Rickenbacker as parkway

As the debate rages on about making the Rickenbacker Causeway safer for bicyclists and pedestrians who use the road as a linear park, it’s interesting to note that the original designer, landscape architect William Lyman Phillips designed the Rickenbacker as if it were part of the park system and not merely as a speedy go-through to Key Biscayne.

Phillips also designed the area’s great parks, Virginia Key and Crandon Park, and both the roadway and the parks were part of a grand plan to bring the splendor of tropics to the public.

The 1947 opening day brochure for the area, talked of an “invitation to a new land” and described it this way:

Replacing the old rainbow trail to contentment, the broad Rickenbacker Causeway now leads to new horizons, just around the corner from Miami’s towering mainland. The new span across Biscayne Bay to Virginia Key, thence to Key Biscayne - and Crandon Park - Dade County’s and the nation’s newest tropic pleasure island.”

A closer look at Phillips design for the Rickenbacker shows a design for a pedestrian parkway called “Paseo de las Americas,” tree-lined with public plazas at intervals, very much about creating pleasant public spaces and amenities.

That idea was carried throughout the four-mile scenic road, recalls Phillips biographer Faith Reyner Jackson in her book, Pioneer of Tropical Landscape Architecture, with Phillips' inclusion of “inviting stopping places for fishing, bathing or launching boats.”