I have received your note of the 28th and am glad to know that the work on the deer park pleased you, and that your visit was otherwise satisfactory.

[305]

Balconies in parapet wall overlooking Ram Branch scenery, Lower Approach Road, Biltmore, c. 1891

With regard to the balconies on the approach road, I hope that you will consent to let them stand until I can ask you to consider the matter with me on the ground. I think it probable that Mr. Gall has not been able to explain the reasons that led us to introduce some of them, especially those suggested by Mr. Smith as a part of the design of the second bridge. The work can be as well done in the Spring as now, and in the belief that you will be willing to give the matter a little further consideration with me, I think it better to delay giving the order for removing them until after I have seen or heard from you again. I will write to Mr. Gall, directing him to go no further with the construction of any not yet fully built.

There were four reasons for designing the islets near the north margin of the lake; first, the effect of them would be to enlarge the apparent extent of the water, because, in looking toward them from the opposite shore, the imagination would assume a larger recession of the main shore behind them than would actually exist, and there would at least be more effect of intricacy and mystery; second, the steepness of the ground almost everywhere at our proposed water-line on the main shore, (determined by considerations of economy), compels us to allow the lake a more rigid and unpicturesque [306]

Islands in the Lake, Biltmgre, c. 1895

I shall be glad to confer with you and will write asking an appointment before I come to New York.

Yours Very Truly,

With regard to Mrs. Van Rensselaer’s article, of which you ask my opinion, it strikes me exactly as it does you. Hyatt’s paper is a rather extreme illustration of the difficulty with which we are always contending. I have been, for several years, laboring with Hyatt upon this subject. He told me that until [308]he received a certain letter of mine, he had never really entertained the notion of open air museums. I began with him by explaining that my leading object was to preserve the Boston Parks from being mixed up with such museums; reserving ground for museum purposes adjoining a park, but separated from it, so as to avoid the tendency to make a combination of park and museum. I have explained this to him twenty times, verbally and in letters, and he has appeared to understand and sympathize with the idea. After all, he springs to the public in a manner which shows that he is utterly ignorant and impenetrable with respect to the leading idea which I have attached to the word park. The difficulty thus illustrated is by far the greatest of all that we, as park-makers, have to contend with. In all my public life, it has been cropping up where I least expect it. I sometimes question whether it is not a waste of energy to contend with it.

After all, it is only a branch of a more comprehensive evil. There is hardly a word or term that can be used in the discussion of any question of landscape architecture that has any fixed meaning, with the public.

What Mrs. Van Rensselaer writes is excellent, as all she writes is. I could only wish that she could be more emphatic and plainer in condemning Professor Hyatt’s loose use of the word park and the fact that he ignores the ruling motive which should be had in view in laying out and maintaining a park. There has not been one year in the last thirty that I have not had occasion to do my best in persuading park commissioners and the public that it was not desirable to make a hash of public grounds.

I must say that I do not think you are blameless in this matter. Why do you speak in this letter of the Arboretum as a park? If park is not a word in the meaning of which it is good usage to include race courses, parade grounds and institutions for all sorts of purposes, then the Arboretum is no more properly called a park than a theatre, a public library or a church. I have never lost an opportunity, in meetings of the Park Commission, to protest against its being called so in their posters and other publications. I never fail to rebuke any one who, in my presence, speaks of the Back Bay Fens as a park and for several years past, I have succeeded in preventing that term from being applied to the locality in any official action of the Commission. I took care that, in the preparation of the plans and publications relating to the South Boston affair, the word park should not be used. I called it Dorchester Point and Pleasure Bay; but in my absence, when correcting proofs, Dalton and Gray had it called Marine Park and this name has become so firmly established that I have abandoned contention with it, although the name is no more appropriate to the place than mountain or continent would be.

Yours Faithfully