Park-Making as a National Art

THE parks and park systems are the most important artistic work which has been done in the United States. Architecture, sculpture, and painting have found adequate expression in this country, but, however good has been the work accomplished, no one can claim that our builders and artists have advanced their arts farther than these have ever been carried before. They would be the first to admit that even in their most successful productions they have been eminent disciples rather than masters. But there remains a fourth art, truly inexhaustible, in which, as in all the others, the aim is the production of beauty ; and in this there is offered a fair field for such genius as it may inspire, where there are unrivaled natural advantages to stimulate artistic imagination, and few competitors to encounter. Certain it is that of this art, at least, we have not heard the last word, for its possibilities are unsounded, its future is unforeseen. In it there will always be full play for that exuberant, fanciful, large expression which is akin to the expansive taste of the American people, and no one can point to all its ways as trodden before.

Moreover, it is safe to say that in this art America has produced one preëminent artist; for in the opinion of competent judges it is held that in conception and execution of an exquisite ideal in landscape gardening, in mastery of practical detail and recognition of the larger moral aspects of great and beautiful public pleasure-grounds, Mr. Frederick Law Olmsted has touched the highest point yet reached by any creator of picturesque scenery; and it is claimed that, largely owing to his inspiring genius, the park systems of the United States are in conception unrivaled in the world.

Different estimates have been made by noted writers of the relation of landscape gardening to other arts ; some, like Girardin, believing that it can create a scenery “ more pure, more expressive, than any that is found in nature herself,” a view shared by Alison and Whately; while others limit its scope to producing merely picturesque and harmonious beauty such as we associate with ancient palaces and manor-houses. The primary idea is that a park should represent a quiet scene diversified with woods and water and gently rolling meadow, which, restricted often by bounds or hemmed in by unsightly and inharmonious surroundings, cannot lend itself to uncontrolled imaginative treatment; but in the gigantic reservations of our great country, comprising as they do cataract and mountain, forest, and mighty river, it is possible that landscape art may have a stupendous future, now but dimly to be descried as a wonderful prospect. Its application contains the essence of all art. which is that the controlling hand of man shall enhance and glorify nature by framing her pictures in an appropriate setting, and so link the wild and magnificent to the tender and harmonious, that each shall form the complement of the other, and all be made to appeal to eye and heart with fresh human significance.

In comparing our park systems with those of other civilizations, it must not be forgotten that the ancient parks of the Old World were originally the property of great sovereigns or lords who had absolute control of the resources of their kingdoms or feoffs. When the pleasuregrounds of Versailles were devised in a desolate wilderness for Louis XIV., or gardens were planted at Tsarskoye Selo to delight the whimsical fancy of Catherine II. of Russia, they were paid for with treasure wrung from a suffering people ; while the mighty barons of Great Britain acquired their broad acres and preserved their stately forests and fair meadows by force of arms and the favor of kings. England is strewn to-day with public commons which are the remnants of ancient royal hunting-grounds ; and there public footpaths often lead across private land, while many grandly wooded estates, freely thrown open to all who care to enter, are the property of private individuals.

In America, all pleasure - grounds of large extent have from the beginning been planned for the people ; they are a constant source to them of pleasure and pride, and it is our boast that on this continent, with its unrivaled resources and its host of generous citizens, parks have been created in our generation which today can be favorably compared with the most famous ancient resorts of Europe ; and when the schemes now begun have had time fully to be carried out, we shall have reservations for the public of unparalleled extent and beauty, reaching perhaps unbroken from the eastern seaboard to the shores of California. The idea of such a reservation, a national parkway from the Atlantic to the Pacific, leading from one beautiful pleasureground to another, and passing through great tracts of woodland patrolled by government foresters, is not inconsistent with the genius of our country, which ever seeks a closer union between its parts ; while the gradually enlarging park systems of our cities indicate the way in which it may be brought about in the linking together of suburb after suburb by great boulevards which tend to bring civilization to distant homes by affording safe and easy communication between them.

In the growth of taste, no educator of the people has been more valuable than the parks. Their attractiveness is undoubtedly one of the causes of that everywhere increasing desire for more perfection in home surroundings, which starts from their neighborhood, or is impelled to action by those who have witnessed their influence upon the town. While the visitor to the park fancies himself merely resting, he is in fact receiving new sensations which insensibly educate both eye and mind. Around him he sees harmony, soft hues, sweet distances, noble groups of trees, broad sunny expanses of turf, the graceful waving of foliage, or he catches far-away glimpses of hills and water, while blossoming shrubs waft to him their fragrance, and the song of birds makes melodious the stillness, till all his senses are trained to delicate enjoyment. The shining sky above, the broad meadow below, the feeling of freedom and repose, all have an artistic value which helps to make the humblest more sensitive to beauty, more intelligent as to what constitutes it. Thus the park becomes the common school of the nation’s art, where the first lessons are learned by the coming artist; for the same eagerness to learn which makes our country blossom with schoolhouses opens minds to the value of parks; they too are the key to something better that the people want to know.

The idea of the necessity of pleasuregrounds is so generally accepted now that it is hard to realize how stoutly resisted it was within our own generation, and how much persuasion was necessary to bring about the cession of land for the first large park in New York city. We can scarcely believe that only ten years ago Mr. Olmsted was urging the necessity of retaining Franklin Park in Boston, and boldly telling slow-goingcity councilors that there was “ not one city in America or northern Europe, distantly approaching it in population, wealth, and reputation for refinement, which had not gone further than Boston in making good its deficiency in parks.” In 1869 there were but two well-advanced rural parks in the United States ; in 1886 there were twenty, and since that time they have multiplied with wonderful rapidity, — showing that at last the country is ripe for action.

In New England, each little village originally had its common, and if a seaport its public landing-place, but most of these have long since been appropriated to private use, Boston Common being the most important instance of the survival of a valuable open space in the heart of a great town. A sense of the value of these public holdings is being aroused, and some of them may yet be recovered. Here, also, as in Europe, private estates and beautiful tracts of land have been absorbed in the rapidly extending grounds of public parks ; but sometimes, as in the case of Central Parle in New York, and Jackson and Lincoln Parks in Chicago, acres of bare and unpromising ground have been given for the purpose by cities, merely because it was cheap and available at the time. The latter parks are monuments to the skill and energy which grappled successfully with their apparently hopeless problems.

Before entering, however, upon the history of the park movement in America, it would be well to explain clearly what is meant by the word “ park ” in its large sense, for with us the name is indiscriminately applied to small recreationgrounds which would be more accurately designated as greens, squares, places, gardens, or woods. While these lesser spaces also demand artistic treatment, it is in the park proper alone that the artist can give free rein to his creative and adaptive genius and produce broad picturesque effects. “ A park,” to quote Mr. Olmsted, “ is a space of ground used for public or private recreation, differing from a garden in spaciousness and the broad, simple, and natural character of its scenery, and from a wood in the more scattered arrangements of its trees and greater expanses of its glades, and consequently of its landscapes.”

In choosing a site for a public recreation-ground near a town, it is very desirable that views of considerable extent should be controllable within its borders, so that in the future unsightly buildings can never destroy their beauty. The roads and paths are of especial importance, for their curves and stretches should be so managed as to be easy and graceful without any straining for irregularity. At the same time, they must be so placed as to afford access to the most desirable places, for in our climate grass constantly trodden upon becomes worn and shabby, and the many million feet which tread the paths of our urban parks yearly would soon destroy the turf if allowed to trample it at their pleasure. There must be a variety of roads, for the carriage, the bicycle, the equestrian, and the foot passenger all need accommodation. There are over one hundred acres of roads in Central Park, and the demand is constant for enlargement; so it will readily be seen that in any public park near a city much natural beauty has to be sacrificed to provide conveniences for the travel and repose of many thousand men and horses.

The sheets of water and rippling streams and waterfalls which diversify parks are great additions to their beauty. In Providence, Springfield, Plymouth, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and many other towns, above all in Chicago, the views of lake and river and sheltered pond are essential to the charm of the parks, and have been most skillfully utilized to give attraction to an otherwise dreary waste. The providing of suitable shelters and resorts for the public is another difficulty which confronts the landscape gardener, for unless suitably placed and screened, and built to harmonize with the scene, they become blots rather than ornaments. Other architectural points must also be faced in bridges and entrance gates, which should never be too ornate, but be so constructed as in time to melt into their surroundings, so that when draped and backed with foliage they will be as harmonious as the rocks around with the parklike character of the scenery. Sometimes stone staircases have to be built to make different levels of ground of easy access ; and then comes the whole vexed question of fountains and works of the sculptor’s art, with which the public is eager to adorn its pleasure-grounds, often without regard to appropriateness of character or situation. Added to all these difficulties the park-maker has the great problems of engineering and grading to cope with, as well as the constant desire of city authorities to combine all attractions in the park, and to turn parts of it into a botanical garden, or a zoological museum, or something else apart from its simple or restfully picturesque character.

Finally, to quote Mr. Olmsted again : “The value of a park depends mainly on the disposition and the quality of its woods, and the relation of its woods to other natural features, — ledges, boulders, declivities, swells, dimples, — and to qualities of surface, as verdure and tuftiness. Under good management, these things do not, like roads and walks, wear out, or in any way lose their value with age. Individual trees must from time to time be removed, to avoid crowding or because of decay; but as a rule, the older the wood, and the less of newness and rawness there is to be seen in all the elements of a park, the better it serves its purpose. This rule holds for centuries without limit.”

The importance of an ancient forest is noticeable at the Arnold Arboretum, near Boston, where the noble hemlock wood which crowns the hill at the entrance constitutes the most striking feature of that great tree garden. The impressive solemnity of those ancient evergreens shadowing the rocky bluff, the wild seclusion of that forest fastness almost within sound of the city’s roar, have a value to the world-weary spirit that must be priceless as the years roll on and bring the storm and stress of life nearer and nearer to its composing solitude.

Having thus indicated the especial problems which attend park-making even in congenial localities, we may throw some light upon the progress made in the last fifty years, in a correct valuation of this difficult art, by recalling the troubles encountered by the projectors of Central Park in the early fifties.

In 1849, Mr. Downing began, in The Horticulturist, a series of papers on landscape gardening, which had a great influence in the United States in awakening an interest in the subject. Consequently, in 1851, a bill was passed in the New York legislature which established a commission with special powers for the purpose of carrying on the work of making a park, the name and position of which were purely casual, for the site was fixed on by a mere chance. The New York legislature had, in the first place, passed a bill providing for a park on the east side of the island, about which there was some contention, and it was only as an afterthought that the same legislature passed the act under which the city took title to the ground now occupied by Central Park.

When the second bill came up for discussion, its originator turned to a map and inquired, “ Now where shall I go ? ” whereat his comrade, without a moment’s reflection, put his finger down and replied, “ Go there,” the point indicated appearing to be about the middle of the island, which therefore seemed to him least likely to excite local prejudice. Mr. Olmsted, who tells this story, says, “ It would have been difficult to find another body of land of six hundred acres, upon the island, which possessed less desirable characteristics for a park, or upon which more time, labor, and expense would be required to establish them.” He adds that in order to remedy imperfectly the defects in outline of the piece of ground the city had to spend more than a million dollars, which might have been saved by intelligent study; but the blundering policy could not be altered even by public discussion, nor could public opinion at the time be brought to dissatisfaction with what was done or with those who did it. Men of wealth feared that the park would add to their taxes, and opposed it. The argument that certain European towns obtained advantage from their parks was met by an affirmation that the conditions being different, and Manhattan Island being surrounded by open water, artificial breathing-places were unnecessary. A leading citizen even suggested that all that was required was to plough up a strip just within the boundary of the ground and plant it with young trees, chiefly cuttings of poplar, which might be transplanted later to the interior, so that the park could be economically furnished with what was quite good enough for it. Somebody of distinguished professional reputation seriously urged in the newspapers that the ground should be rented for a sheep-walk, and that the sheep-trails would serve the public for footpaths, and nature might be trusted to plant shrubs and trees near them in sufficiently picturesque fashion to make a suitable strolling-ground. Others feared that a large park would develop riotous and licentious habits in its frequenters. The New York Herald, seven years after the enterprise was begun, had an editorial stating that it was “ all folly to expect our country to have parks like old aristocratic countries ; ” that leading citizens like William B. Astor and Edward Everett could never have any chance to enjoy themselves where “ Sam “ was flirting with nursemaids, and knocking down better dressed men who might remonstrate with him and his friends for their noisy behavior. “ Is it not obvious,”says the sapient writer. “ that the great Central Park will be nothing but a great bear-garden for the lowest denizens of the city ?" and he proceeds to argue that it would be unfavorable to property in its neighborhood. Mr. Olmsted was asked by eminent citizens, eight years after the passage of the park act, whether he supposed that gentlemen would ever resort to it, or allow their wives and daughters to visit it. A prominent lawyer thought that it would be impossible to police it, and after the work was begun there were loud outcries against the reckless, extravagant, inconsiderate policy of those who had the making of the park in charge, one individual complaining that the designs were even fine enough for his private grounds !

The park was begun in 1858, but at every turn the enlightened policy of the designer was hampered and controlled by state and city officials. By good luck, the park commissioners, who were distinguished citizens chosen apart from political consideration, were allowed to remain in their places for many years, so that they learned to know something about their work. Meantime, they were denounced by the mayor in messages, and the common council and other departments of the city government refused to coöperate with them. Had these men not possessed exceptional personal character, and had not extraordinary powers been vested in them by the legislature, they could not have carried through a policy and method which commanded so little immediate public favor. What saved them was the general conviction that they were honest; hut they were closely pursued all the time, so that here and there in the park evidences remain, in the shape of lasting defects, of the constant interference and restrictions to which they were subjected, as they worked with the hounds at their heels. Four thousand laborers were employed at one time, and the work was rushed along night and day, to put it as quickly as possible beyond the reach of those who were bent on stopping it.

At last the park reached a point where it began to be appreciated. From 1866 to 1870 thirty million visits were made to it by actual count, and many more must have passed uncounted. The poor and the rich enjoyed its refreshment; public health was improved by it. The press awoke to the conviction of its importance, acknowledged its refining influence, and discovered that the park was as free from ruffianism as the churches were, arrests even for venial offenses, the result mostly of ignorance of the rules, amounting to no more than twenty out of a million visitors. Since that time the fourteen millions of dollars which the park has cost have been many times repaid in its effect upon the inhabitants of the rapidly growing city, while the rise in value of the property in its immediate neighborhood has been enormous.

Its character, so wonderfully evolved from stubborn material, is full of beauty, with all the simple pastoral charm of natural scenery. Owing to the conformation of the ground and the various demands of the public, it was found necessary to make a number of small picturesque scenes, rather than to furnish a single broad expanse of turf with groves of trees. It was, however, the effort of the designers to provide the largest open spaces practicable, and at great expense protruding masses of rock were blasted out at the lower end, and the spaces left were filled with loam. To this we owe a peaceful meadow, with its vague borders lost in the shady recesses of the trees, giving an idea of unlimited extent by the glimpses of grassy slopes seen at intervals beyond, though the green contains but sixteen acres, and the ball-ground only ten. In the north meadows there is a greater sense of freedom and space, though only nineteen acres could be secured even there, but the disposition of the roads and paths is so skillful that the fields produce upon the imagination the effect of far greater expanses, and are above all restful and satisfying with their suggestion of seclusion and country charm. A distinguished authority, defending it warmly from an unfavorable comparison, remarks, “ In no European city, we can safely say, is there a park conceived in so purely naturalistic a way and kept so free from inharmonious details as the Central Park.”

After the value of this resort was recognized, other spaces were set aside in New York and Brooklyn for recreation-grounds. When the commissioners began their work, six hundred acres of ground were thought by many to be too much for all park purposes. By 1870 three times as much land had been reserved for the public in New York and Brooklyn, fourteen miles of rural drives were completed, and ground was secured in the two cities and their suburbs for fifty miles of parkways, averaging with their planted borders and interspaces at least one hundred feet in width. Since that time more and more land has been devoted to public uses, and public opinion has been frequently enlisted to resist encroachments upon the breathingspaces which still exist in the more crowded sections. The Riverside Drive in New York, which overlooks the Hudson for a distance of three miles, has an unrivaled situation for picturesque beauty ; the broad strong river, with the wooded heights beyond, and the magnificent views up and down its course, giving the work a dignity of its own. Bronx Park and Fordham Park are of great extent. A park on Pelham Bay, which will one day be developed, comes down to the waters of the Sound. East River Park, on Manhattan Island, occupies a small portion of the bluff which fronts Astoria, and the shrunken Battery has still two thousand feet of sea-wall. Morningside Park, in the upper part of the island, near Harlem, is a strip of land about twelve hundred yards in length, eighty to a hundred yards wide, which is treated as an elaborated parkway. The original plans of Messrs. Olmsted and Vaux are being carried out at present, and twenty thousand dollars have been expended on it this year. Morningside Avenue, upon the terrace above the high steep ledge which is its most picturesque feature, made safe by parapets and accessible from below by stairways, is an important street commanding an extended view, which bounds the great architectural plateau on which will stand the Cathedral, St. Luke’s Hospital, and the buildings of Columbia University. In addition to the greater parks numerous small pleasure-grounds are scattered all over the island, and the present park area of New York city alone is a fraction over fifty-one hundred and eighty-five acres.

Prospect Park, in Brooklyn, containing five hundred and fifty acres of land, is one of the most beautiful of all American parks, commanding as it does superb views over the river and outer harbor of New York, with both cities, Long Island, the Jersey shore, and the Atlantic in full view. It enjoys the great advantage of fine old woods, which, with its large transplanted trees, give it the aspect of some stately ancient pleasure - ground. The beautiful lake which covers fifty acres, the miles of drives and rides, and twenty miles of walks are all ably planned to afford pleasing glimpses of or outlooks upon the varied prospect. It is approached through a broad plaza, where stands a statue of Lincoln, by a series of fine boulevards two hundred feet in width, one of which is an ocean pathway extending to Coney Island, a distance of three miles.

Long satisfied with the Common and the Public Garden, Boston was one of the last of the great cities to secure adequate park equipment. In 1886 Mr. Olmsted wrote in a report: “ Within the city of Boston, or close upon its border, there are nearly two hundred public properties which are not held with a view to building over them, and most of which are secured by legal enactments from ever being built over. . . . Of these permanent green oases among the buildings of the city the area is about four square miles, or nearly as much as the entire building space within the walls of some cities that had great importance in the world when the building of Boston was begun.” From this it may be seen that the completion of its great country park, and also the unrivaled system of parkways which now link together its fine public grounds for miles and miles, are of very recent date, though rapidity of growth and largeness of conception render the whole combination the most far-reaching and important scheme yet outlined in America, or perhaps in the world.

The original plan of Franklin Park, made in 1869, was even more comprehensive than its present wide extent, including streams of water and areas in which lakes, with facilities for boating, skating, and bathing, as well as waterside beauty, could readily have been provided. The city government, however, could not be made to accept the larger plan, and only after much persuasion was it induced to secure a tract which contained no single natural feature of distinguished beauty or popular interest. The ground chosen was rugged and intractable, strewn with boulders and underlaid by ledges; in short, it was a rocky upland pasture, with a stunted second growth of trees, which were of importance only as masses. Its sole advantage was in the fact that “there could be found near the city no other equal extent of ground so pleasingly simple and rural.”

So late as 1886 very little had been done to improve it, and the Notes on the Plan of Franklin Park, published that year, complain of the lack of sympathy with the picturesque idea, in mayors, councilmen, commissioners, superintendents, gardeners, architects, and engineers, and of their persistent ridicule of any plan of park-work not of a class to be popularly defined as strictly utilitarian and “practical.” The idea of the park as “ art ” had not yet dawned upon the working part of the community ; its worth as an adjunct to the Public Library and the Art Museum was still far from being comprehended by those whose votes and support wore necessary to carry out the noble idea of the designer.

Stimulated by Mr. Olmsted’s urgency and by the enlightened support given to his views by a few large-minded citizens, the city government at last awakened to action. The park commissioners were selected from those who could grasp the underlying idea of a great undertaking, and the work was resolutely advanced. With its development grew public appreciation ; the value of the park system was recognized so promptly by the people, new and powerful writers so strenuously expounded its advantages and the importance of still larger acquisitions of territory, that a work which had lagged for fifty years has so greatly progressed in the last decade that Boston may now fairly claim that it has an unrivaled park system, so far reaching, so beautiful, so open to development under skillful treatment, that no future landscape architect born in its neighborhood can complain of a lack of field for his energies.

In 1891 the first suggestion was made for a system of parks adequate to meet the needs of the great cluster of cities and towns that, with the city of Boston, form practically one metropolitan community. In 1892 the preliminary Metropolitan Park Commission was appointed, and in an important report in 1893 its ideas were embodied in the form of law, and a million dollars were appropriated for carrying them out. The reservations secured at that time were, fifty-eight acres and a half, in which were the noble old Waverly Oaks and Beaver Brook cascade, so dear to James Russell Lowell; and the beautiful mountain-like range of the Blue Hills, a reservation five miles long, including an area of four thousand acres, the largest single park space possessed by any American city, obtained at a cost of two hundred thousand dollars.

The Middlesex Fells, since acquired, are a tract of wild woodland, two miles square, west of Boston, including in its boundaries Virginia Wood, the beautiful pine grove recently placed in the hands of the Trustees of Public Reservations by Mrs. F. F. Tudor as a memorial of her daughter. This park contains thirtynine hundred acres of forest and lakes, and is ultimately to be connected with the Arnold Arboretum by a fine parkway, while the highway known as Blue Hill Avenue is to be changed into a boulevard from Franklin Park southward. The Lynn Woods, comprising eighteen hundred acres of forest, are also a part of this system.

In addition to the Park Commission of Boston there exists the body of Metropolitan Park Commissioners, who in 1895 reported that in their charge was an area of seventy-seven hundred acres, which, added to the total open spaces for recreative and water supply uses in the Boston metropolitan district, makes a total of almost fourteen thousand acres. The areas now or soon to be controlled by this commission include more numerous large pleasure-grounds than are governed by any public authority in America with the exception of the governments of the United States and Canada.

The acquisition of these great reservations by the State ; the assumption by the city of the care of the roads and the policing of the Arnold Arboretum, an important educational adjunct to Harvard University; the passage of the playground act, and the additions to the general park act of the commonwealth, by which park boards are enabled, by consent of local authorities and a majority of abettors, to take and improve streets or parts of streets leading to parks ; the incorporation of the society of Trustees of Public Reservations ; the decorative treatment of the shores and embankments of the Charles River ; the rescue of the Back Bay Fens, now one of the imposing adornments of beautiful Boston ; the extension in all directions of fine pleasuregrounds, — these are exhibitions of serious and generous interest in the art of public improvement which seem to indicate that the time is coming when the whole State of Massachusetts may be intersected with fine shaded avenues, leading from park to park in the towns along the route, reserved solely for pleasure travel. The banks of certain rivers and sections of the shores of the sea are included in the magnificent plans of the park commissioners of Massachusetts, and this important body, with its great powers and its generous equipment of money, can accomplish what the Trustees of Public Reservations could only suggest, as they did suggest the whole park system. There is no portion of the great work of park-making which does not admit of extended treatment, and the reports of the commissioners are full of valuable suggestions.

Philadelphia enjoys a priceless treasure in Fairmount Park, which has a larger acreage than any other park in this country, with the exception of the Boston park system. Almost three thousand acres lying along the Schuylkill and the Wissahickon are there thrown open to the public, with every convenience for boating, driving, walking, and all kinds of sports. The wild scenery of the smaller river is of the most picturesque character, and the road winds beside a tumbling stream shaded with dense foliage and bordered by fernclad, vine-hung rocks; while the stately Schuylkill, with its arching bridges and majestic calm, lends itself nobly to decorative treatment, and affords pictures of rare beauty from its winding shores.

This is the oldest park in the country, dating back to 1812, when the Philadelphians, wishing to procure a supply of fresh water free from the impurities of city drainage, purchased the precipitous bluff known as “ Faire Mount ” over Schuylkill, then a remote spot. The first purchase was of five acres, increased as early as 1828 to twenty-four, while almost every decade has seen large additions to its area, either by purchase or by generous gifts ranging from numerous small sums of a hundred dollars to a few of ten thousand, and also by donations of many broad acres which were under high cultivation as private seats. The park was put into the hands of Messrs. Olmsted and Vaux about 1868, when it already had an extent of over two thousand acres. The nobly spacious drives and the ornamentation of the springs, together with miles of planted trees, are monuments to their taste and skill. Though seven million dollars were expended in the mere purchase of the land, the long-sighted and shrewd old Quaker commissioners succeeded in acquiring the property for the city while the price was still low, so that, large as is the sum, it represents but a small portion of the value of the park at the present day. The stately oaks which survive on the sites of departed homesteads, the vistas through ancient woods, the great sky spaces with a foreground of river, are unique in character, and give this valuable park an atmosphere of rare distinction.

In 1860 Baltimore acquired Druid Hill Park, consisting of seven hundred acres of land which had for more than a hundred years been under cultivation as a private estate. Its surface is delightfully diversified with shady ravines, smooth hill-slopes, and broad meadows grazed by sheep. Deer roam under the shadow of its woods, and fish and wild fowl throng its sixteen lakes. Many of the trees are of great age and size, and through vistas one discerns the city and the lakes, while from Prospect Hill there is an extended view over the surrounding country. Through the wisdom of Governor Swann, mayor of the city when the park was bought, the street railways were compelled to pay one fifth of their gross receipts for the park purchase, in return for their franchise; so that when this princely acquisition was delivered into the hands of the people, not only was no bill of cost presented, but the property was provided with an income for its future maintenance. This is an example which might well be imitated by other cities which are too ready to throw away franchises upon all sorts of corporations without any compensation.

The public reservations of all kinds in the city of Washington, including the parks proper and the small spaces at tire intersections of avenues and streets, amounted in 1892 to about four hundred acres. Two hundred and sixty-eight acres are estimated to be in a condition which needs no further improvement. The botanical garden covers ten acres, and the agricultural grounds forty. In 1890 an act of Congress provided for “ the organization, improvement, and maintenance ” of a National Zoölogical Park under the direction of tiie Smithsonian Institution, and about one hundred and seventy acres of ground, delightfully situated on Rock Creek, near Washington city, were secured. A more picturesque site could not have been chosen. The ground is diversified with cliffs and ravines, and watercourses abound throughout its noble woods, where grow fine old trees in the rich soil of the region. There is no European zoölogical garden of the same extent, and it is planned to furnish each animal with its appropriate surroundings. Already the park is a favorite resort of Washington people, and every year adds to its attractiveness. The grounds about the Smithsonian Institution and those of the Agricultural Department, with the Congressional Gardens in the very heart of the city, form most agreeable resorts, and furnish a great variety of trees and plants for the enjoyment of the many visitors who now view them at all seasons. The grounds of the Soldiers’ Home afford an interesting parklike drive in the neighborhood of the city, and the sad charm of Arlington Heights, with its rows of soldiers’ graves and the noble view of Washington and the surrounding country from the dignified old homestead, can never be forgotten.

The Chicago park system contains nearly nineteen hundred acres of land, most of which is in six parks of an average extent of two hundred and fifty acres each, three in one chain, and all, with one exception, connected by parkways. Lincoln Park, in the northern part of the city, is reached by a magnificent drive along the lake - front, bordered by stately dwellings. These houses, varied in their architecture, are in many cases surrounded by large cultivated grounds which form a fitting approach to the extensive park, where are planted trees that struggle upon a thin and sun-baked soil, affording to the citizens an agreeable shade and an attractive resort. In the opposite part of the city, the South Park is distinguished for the unrivaled meadow of a hundred acres which is its most important feature.

Jackson Park, so well known to the country as the site of the Columbian Exposition, was originally a most forbidding spot. The country about Chicago is flat and mostly treeless, with a tenacious clay soil, so that park-making is attended with immense difficulties ; these were further complicated, in the case of Jackson Park, by the fact that its site, except about one tenth, which was artificially made land, consisted in 1893 of three ridges of beach sand with intervening swales occupied by boggy vegetation. A plan for a park upon this worthless spot — given, like the land for Back Bay Park in Boston and many of the New York city park lands, because it was unavailable for building — was made, early in the seventies, by Messrs. Olmsted and Vaux, together with one for the South or Washington Park, and the connecting strip of land now called the Midway. This idea comprised the use of the lagoons as a part of the landscape scheme, by broadening and varying their outline, and using the excavated material to form the basis of higher banks on the old sand-bars, and to make borders to the water-channels of communication.

When the World’s Fair was projected, none of the general landscape design had been executed, and it was thought best to retain the element in the original plan of waterways, with terraced banks to support the buildings. Of course, all the grading, draining, and topsoiling of the land had to be done in an incredibly brief period, and none of the planting had more than two years in which to get rooted, while much of it had to be performed the very year of the Exposition ; some of the turfing was not even completed in June when the visitors began to arrive. Moreover, the work had to be pushed rapidly with unknown and untrained men in a most uncertain and variable climate, on a treacherous bottom which might drop out at any minute. The result upon the several miles of raw, newly made shore, which had to be covered with a graceful drapery, was a most astounding evidence of what can be accomplished by skill and energy. None who saw it can forget the charm of those softly fringed water-banks, peopled by waterfowl and overhung by willows, or can cease to wonder at the promptness with which that beautiful result was achieved, while the growth of the freshly planted trees was even more surprising. The surroundings were an exquisite part of that fair vision which is one of the proofs of America’s native aptitude for the noble art of landscape gardening.

After the Columbian Exposition was closed, eighty thousand dollars were handed over to the board of Washington Park as the price received from the sale of the wrecked Fair buildings, and this money is to be laid out in local improvements. At the northern end of the park, in the neighborhood of the Fine Arts Building, which has been preserved under the name of the Field Museum, there is to be landscape gardening of a character to suit the classic structure. Gradually the drives will curve more informally about the shore of the lagoon and the Wooded Island, sweeping to the summit of the little rise which overlooks the convent of La Rabida. Where was once the Peristyle there is to be a beautiful drive along the edge of the lake, following the lines of the shore from the long pier to the northern extremity of the pleasure-ground. Certain tracts of land near the site of the Liberal Arts Building will be prepared for tennis, baseball, and other sports.

The decision to retain the Art Building made it necessary to revise the original road-lines and most of the walks which had been designed for the original park, so that the surroundings of the great structure might be in harmony with it. The elements of the scenery are still the view of Lake Michigan from the shore drive and the Concourse, the spacious fields between the water and the southwest entrance, with their broad quiet stretches of pastoral landscape, and the lagoons themselves, to be enjoyed both from the shore and from boats. The shores are to be made more varied, but the North Haven and the Wooded Island will remain as they were during the Fair; and while various changes are to be made, nothing is to be done to destroy the peaceful landscape and the refreshing outlook over the great inland lake.

The boulevards of Chicago are also one of the great features which distinguish that enterprising city. There are nearly three hundred acres of them, from a hundred to two hundred feet in width, all lined with trees and connecting the parks.

It is impossible to particularize all the valuable work which is going on in the large towns throughout New England, in the great cities of central New York, and in the other Middle States ; nor can I here dwell upon the Niagara reservation. In the West, after those of Chicago, the parks of St. Paul and Minneapolis are the largest and most beautiful. St. Louis, Cincinnati, Milwaukee, Louisville, Omaha, Topeka, Pueblo, Colorado Springs, as well as hundreds of other cities, have all acquired land for park purposes. In the South, Savannah and Charleston are leading the way, showing how that part of the country is also touched by the prevailing impulse. California was one of the pioneers in securing park lands; for as early as 1866 Mr. Olmsted was requested to draw a design for Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, which now has an extent of ten hundred and fifty acres, one side of it bordering on the Pacific. The situation is very bleak, and it was originally partly covered with drift-sand, no trees growing naturally upon it, and turf could be maintained only by profuse artificial watering. It furnished, however, by means of irrigation, a low southern vegetation of striking luxuriance and beauty, which has been dexterously encouraged. The advance of the sand is arrested by a screen of foliage on the shore, along which a parkway half a mile wide extends for three miles, with a reservation from two to four hundred feet in breadth, affording a view of the Pacific Ocean in all its majesty. When the scheme of the boulevard known as the Great Highway is fully carried out, there will be a drive facing the sea, and an inner one protected by a double row of trees, which will separate the two. One mile of this was completed in 1895. Other California towns are also active. San Diego has acquired twelve hundred acres in the centre of the city, which are not yet developed. Los Angeles has also begun an extensive park system, and there are fine grounds about Sacramento beautifully planted with specimens of rare trees.

In this brief and necessarily imperfect outline of the work which has been begun in this country, suggestive as it is of a great cumulative force in action, there has been no room for individual recognition of all the landscape gardeners who have had a hand in it, nor for a list of the numerous generous benefactors of parks all over the United States, and many pleasure-grounds have been left without mention. Reluctantly omitting many names and places of importance, I have selected examples which seem typical of the work, and I feel that describing the obstacles to rapid advance in one case is merely summing up the difficulties which everywhere beset park construction. The knowledge of the triumphant success of the park movement, wherever it once gets a foothold, is the cheering outcome of even a superficial study of this our most important artistic development.

The spectacle of organized beauty conveys a lesson our people learn at first slowly, but later with extraordinary quickness. Something within responds to the stimulus from without, and a fresh growth of esthetic feeling must result from wise direction of popular taste in the great resorts of the public. Let us not be impatient because we find that the advance is unequal, that its importance does not move all hearts deeply, that only a few have fully awakened to the great æsthetic and sanitary value of public reservations. Slowly and surely the movement is going on which is to protect our scenery and our forests from destruction. If much exhortation seems to fall on deaf ears, let us not be discouraged, for some of it is not unheeded, and the now dormant seed of instruction is destined to yield in time a mighty harvest.

From sea to sea the reservations are dotted about the country, often ill policed, badly planted, and shamefully neglected, but we trust that the spirit which cherishes urban and country parks will clamor for the protection of those miles of territory now left to the plunderer and the firebrand before it shall be too late to save the mighty trees which, once destroyed, can never be replaced.

Foreigners are apt to ridicule the high estimate that we set upon ourselves, in view of the fact that the improvements which are so manifest in their ancient communities and large cities lag behind in this inventive country, where we have less authoritative and socialistic municipal governments for our more rugged and independent civilization. The cheering fact remains that, without the strong arm of government to enforce progress, or the highly organized municipality, the will of the American people acts suddenly when it fairly begins to move, and is open to conviction when once really aroused. The rapid advance made by the park movement in the last ten years gives us confidence that our national æsthetic perception has been touched at last in the right spot and in the wisest way, and that through landscape beauty we may yet be led to the understanding of all kinds of art.

A point to be insisted upon, in conclusion, is that it is not sufficient to purchase land for parks ; they must be planted with care and maintained with taste; and to keep them in condition, renewed expenditure is necessary. They cannot merely be purchased and left to nature and the public; they must be cultivated, pruned, policed ; and the expense of preserving their beauty and usefulness must not be begrudged by tax-payers who reap such great advantages from them. Too many have the idea that the purchase of a park is the end of the matter. This is far from being the case, and exertions must constantly be made to secure liberal appropriations for its proper maintenance. Much difficulty exists in impressing this fact upon citizens, but in time they will realize that a great art demands continuous liberal support; and we may be sure that they will then be as generous in maintaining and improving the parks of the country as they have proved to be in purchasing them. Such an important art development as has been indicated must enlist the interest of public-spirited men in many communities, so that endowments to carry on the necessary work will become one of the pleasures of the rich, while no taxpayer will begrudge the extra charge necessary to make the parks of his locality a joy forever.

Mary Caroline Robbins.