In our correspondence thus far as to the proposed pavilion on Ononto Park, we have been more anxious to get an understanding of the views of your committee, and thus of the problem to be studied, than to express our own views, and the sketches sent you have been influenced by this motive. Your note of the 25th instant, which I find here on my return from Bar Harbor, enables us to take the question up in a more comprehensive and systematic manner. Doing so, we are led to offer you fresh advice as follows:-

A structure will be required in Ononto Park for administrative purposes. It should be placed as centrally as practicable and should contain, first, a room with a well lighted desk, to be used as an office by the superintendent; second, a room for keepers (police) with a desk, a temporary lock-up and a place for lost articles; third, a shelter for the laboring force when waiting orders, and while nooning in stormy weather; fourth, water-closets for the park force; fifth, a room for implements, including rollers and lawn mowers; sixth, a small workshop for slight repairs; and, seventh, a place for the storage of various articles wanting repair, or when not in use.

We advise that a house be built by the Commissioners, in the basement of which there shall be accommodations for all these purposes, and that on the ground floor above them, under the same roof, accommodations as follows:- first, a room for visitors; second, a small private room for a woman to be in charge (a room large enough for a sick person to be cared for in); third, a toilet room for women and children, opening out of one end of the visitors’ room; fourth, a toilet room for men, at the opposite end. The woman to be allowed to provide milk, and a few other simple refreshments at fixed charges. This partly that the building may have other obvious purposes than that of the toilet rooms, and the woman other business than attending them, and particularly to provide for real need of nutrition, especially for children, without making the place a candy shop or restaurant. The house to be about 20′ X 30′ on the floor and to be as low, modest and unobtrusive in character as will be consistent with convenience.

The situation that we have in view for this house is a little shelf of the hill-side in the wood, 30 to 50 feet N.E. of the terrace upon which the pavilion is to stand; this being a comparatively secluded position but near the center of the park and close adjoining the points that will be most frequented by visitors, [105]both on foot and in carriages. In the Summer south-west breezes, the house would be to the leeward of the pavilion and in the direction towards which visitors would have their attention least directed. It would be in a great degree screened by existing trees, and the roof would be kept low enough to be looked over from the pavilion.

Assuming that the Commissioners will, in time, build such a cottage as has been above described, we recommend that the pavilion which Ellwanger & Barry are to provide be designed solely with reference to shade, shelter, air and outlook; that it have no basement; that the lower floor be set but little above the surrounding terrace, with sloped approaches, so that baby carriages can be easily run into it. (Provision for baby carriages waiting would be on the terrace between the entrances.) The ground floor to be of concrete, tile or brick, as a wooden floor, under the circumstances, would soon rot.

The pavilion is to be a structure of great prominence, very public, much visited and observed. It will be the crown of the park. It should be as large and as fine as it can by any means be made within the limit of cost fixed. The simpler it is, the larger and finer it can be made.

The objection we suggested to placing semi-detached toilet rooms adjoining the pavilion on the terrace was that they would be conspicuous and would obscure views from the pavilion. It may be feared that some inconvenience would result from placing the accommodations for visitors, proposed to be removed from the pavilion to a separate house, at the distance suggested, but this has not proved to be the case in practice under our experience. There is a large pavilion set on an eminence in the Central Park of New York, designed and very largely used for the airing and recreation of little children.

Pavilion at Highland Park, Rochester, N.Y.

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If the Board adopts the suggestion we have thus made, the site for the building can be prepared, the plans completed and construction begun sooner than would otherwise be practicable.

Until we hear further from you, we shall proceed upon the assumption that this advice will be accepted. The plumbing arrangements for the entire business will be simpler and less costly. You realize, we presume, that they are, in any case, to be an important element of the cost.

I have just returned from a journey and find yours of the 19th, to which more particularly I wish now to reply.

You are right in supposing that if it had been written earlier, I should have understood your motives better, and perhaps have taken a slightly different course from that I have, but I think the result would have been essentially the same in the end. I wish you to be fully assured of my thorough sympathy with your motive, and that you may be, let me say that I, also, lost my first-born child by cholera infantum, and that for thirty years, the value of fresh air as a means of combating that disorder has been very strongly impressed upon me. I have known a child, after its life had been despaired of by the physicians, taken to the park and kept there in gentle motion for several hours, and return with a tendency to recover well established; in the words of the physician—it was “snatched from the hands of death.”

In 1866, after careful study of the subject, I induced the Park Commissioners of New York to establish a pavilion with special reference to the convenience of mothers with small children, exactly in the line of your purpose. It was nearly circular in form, 110 feet in diameter, situated upon an eminence, but so placed as to be out of the more frequented lines of public movement on the park, and although it is a very large affair, and greatly used during the hot weather by women and children, I do not suppose that one in a hundred of all the visitors to the park has ever seen it. Provision has since been made, under my advice, for the same purposes, in four other parks, not including the great circular three-decked, pier-head pavilion now under construction, [108]of which an illustration was given in the last annual report of the Boston Park Department. I was, for several years, vice-president of a society in New York, having for one of its objects the improvement of the condition of the tenement house population. At one time, I prepared a circular which was sent to every physician and clergyman in New York, calling their attention to the ease with which the children of the poor could be taken to the park by several lines of street railway, and to the conveniences there provided for them, with special reference to the danger of cholera infantum. I did the same thing in Brooklyn, and in both cities I had printed notices to the same effect distributed by the thousand and conspicuously posted in every tenement house in these cities. You will see, therefore, that I have given the subject not a little thought, and so far as I find it my duty to express a different opinion from you on points of detail, it is far from inconsiderately.

Any pavilion placed on the knoll north-east of the reservoir will be a very conspicuous object; will be the center of attraction for that park; all roads and walks will lead to it, and it must necessarily be an affair for the whole public. To get a structure there that will provide all the standing, sitting and moving room that it must have, if crowding, hustling and disturbance in various ways is to be avoided, and that can easily be kept clean and preserved in good order; to do this within the limit of cost fixed, it is necessary that it should be so planned as to give the largest amount of free floor space, especially in all the outer parts, that can be got out of the materials used, and that everything should be eliminated from the scheme that is not absolutely necessary to its success. I think that it is open to demonstration that the circular plan meets these requirements much better than any plan can with rectangular outlines. I cannot see the force of your suggestion that the circular outline would be unpleasant because of the association of ideas which it would provoke with a locomotive house. Hardly anything could be less like the solid brick walls and slate peaked roof of a locomotive house than the veranda construction proposed. There is a much greater likeness between the railroad round-house and the Castle of St. Angelo, or the drum of the dome of St. Paul’s.

I do not think that I quite understand your idea of the fans, but I suppose they may be considered as a part of the furnishing, rather than of the essential structure of the pavilion, and that they can be attached to the ceiling of the house in any form. I should have thought that in a building so placed upon an eminence, a slight movement of air from the south-west would be found in the hottest weather, and that a very slight natural movement of air would not only be more grateful than any that could be easily produced in the manner you propose, but that it would almost prevent it from being felt. I have seen punkas used a good deal in the tropics, but never in a pavilion completely open on all sides.

I do not think a jet d’eau in the center of the pavilion desirable. To make anything of it worthy of the position would be costly and, at the best, it would be extremely puerile by comparison with the jet in the adjoining [109]reservoir. A fountain is so much more beautiful where it springs into sunlight within a shady enclosure, like that of a {Moorish patio,} that the comparative deadness of a fountain under the circumstances proposed would not be very pleasing. A very moderate wind would blow spray from the jet over the adjoining floor of the pavilion, making it sloppy, and the strong tendency which all children have to dabble with water would be a source of constant anxiety to mothers. But if a fountain is thought to be of essential value to your scheme, it can be introduced.

I enclose a copy of a letter addressed to Mr. Barry, containing suggestions that I hope you may approve. We feel sure that everything should be kept out of the pavilion that will not positively and directly help those who are to enter it to benefit much more than they otherwise could, by shade from the sun, shelter from showers, openness to breezes and advantages of outlook to a distance. We are also convinced that everything that it is necessary to these purposes should be within the pavilion, should be so placed and arranged as to favor free movement and circulation in those parts of the structure where people wishing to face the breezes and command the outlooks will naturally aim to place themselves, and where, consequently, there will be the most liability to crowd and jostling.

Yours Truly