Hon. Fernando Wood,
Mayor of New York.
Sir:

I herewith submit in accordance with your request, received through John A. C. Gray, Esq., a drawing showing the arrangement which I think the best that could be made in re-arranging the angles of the streets meeting opposite the park entrance at the intersection of Broadway and Eighth Avenue. The triangular block formed by the intersection of Broadway, Eighth Avenue and 58th Street, and the acute angle formed by the intersection of 59th Street and Broadway, are the most objectionable features in the present arrangement. These being removed, architectural dignity would be best secured by whatever plan [249]would give the greatest length of unbroken street lines symmetrically opposed to each other. If the sacrifice of building space is considered to be too much, in the plan I have suggested, the least objectionable method of increasing it would be by advancing the line on the east side of the open square between 58th and 59th Streets.

I take this opportunity to offer a suggestion to your Honor, with regard to means of access to the park by the rivers. I see no reason why, as the population of the city extends its residence up each side of the island, there should not come into very extended use, a class of small steamboats, practically constituting river omnibuses, calling at frequent intervals to take in and set out passengers in the manner of the London river boats. In my visit to London last autumn, I timed the landings of the small boats there used for similar service, and found in three instances that in making a landing the time from the order to “slow” until the boat was again under way, a score of passengers being taken in or set out, averaged less than 45 seconds. The experience of last year on the Harlem boats seems to justify the anticipation that a system of this kind will soon rapidly develop. But if a general system with boats especially adapted to the duty should not be adopted, there can be no doubt, if convenient landings were afforded, a very large number of people from the lower part of the city and from the adjacent shores would in hot weather find means to approach the park by water.

In entertaining the guests of the city, a water excursion would terminate with propriety at a handsome quay forming the entrance of an approach to the park. For other reasons which will doubtless occur to your Honor such approaches would be desirable. I beg to suggest therefore for your consideration that one or two of the broad streets, leading from the park to each river bank, should be graded, and especially arranged at an early day, and that handsome, commodious, and convenient quays and landing stages should be formed at their river ends.

A question having sometime since arisen whether the ponds in the park should be arranged to accommodate bathers, as is the case in the London parks, and it having been decided that this was unnecessary, because of the rivers enclosing the island, I venture to suggest that it is desirable that the city should take measures to reserve bathing places for the people at suitable points on the rivers not yet occupied for commercial purposes.

A portion of the Central Park being now so far advanced toward completion that it is in daily use by the public, we think it fitting that it should ere long contain some appropriate acknowledgment of the public indebtedness to the labors of the late A. J. Downing, of which we feel the Park itself is one of the direct results.

We solicit for this purpose your aid, in connection with that of a few other of his friends, to obtain a bust of Mr. Downing to be placed in one of the shaded recesses of the Ramble upon a pedestal, inscribed with this passage from one of his later essays:

And yet this broad ground of popular refinement must be taken up in republican America, for it belongs of right more truly here than elsewhere. It is republican in its very idea and tendency. It takes up popular education where the common school and ballot-box leave it, and raises up the working man to the same level of enjoyment with the man of leisure and accomplishment. The higher social and artistic elements of every man’s nature lie dormant within him, and every laborer is a possible gentleman, not by the possession of money or fine clothes, but through the refining influence of intellectual and moral culture. Open wide, therefore, the doors of your libraries and picture galleries, all ye true republicans! Build halls where knowledge shall be freely diffused among men, and not shut up within the narrow walls of narrower institutions. Plant spacious parks in your cities, and unloose their gates as wide as the gates of morning to the whole people. As there are no dark places at noon day, so education and culture—the true sunshine of the soul—will banish the plague-spots of democracy; and the dread of the ignorant exclusive, who has no faith in the refinement of a republic, will stand abashed in the next century, before a whole people whose system of voluntary education embraces (combined with perfect individual freedom), not only common schools of [252]rudimentary knowledge, but common enjoyments for all classes in the higher realms of art, letters, science, social recreations, and enjoyments. Were our legislators but wise enough to understand, to-day, the destinies of the New World, the gentility of Sir Philip Sidney, made universal, would be not half so much a miracle fifty years hence in America, as the idea of a whole nation of laboring-men reading and writing, was, in his day, in England.

A. J. Downing.