although Boone eventually compromised with the county and agreed to build fewer houses per acre than residential zoning allows and gave parkway supporters five years to buy the parcel closest to the parkway, Hodge said: "Many people think we didn't go far enough. And at times, I don't think we went far enough."
The parkway "is part of who we are," he said. "It's a major part of what Roanoke County and the Roanoke Valley is. Without the Roanoke River, the parkway and the Appalachian Trail, we'd be just another Southwest city."
The coalition is hoping all 29 counties - only two or three of which have zoning - will feel the same way. Members see grass-roots support as the key to success for their plans.
"Our hope," Ryan said, "is that this becomes the model that can be used from one end of the parkway to another."
Carlton Abbott has taken on the task of trying to protect his father's legacy. He is working for the parkway on architectural and visual guidelines for buildings along its borders that would be provided to builders but that would be strictly voluntary.
"The road has a way of just lying lightly on the land," Abbott said. "There will probably never be another built like it in America."
The guidelines he detailed recently at a planning seminar at Virginia Tech range from the simple - painting metal fences a muted gray rather than bright blue - to the more-involved - asking developers to plant tree buffers and use materials that fit the region.
The parkway was envisioned as the complete road connecting "a string of pearls" - the Peaks of Otter, Smart View, Pine Spur, Rocky Knob - each about 45 minutes apart. Explore Park is meant to be the latest pearl on the string, Roanoke architect Hill said.
As a graduate student at Harvard, Hill put together the traveling Blue Ridge Parkway Exhibition of blueprints, maps, photos and text detailing the construction and original design for the parkway. A lifelong user of the parkway, he described it as "really an icon of rural American life."
The coalition will meet Friday at Doe Run Lodge at milepost 189 on the Virginia side of the state border. There are 75 members, and the list keeps growing. The North Carolina Department of Transportation is now part of the coalition, and the Virginia Department of Transportation soon may join them.
by CNB